Moxyland (Angry Robot)

by Lauren Beukes

  I'm not going to miss this place at all.

  It's only after I've had my coffee and the greasiest protein combo the kitchen can deliver that I get round to checking my message. It's from Rathebe. Her hyperbole suggests some national crisis, without getting into any of the details. What I think is that it better be a new outbreak of the superdemic to force me into the office on the weekend. If it's some baby stroller issue, I'm going to flip.

  Kendra

  When the swivel grinds through its rotate to open onto the landing, there is an audio notice stuck to the outside of the door that activates as soon as it senses us.

  'For your convenience, please find enclosed a digi map to your nearest immunity centre. This is a South African Police Services public service announcement.'

  'Cunts. Jesus. Motherfuck.' Toby wipes his nose with his sleeve, rips off the GPS chip and scrunches it under his heel, only it doesn't scrunch. 'Fuck!' He picks it up and hurls it across the corridor, but it's so light it drifts to the left and ricochets off the wall with a dull plastic ting. He kicks the wall, then punches it for good measure.

  He comes away shaking out his hand and still swearing. He looks shocking. His eyes are pouchy and bloodshot, and he's pale under his scrag of beard. I still haven't been able to face myself in the mirror. I'm grateful that I don't feel like he looks. He's already taken three painkillers this morning.

  He cringes as we step outside the building, and tries to turn back for his sunglasses.

  'There isn't time, Toby.'

  'Are you chaffing me? We still got thirty-two, thirty-three hours at least. And if we don't make it, they can always come get us. They'll have a roving unit. Door-to-door delivery. Now that's servicing the community.' But he tags along anyway.

  We still don't have a phone between us. When we tried to log in this morning, his connection was down. 'The cabling in this fucking building,' he muttered.

  'Does it go down a lot?'

  'Murphy's law, innit mate?' he says, putting on a jokey Brit accent. 'It's exactly the kind of crap that would go down today.' But I can tell he's unsettled.

  Before we found the warning on the door, the plan was to find a public terminal, to get hold of his corporate friend, but now I don't know. We might just be bringing the shit to her.

  'She can handle it,' Toby says. 'She's a big girl.' He spits a glob of phlegm onto the street in front of Truworths. A young house spouse coming out pulls her black leather handbag against her and steps pointedly around us.

  'Yeah, fuck you too,' snarls Toby and starts coughing so badly, he has to lean against the window. Inside, there is a flurry of motion, and I grab his arm and pull him away before the security guard lumbers out to chase us away.

  Glancing back over my shoulder, I catch a glimpse of my reflection in the glass of the window among the moto-mannequins in gleaming fabrics. My face is totally healed.

  Tendeka

  The thing is, transparency only works as a policy if you can still find a way to make the stuff you don't want people to see invisible – especially when it's out in the open. We're here to make sure there's no possibility of hiding what has happened.

  Who would have thought that so many were ready to give it up, turn turtle before it even kicks in, before they even know it's going to kick in at all? Traitors to the cause.

  And cowards, adds skywards* in yet another msg.

  The emergency room at Chris Barnard Memorial is street level, a glass box beside the ambulance parking with a ramp that leads up and away to the parkade. There is already a queue of people outside, rumpled like they've been up all night, so everyone looks homeless. They're pale and shocked and some of the more pathetic ones have convinced themselves they're sick for real, doubled over and coughing, psyching themselves out, buying in, pushing to get to the front. There's no sign of the media.

  But there will be.

  There's been nothing on any of the newscasts, not even a suggestion on the alt channels, which implies that the clampdown on info is already in force. There are probably S&D teams working round the clock, scanning every blog, censoring every streamcast. Suppress and destroy.

  'Here?' Zuko asks. We're standing across the road, at the edge of the parking lot for the chichi restaurants in Heritage Square. He tosses a soccer ball deftly from foot to foot, ignoring the carguard, who is beckoning that he must skop the ball over here, have a little game, man. But this is not the time for play.

  We'll already have been picked up by the security cams outside the hospital, but I don't think it's worth pointing this out to Zuko, who is tensely eager underneath his cool, still fucked on glue, and wound up from watching the Grand Parade light up in pyrotechnics.

  'Yeah. It's the most accessible.' We've already checked out two other temporary vaccine locations, one in the CBD police centre, the other set up at the main entrance to Adderley Station, but there were dogs lurking at both of those, and they started barking when we came too close, picking up some residue of the chem scent.

  No one will get seriously hurt. The explosive is low-capacity RDX. Limited 'blast phenomena' according to the instructions from Amsterdam. The nearest people will suffer flash burns, maybe. But they're right next to the ER. They'll be able to get medical treatment on the spot. Sometimes small sacrifices are necessary. It's collateral damage. And there is zero chance Ashraf will be here. He'll have gone to a more convenient clinic, closer to Khayelitsha. Definitely.

  Zuko shrugs, always the team player, and strolls across the road, dribbling expertly, dodging a car, while still keeping the ball going, casually following it towards the ER doors, like goal posts. Just a kid messing around. The security guard is too preoccupied with managing the line to hassle him.

  Zuko bounces the ball off his knees a couple of times, fearlessly, as if it were not packed to capacity with RDX, then lets it drop. Before it has a chance to touch the ground, with a swift and perfect sideswipe, he lobs it at the automatic doors.

  The motion sensors pick up the ball and slide open to swallow it up.

  I click the detonator in my pocket, subtly as possible, already walking away.

  The bomb rips through the building with a shudder of glass and concrete.

  I don't look back for Zuko.

  Lerato

  There is a weird vibe on the underway on the way in to the office, an undercurrent frisson even though there's almost no one around, just a few people coming home from partying, a couple of churchgoers. But the controlled clampdown means I'm oblivious to the reality, until I actually reach the office and find out what has gone off overnight.

  Communique's offices are a study in controlled frenzy. The ultra-caffeine baristas are doing overtime. I don't even make it as far as the lifts before I am whipped away to join Rathebe's emergency task team, which has commandeered the boardroom and an additional coffee machine. There are twenty-three people crammed in with their laptops, all monitoring the datalines, killing the most damaging of commentary before it gets out, because anything is allowable when it comes to national security, and the government is a big Communique contract. To my disgust, Mpho is already in the thick of it.

  I pull up a chair next to him. I'm dying to slide into my backdoor to get the full story, but it's insanely risky with the kind of scrutiny going on right now.

  When the first bomb reports start coming in, I don't have a choice. The techniques are so inventive, they leave me breathless and everyone else clutching for information and something to do with it, before it gets out on the newslines – and worse, the streamcasts. There's no way to contain this one, only spin it. We're shutting down large parts of the network with service errors to try and keep it contained. Later, we'll blame this on an underground cable being damaged by the bombs. Of course, I recognise the signature. Soccer balls and graffiti aren't exactly Terrorism 101.

  I have to be circumspect.

  Despite all the caffeine being consumed in the clean-up marathon inside, it's luck or fate that I'm the only one in the stairwel
l bathroom. The red mosaic tiles seem menacingly shiny, but I know I'm just tired and hung over and not thinking clearly. I take the third cubicle, in case the one on the end is too conspicuous and click my back-up SIM into my phone, which is not, surprise, surprise, coded to my identity.

  Communique is willing to indulge us our whims and little vices, just about anything to appease the talent, lest we defect. But a fake SIM ID is serious contraband. Two years' jailtime if I'm bust with it. I'm mad to use it here.

  The phone powers up on silent, logging on to the maintenance subnet which controls the building's cleaning bots. A neat little loophole I discovered by accident rewiring the VIMbot Toby stole from my apartment block. It doesn't work unless you can connect to a booster site to get the signal out of the building, but I already have that set up in every Communique billboard Tendeka and friends have hit with their smear boxes.

  It takes me a minute to track the reroute msg Tendeka sent out via a mirror in Singapore, tracing the trajectory all the way back to the Cheaptime Trip Bar in Little Angola, terminal fourteen, sent at 23h18. It helps that I know his hangouts, that I know who he was sending to, and can backwards engineer it. At least he was using a fake SIM. User ID chipped as Rutger Hoffman, German nursing student, twentyfour, resident in UCT's Slovo Res.

  Still, can't be too many people hanging around at that time in Cheaptime Trip, and the cams would have picked him up in the vicinity. Sloppy work: the guy shouldn't risk tech on his own. But it's not his solo ops that worry me.

  It takes another two minutes to crack Cheaptime's time-clock database and delete all the records. I take their server down too, just for good measure. I just hope they're sufficiently small-time that they don't have back-ups, or at least that it will take them several hours to restore. It's a hack job, but there's not enough time to finesse it, with twenty-three other people in the room across the hallway, all on a similar tack, trying to dig out the terrorists, and it's only a matter of time. Although hey, if anyone does stumble across this, hopefully they'll just assume it's Tendeka and his pals trying to cover their tracks, that they're clumsy amateurs.

  I consider sending Tendeka a warning via his loxion soccer club's fan board, something obtuse enough to be innocent, but I figure he's probably not smart enough to pick it up. I can't risk anything that will link me to him.

  It's absurd how sloppy he's been, the sticky fingerprints he's left over everything. He accessed his banking at the Cheaptime Trip, wired cash from one account to another, so I follow the trail, closing down the links, deleting the cache, covering his tracks, because it's all here, an underway map of connections.

  The Cheaptime leads to a soccer game, by way of his checking on the match scores, which leads to his underprivileged kids' soccer club in Khayelitsha, which leads, via one of the kids, Zuko Sephuma, to the sponsored graffiti project with street kids on Grand Parade, where a wall just happens to have exploded, causing minimal damage but a lot of fright. Enough to bury Tendeka, even if he's managed to miraculously avoid the cams.

  Tracking that kid, Sephuma, who is the common denominator, leads to a streamcast on future*renovate, some anti-corporate community in Amsterdam, and the impenetrable moniker '10'. Christ, Tendeka.

  Lots of postings from 10, IP address links back to the Cheaptime, couple of phone access logins, and back to the soccer club. Rants on the board, video clips of some of the 'hits' posted as instructional guides. I didn't realise he was filming any of it. I feel ill. And I'm running out of time, before someone else comes into the bathroom or wonders where I am.

  It takes me less than a minute to crack his future*renovate email account. Penile enhancement ads. Newsletters from groups with dubious titles like WorldChanger or Guerrilla Corporatista, mostly unopened. Messages from fanboys and girls.

  >> That was the sickest video yet, man! How did you pull that shit off? Props.

  Zuko cropping up once again, quite the disciple. But the account is suspiciously empty, like he's been systematically trashing everything, taking some limited precautions here at least. I could get into the cache on the servers, but that would take hours, which I don't have. And I have to know if there's anything incriminating. Sent items and trash are cleaned out, but the schmuck didn't clear his IM conversations.

  The bulk of the chats are with somebody called skyward*. What's with all the damn asterisks? Mostly bullshit, heavy talk about co-opting the revolution and other doggerel, but then I come across one which mentions me by name.

  skyward*>>how goes your tec contact? like to put her in touch with some of our other operations. she does good work.

  10>>Lerato? Yeah, I only really know her through Toby, and he's too much of a prick to work with.

  skyward*>>pity.

  I look up the IP address for skyward*'s email address, because now I'm going to have to hack into his email account and clean up there too. I feel sick at the thought of how much has to be done, how much time it's all going to take, the hundreds and hundreds of interconnections. I cannot believe he mentioned me by name.

  The IP address is not in the Netherlands at all. And at first I think I've made a stupid mistake, an entry-level blunder. It can't possibly be. And then I catch on.

  I eject the secondary SIM from my phone. My first instinct is to flush the incriminating evidence, but if I can get out of here, I'll need it. What I really need is my passport and the suitcase I haven't packed yet. There is a noise outside. I push the SIM as deep as it will go into my vagina.

  I flush the toilet and emerge to find Jane leaning against the row of curved basins. The relief is mixed with irritation at her timing. I can't begin to imagine what she's come all the way up here for. Her office is in accounts, five floors down.

  'Hey Lerato. I've been looking for you everywhere. Got a minute?'

  'Jesus, Jane. Can't it wait till I get home? I'm a little tied up right now.'

  'There's someone who wants to see you.'

  'What? No. Rathebe will flip. I haven't even had a chance to process–'

  She flashes a card at me, a visual ID. And at first it doesn't register. How can you live with someone for eight months and not know them at all?

  I should have seen it coming. I should have guarded myself at home as carefully as I did at work.

  She guides me to the lift. As I pass the boardroom, I will Mpho to look up, to help me. But he's panic stations like everyone else, head down, and what could he do anyway? Rathebe glances up, sees I'm with Jane, and gives a little nod of acquiescence that lets me know I'm really, really fucked, even before the lift doors open to reveal a security guy with two (!) Aitos flanking him, putting paid to the half-baked plan I suddenly realise I was entertaining, to take her down in the lift, still get away somehow. I take a step back, but Jane grabs my arm.

  'It's okay, we can fit.' The guy whistles and the dogs press in tight against him, making space, but it's still a squeeze. I can feel the hot pressure of their breath on the back of my legs. Jane slides a card key into the control panel. I feel sick with stupidity.

  I fucked a boy for a couple of months whose motto was 'It could always be worse'. It was just stupid. Of course it could always be worse. If you were buried up to your head in the desert waiting for the vultures to pluck out your eyes, someone could piss on you, fire ants could make a nest in your mouth, burrowing rodents could start eating your feet.

  But this is bad. This is as bad as it could possibly be.

  Because the IP address for skyward* comes back to Communique's corporate pipeline. To this building.

  And the ID Jane flashed me in the bathroom had the logo for spyware controller. Internal Affairs.

  Toby

  Of course I've noticed that her face is healed. Think I'm a moron? When she stops to admire her reflection, I hustle her on. 'C'mon. Keep moving. You want to bring attention down on us?'

  'But–'

  'Yeah, yeah, I know. Lucky for you. Wish I had some nano to stitch me up from the inside.' The headache is eating through the
painkillers, chowing down on the edges, and I'm itchy as fuck and my nose won't stop running, so I have to wipe it with the back of my hand and smear the snot off on my jeans.

  'Charming,' she says, real helpful, and refuses to take my hand again. I hadn't even realised we were holding hands. I'm fucking starving, maybe even dying, and she's concerned about playing Ms. Manners. Which sparks me off on my motherbitch, and how the least she could do is download some cash so we can buy breakfast and a Ghost for K, who is jonesing bad, and maybe a pair of cheapnasty sunglasses so I can deal with the glare. I mean, what are parents for?