Sockpuppet: Book One in the Martingale Cycle by Matthew Blakstad

she goes. Telling her story in snapshot stills and coded pairs of words. Like these:
    )) sun rush ((
    Me All Over and Pimpmyhide take just a narrow slice of Dani’s morning. All the other apps eating RAM in her phone and in her brain are dedicated to tracing Sam. Since nine this morning, when she woke for the second time, she’s been nudging about the edge of his online shadow. She’s hooked on him in Parley, Facebook, LinkedIn and some PR sites; and googled up a dozen pages of hash about him. She’s aggregating photos of him in an album but as she hops from app to app the image that lingers comes from behind her retinas – Sam on a beach, near-naked; arms, neck and buttocks eclipsed against burning island sky. The smell of salt and beach-weed rises in her nostrils from the halal shops and continental grocers.
    The groaning fact of a London bus lands inches from her face, giving out a Wookie roar of brakes. She keeps typing on her phone as she mounts the platform and swipes her phone against the Oyster reader. The reader beeps and lodges data. As she bounds to the upper deck the driver pumps the accelerator and the brake in fast succession like he’s playing the drums, and she’s thrown upstairs by the lurch. She picks herself up and dumps her arse and bag on the upper deck’s front seat, still typing.
    As she proffers,an alert pings up from MeatSpace. Really? That is seriously not a zone for mornings. But there. Yep. monkey_love just posted in her private space.
     
    monkey_love
I can smell you.
I know you’re on here. I can smell the sweat on you and your hot wet sex.
I can smell your pheromones and your blood.
Are you here? Your account’s live.
SafeWord? Are you on here?
I could really do with talking to you.
Need to talk to someone.
     
    Does the guy ever sleep? She doesn’t want this now; but as she swipes the sext away it triggers a memory: last night. That rambling batshit mail she composed to the Sambot. Did she ever send it?
    She flips to Mail and selects Sent Items . She scrolls up and down, but the mail isn’t there: it wasn’t sent. She checks Drafts . It’s still there, unsent and unfinished. Now she remembers: she got too hot last night to finish it. She drifted instead to the instant scents of MeatSpace. Christ, what a night. What the living fuck was she writing? She doesn’t want to know but she can’t not open it.
     
i can still feel the warm of your hand on my shoulder as you left the room. how are you doing these days? im in a mad state. always so busy. haven’t slept more than four hours in the last two days. its crazy isnt it. you looked great, though. you were hot against me when you hugged me. do you remember summer camp in aviemore, that one time? a bunch of first year sixth up all night on the hillside. the fire had burned out and everyone had to huddle round the embers to stay warm. did you notice I was wrapped around your back? i couldnt tell if you were still awake. and anyway fucking jenny harris was lying the other side of you.
     
    This shit goes on fold after fold, scroll after scroll. How long was she writing? It helped tone down her horny urge, for a while at least. These itches are getting harder to scratch. More and more she’s channel-hopping an endless feed of online lovers; trolling pickup sites, especially Codr, the new dating site that’s exclusively for geeks. She picks and drops men with a porn-hound conviction that something better will come with the next swipe. Something perfect. Why it’s never slaked. Why she has to land somewhere soon or she’ll pop.
    She hits Send . No reason the poor old Sambot shouldn’t get his morning oats.
    She slides down in the bus seat and puts her feet up on the front rail, squeezing her warm phone into her chest with both hands. What she needs is neat transactional sex: the kind she can leave behind with no stray correlations; but it never goes that way. Things end up twisted and angry, especially with monkey_love – the only