Moxyland - Lauren Beukes [37]
'Fine. But you owe me.'
'Rack it on my tab.'
'And you're still king lame.'
'Love ya, babe. Gotta run, got little kiddies to kill for fun and profit.'
It takes a minute and a half to reroute Toby's IP address so it looks like he's logging in from Melbourne rather than Cape Town, which should sort out his little problem.
And then, at last, the adboard call comes in. I'm not technically involved in the maintenance process, but I have access to the job sheets, and it's not unusual for coders at my level to monitor the execution. Yusuf and Petronella get the call as the closest technicians in the vicinity. I couldn't have calibrated it better myself. Yusuf is smart but lazy, and Petronella is just plain lazy. They'll be more worried about the damage Toby and his friends have done to the hardware than any inconsistencies in the software. Assuming my code holds, all will be well.
And it does. And it is.
There's a surplus of people who do what I do, to the extent that I'm surprised they don't consider culling. Good programmers are as easy to score as a blowjob on Lower Main Road, and just about as cheap. You really have to distinguish yourself if you're going to make any progress.
It was easy getting noticed at nineteen, but I'm getting on, and if you haven't cracked management by twenty-eight, your chances of doing so decrease exponentially for every year you add to your CV. I've still got a few years, but I'm not ending up like Jane. Rather be a startling failure than a benign success.
I figure my options are pretty limited within Communique. But with the penalties for intercorporate poaching running into hundreds of thousands, it's going to be difficult to persuade another corporate that they need me, when they can get fresher and younger talent straight out of the skills institutes for much, much less. Unless I have something to sweeten the deal. Like a backdoor, say, installed in their rival's security software on the adboards that allows you to access Communique's proprietary information, track the data and the response rates. Call it market research. 'Corporate espionage' is so over-dramatic.
A monarch alights on my keyboard, flexing its wings, flashing the striations of velvety orange and black. Strayed too far from the nest, little guy. They don't like that around here. I crush it delicately under my thumb.
Toby
Digging through my laundry to find something relatively fresh and suitable for public consumption, I happen upon Jasmine's scarf, which she left here after the raid last night. It smells like her, very faintly through the musty wool and the overwhelming notes of Fairtrade caramel butter, cos Jazz isn't the kind of girl to wear perfume, but she's not the great unwashed specimen of activist either, which I appreciate. I take a deep breath of that warm girly goodness, and then trash the thing. Hey, it's not like she's going to be coming back to get it.
I stagger over to my console, clip the Moxy chip into the game socket and, instantaneously, there are little blobby monsters bouncing around all over my projecta walls and singing. This, after all the sugar, and with the residue ache of being sucker-punched in the face, is a very bad thing, kids. My cheek has turned a bluish-yellow where that bastard Tendeka got me.
I reduce the display to just one wall, skip the jangle, choose the first character I'm offered (some furry blue thing with oversized paws – RomperStomp, special move the ShakerQuake) and connect to the gameworld along with the 1,487,763 other players currently online, 99% of whom are in the eight-to-twelve demographic. The remainder are like me, gatecrashers cashing in on the system, or maybe paedophiles looking to hook up. I suspect the former group may be the more evil of the two.
The trip connects, and RomperStomp shimmers into existence in some cheesy-ass neo-classical archway in a candy-coloured jungle, swampy pools burping oily bubbles that pop to release weird little flittering manta rays, and, in the distance, weird looming rock things like you'd get in Vietnam