The

  Disinformation

  War

  The

  Disinformation

  War

  S. J. Groenewegen

  Copyright © 2023 Goldsmiths Press

  First published in 2023 by Goldsmiths Press

  Text copyright © 2023 Sarah Groenewegen

  Goldsmiths, University of London, New Cross

  London SE14 6NW

  Printed and bound by Versa Press, USA

  Distribution by the MIT Press

  Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA and London, England

  The right of Sarah Groenewegen to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 in the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologizes for any errors or omissions and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means whatsoever without prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and review and certain non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978-1-913380-80-9 (pbk)

  ISBN 978-1-913380-79-3 (ebk)

  www.gold.ac.uk/goldsmiths-press

  d_r0

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Many thanks to:

  The GoldSF Editorial Board: Dr Una McCormack (chair), Paul March-Russell (co-founder), Joan Haran, Elizabeth English, Anne Charnock, Maureen Kincaid Speller, Robin Reid, Aisha Subramanian and Sheree Renée Thomas. Thank you for seeing the promise in my proposal and making the incisive notes that helped me craft this finished novel. Una, especially, for coming up with the title and casting her expert eye over the final draft manuscript.

  Professor Sarah Kember for creating a home for GoldSF.

  Eva Nazarova for the striking cover graphic design.

  Ilyanna Kerr for the illustrations that evoke the complexity of the novel.

  Dan Shutt for copy-editing par excellence.

  Ellen Parnavelas and Susan Kelly for their outstanding editorial work and production management.

  Dr Debbie Challis and Simon Guerrier for our many illuminating conversations about politics, history, feminisms, eugenics and writing. Debbie also for inviting me to see an exhibition at the Florence Nightingale Museum, St Thomas’ Hospital, London during March 2013. The material about Victorian workhouses provided the spark for this story.

  My brother, Stephen Groenewegen, for his unwavering support and encouragement.

  I am indebted to the numerous autistic people active on various social media platforms who are so generous in sharing their experiences – positive, negative and everyday. Kayla is autistic, but undiagnosed, and that facet of her character featured in my first description of her. At that time, though, I didn’t know that I am autistic. I was clinically diagnosed at the end of 2021, shortly before GoldSF formally accepted my proposal. Of course, any mistakes in the novel remain mine.

  Finally, but by no means least, kudos to all those striving to identify and combat the disinformation threatening liberal democracies the world over. As imperfect as liberal democracies are, they are better than the authoritarian and totalitarian alternatives.

  1

  The day the trucks came, a ray of light from the rising sun pierced Kayla’s eyelids. Protesting, she woke. A moment later, her phone drummed insistently against the desk.

  ‘Alarm off.’

  The phone went quiet. She groaned. All she wanted was to return to her night.

  Kayla had spent most of the night online. She played one game, bowed out of a second and chatted in four different forums. Six of her non-binary personas and an androgynous line of bespoke avatars got a good workout. Online, she adopted ‘they/them’ pronouns, though from time to time she experimented with others. Online, she thrived. In real life, she once witnessed the split lip and bruises inflicted on a kid at school who lived their truth, which taught Kayla to keep her head down. Thirteen years later, and she still felt the guilt of her own cowardice.

  One standout from the night online was a chat with a lad from the UK.Gov Large Computer Array Project. They had been chatting and gaming for two months, and last night he came close to offering her a job. Kayla smiled as she recalled the conversation, but the smile didn’t last. Their conversation was a dance that, while entertaining, would lead nowhere. If she allowed hope to gain a hold, then the inevitable fuckedoverness would do her serious damage. She hadn’t told him about her long-term contract with the companies controlling her estate – currently known as Jackson-Burgess. She couldn’t tell him in case he used this to flush out her offline identity. The lad and his mates from the Array, their friendliness, might be a ruse to find out about her hacking. She could never, ever let her guard down.

  Kayla closed her eyes and listened for any sounds from within the flat. Twenty-six years old and she still lived with her parents and twin brothers. No sound to suggest anyone had risen. None of them had to; their shifts didn’t start until much later in the day. Beyond the flat, she heard dogs barking and the squeals of kids playing far below in the remains of the small estate park.

  Fatigue made her muscles tremble. A headache threatened. But Kayla resisted drifting back to sleep. Her thoughts meandered. What a bland name – the Large Computer Array Project. Maybe all the good names were trademarked and copyrighted years ago. As for the abandoned game, could she be bothered to find a way to break the impasse where she and her gaming buddies were stuck? The group’s current favourite first-person-shooter-in-a-group-of-shooters game just didn’t cut it anymore.

  Her eyes opened wide. She jerked upwards. Shit, she’d be late to the class! Breach of contract… A fact filed in her don’t-give-a-crap folder popped into her consciousness…

  That was it. A day off. A day off from attending the job training class, the one she needed to complete as a condition of her tenancy contract. The course lasted three years and passing it would allow her to apply for jobs outside the protective cocoon of the Balfour Estate. Theoretically, the course certificate allowed for Kayla and her classmates to overcome the worry of having no recognised qualifications from school, college or university. But every time the management company for the estate changed, they reset the course and the students had to start again with zero recognition of past work.

  Still, a day off. Kayla sank back down so her pillow nestled her head. She lanced the hope of a job at the Large Computer Array Project like the boil it truly was. If she took a job outside the estate before completing the mandatory course, the debt-recovery clause kicked in. The estate’s management company would receive fifty per cent of her take-home pay until she discharged both debt and interest, both of which would follow her from job to job. Kayla calculated that it would take twenty years to clear the debt based on the starting salary at the Project, and that assumed she could afford to live on half the pay of her peers. As if. Then there was the interest, tagged to inflation, making it impossible to calculate how much it added to her total debt.

  Before the pre-austerity crash, Kayla’s dad worked as an investment banker and her mother was a high-end travel agent. Yet neither read the small print in the estate’s tenancy contract. They figured her brothers would thrive with the estate-associated apprenticeship scheme, going straight into local jobs, and the semi-academic training course would suit Kayla. Christ, what a mistake. It was ten long years since her parents signed the family up and they moved in together.

  Kayla balled her hands into fists and beat the bed on either side of her body. But what was the point of that? She wasn’t a little kid. After a while, she got up and crossed over to the old laptop computer on her desk. She initiated her bespoke start-up security apps, which tracked and traced, destroyed or quarantined anything that threatened her online anonymity. She left her room and quietly toasted a dry slice of bread. No one had bought any milk or butter and she couldn’t stomach dry cereal at the best of times. With the low-level nausea from sleep deprivation, the idea nearly made her retch.

  Back in her bedroom, armed with a mug of hot, strong tea, Kayla logged in and visited her usual sites. An app pinged to say that a note waited from her best online mate. She followed a maze to where her friend stored a document of interest, with the usual caveats and warnings applied as to its authenticity. Her buddy passed on information about a flurry of irate emails between the parties concerned, seen but not stolen by the third-party hacker. The emails added context to a puzzle about the document’s file name, but her friend couldn’t say what. They didn’t know, and the hacker vanished without answering the obvious questions.

  Kayla sipped her tea and clicked to open the document – a scanned file – labelled EEO/TS/NDA YATES-GRANTLEY_FINAL. A UK.Gov cover sheet marked the file top-secret; the main document of two pages was all about the Social Welfare Amendments bill, plus a full non-disclosure agreement that ran to a dozen pages and a list of the people authorised to see it. The names included the prime minister, all of the secretaries of state and their chief advisors, six names high up in Jackson-Burgess and two directors of a think tank called Poverty Reform. She contemplated the document’s title. ‘EEO’ meant England Eyes Only, ‘TS’ was Top Secret
and ‘NDA’ referred to the non-disclosure agreement. Each term was bog-standard for documents like these; she’d seen enough of them, faked and real, to know. But the use of ‘Yates-Grantley’ stood out. Kayla pondered this. Why name the document after a subsidiary to Jackson-Burgess and not the main company? Even a phrase connected to the Social Welfare Amendments bill would make more sense. Leaked documents never came with full context, but in this case those missing emails would have helped.

  A door opened within the flat. One of her brothers shuffled past her door and yawned. Time for her to leave, to avoid them. Kayla stashed the document in a secret online place of her own and set one of her bots to track and destroy all traces connecting her to it.

  *

  Libby Seymour ran along the path through Battersea Park next to the Thames. Reaching the Albert Bridge, she stopped to recover her breath and used the railing to stretch. She was sweating from both the exercise and the heat of the sunshine. The overnight rain had washed away enough of London’s summer haze, so she didn’t wheeze or need her inhaler.

  Two gulls battled over a tossed fish tea. Libby, stretching, fretted about a newspaper article she’d read before setting out. Her newsfeed app flagged up a mention of the Ministry for Military Affairs, the department where she worked as an intelligence analyst. The piece included a fleeting reference to the prime minister favouring proposals to extend the list of offences leading to automatic remand. The article quoted an independent think tank, Poverty Reform, assuring that private business would meet the increased pressure on the prison system. The rest of the article outlined the contractual relationship between Jackson-Burgess (UK) Ltd and several government departments, including Libby’s. Those facts were glossed over as background material for the main story about the husband of a junior minister failing to disclose his non-executive directorship with Jackson-Burgess. Libby wondered how long it would take for a press release to be issued ‘rectifying’ the mistake.

  Libby gripped the railing and completed twenty push-ups. With a soft grunt, she turned away from the river and ran hard along the south-bound path. She abhorred the news media for their failure to follow the real story when it came to corruption. Every time they zeroed in on an example, the individual concerned ended up able to withstand the scrutiny. The excitement faded and the corruption continued. Every blasted time. Libby pounded faster on the pavement. Surely the real story lay in the prime minister’s push to lock up more people for longer and without trial. Few, if any, of the offences listed would apply to anyone with any money. So, who cared? Well, she did, for one.

  When she reached her street, she slowed to a walk to cool down. Her watch buzzed to notify her of an email received on her work phone. She stopped to read the preview. Scowling, she hurried inside her home to read the full message. HR were demanding yet another meeting that morning to review her annual application to engage in voluntary work outside of the Ministry. They claimed a campaign to push for a general election was political and therefore she had breached the Civil Service Code.

  ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake, how many more times? It’s not political! Not at my grade. And Security have okayed it.’ She flung her phone down on her kitchen bench. She’d deal with it when she got to her office.

  *

  Kayla shut down her computer and put it back in its place above the laptop issued to her by Jackson-Burgess. She collected her notebook, identity card, a pen and two pencils and her phone. She looked at her satchel, then at her jacket. The forecast promised a high temperature and a mostly sunny day, but a cool breeze always blew where she headed, so she chose the jacket. She pulled it on and filled the pockets with what she needed.

  Her brother shuffled back from the flat’s main bathroom to his bedroom. She waited to make sure his twin didn’t emerge from the bedroom they shared, and that her parents stayed in theirs. After counting to ten, she eased herself out of her room, scuttled along the short corridor, and left the flat with barely a sound. Outside she paused, alert for any sign of other people. She wanted no one to know where she hid on days like this. She crept towards the fire escape stairs and breathed a sigh of relief when she got to the other side of the heavy door. She bounded up the two flights of steps and emerged into the corridor that ran alongside the housing for the building’s lift mechanism.

  A sign stuck to the exterior door declared it was locked for safety reasons; maintenance crews could collect a key from a fire marshal. But a few months after Kayla and her family moved in, she had explored up here and discovered the key in the lock. She didn’t report it and no one else noticed. The third time she visited the roof, she placed the key on the top of the doorjamb and kept the door unlocked like she found it. Over all the years she had been sneaking up on the roof to hide, no one had changed the lock. So much for health and safety gone mad.

  Kayla went out onto the roof and straight to the north-eastern corner. This was where she liked to sit and read whenever she could, nestled quietly in the space between the four-and-a-half-feet-high perimeter wall and where one of three large air conditioning vents emerged. Her safe space. She rested back against the vent’s brick housing and gazed up at the puffballs of cloud drifting across an otherwise clear-blue sky. For a few moments, she forgot about where she lived, the poverty trap, the impossibility of freedom.

  She fell to thinking about the document from her online friend. She itched to check its bona fides, to find out if it was genuine and why someone would leak it. Whoever had done that was risking a long prison sentence should they be discovered. Why would someone take that chance for a document that by itself betrayed little? Kayla sighed. She would have to leave the mystery for later.

  Her day off from class came with a price, of course. She and her classmates needed to complete an assignment to a grade that contributed to their total course mark. If they failed to meet the grade, they would fail the whole course. She dug out her phone and called up the assignment in the Jackson-Burgess Education for Life app. Reading through, she quickly recognised that this was a blend of two assignments set during previous iterations of the course. With a weary sigh, she opened the app where she stored her work from past courses and found her previous answers. She hashed together a response to the new assignment, read it over and amended her phrasing to beat the Jackson-Burgess plagiarism detector. Her deadline was the end of the day, so she set a reminder to check it over once more before submitting it.

  She shoved her phone back in her pocket. All that palaver to learn nothing other than how to dodge breaching the tenancy contract. Everything the students submitted became the intellectual property of the company that managed the estate and ran the course. Anyone caught reusing previous submissions would be accused of theft and could be charged with a criminal offence. Such a charge would be a breach of contract, no matter the imposed penalty. In her head, Kayla railed about the unfairness of the companies using their prior work as a threat rather than credit for them to pass the damned course and escape. But what could be done?

  At least she now had most of the day free. She took out her notebook, flipping through to where she had copied down the latest mathematical puzzle sent to her by the lad from the Large Computer Array Project. She read through, then stared at it without focus as her mind absorbed the problem and played with it. One part of the puzzle clicked into place, and with a soft laugh she wrote her response.

  ‘Too easy’, she said out loud. She worked through her proof, curling over to capture and write out each of her thoughts.

  The roar of a helicopter shattered her concentration. The downdraft of its blades whipped up dust. Kayla clung on to her notebook and covered her face with her arms.

  ‘Jesus!’

  She sneezed. The helicopter dropped away, but the dust eddied around her for a few seconds longer. She sneezed again and rubbed grit from her eyes.

  She scrambled to her feet, sticking her notebook back in its pocket. Abandoning her sanctuary, she crossed to the edge of the roof. Helicopters were circling the five blocks, each one drifting its way down the twenty stories to the ground. The choppers looked military to her untrained eye. Maybe a hotshot at the nearby barracks decided the estate would make for a good place to practice. No one would listen to any complaints from the Balfour Estate. No one ever did.