The sun goes down and his eyes open. The work starts now. Dripped in slowly rotating neon light, he faces a black screen and the sigils moving across it. Nodes. People. Their movements. Their conversations. Their lives.
He searches through millions of datasets, each containing within them millions of files both banal and critical. Portfolios that contain intricate details of a person’s moment-to-moment living and the data that trails off and connects to an adjacent person and all their adjacencies. Lines that form webs that form a cracked glass window on the screen. Pull back far enough and you get a flat white circle made from billions of interlinking lives. Like electrons to electrons. Quanta. The mesh of reality. The known universe.
But it is not these bright spots he is looking for. It is the entities between. The places where data disappears. Or never appears. Where people disappear. Adults and children. Run by traffickers. Cartels. Multinationals. Shells. Governments. Where truth is rewritten. Lives extinguished. Where no light shines.
But his eyes see through the dark. By inches he finds them. Holes in the pattern. Spaces unoccupied yet opaque. Breadcrumbs. And when he finds them there is a red phone on his desk. At the other end are some people inclined much the same as he is, but lack the digital senses. Instead, their talents lie in executing a special breed of primeval justice. And they are very good at it.
Paddy Dobson
10th October 2021