Sockpuppet: Book One in the Martingale Cycle Read Free Page B

through her Office.
     
    The next note was scratched out on Ministry of Technology notepaper.
     
Monday.
J-R, I’m completely caffeine starved. Can you persuade one of these brontosauruses to once in a while take a break from wiggling their mouses around and get me a skinny latte? Do they honestly expect me to down tools from running the country and wait in line with the spotty wonks in Prêt à Manger? Cheers ears. Bx
     
    J-R had been struggling with this one for ten minutes. He’d got as far as:
     
2) The Minister is not unaware of the heavy workload of her Private Office staff, and greatly appreciates the efforts of the whole team in supporting her official duties. Nevertheless,
     
    The cursor blinked useless after the comma. As the minister’s communications spad – special advisor – J-R’s role was meant to include speechwriting, drafting of lines-to-take on political issues and working with the civil servants on policy statements. To be fair, he did very often get to do these things and was still in awe of the responsibility and trust so placed upon him at the age of twenty-six. The Digital Citizen initiative he was currently working on was of national importance. Bethan, for all anyone could say of her, was decent and principled, and up until recently he’d trusted her as a mother, but a great deal of his time – generally the small hours of each morning – was spent diverting the floodwaters of her consciousness into language her officials could understand and respond to.
    He’d taken to this court translator role with gusto; had picked up officialese like a native in a matter of days. If anything, he’d become too fluent. His friends, when he ever saw them these days, had begun to rag him when this new jargon crept into his pub vocabulary. They’d threatened to charge him five pounds every time he said, ‘I don’t disagree with that’ instead of ‘Yes’ – or ‘notwithstanding’ for ‘even so’ – or ‘whilst’ for ‘while’. He didn’t mind. A maturing speech denoted a new gravity. Underneath, they respected him for it, even whilst they teased him. The occasional hints he was able to drop about the business of Bethany’s office carried more import than the drudge-work most of them described, in their long days toiling at structured finance, audits or viral marketing – whatever those might be. None of them had advanced very far up their chosen food chains. J-R was at the heart of government.
    He shook his head to clear it, stretched his arms, beat a tattoo on his tummy and was about to have another crack at the latte paragraph, when the BlackBerry started to buzz again somewhere out of view. He traced it to a spill of draft White Papers and extracted it. There were now five messages. He read the first, from fifteen minutes back:
     
Substance, meet fan. Dancing pigs unleashed on Teesside. How soon can you be here?
 
    This was confounding, but it was from Big Krish – ergo, important. J-R fiddled the cursor to Call contact. Before the line had rung once, Krish’s Glasgow drawl kicked in.
    ‘J-R, thank feck. You ever hear of a social network called Parley?’
    Krish was never one for pleasantries. J-R trotted to the still-dark bedroom in search of trousers.
    ‘I do occasionally venture into the twenty-first century,’ he said.
    ‘Sorry, aye. I need you at Parley pronto. No, before pronto. Get there yesterday.’
    ‘Because –?’
    J-R tucked the BlackBerry between his shoulder and ear and rifled the wardrobe with the other. He prayed he had at least one ironed shirt.
    ‘Because some wee girl is on there just now, putting it about that our flagship programme has been hacked.’
    Still holding the phone with his shoulder, J-R hopped across the half-lit room, struggling his right leg into a pair of suit trousers. His foot connected with something sharp.
    ‘ Yah! ’ he cried into the BlackBerry.
    ‘Jesus, man, don’t take it so hard,’ said Krish.
    J-R stooped to extract