Moxyland - Lauren Beukes [30]
'It's standard anti-corp, Jasmine. Don't sweat it. We can't limit the sentiment to the largescale corporati. Every capitalist enterprise propagates the system that fucks people over, keeps the poor and the sick down and out of sight. Your boss has it coming.'
'Okay. It's just that my boss was, like, a decent guy, yeah?'
'How decent could he have been if he fired you?' Toby cuts in, getting a grateful look from Jasmine.
'All right, whatever. We're heading out. Now that everyone is finally here.'
As we pull up our hoodies, I can't help noticing that Toby has ignored the very specific instructions to wear all-black.
Outside, the humidity from the rain earlier sinks down on us together with that musky smell of wet tar. I'm already starting to sweat. At least it's deserted. The lofts above the warehouses are all lit up, but nobody bothers to look out the window. The loft dwellers are all locked away. All the stuff they need is inside, cafés and laundros and private gyms, so they go direct from garage to apartment, never venturing out on the street unless it's in the security of their cars.
We turn left into Roodebloem, stepping up the pace. Zuko is playing handlanger, carrying the ropes and the harness. It's a test run, his first major sabotage, and I have high expectations of him.
The rules are that the targets have to switch constantly. It's self-evident, but you'd be surprised at how many wannabes don't think that far ahead, and get bust when they hit the same board the third time round. It's great that kids are doing it, that they're actually getting out there, but they fucking have to think it through properly. It's not like we haven't made the information available.
Most of them do it for the thrill. And when it comes down too heavy, the first time they get crisped, say, then they're out. They'll still hang in the forums, they might make it down for a protest or a flash mob, but they won't go on a raid again. Zuko is going to be different, though. I can tell.
I turn to tell him this, but he's not behind me as I anticipated. Instead, he is tagging along with Jasmine, both hanging tight with Toby, who is spouting shit, dragging up the whole Hope Modise thing, as if Jasmine weren't nervy enough already.
'Twenty years' disconnect. And the kid was only fourteen. You seriously didn't hear about this? It was, what, three years ago? There was that whole ad campaign?'
Zuko trots up, obedient. 'Sorry, Ten. Toby was telling us about–'
'Hope Modise, I heard. But he's got it wrong. You got it wrong, Toby. She was thirteen. And she didn't get twenty years. They remanded her sentence.'
'Yeah, yeah, yeah, I was getting to that.'
'What do you mean, remanded?' Jasmine says, too bouncy in her step by far, wired on adrenalin.
'After she hacked Sonica Wireless's servers, some dumb teenage crush thing, sending out a worm that interrupted people's programs with a message about how much she loved this guy–'
'Her programming teacher,' Toby interrupts, 'who was way older, like 34, and she figured this was the one way she could prove herself. It was beautiful. Love made code. Cos she did it all in binary, right? So you would be working on your spreadsheet or your email or whatever, and this thing would pop up, like an animation, but all ones and zeros just flipping out all over the screen. The general public didn't have a clue. Thought it was a crash or a virus. Hit half the world in four days. They estimated the loss in productivity at something like 6.3 billion while they tried to sort it out, and I'm talking dolleros, not rands. But here's the stupid thing, cos Hope had stamped it. I mean, how else was her teacher gonna know it was her unless she included his name? Disguised in the code, but they figured it out, traced it back to him, and then to her. He got off with a warning, I reckon due to turning her in, cos by then she'd realised this was some heavy shit, and had gone to ground. So no one was going to lure