Looking for Jake and Other Stories

Aykan’s, though, I always checked. They were pretty extraordinary. Essays, art pieces, things like that.

Sometimes he provided a password to get into hidden pages online, and when I visited them they were incomprehensible internal reports that looked very much like governments talking to governments, or rebel groups talking to rebels. I couldn’t tell if they were hoaxes, but if not, I was rather alarmed.

“What’s all this shit you keep sending me?” I demanded.

“Interesting, huh?” He sniggered, and put the phone down.

Sometimes he directed me to one or another of his online projects. That was how I realised that Aykan was a virtuoso of programming. Once, on one of our infrequent rendezvous, I called him a hacker. He burst out laughing, then got very angry with me.

“Fucking hacker?” He laughed again. “Fucking hacker? Listen bro, you’re not talking to some sebum-faced little sixteen-year-old geekboy with wank-stained pants who calls himself Dev-L.” He swore furiously. “I’m not a fucking hacker, man, I’m a fucking artist, I’m a hardworking wage-slave, I’m a concerned motherfucking citizen, whatever you want, but I’m not a fucking hacker.”

I didn’t care what he wanted to call himself. Whatever he thought he was, he left me awestruck— disbelieving, really, utterly bewildered—with what he could do.

“What search engine do you use?” he wrote to me once. “How often does your name come up? Try it now and then again tomorrow morning.”

According to searchsites.com I appeared on seven websites, all of them work-related rubbish. When I typed in my name again the next day, I was nowhere. I looked up my company’s website and there I was, halfway down the page. But when I ran my name through searchsites or runbot or megawhere, I had no luck. I had become invisible.

“What did you do, you fuck?” I yelled down the phone. I was excited, though, feigning anger badly.

“How’s that, huh? I ran you through my hide engine.” I could hear him smoking. “Don’t worry, man,” he said. “I’ll take you out of it. But it’s good, huh? Tomorrow I think I’m gonna run Jack fucking Straw through it, or maybe every fucking sex-related word I can think of.” He put the phone down.

If he did run those words through his engine, it had stopped working. I checked the next day. But maybe he just hadn’t bothered.

I spoke to Aykan several times, but a couple of months went by without me seeing him.

One morning I found another of his unmarked emails in my inbox. “HAVE YOU SEEN THIS

FUCKPIG SCUMSUCKING PIECE OF SHIT?”

I had. It was the homepage of an organisation called An End To Hunger. I had been sent it at least twice already, as a recipient on mass emailings.

The site contained low-key, muted, and simple graphics, with a selection of harrowing statistics about world hunger. There were links to the UN Food Programme, Oxfam, and so on. But what made it such a popular site was its push-button charity donation.

Once per day, anyone visiting the site could click a little toggle, and in the words of the website, “feed the hungry.” Alongside the button was a list of sponsors—all very dignified, no logos or bells or whistles, just the name of the company and a link to its homepage. Each sponsor would donate half a cent per click, which was roughly equivalent to half a cup of rice, or maize or whatever.

It all made me feel a bit uneasy, like corporate charity usually did. When I first saw the site I’d pressed the button. It had seemed churlish not to. But I hadn’t visited it since, and I was getting irritated with people recommending it to me.

I called Aykan. He was incandescent.

“I’ve seen the site,” I told him. “Bit gruesome, isn’t it?”

“Gruesome?” he shouted. “It’s fucking sick is what it is. It’s fucking beyond beyond, man. I mean, forget

‘politics lite,’ this shit couldn’t be parodied.”

“I keep getting emails recommending it,” I told him.

“Any motherfucker emails you that reply them right back and tell them to shove it up their arses till it hits the roof of their mouth, yeah? I mean by shit almighty . . . have you read the FAQ? Listen to this. This is fucking verbatim, OK? ‘Can I click the “Give Food” button more than once, and keep making donations?’ ‘We’re sorry!’ ” Aykan’s voice spewed bile. “ ‘We’re real sorry! It’s a shame, but you can’t do that. Our sponsors have agreed for us to count one donation per person per day, and any more would be breaking our agreement.’ ” He made a noise like angry retching.

“Fuck ’em, bro,” he said. “They tell us we can’t be naughty and do it too often? ” I didn’t tell him I had donated that first time. He was making me ashamed.

I murmured something to him, some agreement, some dismissal and condemnation. It wasn’t enough.

“This is fucking war, man,” he said. “This one I can’t let go.”

“Run them through your hide engine,” I suggested vaguely.

“What?” he said. “What the fuck you talking about? Don’t talk horsefuck, man. I want them down and dead. Time for the big fucking guns, hombre, ” he said, and put the phone down. I tried to call him back but he didn’t pick up.

Two days later I got another email.

“Try visiting you shitting know where,” it said. I did, and An End To Hunger would not come up. The browser couldn’t find it. I tried again at the end of the day and it was back, with a small, pious note about how sad they were to be targeted by hackers.

Aykan wouldn’t answer his phone. A week and a half later he called me.

“Man!” he shouted at me. “Go back to the bastards,” he said. “I was . . . you know, I jumped the gun last time. Wasn’t particularly clever, right? But it was like a fucking, what do you call it, I was doing a reconnoitre. But go back now, click the bastard button all you can.”

“What did you do, Aykan?” I said. I was at work, and kept my voice neutral.

“I don’t know how long it’ll last,” he said, “so get all your fucking friends to go visiting. For a short time only the shit-licking sponsors are going to be making a reasonable fucking payout. Ten bucks a fucking click, my friend, none of this half a cent bull. So go give generously.”

It’s impossible to say how much of an impact it had. Certainly for the next day or so I proselytised zealously. An End To Hunger kept it very quiet, when they found out. I like to think that it took the businesses in question the best part of a day to realise that their pledged donations had gone up by around 200,000 percent.

I wondered when Aykan would get bored of these games.

We spoke for a long time on the phone, one evening a fortnight or so later. He sounded exhausted.

“What you up to?” I asked him.

“Waging war, man.”

I suggested that he was wearing himself out, that he should apply himself to other things. He got angry and depressed all at once.

“It really got to me, this one,” he said. “It really got to me. I dunno why, but I can’t . . . This one matters.

But . . . I keep hitting the wrong enemy. ‘Corporate sponsors don’t actually care!’ ‘Big business is hypocritical!’ That’s not news to anyfuckingbody. Who doesn’t know? Who gives a fuck about that?

“Do you ever stop to think about them, man?” he said. “Them in the AETH office. What must that do to your head? Like some kind of ghouls, man. What’s that got to do to you?”

I changed the subject several times, but it kept coming back. “I dunno, man . . .” he kept saying. “I dunno what to do . . .”

It may have been the next day that he decided, but it was a good three weeks before he could make it work.

“Go and visit A* E** T* H*****,” the email said. “Click and send the poor starving masses a present.

See what happens.”

I went to the site. Apart from a few minor updates, nothing seemed to have changed. I looked for some clue