Moxyland

Lerato

There is a weird vibe on the underway on the way in to the office, an undercurrent frisson even though there’s almost no one around, just a few people coming home from partying, a couple of churchgoers. But the controlled clampdown means I’m oblivious to the reality, until I actually reach the office and find out what has gone off overnight.

Communique’s offices are a study in controlled frenzy. The ultra-caffeine baristas are doing overtime. I don’t even make it as far as the lifts before I am whipped away to join Rathebe’s emergency task team, which has commandeered the boardroom and an additional coffee machine. There are twenty-three people crammed in with their laptops, all monitoring the datalines, killing the most damaging of commentary before it gets out, because anything is allowable when it comes to national security, and the government is a big Communique contract. To my disgust, Mpho is already in the thick of it.

I pull up a chair next to him. I’m dying to slide into my backdoor to get the full story, but it’s insanely risky with the kind of scrutiny going on right now.

When the first bomb reports start coming in, I don’t have a choice. The techniques are so inventive, they leave me breathless and everyone else clutching for information and something to do with it, before it gets out on the newslines – and worse, the streamcasts. There’s no way to contain this one, only spin it. We’re shutting down large parts of the network with service errors to try and keep it contained. Later, we’ll blame this on an underground cable being damaged by the bombs. Of course, I recognise the signature. Soccer balls and graffiti aren’t exactly Terrorism 101.

I have to be circumspect.

Despite all the caffeine being consumed in the clean-up marathon inside, it’s luck or fate that I’m the only one in the stairwell bathroom. The red mosaic tiles seem menacingly shiny, but I know I’m just tired and hung over and not thinking clearly. I take the third cubicle, in case the one on the end is too conspicuous and click my back-up SIM into my phone, which is not, surprise, surprise, coded to my identity.

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.

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 the cache on the servers, but that would take hours, which I don’t have. And I have to know if there’s anything incriminating. Sent items and trash are cleaned out, but the schmuck didn’t clear his IM conversations.

The bulk of the chats are with somebody called skyward*. What’s with all the damn asterisks? Mostly bullshit, heavy talk about co-opting the revolution and other doggerel, but then I come across one which mentions me by name.

I look up the IP address for skyward*’s email address, because now I’m going to have to hack into his email account and clean up there too. I feel sick at the thought of how much has to be done, how much time it’s all going to take, the hundreds and hundreds of interconnections. I cannot believe he mentioned me by name.

The IP address is not in the Netherlands at all. And at first I think I’ve made a stupid mistake, an entry-level blunder. It can’t possibly be. And then I catch on.

I eject the secondary SIM from my phone. My first instinct is to flush the incriminating evidence, but if I can get out of here, I’ll need it. What I really need is my passport and the suitcase I haven’t packed yet. There is a noise outside. I push the SIM as deep as it will go into my vagina.

I flush the toilet and emerge to find Jane leaning against the row of curved basins. The relief is mixed with irritation at her timing. I can’t begin to imagine what she’s come all the way up here for. Her office is in accounts, five floors down.

‘Hey Lerato. I’ve been looking for you everywhere. Got a minute?’

‘Jesus, Jane. Can’t it wait till I get home? I’m a little tied up right now.’

‘There’s someone who wants to see you.’

‘What? No. Rathebe will flip. I haven’t even had a chance to process—’

She flashes a card at me, a visual ID. And at first it doesn’t register. How can you live with someone for eight months and not know them at all?

I should have seen it coming. I should have guarded myself at home as carefully as I did at work.

She guides me to the lift. As I pass the boardroom, I will Mpho to look up, to help me. But he’s panic stations like everyone else, head down, and what could he do anyway? Rathebe glances up, sees I’m with Jane, and gives a little nod of acquiescence that lets me know I’m really, really fucked, even before the lift doors open to reveal a security guy with two (!) Aitos flanking him, putting paid to the half-baked plan I suddenly realise I was entertaining, to take her down in the lift, still get away somehow. I take a step back, but Jane grabs my arm.

‘It’s okay, we can fit.’ The guy whistles and the dogs press in tight against him, making space, but it’s still a squeeze. I can feel the hot pressure of their breath on the back of my legs. Jane slides a card key into the control panel. I feel sick with stupidity.

I fucked a boy for a couple of months whose motto was ‘It could always be worse’. It was just stupid. Of course it could always be worse. If you were buried up to your head in the desert waiting for the vultures to pluck out your eyes, someone could piss on you, fire ants could make a nest in your mouth, burrowing rodents could start eating your feet.

But this is bad. This is as bad as it could possibly be.

Because the IP address for skyward* comes back to Communique’s corporate pipeline. To this building.

And the ID Jane flashed me in the bathroom had the logo for spyware controller. Internal Affairs.