Auto Read online

  Contents

  Copyright page

  Setup

  Relationship Status

  Timeline

  Friend Request

  Backup

  Copy

  Share

  Link

  Auto Series

  About the author

  Auto

  Auto Series - Book One

  Copyright © David Wailing 2013

  All Rights Reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by photocopying or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  This novel includes the first eight stories in the Auto Series.

  The stories Relationship Status, Timeline, Friend Request, Backup and Copy were previously published as Kindle eBooks and remain available to buy separately.

  www.auto-series.net

  www.davidwailing.com

  Setup

  Automatically, Michael Walker starts to say his real name. But stops himself just in time.

  “My... name is Eanga Tepaki,” says Michael. “I think I have an appointment?”

  The girl he’s talking to, who wears a bright red shirt and namebadge, checks the digital tablet in her hand. “Ah yes, Mr Tepaki, two o’clock. You’re going for the complete setup procedure, right? If you’d like to take a seat over there, someone will be with you shortly.”

  “Meitaki ma’ata.”

  She stares at him. “Uh?”

  “It means thank you,” he smiles.

  “Oh.” She glances up and down with her own tight smile. He can see the label she’s just applied to him. Foreign.

  Michael takes off his long black overcoat and folds it across his lap, as he sits down in one of the row of chairs. His whole body seems to be rocking slightly, in time with his pounding heart. He swallows. Wipes the sweat from his lip. Glances around to check if anyone has noticed. Takes a deep breath.

  The only thing that helps is the heaviness of the gun in his coat pocket. Its reassuring weight slows down his heartbeat.

  Stupid. Bloody stupid. Managed to pull it back at the end there, he hopes, but can’t believe he almost said his own name!

  Not good enough. He’s not at home any more, surrounded by people he trusts. He’s not in a place where he can be proud of who he really is.

  He’s in London now.

  It’s New Year’s Day, Saturday 1st January 2022, and Michael Walker is buying a new auto.

  He looks around, keeping his movements slow and easy. He’s in a large shop called Autotal Showroom, although it feels more like some weird brightly-lit nightclub, what with the pumping music and swarming teenagers. It’s a huge open space, full of clean white lines and shiny technology. The walls are lined with UDTVs displaying pop videos, movies and product demos. There are racks of gadgets that customers can try: tablets, laptops, smartphones, eyewear, smartscreens, depthvision monitors, and dozens more. Cheery assistants in cherry-red shirts are strolling around, helping with enquiries.

  The music changes to something new, triggering a cheer from somewhere in the crowd. The sound system detects and plays the favourite song of customers at random, something which helps draw people in. Lots of youngsters seem happy to spend their Saturday afternoon hanging out inside the store, waiting for their track to be played while they fool around with the latest devices.

  But the main reason it’s always busy is that stores like this are where people buy and upgrade their autos. The Autotal Showroom is the biggest and most popular, since it covers all suppliers and networks. That’s where the name comes from: their claim to sell the total range of auto-related technology.

  Earlier, Michael had walked for three miles before ending up here, in the high street of Ealing Broadway. He’s keen to avoid using his Oyster card on public transport if he can. The fewer trails he leaves, the better.

  And in the open, he can hear the police sirens before they get too close.

  Michael had been surprised by all the people crowding the pavements and filling the shops. Some looked a little worse for wear after last night’s celebrations, but otherwise it could have been any ordinary Saturday. That felt wrong to him. Bank holidays should be restful. All the shops shut, everything on pause, like it used to be when he was a kid.

  The feeling of wrongness increased when he got to Ealing Broadway. So many people… and yet the streets were so quiet.

  Wherever he looked, people were staring at their smartphones and tablets. Couples walking arm in arm, both texting with their free hand. Groups of friends not even looking at each other. Children silently lagging after their parents. All heads bowed, towards the devices in their hands.

  A New Year’s Day more hushed than any from Michael’s childhood.

  He noticed the way everyone constantly points their phones at this and that, capturing whatever digital information is available. Every item in shop windows. Every poster and billboard. Every bus stop. Every vehicle. Every person. All tagged. All broadcasting themselves.

  It had depressed him. Feeling low on the high street. Michael’s hate had gathered pace with every step he took, until he felt like he wanted to start punching passers-by in the face, or machine-gun the murmuring crowds, or drop a bomb on the whole city and blow London off the map!

  Terrorist thoughts, he realises now.

  So? Why not? That’s the list his name’s on.

  From his seat, Michael peers through the high glass walls of the Autotal Showroom, at the traffic and pedestrians outside. No sign of the police. He looks at the two security guards by the entrance. Neither are looking his way. He scans all the faces bobbing around like balloons. Nobody is noticing him.

  All right, he thinks. Fire exit is over there, take me about three seconds to get to it. Internal door there, that’s about four seconds away... and another there, maybe six seconds... no, fire exit’s the best way out.

  Entrance, that’s about ten metres. With all these people, probably take those security boys seven, eight seconds to reach me. So, a four-second window. Enough time to shoot them both?

  Best to take a hostage first. Who’s closest? Who looks like they’d be too scared to struggle? Her in the leather jacket. Him with the glasses. Her with the annoying laugh. Her in the red shirt – shit, she’s coming my way! – no, it’s okay, she works here. All right. I can do this.

  “Mr Tepaki?”

  Michael stands, reminding himself of his own appearance. He isn’t much taller than her but is very well built, filling out his blue and yellow short-sleeved shirt. His skin is a rich brown and his face is weathered-handsome, a man in his forties who has spent years being exposed to sun, sea and wind. His black hair is short and tightly-curled, with streaks of silver at both temples.

  But what really makes him stand out are his tattoos. Polynesian symbols and markings curl up one muscular arm, while on the other, a turtle swims from wrist to bicep leaving a patterned wake of ink. Most striking of all are the intricate spiral designs tattooed along both sides of his jaw and lower chin. He would seem fierce and tribal if he wasn’t beaming a big white smile.

  He doesn’t look anything like Michael Walker anymore.

  “Kia Orana!” he says loudly. “Hello to you!”

  “Hello!” the woman replies with a tinkly laugh. “My name’s Meena, and I’m going to be taking you through your auto setup.”

  “It is my pleasure to meet you,” says Michael in the accent he’s practised for so long: similar to a New Zealand twang, but deeper and slower. Enunciating each syllable carefully, like he recently learnt English from a book.

  No trace of his East London roots. No hint of his Cambridge education. No vocal patterns or syntax tags that could
be detected, analysed, cross-referenced and matched to historical crime files on Metropolitan Police databases. Instead he sounds like a simple man who lives in a hut on a beach somewhere. A man who doesn’t belong in this country.

  Foreign.

  “Come with me and let’s get started,” she smiles. An Indian lady in her late thirties, she wears a baggy bright red shirt like the rest of the staff, with a namebadge stating MEENA PRAKESH. Michael has no doubt that if he aims a smartphone at that badge, it will display her staff profile and play a little video welcoming him to Autotal Showroom. But she’s no company drone: there are multiple jewelled rings on her fingers, gold hoops dangling from her ears, her black hair is fashionably braided and her eyes are big, brown and kind, looking directly at him rather than the tablet in her hand. For that alone, Michael finds himself warming to her. Even if her proximity means she’s the prime candidate if he needs to take a hostage.

  With his coat under one arm, Michael follows her towards the rear of the store. He sees a row of transparent plastic-walled cubicles, each with two seats and a smartscreen, but all are filled. Meena apologises and tells him that they have to wait a short while for a cubicle to become free, she’s very sorry but they’re terribly busy today. Michael nods and says he understands, looking relaxed even as he glances over his shoulder.

  “So where are you from, Mr Tepaki?” Small talk.

  “Rarotonga,” he tells her with a grin. “I am really from Atiu, which is the most beautiful of all the islands, very very beautiful! But I live on Rarotonga now. That is where the business is.”

  “Oh, the Cook Islands! My friend Louise went there a few years ago, she said they were lovely. So... you are Maori?”

  “Yes! I think, in Britain there are not many of us?” Michael makes himself boom laughter.

  “Haha, well no. You certainly stand out here.” Her eyes flick over him and he knows she is referring to the tattoos. It triggers a pre-rehearsed spiel.

  “We call them moko,” he says, proudly showing off both arms. “It’s a very old tradition for us. They tell the story of our Maori ancestors, yes? This is how we all know where each of us are from. All you have to do is look at a man’s face, to know about his family, his clan, their whole history. And his history too, the things that matter to him and made him who he is.” He strokes the curling swoops of ink embroidering his jaw, as if they were a beard.

  “They’re very... striking.” Polite smile from Meena. Hiding disgust? Or trying not to show that she finds him attractive? “And are you in the UK on holiday, or...?”

  “No, I am here for my company. It is called Katuke Exports Ltd. I own one third part of it!” Proudly, he pulls a business card from his pocket, which she smiles at the same way parents smile at their child’s finger-paintings. He can tell she hasn’t seen one of these paper-and-ink relics for a while. “We are hoping to get new customers in the UK. I have come to make negotiations with many of your wholesale suppliers here, especially those who are looking to import products – ”

  “Ah, here we are, let’s take a seat.” Meena waves him into the cubicle that has just been vacated. Michael slides into the chair, genuinely grateful. He was on the verge of making up company names.

  The music and chatter from the store dims noticeably inside the cubicle. He wonders if the smartscreen emits noise-cancelling frequencies. The giant monitor recognises Meena and displays her Autotal Showroom staff profile in the corner. She makes a gesture, causing a staggering list of options to be displayed. She selects some of them without even touching the screen, just by making tapping motions in the air.

  “Okay, Mr Tepaki, so we’re going to set your auto up from scratch, since you’ve never previously owned one. I’m not sure how familiar you are with autos?”

  Michael hesitates for a second. “We don’t have any of this back home,” he shrugs. “Things are more... simple.”

  “Well, over here you’ll find they’re vital, and also very useful for a businessman like yourself. I’ll take you through some of the basics, but we encourage you to download the operations manual of whichever auto you choose, and examine its options for yourself in detail.” She adjusts her position to get comfortable, adding “Feel free to stop me and ask questions.”

  He nods eagerly, like an ignorant foreigner would.

  Meena starts by explaining why people started using autos in the first place – as a way of bringing everything together. “Years ago,” she tells him, “all I had to worry about was checking my email every day. Then Facebook came along and I started having more friends online than anywhere else, and then I was tweeting and joining various forums, and buying from online shops, and so on and so on... it became impossible to keep track of everything. I always used to say, ‘I need a secretary’! And that’s what an auto is, basically, your own personal assistant.”

  “I understand,” says Michael.

  He does understand. He knows what she really needs. To just press a button for everything. You need to switch the whole world onto ‘automatic’ and not think about it. That’s what everyone needs now.

  On the smartscreen, Meena demonstrates the various models of auto available. There’s the Microsoft Curator 6, probably the most common choice, and the Curator 7 which she confesses still has a few bugs but a much nicer interface. There’s the sleek Apple Unicorn, mentioning that their new Hydra model will be out in a few months. There’s the Google Jupiter, another popular choice, and the recently-released Google Saturn which he must have seen the adverts for – ‘runs rings around other autos!’.

  “Other autos are available,” she adds, producing a long list of brand names and model numbers.

  Michael remembers the Auto-Mate™.

  No different models. No fancy names. There was just the one.

  He tells her that a friend recommended the Macroverse Liberty to him, and he’d like to buy that one please. Meena suggests the Macroverse Opportunity instead, which is a professional model with more built-in business apps. He allows himself to be convinced. She adds “Funnily enough, it was Macroverse who first came out with the auto, about ten years ago. Everyone else quickly jumped on the bandwagon, of course!”

  Michael hopes his grinding teeth are hidden by his tattoos.

  “Now, just to make this clear,” says Meena, “an auto isn’t hardware, it’s not an actual computer. It’s a software agent, which means it only exists in the cloud. Not actually up in the clouds, haha! I mean on the internet. It actually sits on some server somewhere. A ‘server’ is a special kind of computer that runs online services and systems, but you don’t need to worry about that. The point is that because your auto is just software, you can access it from any kind of device… a smartscreen or a tablet or eyewear, anything. It’ll know where you are at all times and make itself available to you on the nearest gadget, or at least whichever one you’re authorised to use. Okay?”

  Quite how Michael manages to sit through this ham-fisted description of distributed network architecture and application service provisioning without screaming is a mystery even to him. “Okay,” he replies.

  She asks which of the 5G networks he wants a contract with, listing the various sign-up packages for EE, Five, O3, Tesconet and the rest. Knowing there’s almost no difference whatsoever, Michael quickly chooses EE premium rate. She rattles through the terms and conditions, while he resists the urge to look around the cubicle wall. He shifts the black coat on his lap, feeling the heavy weight within the inner pocket.

  “All right, Mr Tepaki, now I’ll need all your paperwork so we can fully authorise your account.”

  He hands over a large envelope. It contains a temporary ID card, biometric residence permit, and a six-month visa categorising him as a representative of an overseas business. All courtesy of the UK Border Agency, following a four-hour session at Heathrow Airport when he flew into Terminal 6 just before Christmas. Plus his citizenship documents from the Cook Islands – including freshly-minted passport and ragged birth certificate
from 1979 – that all look absolutely genuine. But aren’t.

  Meena patiently scans everything into the smartscreen and confirms his account directly with Govnet. She doesn’t bother explaining what she’s doing, but remarks how important it is that each auto profile is unique. “One auto per person,” she says cheerily, “that’s the golden rule.”

  Michael struggles to control the sneer trying to twist his face. He knows exactly what this is. Federated identity management. Single sign-on. Linking a person's attributes across multiple databases, making it impossible to pretend to be anyone else.

  It’s a digital passport.

  It’s a namebadge, like Meena’s, that can never be taken off.

  It’s a serial number branded into the flesh of his inner arm.

  “It’s sort of like your tattoos,” she smiles. “The same way they tell the people of your island all about you, an auto does the same thing, except online. So just think of an auto like a really big moko!” She beams at him, clearly pleased to have found a way to explain something so sophisticated to someone so primitive.

  “Ahh, yes!” he says. “But what if someone wants to copy my moko from me? Can they pretend to be me on the internet?”

  Meena’s earrings sway as she shakes her head. “Absolutely not. It’s completely impossible to falsify an auto, or to hack into one. The very tightest encryption protects them. Identity theft is very rare nowadays. You might be able to forge a passport, but you can’t forge a person’s relationships with other people, with Govnet, other organisations, their local council, and so on. Trust me, it can’t be done.”

  Trust me, Michael thinks, it can. I did it four days ago.

  The new K8 software had worked faster than he expected. It didn’t take long to generate a fully functioning profile for a man who was completely made-up. A mask for him to wear so he could get online incognito.

  With a smirk, Michael had decided to call him ‘Lee Berners’.