Revenge Of The Mutant Algorithms - The Guerilla Information Team

Throughout November I'll be releasing new weird sci-fi short stories. Each one is a campfire horror yarn, with a technological twist. Your feedback is highly appreciated.

Everything you read is possible - there's no magic, just sufficiently advanced technology.

Chapter 4 - The Guerilla Information Team

The GITs didn't mean to cause all this trouble. It is just a sad fact the trouble seemed to follow all their dubiously-legal-but-morally-justified schemes.

Jitney was first radicalised by a bus stop. As in, he was literally stood next to it when he was visited by a revelation rather than the N7 bus he was expecting.

A bunch of local Static Heads had smashed up the info screen. The LCD panel lay splintered on the floor oozing whatever weird fluid kept it working. In a better world, it might have been smashed by people protesting the persistent advertising which interrupted the commuter-focussed messaging. But this world wasn't in a better, cooler parallel universe. Instead it was a world where homebrewed nootropics drove people to seek out bright and twinkly lights. Most just sat slack jawed and stared. You could often find them clustered around old CRT screens. There were no analogue signals any more, so the screens showed an endless fuzz of static. Hence the name. Most Static Heads would sit there peacefully for hours watching the infinite crawl of flashing lights. A few were driven into fluorescent rage.

Presumably a particularly sparkly message about bus delays had tripped one of them over the edge. All that was left of the screen was shards of glass littering the street, a few exposed circuit boards, and an unhealthy amount of blood. Hopefully that of the miscreant rather than that of an innocent commuter.

Jitney tried to get it fixed. He rang the council - who passed him on to their streetcars team - who referred him to the bus company - who referred him on to their parent company - who referred him back to the council. Useless!

So Jitney went scavenging! He found exactly what he needed while dumpster-diving in the bins behind the library. A dozen years ago, some twattish politician had proposed replacing all libraries with Kindles. That worked great for a while, until Amazon got hacked and started pushing copies of Chuck Tingle novels to anyone who had checked out Thatcher's autobiography. The subsequent uproar sent the government into one of its periodic "back-to-basics" frenzies. Kindles were out, paper was in. Amazon was ordered to send a firmware update that permanently crippled the devices and they were then thrown into a landfill where they could leach toxic chemicals into the wastewater.

Jitney liked the word "permanent". Nothing was permanent if you had a soldering iron, a JTAG cable, some dodgy Tiawanese firmware, and a Matrix server full of civic-minded reprobates.

J: "Anyone got a Kindle patch?"
K: "Can't be done mate. The blew an eFuse. Thing's buggered."
Z: "Yeah. Permafucked."
J: "OK, so how do I replace an eFuse?"
K: "Can't be done mate. Proper hardware protection."
J: "I thought, on old Intel processors, you could melt some pencil graphite onto the trace?"
K: "Well, yeah, that would work. But you'd need steady hands and a decent microscope."
J: "Anyone want to lend me a decent microscope?"
Z: "*SIGH* FINE! OK! I'll come over. But you're buying dinner."

Jitney and Zöë burned their fingers, set off smoke alarms, inhaled more fumes than was sensible, until - at about 3am - they had a working jailbreak. They wired the paperback sized screens together, re-soldered a bunch of delicate components, and flashed some firmware originally meant for displaying the fluctuating price of fish in the local market. They hooked it up at the bus stop and left a little calling card - "Provided to the community by the Guerilla Information Team."

Static Heads craved bright and flashing lights. Jitney and Zöë's ersatz eInk display was boring monochrome. Commuters loved it! No advertising, no distracting animations, no crowd of spaced-out zombies cluttering the bus stop. A plain matt screen which updated every minute and showed the bus times in a large friendly font. The bus company occasionally took it down, but the chat-room kept them well supplied with blackmarket epaper - acres of the stuff.

The GITS released all their schematics for free online, allowing a ridiculous number of flowers to bloom. With every new retrofitted information screen, more users flocked to the chatroom. As more users arrived, more project ideas were floated. Half of them were clearly illegal. Half were basically insane. And one was genius.

PC Fletcher was used to being shouted at by his superiors. He was even used to the baying mob whenever he had to kick in a drug-dealer's door, or slap a hysterical woman. What he wasn't used to was the ever-present whine of a drone tracking him. Wherever he went, no matter how far or how fast he travelled, there was always a GIT nearby with an autonomous drone. The GITs had "liberated" the internal complaints dossiers on hundreds of serving police officers. Fletcher wasn't perhaps the worst of the bunch - although his disciplinary record came close - but he had distinctive features which were easy to pick up on camera/ And that made him an excellent target for sousveillance.

The drones were thrown into the air via a wooden trebuchet - a simple enough contraption for a moderately skilled carpenter or anyone with a laser cutter and a few planks of wood. Once airborne, they locked on to the TETRA beacon pulsing out from Fletcher's Airwave radio. It wasn't fine-grained enough to locate him directly, but it allowed the drone to fly in roughly the right direction. Even in a crowd of police, Fletcher's shoulder numbers were easily readable from the multi-megapixel optical zoom lens. Should he cover them up (as he often did) then gait analysis tracked his lumbering form throughout the streets.

Even though he knew he was being watched, he couldn't moderate his behaviour. The GITs caught him parking in a disabled parking bay, ignoring no smoking signs, and kicking handcuffed suspects. An enterprising falconer hired herself out to the police; her birds were winged fury. Screaming terror from the skies which could strike a fatal blow to any drone they chanced upon. So what? The drones were a couple of quid off Temu. There were no serial numbers, no MAC addresses, no identifying marks whatsoever. So the swarm multiplied. Any officer who tried to block the drones' view quickly found themselves added to the watchlist. All the data was streamed out unedited. There was no chance of a cover-up or selectively releasing the worst clips. People saw everything and they saw it raw.

The answer to "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" was, apparently, Jitny and his merry band of pranksters.

By now the GITs were less of an ad-hoc anarchist collective and more of a radical interventionist squadron of hard-nosed data-freedom absolutists. Their final plan was so audacious that it nearly caused the downfall of democracy.

The House of Commons was more raucous than usual. The scent of blood was in the air as the Prime Minister sat down after a particularly bruising encounter with the Leader of the Opposition. The PM's majority depended on a good performance and, with luck, he had escaped unscathed. The jeers from the benches opposite weren't the problem; the hushed silence behind him was.

The Chancellor shoved her phone into the PM's lap and elbowed him hard. He glanced down and tried to make sense of the live-blog headlines rapidly scrolling past. He strained to read the tiny text while desperately trying to ignore whatever The Speaker was shouting about.

"There will be ORDER!"

The MPs reluctantly settled down. The PM didn't have a chance to finish reading the article before some jumped-up Scottish politician arose to berate him.

"Mr Speaker," she said, "Just now, the right honourable member told this house that there were no plans to send troops to the United States to participate in the insurrection. The House should be aware that, not only did his heart-rate spike during his statement, but his pupils dilated to an alarming degree? Was the Prime Minister lying to us?"

There was uproar.

The MP for Twickenham South angled her lapel pin to face the Prime Minister again. The hidden array of sensors focused tightly on his flushed face and wirelessly transmitted its data to an overclocked knock-off Raspberry Pi running a Python 4 script written by the GITS. The real-time analytics cross-referenced the PM's face with every other time he'd appeared in public. They had a complete biometric profile of his psychological state and blasted that telemetry to everyone online. The PM's face was overlaid with a graph of his heartbeat, likely sweat rate, vocal stress patterns, and pupil dilation. He was naked in front of the world and found wanting.

He stammered and spluttered and faked having a heart-attack in order to escape the baying chamber. He was gone by the end of the week.

It was hard to pin the blame on the Guerilla Information Team directly. Yes, they'd published the schematics and software, but no one could prove which anonymous member of their collective had built the box and delivered it to the constituency office. The MP claimed Parliamentary Privilege and refused to be drawn on whether or not they knew how to recompile the Linux kernel.

The GITs weren't done. Not only did information want to be free; it wanted to be the cause of freedom. Why shouldn't the world know everything? If only there were a way to make vital data easily viewable to everyone on the planet. If only there was a convenient surface which could be seen by most people no matter where they were in the world.

Jitney looked down at his collection of over-specced lasers, and pointed them at the Moon.

Thanks for reading

I'd love your feedback on this story. Did you like the style of writing? Was the plot interesting? Did you guess the twist? Please stick a note in the comments to motivate me 😃

Hungry for more? You can read:

• 2024's "Revenge Of The Mutant Algorithms"
• 2023's "Tales of the Algorithm"