MaddAddam (MaddAddam 3)

"Who is your friend?" she said to Glenn.

Glenn frowned at Zeb, which meant he felt insecure about the game. "This is Seth," he said. "This is Pilar. Your move."

"Hey," said Zeb, nodding.

"A pleasure," said Pilar. "Good save," she said to Glenn.

"Catch you later," Zeb said to Glenn. He wandered off to eat some NevRBled Shish-K-Buddies - he was getting fond of them, despite their ersatz texture - topped off with a SoYummie cone, quasiraspberry flavour.

He sucked on the cone while looking over the field and ranking all the women he could see. It was a harmless pastime. The scale was one to ten. There were no tens (In a Minute!), a couple of eights (With Mild Reservations), a clutch of fives (If Nothing Else Available), some definite threes (You'd Have to Pay Me), and an unfortunate two (Pay Me a Lot!) - when he felt a touch on his arm.

"Don't act surprised, Seth," said a low voice. He looked down: it was tiny, walnut-faced Pilar. Was she makin

g a move on him? Surely not, but if so it could be a delicate moment, politeness-wise: how to say no in an acceptable manner?

"Your shoelaces are untied," she said.

Zeb stared at her. His shoes didn't have laces. They were slip-ons.

"Welcome to MaddAddam, Zeb," she said, smiling.

Zeb coughed out a chunk of SoYummie cone. "Fuck!" he said, but he had the presence of mind to say it softly. Adam and his idiot shoelaces password. Who could have remembered?

"It's all right," said Pilar. "I know your brother. I helped bring you here. Look bored, as if we're making small talk." She smiled at him again. "I'll see you at the next Thursday barbecue. We should arrange to play a game of chess." Then she wafted serenely away towards the croquet game. She had excellent posture: Zeb sensed a yoga aficionado. Posture like that made him feel personally sloppy.

He longed to go online, zigzag into the Extinctathon MaddAddam chatroom, and ask Adam about this woman, but he knew that wouldn't be prudent. The least said the better online, even if you thought your space was secure. The net had always been just that - a net, full of holes, all the better to trap you with; and it still was, despite the fixes they claimed to be adding constantly, with the impenetrable algorithms and the passwords and thumb scans.

But what else did they expect? With code serfs like him in charge of the security keys, of course the thing was going to leak. The pay was too low, so the temptation to pilfer, snoop, snitch, and sell for high rewards was great. But the penalties were getting more extreme, which was a counterbalance of sorts. Online thieves were increasingly professional, like the outfits he'd worked with in Rio. Few were hacking for the pure lulz of it any more, or even to register protests, as they had in the golden years of legend that middle-aged guys wearing retro Anonymous masks got all nostalgic about in the dim, cobwebby, irrelevant corners of the web.

What good would registering a protest do you any more? The Corps were moving to set up their own private secret-service outfits and seize control of the artillery; not a month passed without the arrival of some new weapons law pretending to safeguard the public. Old-style demonstration politics were dead. You could get back at individual targets such as the Rev using underhanded means, but any kind of public action involving crowds and sign-waving and then storefront smashing would be shot off at the knees. Increasingly, everyone knew that.

He finished his SoYummie cone, fended off snub-nosed Marjorie, who wanted him to join a game of croquet and acted hurt when he said he was awkward with wooden balls, then meandered over to where Glenn was still sitting, staring at the chessboard. He'd set it up again and was playing against himself. "Who won?" Zeb asked.

"I almost did," said Glenn. "She pulled a Grob's Attack on me. It caught me off-guard."

"What exactly does she do here?" Zeb asked. "Is she in charge of something?"

Glenn smiled. He liked knowing things Zeb didn't know. "Mushrooms. Funguses. Mould. Want to play me?"

"Tomorrow," said Zeb. "Ate too much, it's dulling my brain."

Glenn grinned up at him. "Chickenshit," he said.

"Maybe just lazy. How come you know her?" said Zeb.

Glenn looked at him a little too long, a little too hard: green cat eyes. "I already said. She works with my dad. He's on her team. Anyway, she's in the chess club. Been playing her since I was five. She's not too stupid."

Which, in the high-praise area, was about as far as he went.

Vector

At the next Thursday barbecue, Glenn wasn't there. Nor had he been in evidence for a couple of days. He hadn't been mooching around the cafeteria, or asking Zeb to show him a few more hack moves on the computer. He'd become invisible.

Was he sick? Had he run away? Those were the only two possibilities that Zeb could think of, and he ruled out running away: the kid was surely too young for that, and it was too difficult to get out of HelthWyzer West without a pass. Though with Glenn's newfound robinhooding cryptic skills he could probably fake one.

There was another possibility: the little smartass had been colouring outside the digital lines. He'd broken into some sacrosanct Corps database or other and helped himself, just for the heck of it, because he couldn't possibly be into shady trading with the Chinese grey market, or worse - the Albanians, they were incandescent at the moment - and he'd got himself caught. In which case he'd be in a debriefing room somewhere having his brain pumped out. A person could come out of such affairs with nothing but a year-old dishrag north of the eyes. Would they do such a thing to a mere child? Yes. They would.

He really hoped it wasn't that: if it was, he himself would feel very guilty, because it would mean he'd been a bad teacher. "Rule Number One," he'd emphasized. "Don't get caught." But that was sometimes easier said than done. Had he been sloppy about the coding fretwork? Had he shown the kid a past-sell-by-date shortcut? Had he missed a few Detour signs, a few spoor marks that meant that he and Glenn were not the only ones on what he'd thought was his very own self-created poacher's jungle trail?