Moxyland - Lauren Beukes [18]
I take a shower and decide the only way I'm going to get the dust (and okay, that man) out of my hair is to cut it off. So when the doorbell goes ten minutes later, I'm busy hacking through my braids with a pair of sewing scissors. Naturally, I assume it's my sushi. But home™ logs the SIM as Toby. I waver about whether I really want to let him in, whether I can handle him right now, decide what the hell, and instantly regret it as he lopes in still wearing his peel, fresh from a surf on the Communique beach. He's soaked. And his backpack is squirming.
'You're dripping on my carpet.'
'Nice hair,' he responds with real admiration, and leans down to kiss me on the mouth, a little too intimately. I shove him off, but, unlike Mpho, he's not bothered by the rejection. 'Gotta towel?'
Jane steps into the lounge to see who it is, and her face clouds. She and Toby share a prickly antipathy, although she flat out refuses to admit it's because he's not corporate. She's internalised enough feel-good talkshows to know you should never confess to being a bigot.
I've been cohabiting with her for eight months now, assigned as live-ins according to synchronous personality matching by Seed. The overlap of our schedules is usually only an hour or so a day, not including weekends. I don't know how she manages to be so bad at number-crunching that she has to work overtime so frequently. Maybe she's trying to impress someone, get that promotion which is always and forever going to pass her by in favour of a smarter, better, more attractive candidate.
Not that I'm complaining. It means we stay out of each other's way, and she's oblivious to how I really spend my down time. (I could even confess to having maybe given Seed a little nudge in this direction, but hacking Communique's central database would be a violation of company protocol, and subject to a downgrade at the very least.)
Toby is still bitching. 'What is up with the security pricks? Like I haven't been here a squillion billion times before. Scratch that your visitors should have free rein.'
'Yeah, but then who knows what kind of streetside degenerates would wander in.'
'People like me, most probably,' Toby grins.
This is old routine. Even though I've hooked Toby up with a Communique Preferred Visitor's card, he has a habit of losing it. I don't let on how much this irritates me, because then he'd only do it on purpose, the same way he always ups the slang to get under my skin.
'Poor baby. Lumped in with the civilian dregs again?'
'Separate entrance and all. Back of the train. Can you tell?' He sniffs himself suspiciously and then flumpfs into the couch, still wearing his peel. Jane bites off a little squeal of dismay.
'But never mind my travails. How was Gabs?'
'Shit. Thanks. It's this big push on Push–' Toby snickers gratifyingly. 'But their cellular network is a shambles. It doesn't have the bandwidth to cope with the content, and there have been horrendous glitches with Bula Metalo's ads conflicting with the defusers. So it's ads or social control. Your choice.'
'Sounds like a good time to be a criminal in Botswana.'
'Uh, yeah, apart from that whole death penalty thing.'
'Hectic. Forget the work shit. I only asked to be polite. Did you get it?' Toby grins lopsidedly in that way that girls find attractive, although, honestly, he's more interesting than beautiful, especially since he's started cultivating his beard.
Jane is still hovering in the alcove anomaly squeezed between the kitchen and the lounge, which is but one of many factors that reveals our apartment was originally intended for one inhabitant and then converted, which only makes me more bitterly resentful about being lumped in with tedious finances girl.
'C'mon, let's get you that towel,' I say, downplaying his comment, and because I'm dying to see what's in the bag. And yeah, okay, because otherwise Jane is going to have a coronary about the