Moxyland - Lauren Beukes [69]
I pull the trigger.
The .44 kicks in my hand with a sharp metallic roar. Which should have been the end of her, only the blobby cow is still shrieking, clawing at the wet gobs splattered across her face. She squeals even louder when her hands come away sticky with sheen. I am way pissed now, kids.
'What are you doing? You're analogue, baby. You're out. Fucking go down.'
She holds her hands out to me, all shaky disbelief, and catches me left-field by starting to cry, little pathetic mewlings.
'Oh. Hey. Everything's sony, okay? It's not… Look.' I'm about to wipe her forehead to show her, but I don't want to get the dye on my BabyStrange, so I grab her by the wrist instead. 'It's purple, see?' Inexplicably, she starts crying harder. 'It's not blood. You don't gush purple. It's just a game. It's icy. Okay?' But she's sobbing so uncontrollably, I don't think I'm getting through.
I holster the gun and start sliding away from the blubbering girl, making sure I still have the keyring. The hippie with the audio-chip bandolier barges in. 'Bro, that was so uncool.'
'Hey! She was registered gameplay. It's not my fault she's a rookie.'
'Oh yeah?' He bends down, comes back with her handbag and dumps out the phone, turns it over to show me. It hasn't been chipped for ingame. It's so outmoded, it wouldn't even support the tech. Shit.
I hightail it through the crowd, ignoring dreadlock boy's recriminations shouted after me. The protest is going off, it's too thick to move without worming between the bodies, and the amplified chatter is deaf-making. I duck down besides a motobin that's been stopped in its circuit by the human traffic, humming quietly to itself, and check my phone. My msgs display various riffs on 'where the hell are you?' from all three of my clan mates.
Surprisingly, Ibis/Julia is the most graphic of all of them, threatening my mother with violence if I don't get my skinny ass down there immediately. Maybe I'll take her up on it later.
But right now I have bigger pilchard to panfry. I skip the rest of the msgs and reload the target list, flipping through the visuals to saggy cow, who is indeed the girl I just fragged in the face, down to the last inflamed zit. This is all seriously dubious.
>> Weird stuff going on. Think the mission has been compromised. Could we have got bad intelligence? Considering mission abort? Confirm?
I sit tight and wait for an answer. The motobin is a little slow, only now detecting my proximity. It swivels on its axis and gapes its flap at me hopefully, waiting for a deposit. No one gets back to me, not even Twitchy, who is supposed to be holed up at high altitude.
Fuckit. What else to do? I throw myself back into the fray, all bargey elbows to get through the toyi-toyi, because the protesters seem to be holding fast to their positions. If they hoped to stop the station functioning today, they're doing well.
From the plastech pedestrian tunnel that crosses over the junction, I can see it's mal chaos below. On the platform, only heads are visible in the mesh of people, like coloured pixels, shoving in different directions. The trains are at a standstill, but there are bursts of flashfire going off inside the compartments, six or seven while I'm watching. I skeem I'm not the only player here today with corrupt data.
A ripple of quiet spreads out from one side of the station as the audio chips suddenly fade out, as if they've been dampened. The protesters' voices sound hollow without them, too warm, too varied without their mechanical accompaniment, and even the voices are starting to falter. I can't see shit, but I can anticipate what's coming.
'This is the South African Police Services,' the announcement blasts over the PA as the protesters and the civilians all fall respectfully, no, fearfully, silent, so now we can hear the shouts from the platforms below. The toyi-toyi-ing wavers and stops as people turn expectantly to the entrance, where uniforms