You have to listen!

“You have to listen, you have to hear this.”

The man bounced about on his makeshift podium, shouting to be heard over the hubbub of other speakers at speaker’s corner and the traffic noise from Marble Arch.

“Please, it’s important. Please stop and listen.”

He had a small crowd, probably more interested in his behaviour than anything he might have to say.

“Get on with it!”

“Yeah, what is it you’ve got to say?”

A smartly dressed man wearing medals shushed the others into silence.

“Sir, if you start to speak people who are interested will listen. You can always repeat yourself if people arrive mid way through your rendition.” He gave a slight bow of his head, then looked intently at the speaker.

Pausing, the speaker visibly shook himself, drew himself up to his full height, then started speaking in a quiet yet firm voice.

“The Government are after me, they want to silence me, stop me from telling people what I know. I have been followed for days now, and it can only be a matter of time before I’m assassinated.”

A few more people started to gather round. The man with the medals glanced around.

“I found out the truth. I am a web designer and programmer. I was approached by a civil servant, and asked to write a programme to search the web for patterns. Certain words, phrases and images. They wanted it set up so that they could change the search criteria themselves, for social research. I thought it was odd that I was asked to work from home rather than in Whitehall, but it didn’t really make any difference to me. They agreed my asking price for the contract and my contact spoke to me twice daily. I wrote the programme downloaded it on to the IP address they’d given me.

“Two days later I realised I’d left a back door open in the programme. I decided that all I could do was to hack my own programme and close down the back door. That way they’d never know I made a mistake and I would know I’d finished the job properly. I logged on to their network through the same IP address and opened my programme. That’s when it happened.”

“What happened? Get to the point!”

“My computer crashed, it couldn’t handle the data flow. When I finally got it re-started and tried again all I got was error messages, then it crashed again. I tried to recover it but nothing worked. They must have found my back door and booby trapped it.”

“Or your computer just crashed?”

“No, this was deliberate. I was scared. I sat around for an hour or two. Then I went and got an old PC out. By the time I’d hooked it up my home wi-fi network had gone down. I went to look at the router and I saw the man who had contacted me to write the programme stood by a black Range Rover parked outside my flat. I was sure he’d come to kill me for what I know, or what I’d done.”

The old soldier stroked his chin.

“I’ve been on the run for three days, hiding from them. But I decided if I tell enough people I’d be safer than if I keep the story to myself. They can’t kill us all!”

He stopped, staring at the crowd as if challenging them to argue with him. One woman cleared her throat.

“So what is it that you’ve found, other than that they’ve fixed your programming mistake?”

“Don’t you see, they can see everything that’s on the internet.  They can search for anything, draw together all of the data on any issue, subject or person and use it”

“So can I, it’s called Google you fool!”

He leaned forward, hopping from foot to foot as he replied in a louder voice.

“No, no, it’s not like that, it’s quicker and more detailed and…”

But he’d lost his crowd, they slipped away first in ones and twos then in groups;

“Stop, you have to listen, you have to hear this.”

Eventually only the old soldier remained, still listening intently, head bowed while apparently fiddling with his medals.  Anyone close enough may have just heard him speak quietly.

“Stand down the snipers, no one’s listening.”

On nearby rooftops, men in black began to disassemble their rifles.

(C) Chris Johnson 2013