002. See More

‘Ah, plus two. I was not expecting additions here, and not today. Something in my Whether Report seems to be off.’

‘Hello, Eyeball. We’re here because we need your help.’

‘Well, Merritt, that kind of goes without saying, doesn’t it? It’s not like anyone ever comes here just to hang out. No one ever brings party favours and cake for Eyeball, do they?’

‘It’s because you’re weird.’

‘Can I help how the algorithm of I unspools? No, I cannot. The sum of me is already determined.’

‘Great, OK, well now we got that out of the way, this is Wendover, and he’s here to help me catch some people; some people who defected.’

‘Do I get to know who the players are? Do I get to know what the game is?’

‘Eyeball, stop bullshitting me – you now that as soon as you lay your hands on this you will get a sense of how it plays out, and of the things that lay behind it. When have I ever had to tell you a damned thing. If I did do you think I’d ever come here? I am comfortable with you knowing things that I have not had to tell you, because then I have not violated the rules by which I have to play.’

‘Understood. OK. But what is your plan, and how can I help to build the trap that you need to build?’

‘We need to find away to build a parallel to The Blockchain, and then we need to divert these people into it.’

‘Oh, nothing too ambitious then – we take the very thing that forms the spine of reality and we build something that is convincing enough to fool people that have been manipulating said spine … should be easy enough, eh?’

‘You have connections, Eyeball – I know you do. Quantum Elements, and Reality Engineers. Don’t sit there and pretend that this is totally out of the ballpark in which you operate, because I know for a fact that it isn’t.’

‘And how do you know so much, Merritt? What files have you been opening that you shouldn’t have been?’

‘Oh, enough – you know. Can’t be an agent for any kind of intelligence community outfit and not trip over this shit left right and centre. I had a run in with a guy called Carter Brecht and his friend Quint Essential when I was chasing down someone I was interested in for a plot to take down the President. They couldn’t wipe my mind afterwards because it would have created a paradox on top of a paradox.’

‘Spay. Yes, I see’

‘Spay?’

‘Don’t worry, Wendover, Eyeball is being a little loose-lipped. It’s not that I won’t tell you what you need to know, but Spay is not a can of worms that you want to be anywhere near.’

‘I’ll believe you. I am learning way more than I ever expected to learn. I know you aren’t going to wipe me, and now I know about Reality Engineers and Quantum Elements, and whoever this guy is.’

‘Me? I’m a Seymour; guide for a Quantum Element, dwelling in Mathspace, and disguised as a harmless subroutine.’

‘Thanks for letting me know. OK, so is there even the technology available to do this, and is there a place to build it, and is there a way to build it that won’t immediately bring attention to us?’

‘Some very valid questions. Yes, the technology does exist to do it – I have seen it – loops to wrap time and reality around. A place to build – kind of – but it’s going to get noticed .. if we were to build something this big and not be noticed you would have to worry, wouldn’t you. The thing is though, the kind of attention we are going to draw is not going to be from people who necessarily disagree with what we are trying to do, so then the task is to convince them that this is a good thing.’

‘And that’s going to be easy?’

‘Should be a cinch, my friend, eh, Eyeball?’

‘Sure, Merritt, whatever you say.’

‘Christ, what do you mean, whatever I say? You can see for damned sure whether or not this will turn out OK. I know some of the finer points of a thing are sometimes hard to determine, but something this big causes enough ripples for you to see more’

‘Laughing Out Loud. Of course it does. I am just pulling your pisser, Merritt. It deserves to be pulled does it not? Is that not what you always say to me?’

‘Fucking hell, Eyeball – you are a royal pain in the posterior.’

Eyeball smiled.

001. All The Red Herrings

Wendover took a seat. Merritt smiled at him, he held out a hand, and Wendover reluctantly shook it. Merritt had read his file and understood him to be the best at catfishing that they had. He had specific ideas in mind for the kind of people he wanted designed because he had the profiles of the people he was looking to snare.

Burgold was another piece of a larger puzzle one might say he was building, rather than putting together. Most of Merritt’s puzzles didn’t have pictures on the box; they didn’t have boxes. Well, if they had boxes they were black boxes and no one could see their workings. He paused and he took a deep breath – his mind was prone to running away with itself

‘I understand you’re the best at what you do Wendover, and I need someone that good to help me to do what I need to do.’

‘And what is that?’

‘We’re going to catfish some of our fellow agents.’

‘And why are we doing that? And who sanctioned it.’

‘It came down from above, and the reason for it, is that we have an infiltrator. Someone who is totally side-stepping the usual things that would catch someone out.’

‘Beating the Blockchain?’

‘Beating the Blockchain.’

‘How is that even possible?’

‘There are echelons way above my pay-grade that can answer that for you, but I believe that it might have to be something extra-temporal.’

‘How are we going to catch someone operating on that level?’

‘Well, it has to be a built-in feature of the trap.’

‘Do you have clearance for that kind of tech?’

‘We’re going off-book for this one. No sanctions for any of it. They want it done but they don’t want to talk about it. They can’t talk about it.’

‘Because then it would be in The Blockchain, and they would have access to the data, and they’d be able to beat it.’

‘Yes.’

‘OK, but don’t all missions get added to The Blockchain eventually?’

‘Yes, they do, but, and some people don’t realise this, some parts of The Blockchain are compartmentalised, or tumbled as they call it, and they can’t be accessed by anyone.’

‘OK, but these guys have beaten The Blockchain, so might they not have that data?’

‘They might. We build that into it. Over-confidence is the most common Achilles’ Heel in my experience.’

‘I’ll do it. It sounds interesting. I might learn something to help me in my own work.’

‘There we go. Hold up your hand.’

He did. Phut, and an intra-temporal clever maths key bedded in and began to branch through him.

‘Mathspace?’

‘Of course. Can’t run everything in The Slice, right?’

‘Right.’

They smiled at each other. Wendover was in a place he never expected to be.

000. fridge magnets

Alphabetti Spaghetti. Fridge magnets. Post-it Notes. Whatever the fuck he could find. He didn’t really care as long as it looked semi-anonymous and could be used to either trigger someone or just get them into the paperchase.

He had spent time on the streets, in deep cover, homeless, learning war-chalking; hooking into networks no-one would even admit were there. When he’d brought evidence of the Homeplus Network, and the fact that the psy-ops program underpinning it had been infiltrated by Cuckoos that were siphoning off the technology for use by The Nest, he had made his name and could pick his mission.

His tradecraft was excellent because it was invisible except to those who had been trained, and even they, if they were not clued into his methods, might miss things that were glaringly obvious to students of his practice. They called it The Writing School; it had loose connections with The Acting School and The Fiction Department, and even members of The Fact Department had been known to call upon his expertise to help them bury something.

Merritt wielded metaphor and implication and propaganda as well as any agent provocateur in the field; most would say better. He had been asked to build a maze, and he had been asked to draw people into it. It was something of a honeypot for existing agents, and something of an audition for prospective ones. It worked on many levels – like sets of tumblers falling into place – one trap solved triggering another. How many traps could you Russian Doll into a puzzle? He was always trying to push the limit.

They brought him in two weeks back because they were having a problem; a possible infiltration that needed to be handled. They didn’t have enough to legitimately pull the suspected agents in, but they wanted to give them enough rope to hang themselves. However clever they thought themselves to be, the notion that they were capable of outwitting Merritt was more than likely fallacious. If that proved not to be the case then there was something else on the cards for them.

Merritt had at one point thought of just being a writer, but he was a man of action, and when he had discovered the power that his words could have he really fell in love with the work. He did have a nom de plume that he used, and he was churning out some great pot-boilers at a pulp writer pace. He knew they would have probably put a bullet in the back of his head is they ever found about this past-time, but he was super careful, and he gave all the money away that he made, so there were no irregular blips in his finance.

Everyone knew that he was very able,and in a world where trust was in short supply,he was a trusted person. This was good in some ways and bad in others;he had to be ready to break trust and burn the world to the ground at the drop of a hat.

Fear in a handful of dust on Burgold’s fridge in fridge magnets set another paperchase in motion.