FUTURES RESEARCH

9018 - JOCKY, JOCKY - 1998

I guess I only come really alive when I put on my VR helmet. I know its old-fashioned, the latest vidwalls offer much the same effect with much greater comfort even if you don't have wrap-around. But, for a professional like me, they are just not responsive enough, or accurate enough. I know you are going to say 'so what?', the material we jocky is asynch; off-line, to you punts. But try sembling even a half-hour programme in twelve hours, as we have to do. Maybe you could, but would it reach the top-ten jocky list for even that day? Would it stand a chance of getting into the best hundred oldies - will other channels replay it long after your death? You bet it won't!

But, as soon as the helmet is on, I head for those heights. I have regularly reached the readers' daily top ten, though I will admit - regretfully - that so far this year I have not actually made it to number one; the best I have made is number four. Yet, how many of you punts dream of even that! But, in the past, I have occasionally made it to the top of the bill. On the historical two hundred, decided by other jockys,  I have three entries in the hundred plus list; at one thirty seven, one hundred fifty four and one hundred sixty. Of the top jockys, currently hitting the lists, I am number six, the only one in the top ten with no regional backing; which is why I am on my way to the asteroids - it's frontier country out there! So what, I hear you say again, what does a strong regional base do for you when you are working the global web? When you are aiming for that top slot you must be quite literally up to the minute, and that last-second contro from your local audience makes all the difference. Such touches show that you really are 'live', even if in truth you aren't quite that! Indeed, the danger you feel in working 'near-live' seems to push the adrenaline, and the thrill of the listening crowds urges you on to even higher risks. Alright, for the historical hundred you have to hit something timeless, but you only qualify for consideration if you are hitting big-time on the daily charts. Nobody plays a nobody, that's the stations' motto; and it's mine too. You have to already be a somebody before you become bankable, and then a star. I can see you still aren't listening, you are reaching for that channel switch; so let me spice things up a bit by telling you personally about my best top two hundred entry.

As usual, I started my day by scanning the waves. Everyone swears that they find all their own stories. They're lying! I have my own stringers, I've lost track of how many; thousands perhaps, but only the top forty or so are regular newshounds. Above all, though, I get my jump-starts from other jockys - which is why I scan their sites so avidly. It's a skill few of us have, it takes years to learn. I guess I scan twenty other sites every morning; and that's at least ten hours of material to scan in the single hour I allow myself for this. So I scan-read their script lines rather than listen as most of you do, but even then it needs a special set of skills to hit paydirt. I don't even know how I do it myself, the best I can do is say that the golddust has a different 'smell'. I believe my nose actually twitches when I hit that sweetspot; a story in the making, which - with a bit of luck - only I will recognise!

In fact, this story was let out of the traps by one of my peripheral stringers, one that was almost a stranger to me. This time my own nose didn't lead me to the obscure channel where it started - but her's did when she found it in her local jocky report. Even then it looked innocuous, so maybe even I would have overlooked it. According to the report, the chair of the national ethics committee had been seen making an informal visit to a small out of town mall. So what? But what on earth was he doing there, and where was his secret service detail? His heart-warming explanation, that he loved to get out and mingle with the crowds simply didn't ring true; or at least that was what my twitching nose was trying to tell me! I immediately started a quick scan of the datafiles on him, but to play safe I also put two of my datascanner staff onto it as well. They would help direct me, but at the end of the day it was my own dig which would convince me; don't send a boy to do a real man's job!

The dig showed that his visit, and even more his warm-hearted concern for his fellow-beings, was totally out of character! It proved difficult to find any coverage of him even out of a tuxedo, let alone in informal situations. Informal visit, pish! This guy didn't know what the words meant. So what was he really doing there? Nothing read quite right. So I added two more broad-scan staff members. I should, at this point, add that like the rest of my 'central staff' they only get paid for results, and only then at industry rates which even I recognise are penurious. But they live in hope of the lucky break, which will catapult them into the big-time league; to be a top-division jocky like me. I guess all of us in the industry live on hope. I started like them, but I was lucky - and such luck comes about as frequently as it does to a lottery winner. Don't bet your life on it - but of course we do!

At the same time I launched into the fray as many of my local stringers as I could muster. They didn't get paid at all. To be honest they rarely ever turn up anything worthwhile, that's why they still are local stringers, but once more the hope of making the big-time drives them on. Against the odds, however, it was one of these who turned up the key material - and I was so pleased I gave him an industry-standard bonus as well as covering the cost of the tapes he turned up. You see, I can be a soft-hearted bastard after all! What he obtained for me was the mall video-records.  Best of all he didn't break our cover in getting it; a real bonus when other jockys are always waiting to pounce. The mall fortunately had installed the best high-resolution equipment, which showed every eyelash on passers-by. It was now needed more than ever, as the regional shoplifting gangs could almost denude shops of their most valuable merchandise in a matter of a few minutes - and be in the next state in not much longer. That we had the videos was the good news. The bad news was that we had hours of tape, from dozens of cameras, to scrutinise in as many minutes - if we were to make the daily show ahead of our rivals.  By now I had the whole central team involved, running as many digital scanners as we could get access to. The investment paid dividends, for in less than thirty minutes we were looking at crystal clear pictures of our target; surrounded by a crowd but, thank god, not a newshound in sight. There was just one lone cameraman, and I guessed this was the Joe who gave the story to the local site.

On our monitors, the throng thickened as the senator slowly made his way to the end of the mall, shaking hands around him like an old-time huckster - which I knew he wasn't, so why the pretence? It couldn't have been a PR photo-opportunity. These were always well-rehearsed, even if they were for a politician's home audience. The crowd mightn't have seen the news-teams, freelances bought as back-up by the press office as much as the network crews, they would have been discrete - after all that was the price of the 'scoop' they would be offered. But we would have found them, and we couldn't find a trace no matter how hard we looked. No! This was not an arranged visit, and surely no politician worth his salt wastes his time on a genuinely informal one - especially in hicksville as this was! So what the hell was he doing here?

We followed his progress down the mall, where he eventually climbed into a limo and quickly disappeared from the scene. Was it my imagination but did his fixed politician's smile turn into one of relief at that moment? The plates of the limo only told us that it belonged to a local hire company; later one of our local stringers found that it had only been booked as the senator was entering the mall - again, why wasn't it pre-arranged? On the traffic tapes, obtained by yet another stringer, we followed the limo through the streets to the local commuter airport, where he boarded a private jet - this time booked well in advance - for the journey back to the capital.

OK! So the story which his office had put out a few minutes after the local story broke could have made sense - but then why had they been monitoring the local shows so closely. In any case, it was well-crafted, so low key that none of the other national jockys would have even registered it. But it had clearly been put on record in case it was ever needed - and that betrayed the sound judgement of a real professional. I gave my nose a mental ticking off for missing the story in the first place, but by that time it was twitching fit to burst. Nothing smelled right. Nothing fitted the pattern it should have followed, and certainly none of it fitted him. So what was the true story? It had to be big to justify such an elaborate cover-up; and it was elaborate, even if it showed signs of being hastily constructed. Just what was he doing in a small town in the middle of nowhere, with less votes to win than from the hotgirls on the hill.

So, we changed tactics and worked backwards. We caught his entry, from the street not from the parking; that would make it difficult to link him to a car - malls put less video investment into covering the streets than into the parking areas where almost all of their customers came from. But it raised another anomaly. Almost nobody in their right senses, and certainly not a senator, walked to a mall - it was almost suicidal - and many malls no longer even had street-side entrances. Mug someone in the parking area these days and the barriers would be up before your car could get to them. But only vagrants, looking for warmth, used the street-side entrances these days - and they were immediately thrown out by the security guards who patrolled them. Yet it was that very improbability which gave us our biggest break.

Less than a minute later a woman sauntered into the same entrance; and she was no vagrant. To the casual eye she might have looked like any other shopper, but to us her clothes sang out designer; she must be worth several million dollars just to afford the clothes on her back. It couldn't be a coincidence! She had to be linked to him. In any case, once inside she had very purposefully made her way - in the opposite direction from him - to a bank of public data booths; and our hackers rapidly established that it was from one of these that she had booked the limo, using cash. Another anomaly, a rich chick who didn't use the inevitable mobile data terminal which she must have had in her bag; and then she paid in cash. I couldn't even remember the last time I had used cash myself! On the other hand, that was, presumably as planned, a bad break for us. So we couldn't trace her cards, and had to be content with a characteristics match. Of course she wore the obligatory headscarf and dark glasses, all celebs did, and you wouldn't have been able to tell just from looking at her who she was - she might have been the president in drag, now that would have been a story! But Jocky Pool Inc. runs its own matching software, and you can't hide everything. Even a good short of your hands will uniquely identify you; which is why some security checks still use these rather than the chip implants. They are almost as good as retinal implants, and you don't risk million-dollar lawsuits when the lasers go wrong and blind the punter!

But, for once, there was no match. It wasn't conclusive, but I was almost certain she wasn't on our celeb list. So she wasn't the wife of some other senator, or even a famous madam; or even a lowly hooker from one of their stables - our celeb list, which drove the characteristics database, was determined by the scandal value of its unwilling, and often unknowing, victims. So who was she? Some little housewife who had taken pity on a lonely senator and welcomed him into her bed because his wife - and three teenage kids - didn't understand him? Again it didn't ring true. I suppose it might sometimes happen, but senators simply don't meet people like that. Their peccadilloes are lavished on the wives already on the cocktail circuit, and on our celeb list, or on the hookers - though, to be fair, they probably thought that some of these were chance encounters with innocent young women. These might not even charge, for it was enough to have suitable videos of the encounter to boost you into the super-league. While they buy their own immortal moments of pleasure, rich businessmen like nothing better than to hear dirty stories about their supposed betters.

No! I couldn't see that designer clad body falling into that league. She was just too damn smart to be a hooker, or even a one-night stand. She knew what she was doing. Sure we had caught her; but we are damn good at our job. Most other would never have noticed her as she slipped in and out, to make that very anonymous call. Indeed, we lost her ourselves almost immediately after she made that call. We saw her window shopping for a while, and going in and out of a few shops. Then she disappeared. She went into the largest department store, and into its changing rooms - which were on the grounds of modesty not video-protected - and was nowhere to be seen thereafter. Of course, she was there, but dressed in totally different clothes - no longer with designer labels - so she looked just like the hundreds of others around her! Even then she was careful to make no obvious moves. I suspected she went through a number of other shops before she had eventually gone to the pick-up point where a car would have been waiting. She was one smart lady, and that was another thing which had my nose twitching like an anteater on heat.

So why the elaborate play. They clearly had not intended to make an assignation there. So were they on their way to another one? My hunch was that they had to be on the way from one. The senator's plane had landed the previous night and yet had barely been an hour late in taking off. So they had to be coming from an, overnight, assignation. I had visions of the ageing senator in bed with the lady. We hadn't been able to see much of her, but she obviously had a nice young body and she looked after herself. So it was beauty and the beast. But how, and why, and where? The only explanation must be that their car had broken down, and they had been forced to leg it on foot - the adulterer's nightmare! So, off went my stringers again; this time to talk to all the local auto-repair outfits. But once more a dead-end. Sure, there had been lots of breakdowns that day, but none of them had been really expensive cars; and I couldn't see either of them squeezing into a family compact. How about the police reports then? They love to gossip about the rich and famous, the salacious material circulating through their front-seat consoles sometimes makes even me blush. But again there was nothing. This lady was a magician of international standing. Not only had she managed to vanish herself, but she had arranged the same trick for her car!

Again we got a lucky break. Our best hacker noticed that the police reports were not entirely clean. This wasn't unusual. If you wanted a misdemeanour buried, a few thousand dollars would buy you a new - innocent - entry. But it was just as likely to be some home-going drunk who had shocked his neighbours by exposing himself to piss on their best astro front lawn. So, it was detectable - and about the right time - nothing could get past our best hackers. But even they couldn't recreate the deleted record. But yet again we got lucky; this was our lucky day - didn't I say that you needed luck to get a top two hundred listing? We had been looking for an expensive limo broken down near the mall at around the time of the sighting. What we eventually got, after a lot of searching of street camera tapes, was three blocks away and an hour earlier. On the monitors we saw a limo being cut up by a hells-angel, and swerving into a bollard. It hadn't been a spectacular accident, but it had been enough to incapacitate the vehicle. The clinching detail for me was that the incident wasn't on police records, even through a police cruiser had been there within a few minutes. What is more, even though the video was low grade, we were able to catch a glimpse of the occupants slipping out of the passenger compartment and vanishing into the side streets, which were too poor to afford video coverage. I would have gladly bought a complete package for them if I had only been able to follow that hour-long journey; for the pair was undoubtedly our star-crossed lovers. They must have been desperate, though, to have risked that journey!

The limo was rented from an exclusive outfit, which wasn't going out of its way to divulge anything. It even tried to claim it didn't own the limo, though the registration details were there for all to see. So, yet another dead-end. But, once more, we got lucky; we were really on a roll - if I had time I would have switched to cash it in on one of the casino sites, but a position in the top hundred beckoned! By now, however, I was beginning to smell a very big rat. My nose was twitching in a very different way. We were being too lucky! Why complain when the future beckoned? But there were too many easy leads for us to find. My nose said that the secret services were feeding them to us. I knew they routinely videoed assignations of this type, I had watched some of those in their private library, but they were never released for public consumption. So that meant that this surely was not just about one sordid little assignation no matter how important the subjects. Perhaps it was just that the SS were pissed off about the senator escaping their personal protection net, as he obviously had. Perhaps they had recently been excoriated - off the record - by his ethics committee; they often were. But none of this was enough to explain the level of help I now realised we were getting. This must have been authorised at the level of the capitol. In any case, the revelation of some sexual peccadilloes - especially with such a foxy lady as this one - might even have helped the senator's reputation; where he was most often criticised for being an unbearable prig!

Anyway, let us return to that further lucky break. I don't know why we watched on, as the chauffeur worked fruitlessly under the hood, until the tow-away truck appeared; another deleted record, but one we hadn't spotted. But, just before it arrived, a cab drew up alongside, and another figure slid furtively from the back of the car. He was careful, but enough of him showed for us to this time get a positive make against the celeb list. It was the Duke! We couldn't believe our luck, though the researchers almost immediately told us his estate was nearby. We had not thought to look for this particular pin in the haystack! The senator had been in bed with a member of a mob family! A quick trawl of our back files soon showed that the foxy lady was the Duke's daughter. When we got the pics we all marvelled; she was not just foxy, she was gorgeous. I could have understood the senator, I would have given a dozen industry-standard bonuses for ten minutes in bed with her. But why had she done it? The very thought of that lovely body being violated by him made me shudder.

In any case, whatever was the senator thinking of. I had seen pictures of unfortunates who had just pinched the fanny of a gang member's moll. They didn't all die, but they came very close to it. Yet here was the godfather himself seeming to bless this liaison. We were barking up the wrong tree, or at least pissing on the wrong bed! This couldn't be a romantic liaison. Furthermore, our researchers had turned up a profile of the daughter. The interesting things in this were not the pics of her in a bikini, though those nearly blew our minds, but her career listing. Top of her DBA class at Stanford, she had distinguished herself at a leading consultancy before returning to run the family business. There the records got fuzzy. This sort of business does not file the sort of records we jockys would like to get hold of! So we had to build the picture out of innuendoes; the sort of conferences she went to, the business journals she took, the comments of her few business contacts and of the surprisingly few boyfriends. Based on these, as far as I could make out, she headed up the family's mergers and acquisitions department! To back up this line of enquiry, we found a disgruntled employee of the limo hire company who was willing to talk - there are always disgruntled employees if you look hard enough. He wasn't able to tell us about that day's hire, but he had told us that there was a rumour that not long before one of the passengers going out to the estate had been Lucky Jim.

Now, finding anything out about the mob is near impossible. They have their own satellite circuits and, even then, everything is heavily encrypted. Even the security agencies can't break the codes. But they still have to meet face to face to close the most important deals. Well actually they don't have to, other businesses long ago disposed of such niceties. But the mob has hung onto it. I don't know why. Maybe their acid test is the sweat level, the torrents of which will break forth if anyone lies! Whatever the reason, such face to face meetings, though rare, were always important. The proximity of that meeting between two godfathers just couldn't be a coincidence.

Even so, our researchers were drawing a blank in their attempts to link the senator to the family. The last investigations into the Duke, and his family, had ended a couple of years before; and there was seemingly no intention of reopening them. But, when Luck Jim's name was added to the pile we hit the jackpot immediately. The ticker showed that the senator's committee was just completing an investigation of his family, and its links with the illegal money markets, and the juiciest rumours had it that the family was just about to consummate a marriage with the Duke'. Yes!

Now came the application of our real genius; packaging that story as a one hour special - remembering that we have to allow ten minutes for station breaks, five minutes for titles, and another five for next day's promo. Of course, we needed another ten minutes for my live update, so the whole complex story had to come in at under the half-hour. That's where the real genius lies.

I won't go any further, you will already know the story thereafter; everyone knows about the very public fall of the senator which followed our revelations. The head of the national ethics committee on corruption charges would have made number one in the ratings worldwide, as it did. In addition, the story of how we achieved such a scoop made me a legend in the industry. Shame you can't cash in legends! But that was how I made my first, and highest, entry to the top two hundred. Patience, and hard work, had been rewarded. But I still give thanks to that kindly desk officer in the security services who was our patron saint.

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