Moxyland - Lauren Beukes [67]
'You gotta buy.'
'Fine.'
I skim the shelves and grab a dark porn push, way up top, hand it to her to scan and flash my phone at the till. And then I crack the seal and start paging through it in front of her, pausing to show her a grotesque special on page six, cranking the volume up. She grimaces, managing to look even stupider and uglier, and leans back on her stool, pumping up the sound on her soap to try and drown me out.
I'm enjoying this now. I flick through to find another disturbing combo – oh, don't sweat it, it's all digital re-creations, they wouldn't really force a hyena to mount a nubile teenager.
Her repulsed reaction, the way I'm playing her, kicks up my rush. It's a sugar–bliss combo, if you were wondering, just enough to remix my experience of the world a little.
I glance round to check on the mission status. There's no sign of the little OCD monster. Doyenne is standing peering at the map but really scouting out the junction, looking through the screen to the platforms below; Ibis/Julia is sitting primly on a bench, reading a book, her
posture straight as an arrow.
Someone in the crowd jostles me harder than is politely acceptable, so I nearly drop the pushmag. Often, I get off on the tight; walking so close you can feel the swerve of the air currents between you and the people coming in the opposite direction. And it's always fun to infringe on people's personal space. But the crush is even thicker now, like fucking rush hour or like there's a soccer game on. Last time Orlando Pirates played the city stadium, eight people were fatally squished in this very station.
I catch a glimpse of a sludge hoodie bobbing away, carried by the surge, and recognise it as Twitch's signature style, or rather signature lack of style. Which means either that he's fucking with me, or that it's time.
I glance over at the team's positions. The bench is vacant. No visual on Ibis/Julia. Doyenne is heading down the stairs at an easy amble. Nice of them to let me know. I sneak a peek at my phone, which is thrumming insistently with an in-game msg and an attachment of ID images.
>> *SECURITY ALERT. #SD-17* Scan cams identified four (4) known terrorists in immediate vicinity.
I dump the pushmag in my pocket, saving it for later, and let the throng sweep me towards the lifts, as per our blueprint. It's basic stuff. Ibis/Julia and Doyenne will take either end of the train, working their way down towards each looking for the terrorist called Unity, the one with the dirty bomb, while I cover the platform – and the little shit keeps a bead on all of us from some disused maintenance cube lodged in the ceiling. They got access to a maintenance cube through sheer fluke. Took them eighteen hours solid gamespace play to crack a drug-bust mission, and when they'd fragged every junkie in sight, they found all kinds of useful goodies tucked among their stash, including an access card that unlocks certain gameplaces realworld.
I click open the folder, flip through the images, supposedly uploaded fresh from the station security cams. Not actually, sorry to disappoint you. It's all pre-scanned. As lucrative as play is, and trust me, Inkubate Inc. is paying Metro bigtime for the rights to play in the underway and set up gameplaces like Twitch's maintenance cube; they're still not allowed to interfere with actual realworld goings on in the public domain, which includes linking to the security cams for our gaming pleasure.
The photo-IDs are, in order:
A heavy in a gold vinyl tracksuit rubbed shiny with wear or maybe distressed on purpose, with tightly wound blond curls and a jaw designed to shatter all the bones in your fist.
A shaven-headed girl, around my age, done up all pantsula in pinstripes and carrying a black steel case, which is so blatantly obvious, I dismiss her as a decoy.
Another macho, business-slick in a suit with a gym bag slung casually over his shoulder, but it's clearly heavy, which is a tad more promising.
And. Hey, there.