Moxyland - Lauren Beukes [82]
Communique is willing to indulge us our whims and little vices, just about anything to appease the talent, lest we defect. But a fake SIM ID is serious contraband. Two years' jailtime if I'm bust with it. I'm mad to use it here.
The phone powers up on silent, logging on to the maintenance subnet which controls the building's cleaning bots. A neat little loophole I discovered by accident rewiring the VIMbot Toby stole from my apartment block. It doesn't work unless you can connect to a booster site to get the signal out of the building, but I already have that set up in every Communique billboard Tendeka and friends have hit with their smear boxes.
It takes me a minute to track the reroute msg Tendeka sent out via a mirror in Singapore, tracing the trajectory all the way back to the Cheaptime Trip Bar in Little Angola, terminal fourteen, sent at 23h18. It helps that I know his hangouts, that I know who he was sending to, and can backwards engineer it. At least he was using a fake SIM. User ID chipped as Rutger Hoffman, German nursing student, twentyfour, resident in UCT's Slovo Res.
Still, can't be too many people hanging around at that time in Cheaptime Trip, and the cams would have picked him up in the vicinity. Sloppy work: the guy shouldn't risk tech on his own. But it's not his solo ops that worry me.
It takes another two minutes to crack Cheaptime's time-clock database and delete all the records. I take their server down too, just for good measure. I just hope they're sufficiently small-time that they don't have back-ups, or at least that it will take them several hours to restore. It's a hack job, but there's not enough time to finesse it, with twenty-three other people in the room across the hallway, all on a similar tack, trying to dig out the terrorists, and it's only a matter of time. Although hey, if anyone does stumble across this, hopefully they'll just assume it's Tendeka and his pals trying to cover their tracks, that they're clumsy amateurs.
I consider sending Tendeka a warning via his loxion soccer club's fan board, something obtuse enough to be innocent, but I figure he's probably not smart enough to pick it up. I can't risk anything that will link me to him.
It's absurd how sloppy he's been, the sticky fingerprints he's left over everything. He accessed his banking at the Cheaptime Trip, wired cash from one account to another, so I follow the trail, closing down the links, deleting the cache, covering his tracks, because it's all here, an underway map of connections.
The Cheaptime leads to a soccer game, by way of his checking on the match scores, which leads to his underprivileged kids' soccer club in Khayelitsha, which leads, via one of the kids, Zuko Sephuma, to the sponsored graffiti project with street kids on Grand Parade, where a wall just happens to have exploded, causing minimal damage but a lot of fright. Enough to bury Tendeka, even if he's managed to miraculously avoid the cams.
Tracking that kid, Sephuma, who is the common denominator, leads to a streamcast on future*renovate, some anti-corporate community in Amsterdam, and the impenetrable moniker '10'. Christ, Tendeka.
Lots of postings from 10, IP address links back to the Cheaptime, couple of phone access logins, and back to the soccer club. Rants on the board, video clips of some of the 'hits' posted as instructional guides. I didn't realise he was filming any of it. I feel ill. And I'm running out of time, before someone else comes into the bathroom or wonders where I am.
It takes me less than a minute to crack his future*renovate email account. Penile enhancement ads. Newsletters from groups with dubious titles like WorldChanger or Guerrilla Corporatista, mostly unopened. Messages from fanboys and girls.
>> That was the sickest video yet, man! How did you pull that shit off? Props.
Zuko cropping up once again, quite the disciple. But the account is suspiciously empty, like he's been systematically trashing everything, taking some limited precautions here at least. I could get into