CW // Sexual violence, abuse.
Violet light glides through the slatted blinds, tracing across the dark room and her arm, extended across the desk. The deck is off, her hardware shutdown, and now she finds herself with a few hours of silence. This is when the tinnitus of the day rings loudest.
She is a mere conduit. The data is mined by bots growing exponentially more sophisticated, housing intelligences larger than any biological brain could ever handle, and is processed by other bots in her deck. It is left to her, the human in this arrangement, to collate the data, contact the clients, and reap the rewards.
And every day, her eyes must cross what the data contains. Secrets. What people do, or rather, what they won’t do. There are the scandals; infidelity, deviancy, obsession. The corporate concerns; fraud, embezzlement, manipulation. These are the low end of the market, in terms of prices. The higher end comes in too often and too dark. The abuses endured, hidden, and swept away. The victims; the elderly, the poor - kids. Human trafficking. Paedophile rings. Drug mules. The murders. The rapes. The coverups, from the eyrie to the gutter. Always, the powerless at the mercy of the powerful.
She passes it by, not to the public or the justices, but to the rivals, the competitors, and collects a neat profit in the process. What lies on her deck could blow open the whole city, exposing its reeking guts to the world. But it won’t.
Another conduit tried that stunt last year. Every black secret from the last decade, exposed. The public was given access to a larder of sin. And what happened? Some detective lost his job. There were a few corporate shakedowns. Scapegoats were found. A law was passed. Conduits lost out on decades of profit. And by and large, the public couldn’t be bothered to read what was in Pandora's Box.
Paddy Dobson
23th February 2021