#secrecy | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

mostlysignssomeportents · 7 months

Text

How Google’s trial secrecy lets it control the coverage

I'm coming to Minneapolis! Oct 15: Presenting The Internet Con at Moon Palace Books. Oct 16: Keynoting the 26th ACM Conference On Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing.

"Corporate crime" is practically an oxymoron in America. While it's true that the single most consequential and profligate theft in America is wage theft, its mechanisms are so obscure and, well, dull that it's easy to sell us on the false impression that the real problem is shoplifting:

https://newrepublic.com/post/175343/wage-theft-versus-shoplifting-crime

Corporate crime is often hidden behind Dana Clare's Shield Of Boringness, cloaked in euphemisms like "risk and compliance" or that old favorite, "white collar crime":

https://pluralistic.net/2021/12/07/solar-panel-for-a-sex-machine/#a-single-proposition

And corporate crime has a kind of performative complexity. The crimes come to us wreathed in specialized jargon and technical terminology that make them hard to discern. Which is wild, because corporate crimes occur on a scale that other crimes – even those committed by organized crime – can't hope to match:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/12/no-criminals-no-crimes/#get-out-of-jail-free-card

But anything that can't go on forever eventually stops. After decades of official tolerance (and even encouragement), corporate criminals are finally in the crosshairs of federal enforcers. Take National Labor Relations Board general counsel Jennifer Abruzzo's ruling in Cemex: when a company takes an illegal action to affect the outcome of a union election, the consequence is now automatic recognition of the union:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/06/goons-ginks-and-company-finks/#if-blood-be-the-price-of-your-cursed-wealth

That's a huge deal. Before, a boss could fire union organizers and intimidate workers, scuttle the union election, and then, months or years later, pay a fine and some back-wages…and the union would be smashed.

The scale of corporate crime is directly proportional to the scale of corporations themselves. Big companies aren't (necessarily) led by worse people, but even small sins committed by the very largest companies can affect millions of lives.

That's why antitrust is so key to fighting corporate crime. To make corporate crimes less harmful, we must keep companies from attaining harmful scale. Big companies aren't just too big to fail and too big to jail – they're also too big for peaceful coexistence with a society of laws.

The revival of antitrust enforcement is such a breath of fresh air, but it's also fighting headwinds. For one thing, there's 40 years of bad precedent from the nightmare years of pro-monopoly Reaganomics to overturn:

https://pluralistic.net/ApexPredator

It's not just precedents in the outcomes of trials, either. Trial procedure has also been remade to favor corporations, with judges helping companies stack the deck in their own favor. The biggest factor here is secrecy: blocking recording devices from courts, refusing to livestream the proceedings, allowing accused corporate criminals to clear the courtroom when their executives take the stand, and redacting or suppressing the exhibits:

https://prospect.org/power/2023-09-27-redacted-case-against-amazon/

When a corporation can hide evidence and testimony from the public and the press, it gains broad latitude to dispute critics, including government enforcers, based on evidence that no one is allowed to see, or, in many cases, even describe. Take Project Nessie, the program that the FTC claims Amazon used to compel third-party sellers to hike prices across many categories of goods:

https://www.wsj.com/business/retail/amazon-used-secret-project-nessie-algorithm-to-raise-prices-6c593706

Amazon told the press that the FTC has "grossly mischaracterize[d]" Project Nessie. The DoJ disagrees, but it can't say why, because the Project Nessie files it based its accusations on have been redacted, at Amazon's insistence. Rather than rebutting Amazon's claim, FTC spokesman Douglas Farrar could only say "We once again call on Amazon to move swiftly to remove the redactions and allow the American public to see the full scope of what we allege are their illegal monopolistic practices."

It's quite a devastating gambit: when critics and prosecutors make specific allegations about corporate crimes, the corporation gets to tell journalists, "No, that's wrong, but you're not allowed to see the reason we say it's wrong."

It's a way to work the refs, to get journalists – or their editors – to wreathe bold claims in endless hedging language, or to avoid reporting on the most shocking allegations altogether. This, in turn, keeps corporate trials out of the public eye, which reassures judges that they can defer to further corporate demands for opacity without facing an outcry.

That's a tactic that serves Google well. When the company was dragged into court by the DoJ Antitrust Division, it demanded – and received – a veil of secrecy that is especially ironic given the company's promise "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful":

https://usvgoogle.org/trial-update-9-22

While this veil has parted somewhat, it is still intact enough to allow the company to work the refs and kill disfavorable reporting from the trial. Last week, Megan Gray – ex-FTC, ex-DuckDuckGo – published an editorial in Wired reporting on her impression of an explosive moment in the Google trial:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/03/not-feeling-lucky/#fundamental-laws-of-economics

According to Gray, Google had run a program to mess with the "semantic matching" on queries, silently appending terms to users' searches that caused them to return more ads – and worse results. This generated more revenue for Google, at the expense of advertisers who got billed to serve ads that didn't even match user queries.

Google forcefully disputed this claim:

https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1709726778170786297

They contacted Gray's editors at Wired, but declined to release all the exhibits and testimony that Gray used to form her conclusions about Google's conduct; instead, they provided a subset of the relevant materials, which cast doubt on Gray's accusations.

Wired removed Gray's piece, with an unsigned notice that "WIRED editorial leadership has determined that the story does not meet our editorial standards. It has been removed":

https://www.wired.com/story/google-antitrust-lawsuit-search-results/

But Gray stands by her piece. She admits that she might have gotten some of the fine details wrong, but that these were not material to the overall point of her story, that Google manipulated search queries to serve more ads at the expense of the quality of the results:

https://twitter.com/megangrA/status/1711035354134794529

She says that the piece could and should have been amended to reflect these fine-grained corrections, but that in the absence of a full record of the testimony and exhibits, it was impossible for her to prove to her editors that her piece was substantively correct.

I reviewed the limited evidence that Google permitted to be released and I find her defense compelling. Perhaps you don't. But the only way we can factually resolve this dispute is for Google to release the materials that they claim will exonerate them. And they won't, though this is fully within their power.

I've seen this playbook before. During the early months of the pandemic, a billionaire who owned a notorious cyberwarfare company used UK libel threats to erase this fact from the internet – including my own reporting – on the grounds that the underlying research made small, non-material errors in characterizing a hellishly complex financial Rube Goldberg machine that was, in my opinion, deliberately designed to confuse investigators.

Like the corporate crimes revealed in the Panama Papers and Paradise Papers, the gambit is complicated, but it's not sophisticated:

Make everything as complicated as possible;

Make everything as secret as possible;

Dismiss any accusations by claiming errors in the account of the deliberately complex arrangements, which can't be rectified because the relevant materials are a secret.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/09/working-the-refs/#but-id-have-to-kill-you

My next novel is The Lost Cause, a hopeful novel of the climate emergency. Amazon won't sell the audiobook, so I made my own and I'm pre-selling it on Kickstarter!

Image: Jason Rosenberg (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/underpants/12069086054/

CC BY https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

Japanexperterna.se (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/japanexperterna/15251188384/

CC BY-SA 2.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

#pluralistic #secrecy #opacity #google #antitrust #trustbusting #wired #working the refs #megan grey #semantic matching

2K notes · View notes

ollieofthebeholder · 14 days

Text

to find promise of peace (and the solace of rest): a TMA fanfic

Read from the beginning on Tumblr || AO3 || My Website

Chapter 110: April 2018

Martin was usually up before Jon in the mornings. He’d been assuming that it was the Archives themselves waking him up, or maybe just an internal clock telling him he had to get things ready before his people came in, but they’d spent the night at his—their—flat, and here he was, up before the dawn and presiding over the stove as he made breakfast for his boyfriend. Nothing fancy, just a simple, basic spread, but since he wasn’t in the Archives, he needed something else to do with his hands while he cataloged, and he wasn’t the type to linger in the shower.

It was one part reassurance, one part prediction, like walking the rows of shelves and looking for files out of place. Martin knew every dream by now, knew the shape of the fear, knew the course each one took, knew the exact likelihood of his being spotted in them, knew what the door to the room of each dream looked like and where in the room he was likely to find the next one. But they didn’t always appear in the same order, and he used this early morning time to himself to sort out what dreams he’d seen when and what that meant.

It didn’t have to mean anything, and he knew that, but if Gerry’s flashbacks could telegraph what was likely on its way—what was likely to be the death of them, Martin had realized after the last one—why couldn’t Martin’s be leading him to a truth? The Eye wasn’t one for predicting the future, but it could See the present, which was infinitely harder, if you asked him. Easy to make guesses at what might be coming, harder to see what was right under your nose. All he had to do was put the pieces together…right?

The dreams were only of the live statements. At first it had only been the live statements Martin himself had been present for, but now every tape of a live statement he’d listened to had a corresponding door. Well, almost. He’d listened to three live statements Gertrude had recorded, and only one had made it into his dreams—the woman who’d been present when Gertrude disrupted the Flesh’s ritual, apparently. He didn’t dream about the man who’d encountered the ancient Archivist beneath the streets of Alexandria, nor, thankfully, did he dream about Mary Keay. Melanie had also never turned up, but the reason for that wasn’t hard to figure out; he hadn’t started having the dreams until he’d been kidnapped by Breekon and Hope—until he’d begun taking Jon’s place—and both of them had been employed by the Institute by then. The crew of the Archives were exempt from the nightly voyeurism, presumably because the Ceaseless Watcher could see them any time it wanted.

The other two…well, he was fairly certain the reason that he never saw them was because they were no longer in a fit state to dream.

He’d learned the rules of the dreamscape, too. He would find himself standing in front of a closed door. If it was a familiar door, it was almost always the one that led to a cemetery full of fog and empty graves, and all he had to do was touch the knob for it to swing open with a dread creak. If it was unfamiliar, though, he knew to reach for the ring of keys clipped to his belt to find the one that matched the lock. Each lock, each door, each key was—somehow—completely unique, and it was easy to match. There were doors he Knew led to Melanie’s fears, or Basira’s, or Tim’s, or even Jon’s, but there was no key to match on the ring and they remained resolutely shut. On those occasions when he had listened to a tape someone else had recorded and was confronted with a new door, he would be approached by the spectral form of whomever had taken the statement, who would place the key into his hand. They always seemed to be sleepwalking, like they weren’t truly there, and faded away immediately after completing their errand. Whatever the case, once he unlocked the door, while the key remained on his belt, the door stayed unlocked.

Usually.

Martin hummed under his breath as he traced his path in his mind. He’d started with Naomi Hearne as usual—she hadn’t seen him tonight, which was a pity in the waking world but a boon in the Eye’s realm—and then gone through all the other Lonely statements in rapid succession; obviously the Beholding just wanted to get them out of the way. He’d long suspected that the reason Naomi was always first was precisely because she and Martin had known each other through Evan, so it was less likely to be particularly fulfilling, especially if it was a night where she could see him; the nature of the Lonely was such that knowing another person was present took a lot of the fear out of it, and he was pretty sure the only reason the door was still there was that it had to be.

Once the Lonely rooms were over, he’d stepped into a hospital morgue and watched as a corpse rose to address a young woman. This, too, was always largely unsatisfying to the Ceaseless Watcher. Georgie’s lack of ability to feel fear meant that anything he got out of the dream was residual, and on the nights she noticed he was there, she just glared at him. The door on the other side of that one had led to a slowly collapsing train on the London Underground, and despite Karolina Gorka’s apparent lack of fear, she’d been concerned enough to make a statement of her own volition, so it was a little better. Martin wondered, in the daylight hours, how he didn’t have a worse time himself in there, considering there had never been any denying it was the Buried, but he supposed it was because these weren’t really about him. He was only there to observe; the Fears, or the memories of them at least, couldn’t touch him. He wasn’t a god, but he was probably the closest thing there was to it in the dreams.

Things had escalated from there, as they usually did, and Martin laid them out methodically in his mind like a tarot spread. Last night’s path had been largely grouped by which Fear had touched the victim, with an added increase in how much terror they still inspired. The office building had actually been occupied—it wasn’t always, the Hunters kept to odd hours and were half a world away anyway—and the door at the other side of it had been the pale, unvarnished oak with the silver padlock that led to Daisy’s months in the Buried.

Except…except last night, when he had touched the door, it hadn’t budged.

Martin turned the bacon over carefully. He’d been…unconcerned really. Emotions didn’t really factor into the dreams for him. He’d simply reached for the keys on his belt. But when he’d gone through every single key on the ring, looking for the one he Knew matched the padlock, it was simply gone. That was…unusual. Something wasn’t right about it.

There’d been another door right next to it, as there usually was when he encountered a door he wasn’t allowed to access, and he had gone through and lost himself in witnessing Gerry’s spectral form tremble and flicker as the Book burned, which meant Gerry had been asleep, which meant there was probably a flashback to discuss. Martin wondered if it would overlap with wherever his own dreams had been leading him. Gerry’s dream had been one of the last ones; the only one after that had been Web-related, so either there was that to look forward to or that was just the one that drew out the most terror. The guy on the tape had still sounded pretty terrified while Melanie tried to calm him down, but that could easily have also been due to Melanie’s expression.

In his dreams, he’d quickly put the matter of Daisy’s door out of his mind and focused on drinking in the terror of the next room, especially Gerry’s—the Eye got a lot of satisfaction from feeding off another avatar—but in the grey light of pre-dawn, he kept coming back to it again and again. Worry gnawed at him. Could something have happened to her? He didn’t think her falling back into the Hunt would block her door up like that, and he’d learned, first from his round-the-world trip and later from taking Trevor and Julia’s statement, that if whoever’s statement he was wandering through wasn’t asleep at the same time he was, the room would just be vacant, not locked. This had to be something more serious.

But reversible, he reminded himself. The doors being present meant there was a way for him to get to the other side of them…not that he wanted to, really, but they were there. He didn’t know if it was in case they ever distanced themselves from the Beholding or if it was in case everybody else was asleep and the Beholding was willing to settle for crumbs.

Was that it? Martin paused, chasing a nascent thought. The Archives crew were exempt from nightly viewings of their traumas, by virtue of being allied to the Eye, and he suspected it went with anyone who was in some way bound to the Eye. Had Daisy—

The sound of footsteps behind him broke his train of thought, and he turned around with a warm smile. “Morning, Jon. Sleep okay?”

“Hmm? Fine, fine.” Jon seemed…grumpy was the only word Martin could come up with. Despite his claims, he didn’t seem like he’d actually had a good night’s sleep. His hair was a bit disheveled, as though he hadn’t bothered running a brush or comb through it, which was probable—he and Melanie had had a few go-rounds about him not taking proper care of hair as long and thick as his was, and if Martin didn’t brush and style it for him, he often just pulled it back into an absent, messy ponytail or topknot screwed in place with a rubber band, a few of which Martin had had to cut out of his hair in the end—and he hadn’t shaved. There was something off about his clothing, and he was stood in the doorway, arms folded over his chest.

He also, Martin couldn’t help but notice, hadn’t asked about his sleep.

“Oh. Good.” He had to fight to keep his smile in place. “Breakfast is almost done. Could you grab the plates, please?”

Wordlessly, Jon came into the kitchen, opened the cupboard, and yanked down two plates. Martin eyed him, but decided not to ask about it yet. Jon was obviously thinking over something that was upsetting him, but if Martin asked too early, he’d clam up. Better to either let him decide for himself that he wanted to bring it up or wait until he burned off some of his agitation. Meanwhile, he focused on not burning the bacon.

He served up the food, fetched the silverware, and made tea, then set a mug in front of Jon and sat down. They didn’t often have time for a leisurely meal in the morning, just something quick thrown together in the break room or something Melanie or Tim brought in with them, and even when they spent a night at the flat, Martin’s anxiousness to get back usually meant they didn’t linger. But he’d needed to think, and besides, he wanted to spend time with his boyfriend doing something normal every once in a while. Like eating bacon and eggs and fried bread.

“I think the bread might be starting to go,” he mused, prodding at one of the pieces with his fork. “Not moldy, but a bit stale. Still, nothing a bit of butter can’t cure, right?”

Jon grunted. He was shoving his eggs halfheartedly around his plate without seeming very interested in eating them. He hadn’t made eye contact with Martin since waking up, either, and it wasn’t the comfortable kind of loose attention he usually paid when he was sleepy or overstimulated and just couldn’t have too deep a connection with individual people. It was like he was deliberately not looking at Martin. He was also sitting on the opposite side of the table instead of next to Martin, he’d only got the plates, not the silverware, and—that was what was off about his appearance. He was wearing a crisp, stiff olive green cardigan, which wasn’t unusual in and of itself—Jon was fond of earth tones—but it was a machine knit, commercially produced cardigan rather than one Martin had made (and Jon had mostly appropriated). He hadn’t worn one of those since Jane Prentiss had attacked the Institute.

Martin told himself he was reading too much into it, just being paranoid. Jon could wear whatever he wanted, obviously. He probably had just grabbed the first thing he found, not worrying about whether it was one Martin had made or not, and really, it didn’t matter if he did. They were past the stage where Martin got a weird, fluttery feeling he couldn’t explain when Jon wrapped himself in one of his jumpers without thinking about it. They’d spent the night curled up together, for God’s sake, he knew Jon loved him.

That didn’t mean Jon wasn’t mad at him for something, though.

Part of him—most of him—wanted to avoid the topic, let Jon bring it up in his own time. Apart from his earlier assessment that Jon would be less likely to tell him what was wrong if he asked too early, he wasn’t going to ask are you mad at me like a child. His mum had been like that, refused to actually say when she was upset with him—which, honestly, was most of the time—and would play the passive-aggressive game until he cracked and begged forgiveness for unspecified crimes. Asking what he’d done had never ended well.

The tiny, rational, adult part of him pointed out that, as he had just been telling himself, Jon, unlike his mother, actually loved him. Putting Liliana Blackwood’s motives on Jon without provocation was just cruel, to both of them. And they were trying to communicate. Maybe Jon was trying to conceal his irritation, but surely he’d realize that Martin was only calling him out on it because he cared.

Right?

“Jon?” he ventured, laying down his fork. “Is something wrong?”

“Is something wrong?” Jon repeated, and oh, boy, Martin knew that tone of voice. He cast an involuntary glance towards the hallway, and it was only when the Knowledge that all of the closets in the flat had knobs on the inside and none of them locked popped into his head that he realized what he was doing in his panic.

He started to swallow the surge of irritation, but that rational adult part of him whispered, No, actually, that’s justified, go for it.

“Yeah, Jon. I’m not a mind reader,” Martin snapped. He paused, then added, “Okay, I am, kind of, but I’m trying very hard not to do that to any of you, and especially not you. It’s really easy to see that you’re upset, but I don’t know why, and if it’s something I can help with, I’d like to know.”

“And if it’s not something you can help with?” Jon said, a bit acidly.

“Then I’d still like to know. Even if I can’t fix it, I’d like to at least know what’s bothering you.”

“Bothering me,” Jon repeated.

That did not serve to make Martin any less irritated. “Are you going to tell me, or are you just going to treat me like I’m the stupidest being on the planet?”

As ways to diffuse the situation, that was probably one of the worst things Martin could have said. As a means of getting Jon to look at him, it was highly effective, even if the shock in his eyes quickly gave way to a look Martin hadn’t seen leveled at him since that stupid dog slipped past him his very first day in the Archives.

“Don’t be ridiculous, Martin,” he said, his voice cold and brittle with sarcasm. “Of course you’re not the stupidest being on the planet. Far from it. That would be the rest of us, wouldn’t it?”

“What are you talking about?” Martin demanded, both bewildered and angry now. “When have I ever said any of you were stupid?”

“You don’t have to say it. It’s obvious in everything you do. Or don’t do, as the case may be. Your knowledge surpasses ours and we all know it.” Jon pushed away from the table, leaving his breakfast—and, Martin couldn’t help but notice with a twist of pain, his tea—untouched. “I’m off to work. If you think there’s anything there I can be of use for.”

“Jon—” Martin began, then changed his mind. He’d fucked it up, as—no, not as usual, he told himself firmly. Yes, he’d suspected that Jon would be upset if he tried to ask what was going on before he was ready to share, but he hadn’t known. He’d made a judgment call and been wrong, that was all. It happened to the best of them. At least it was something fairly low stakes. “Fine. Let’s just go.”

It didn’t feel low stakes, though. This was their first real fight since becoming a couple…if you could call it a fight…and deep down, Martin was both miserable and terrified over it. Few of his relationships had ended well, and all of them had fallen apart at the first serious disagreement. While those had mostly been over things like sex and Martin’s loyalty to his siblings—things Jon was, in theory anyway, completely on board with—he didn’t need the Beholding to know that Jon was it for him, that he would never love another man in his life. He’d been afraid for a while of losing Jon to an Entity or an avatar. He’d never considered the possibility of losing him to a breakup. He was probably catastrophizing a bit, but the fear was real and he didn’t know how to handle it.

Especially when they rode the entire way to the Institute in silence.

He wasn’t surprised when they arrived before Melanie and Sasha, Tim and Gerry having taken a turn spending the night. He also wasn’t surprised when Tim took one look at him and came over to give him a hug.

“Rough night?” he asked sympathetically.

“Rough morning,” Martin mumbled, hugging him back. He was still a little angry at Jon, but he was more scared than anything, and a Tim hug was doing him a world of good. “You?”

“Not pleasant.” Tim let go and glanced over at Gerry.

Gerry set down his mug and came over to hug Martin as well. As usual, he was colder than an ordinary human being, but at least he wasn’t burn-your-skin cold. “We can talk about it when everyone’s together. I, uh, had another flashback last night.”

“Figured. You were in one of my dreams last night.” Tim gave a fake dramatic gasp, putting his hand to his chest, and Martin narrowed his eyes at him. It was only partially in jest. “Not like that. Just…statement dream. If you’re not sleeping, the shack is empty.”

“Wait, you dream about that?” Tim asked, sounding startled. “I thought you just dreamed about the statements.”

“Gerry gave a statement,” Martin reminded him, letting go of his brother. “A couple days before Jon and Melanie left for Sheffield, remember?”

“Yeah, but not to you. And besides, you don’t dream about the rest of us, do you?” Tim frowned. “At least I don’t…I haven’t had any nightmares about…Danny since I made my statement.”

Martin shook his head. “You’re all bound to the Eye, I can’t see your dreams. The, the doors or whatever are there, but I can’t get through them. Gerry isn’t.” A sudden thought struck him. “By the way, where’s Daisy?”

“Right here.” Daisy’s voice floated from the direction the shelves. Martin turned to see her looking…remarkably better than she had in a while, actually. At least like she’d got a good night’s sleep. Her hair was slightly damp, like she’d just got out of the shower, and she was holding a cup of something hot and steaming. She saluted him with it, a dry smile playing about her lips. “Morning.”

“Morning.” Martin did manage to smile back at her. He was honestly relieved to see her. “Sleep okay?”

Daisy shrugged. She looked faintly pleased with herself. “Eventually, yeah.”

Before Martin could inquire about it further, he heard the sound of footsteps behind him and turned to see Sasha coming towards them, her usual cup of coffee in one hand and her laptop bag slung over her shoulder. Most of them didn’t bother dressing professionally these days, and usually Sasha was no exception, but today she was wearing a pant suit, pumps, and makeup. With her hair in a loose braid slung over one shoulder, it crossed Martin’s mind that she was dressed exactly the way she’d done on their first day in the Archives.

Daisy raised an eyebrow at her. “Job interview, Miss James?”

“No, just reminding myself I’m a grown woman with a job. Morning, all,” Sasha added, slinging her bag off her shoulder and setting it on her chair.

“Morning. Where’s Melanie?” Martin looked over Sasha’s shoulder, but there was no sign of his sister, which was unusual; she was normally in the lead, or glued to Sasha’s side.

“Outside. Jon passed us on the way in heading out to the courtyard, and we got about halfway across the floor before she decided to turn around and follow him so he didn’t have something happen to him.” Sasha set her coffee on her desk and began unpacking her laptop. “I’m guessing he had a rough night, too. He looked unsettled.”

“We’re…fighting. I think,” Martin added uncertainly. “He’s pissed at me, anyway.”

Tim raised his eyebrows in surprise. “Why, what did you do?”

“I don’t know, that’s the thing. I asked him about what was bothering him and—he didn’t really answer? He was kind of passive-aggressive about it, actually. Something about me treating everyone like you’re stupid?”

Tim’s eyebrows, impossibly, rose higher. “Jon said that?”

“You mean like how he was treating you when he first got the job down here?” Sasha asked. “Like you were stupid. Not like you thought everyone else was stupid.”

“He never thought I was stupid. Just incompetent,” Martin muttered. He rubbed his forehead. “I—have I been acting that way? I don’t mean to, and if I’d known…”

“No?” Sasha sounded incredulous. “Unless you’re complaining about us behind our backs on the tapes when you think we can’t hear them. You know, like Jon did about you those first few months.”

Martin felt the beginning of a headache forming between his eyes. “Sasha, I’m really not in the mood for any more guessing games today. Are you trying to make me angry at Jon back, or are you trying to subtly call him out as a hypocrite?” He froze as the words he’d just said, and the tone he’d said them in, replayed in his head. “Christ. Is that how I always talk to you guys?”

“No, you’re usually a lot more soft-spoken and polite about it when Sasha or Jon are being cagey like they won’t say what’s on their minds if you don’t compel them, and the rest of us don’t do that to you,” Tim said bluntly. “You really need to quit that shit out, Sash, it’s not fair and it’s not funny. We’re supposed to be communicating, remember? If you don’t want to talk about something, just say that.”

Sasha froze, then looked up at Martin with an expression of genuine contriteness. “I’m sorry. I—I didn’t actually realize I was doing that. I guess I was trying to get you angry back at Jon—maybe so you’d force him to tell you what’s on his mind, I don’t know. But I wasn’t…I don’t think I was doing it on purpose.” She sighed. “I’m sorry. I had a nightmare last night that I haven’t had in years and I guess it upset me more than I thought.”

“About the funfair?” Daisy asked, startling Martin.

Sasha whipped her head around to stare at Daisy, eyes wide with shock. “The—? How’d you know about that?”

“We indoctrinated Daisy into the family proper last night,” Tim said dryly. “She got to witness her first flashback.”

“Maybe that’s why Jon’s so upset. He’s the only one that hasn’t, then.” Sasha rubbed her chest. “But that—that didn’t actually…happen, did it?”

“Must have. I don’t flash back to imaginary events,” Gerry said quietly. “I get it. Easy to convince yourself something like that wasn’t real, especially when you’re a bit older…if you don’t know this sort of thing is real, it’s harder to believe it. And Martin did say you’d been Marked by the Web before Prentiss attacked. I didn’t think that spider biting you in the boiler room was enough to do that if your encounter with the Distortion wasn’t.”

Martin’s stomach lurched. He honestly hadn’t thought about that since the night he’d Looked at everyone, and since Sasha had never asked to make a statement, he’d continued to not think about it. That she didn’t even remember being Marked had never occurred to him, even though he and Melanie had both forgotten their first Marks…

“It wasn’t…that bad, as some of these things go,” Sasha said, a bit uncertainly. “I mean, anyone would have been scared of almost falling off the top of a funfair wheel in the dark.”

“Yeah, but the ringmaster climbing after you with too many limbs, not exactly normal,” Gerry said. “And you were ten.”

“Near enough eleven,” Tim and Daisy said in unison. Despite himself, Martin smiled.

Sasha laughed, but it sounded a bit forced. “I guess I should give you a statement about that later, Martin. Are you up for it today?”

“Yeah, sure. If you are.” Martin rubbed the back of his neck. “And only if you’re sure you really want to.”

“I do. You deserve to know about it, and at least this way it’s my choice.” Sasha sucked in a sharp breath. “I mean, not that you’ve ever forced one of us to tell you anything we weren’t ready for. That’s not what I’m saying at all! I just mean that I’d rather you hear the details from me rather than accidentally. Besides, you probably haven’t had a good live statement in a while, you’ve got to be hungry, and it’s better to have…farm-raised than wild-caught, I guess. Want to do it now, before Jon gets back in?”

“No. I want to do it later, after you’ve had a chance to tell Jon what we’re doing,” Martin said pointedly. “Last thing I want is for him to think I’m sneaking around keeping secrets from him. Or that I’m, I don’t know, making you tell me.”

“You’ve never done that,” Sasha said. “And I could see how hard it was for you not to ask Tim about his Stranger Mark all the way back at the beginning. You’re a good man, Martin Blackwood, and don’t let anyone ever tell you differently.”

Martin smiled weakly. He’d been really worried about Tim’s Mark. Now that he knew the truth about Danny, of course, he could understand why he’d seen the intense indigo glow that looked like the Stranger had physically reached into his chest cavity and ripped his heart out—because, metaphorically speaking, it had. Still worrying and upsetting, but at least not in a something in you has been replaced kind of way.

“Have you ever thought about tracking down the people he flashes back to?” Daisy asked. “Getting their statements?”

Gerry shook his head. “I don’t ever know who I’m flashing back as—to me, it’s always just, well, me. Tim can usually guess when it’s not me—”

“Pretty sure your mum wouldn’t have let you wear pinafores and bows,” Tim interjected.

“—but if it’s not one of you lot, or someone he knows, that’s about all he gets,” Gerry completed. “Even when it is someone he knows…”

Tim nodded. “Honestly, if Sasha hadn’t introduced herself to…uh…Mister Seymour at the funfair, I might not have clued in that it was her. I guess we could maybe start recording them and giving them to Martin so he can Know who it’s about and go find them, but—”

“Can we not?” Martin begged. “I really don’t want to start getting into that habit. The only reason I’m taking Sasha’s is because it’ll keep her from dreaming about it again, but I can’t guarantee that with the other people who give live statements.” He turned to Daisy as a thought he’d had earlier came back to him. “Speaking of, I—”

A door banged hard from the other side of the Archives, cutting him off. “MARTIN!”

Melanie’s voice, equal parts angry and panicked, sent all other thoughts flying out of Martin’s head. She’d been outside—outside with Jon, who was upset and angry and liable to do something stupid. Nothing had attacked them in the Archives in ages, and he Knew that was to do with Basira and Peter Lukas somehow but couldn’t see the shape of it yet, but that might not extend to outside the building, and if they’d left the grounds anything could have happened, and all he could think of was that Jon had been kidnapped, or worse…

He started towards the door leading to the courtyard and halted, drawing in a sharp breath of relief, as Melanie burst into the open part of the Archives, dragging a both startled and annoyed-looking Jon after her. She thrust him into the center of the group and stabbed a finger at him. “Look at him!”

Bewildered, Martin did. He looked both startled and irritated, although the irritation was clearly winning out as he adjusted his cardigan with a jerk. His hair had started falling out of the half-knot he’d pulled it back into, and while from the shoulders down he looked crisply professional, from the neck up he looked like he had just rolled out of bed. And into the path of a backfiring Hoover.

“I don’t know—” he began, not even sure where he was going to end that sentence.

“No, Martin, Look at him,” Melanie said again, and this time he could hear the capital L on Look that had nothing to do with it being at the beginning of the sentence. “We were talking, and I was telling him to stop stressing so much because it’s giving him more grey hairs than before and ran my hand through it to show him and—” She held up her hand, which had a couple strands tangled around it.

They weren’t hair. Jon’s hair was glossy, and even the grey strands were darker than those. It also wasn’t sticky.

Martin stood frozen, staring at the strands of web Melanie had apparently brushed out of Jon’s hair. Several things—Jon’s attitude towards certain things, seemingly innocuous conversations, Tim’s comment about how Sasha and Jon tended to act—suddenly slotted themselves into a picture that made horrific sense. The Eye buzzed excitedly in the back of Martin’s mind, and he had a hard job pushing it away.

Slowly, he turned to look at Jon, who also seemed stunned and frozen as he stared at Melanie’s hand. The expression could have been feigned—and Martin hated that he was thinking like that about his boyfriend—but somehow, it didn’t seem that way. And when he turned to look up at Martin, the horror in his eyes was not something that could be faked.

“Jon?” Martin said, as quietly as he could. It took almost all of his strength to keep the Eye out of his voice as he asked the next question. “May I?”

“Yes,” Jon whispered. His lips barely moved.

Martin…blinked.

The glasses didn’t do much to stop him from Seeing things these days; it was almost entirely by force of will that he didn’t walk around viewing the evidence of the Fourteen on everything he encountered. Without his glasses on, he couldn’t stop it, another reason he was thankful he woke up before Jon and could avoid seeing him before he could get them on, but he didn’t need to take them off to See things clearly. All he did was relax his hold a little, and the Beholding eagerly rushed in to take what it could.

Jon’s Marks nearly stole the air from his lungs. The bright green glow of his eyes and lips had faded a bit, or maybe it just seemed that way, as had the pus-colored glow that still clung to the worm scars dotting his face and neck. There was a bright red slash at his shoulder, splintering into bright blue forks of lightning that seemed to reach his lungs, where it tangled with the brownish-tan that had settled there, and a red-orange line across his throat. There was a flash of yellow in his abdomen where the Distortion had stabbed him, just on the edge of where Martin was looking.

All of that he had expected.

Martin had gone to a Mechanisms concert with Melanie once, just after Gerry had left London with Gertrude for the last time. He remembered the lead singer, Jonny D’Ville, and his delighted, feral grin as he’d sung into the microphone; more particularly, he remembered the makeup on his face, like cracks mazing and emanating from his eyes and spreading across his face. The Web Mark spreading across Jon’s face made that look like a drag queen’s eyeliner. It sparked out from his eyes in long, jagged lines, up into his hairline, into his ears, into his mouth. One particularly long spar traveled in a meandering, unbroken, but still direct line from his eye to his heart—the only part of the Mark that had been there the last time Martin had Looked at Jon, almost two years ago now.

God, how had it gotten so bad so fast?

Slowly, Martin raised a trembling hand and touched Jon’s face, tracing the scars only he could see. Jon wasn’t an Avatar of the Web. Far from it. But it had been slowly taking him over, poisoning his sight, his hearing, his words, even his heart. And Martin hadn’t noticed.

“Jon,” he whispered, penitent and hurting. “I’m so sorry. I should have noticed.”

Jon made a noise he’d only made once or twice before—a tiny whimper of pain, like he’d done when Martin had first Looked at him. The static died abruptly as he threw himself at Martin and jolted him back to the present, throwing his arms around his neck.

“I’m sorry,” Jon gasped out, clinging to him tightly. “I’m so sorry, I—I didn’t know, I didn’t—I-I shouldn’t have let it get this bad, I—”

“Jon, no, it’s—” Martin stopped himself as he pulled Jon into his arms and held him just as tightly. He couldn’t say it’s not your fault. It…kind of was his fault. At least partly. He took a deep breath and tried again. “I shouldn’t have let it get this bad, either. I was too focused on that…compulsion thing you were doing, and I didn’t realize that was the Web either. I never thought about…the paranoia.”

“It’s not just you. I, I talked Tim into letting me go into the Buried, I—” Jon took a deep breath and buried his face in Martin’s chest. “I’m sorry. I’ll, I’ll make it up to you. Somehow.”

Martin pressed a kiss to the top of Jon’s head. A too-familiar smell hit him, and he wrinkled his nose. “Did you start smoking again?”

“Last week,” Jon admitted, his voice muffled by Martin’s jumper.

“Those things will kill you, you know,” Martin scolded automatically.

To his mild surprise, Jon actually laughed—a bit brokenly, but genuinely. He pulled back and looked up at Martin with genuine warmth and affection in his slightly wet eyes. “I know. I’ll stop. I promise.” He wiped his cheeks and turned to Melanie. “Thank you. For…noticing.”

Melanie shrugged, a bit awkwardly. “You noticed the Slaughter bullet. One good turn deserves another. Thank you for not breaking my wrist when I went to mess with your hair. Speaking of, want to borrow my brush? You look like a horse’s ass.”

That got a round of chuckles, albeit weak ones, from the rest of the Archives crew. Martin looked around at all of them seriously. “I—I’m sorry about that. Is everyone okay?”

“We’re fine, Martin,” Sasha assured him. She looked a bit uncomfortable as well. “I, ah, I won’t ask you to Look and see how bad mine’s got, but I can guess. Anyway, I do really want to give you my statement about Mister Seymour’s Wondrous Entertainment Ballyhoo.”

“Mister what?” Melanie sputtered.

Martin closed his eyes briefly. “Was it seriously called that? Jesus. Let it never be said the Mother of Puppets and her ilk are subtle.”

“Huh?” Sasha blinked, then suddenly smacked herself in the forehead. “Seriously? How did I not get that?”

Daisy actually laughed. Martin didn’t think he’d ever heard her laugh before. Jon looked a bit bewildered. “What’s going on?”

“Gerry had a flashback last night,” Tim explained. “It was how Sasha got Marked by the Web. Sasha’s going to give Martin a statement about it so he can get some energy back, especially after what he just did, and also so she doesn’t have to dream about it again.”

Martin took a deep breath and turned to Daisy. “While we’re, uh, getting things out in the open—I, uh, I couldn’t get into your dreams last night.”

“What?” Melanie frowned.

“I don’t remember how much I’ve told you about the dreams.” Martin, reluctantly, let go of Jon and leaned against the edge of the nearest desk; Jon, unprompted, seated himself on the desktop and leaned against his side, which felt a lot like forgiveness to him. “It’s like I’m walking through a series of rooms, and there are…doors. I’ve got a ring of keys on my belt, but the doors are all unlocked. And if I come across a new one, there’s usually a matching key on my belt to unlock it. There are a few I walk past that I Know are, um, yours, but there’s no key on my belt for them, so I can’t witness those. I know all the doors by sight.” He turned to look at Daisy. “Last night, I came up to yours—well, one of them, anyway, the one that leads—led—to the Buried—but it was shut, and the key wasn’t on my ring anymore. I, uh, I got a little worried. Usually if whoever’s dream I’m in isn’t asleep, I just don’t see them, but…this was different. I couldn’t get into it anymore, and…I don’t know, I thought something might have happened to you.”

Daisy shrugged. “I joined the Institute.”

Tim coughed. “Sorry, what?”

“Remembered Basira saying something once, about how she hadn’t dreamed about anything since Elias recruited her,” Daisy said. “And I remembered the first night Martin turned up to watch me watching Masters climb into that coffin, and the first night he turned up without Jon. Couple nights ago I couldn’t sleep and listened to the tape we all made right before the Unknowing…” Something flickered across her face briefly, and she swallowed hard, then rallied and continued. “Anyway, Melanie said something about maybe making a statement about something so she’d stop dreaming about it and…I dunno. Wondered if it would work. So last night after Gerry passed out and you fell asleep on top of him, I nipped upstairs and broke into Bouchard’s old office. Forced the lock. Found where he was keeping the employment forms and just…filled one out.” She shrugged again, seemingly unconcerned, but there was a glint of pride in her eye. “Seemed to work just fine.”

Martin stared at her for a long moment. Worry for what she’d done to herself warred with pleasure that she’d found a solution, and there was a tiny bit of malicious satisfaction at having stolen a servitor of another Fear that he attributed exclusively to the Beholding and ruthlessly told to get fucked.

He smiled. “Well. Welcome to the family, then.”

5 notes · View notes