The events on the rotating screens in his bedroom were incredible.
‘Get back!’ roared a police officer, and the camera panned across his fear and towards the crowds.
The scene was like one of those old movies they showed on the History channel and in schools. A snarling mass of bodies and hands flailing like claws, eyes on stalks as though a zombie plague had just taken over, except their clothes were slightly more modern and neater. New York Police and US Army together with sonic riot shields knocking them down like skittles, but the sheer weight of numbers were pushing the lines back and back. Huge trucks, all armour and impossibly large tyres, were actually electrical cannons firing pulse waves, which flung the zombies high into the air and back down again. Being winded was the best-case scenario, if no bones took a pounding on the way down. The screen panned into the crowd at a hilarious ‘undead creature’ that looked out of place, too young to be there, 16 or 17 years old. He stood tall with a two-tone hairpiece that was flat to the left and back, combed high to the right, asymmetric to the extreme, and this was set off by the same look all the way down. He had one large earring and one small one; bright red on one half of the mouth and pastel colour on the other; half a jacket and half a blouse; denim jean on one leg and trouser on the other; one shoe and one boot. Oh, how the young ached to be individual these days. This one was the perfect embodiment of two people, as if schizophrenia had suddenly become common and cool. The half-face told lies in its rage as both halves contorted the same way. Both jean and trouser leg crunched the pavement in a charge that was part rabid, part manic zombie, firing forward to meet the crunch of the sonic shield. This was followed by the ear-splitting, if inaudible, sound wave as both halves hit the road with a gasp for one breath to fill out two lungs.
All this as the traffic lights failed. It showed just how dependant we had become on technology. It also showed an intrinsic fear of the authorities. Years and years of peace, of things just… working, and all of a sudden, the masses see the streets controlled by police again. In riot gear? It was like fear breeding fear. The uncertainty of the police, the lack of training and real-life experience they all had of real disorder, of crowd control, was transmitted to the public, who in turn projected their own fears back. And violence was the only certainty today.
Dylan’s room was bare, yet strangely lived in. His routine comprised shifting from his bed to his desk to his screens to his wardrobes and to his computer station. It was full of electronics, sparse of clothes and character. Yet this was a room that he spent all his time in. The personalised memo screen above workstation one gave way to his full name: Dylan Ryan Montgomery. At least six screens were spread across his desk, a seriously impressive manual rig that at least hinted at the talent which sat in front of it.
Dylan had a solitary poster. Just the one. On old school shiny paper, held in place by even older school tacks, her face constantly looked down and connected to him. Her androgynous features and bright blonde hair gave way to a sexuality beyond his years, or maybe not, as she was his fantasy and his dreams.
Suki.
He got up from his bed where the TV flickered off to reveal his day’s to-do list before a flick of the wrist in the direction of the screen had CNN back on. It was showing the zombies live from London that afternoon, on The Mall itself as the demonstrators somehow wanted to fight the police right in front of the King, as if to show William that they meant business.
The crowds there seemed a little cleaner, if no less mad. It was as if the grime of New York trumped the grime of London. Or perhaps the late September rain in London had washed the faces of the zombies. Dylan had been a big fan of zombie movies, the old classics such as Dawn of the Dead paling into comparison against modern masterpieces like 28 Days Later, and he recognised the slow, jerky movements of some of the characters advancing down the wide avenue towards the palace. The police had set a perimeter some way from the usual places that pedestrians could go, for fear of any sorts of missiles, bombs or explosives going the way of the building itself. That the flag was not flying did not matter, this was the symbolic residence of the monarchy the world over, and heaven forbid that any nutter would try to sabotage or damage it.
Drones whizzed overhead capturing ever more footage of the crowds, no doubt to follow up in the coming days with arrest warrants for those who could be identified. The West had steadfastly refused to bring in facial recognition by way of population control like the Chinese had in the early to mid-twenties. It was instead being used to ‘investigate crimes’, which was just the Government’s way of trying to say, ‘No, we are not using it’ when in reality they meant, ‘Well, we are not using it officially, but we will use it when we want to. And if you are doing anything wrong, then we will use it to find you, and it was your fault anyway so no, we won’t apologise for using it then.’
Dylan saw even more half-faces in the London crowd. Surely this was a global trend now, and he shook his head at the madness of it all. He was pleased that people were rising up, and one day they’d remember his name as being the catalyst for it all. But he couldn’t stand some of the characters in the world nowadays, their duplicitousness, their deceit, the way they openly espoused hypocritical shite like loving the planet but loving their lithium battery-operated cars more. It had long been proven that mining cobalt from the depths of the earth beneath the Congo was way more catastrophic than the micro pollutants of the very early twentieth-century combustion engines, but the Liberal cabal that ruled the world eventually twisted even that narrative towards the economic growth of Africa being a good thing.
Settling into his workstation, the myriad screens flickered with an array of code, save for one, which had another live feed, like that earlier of Fifth Avenue, New York. He grinned as the skirmishes broke out before switching his focus back to the trade boards, the markets open and ready for the bounce, which would make him very, very rich. The algorithms had been perfect, driving the prices of certain stocks all over the place, making it very easy for him to play both bear and bull and wait for the inevitable settling effect, which would occur once the markets came back up. His tracks were covered expertly, the information in The Book worth every single penny of what he had paid for it: lists of code, algorithms, backdoor entries into the world of Google and the US Department of Transport. Where it had come from who knew? He didn’t care, but in his skilled hands, he was able to wreak havoc, confident that his firewalls and daisy-chain IP routes would confuse even the most sophisticated of trackers.
He was convinced that Wall Street was going to go down soon, so he worked fast to manoeuvre his trades and then move around the funds. The markets were indeed in a tail spin, and the riots occurring certainly did not help matters. It was a little after 15.00 his time, and Wall Street had only been open 30 minutes. Already stocks were crashing left right and centre as investors tried to get their cash and liquidise themselves as much as possible.
His remote trades were highly elaborate, all conceived via a tangled web of companies worldwide. The time spent studying not only the markets, but also the oversight on global financial institutions, meant that Dylan knew exactly how to get money in and out quickly, and how to maximise his returns. He’d built up a sizeable nest egg that he’d managed to hide from the authorities thus far, and had also resisted the temptation to spend it, figuring that his plan was the only thing that mattered. And it was now time to move into full deployment of that plan.
It started with the GoogleCab. Just a quick write of malicious code was enough to make that one car stop talking to that set of traffic lights. And BAM… accident! Then it was time to see what else he could do. Previously researched backdoor entries into the Google-backed public services saw him test the waters further with the train incident in Singapore. Then the traffic lights in NYC.
That was a hilarious test. The previous night had played out just as he had hoped it would. First, a few sets in downtown Manhattan caused hilarious scenes as GCabs bucked and wailed like wild horses trying to figure out which way to turn and when to move and when to stop. There had been a few casualties for sure, but his clear lack of empathy and guilt, pointing to a narcissistic and psychopathic set of tendencies, simply thought of it as collateral damage.
The scene from the city cams he hacked was hilarious, and he had roared with laughter just as if he had been watching a classic slapstick movie in which its characters were falling over themselves. The cars were acting like crazy and playing games of chicken and dodgeball with the pedestrians running hither and thither.
This of course only fuelled the unrest of the crowd, not that he could know about that, or even sense it, but because the oft quoted folly, The Madness of Crowds, was right: that fool would follow fool. After all, it was back as far the mid-1630s that the world had seen tulip bulbs become one of the most expensive items on the planet. Fools indeed.
The madness of this particular crowd was fuelled by uncertainty, by propaganda, by the combination of the Government controlling the narrative on one hand and the conspiracy theorists the other hand. It was slowly driving the lambs—who trusted their farmers as the hand that fed them—mad. People just didn’t know who or what to believe.
All of this led Dylan up to the BIG ONE: Wall Street.
This was just Phase One of his plan though. He had way bigger things to achieve than Wall Street, and besides, what use was money in this horrific world if you had no one with you to spend it, to enjoy it? And humanity was killing itself anyway, so he wanted out. Away from it all.
He had his back story figured out: an alter ego of passport, bank accounts and a social media stack that gave his new alter ego, Dylan David Norris, just the right amount of gravitas in case of a story search by the Feds. He had worried that keeping his Christian name could put him in jeopardy if someone, somewhere made two and two equal four, but he figured that risk paled into insignificance against the difficulty of learning, and possibly forgetting, a new Christian name, during airport searches or security stops.
David was his father’s name, though he didn’t really know him very well. He knew that he had left them all alone when he was ten, and that his mother didn’t really like to talk about him anymore. But he’d seen the odd photo here and there, and he often wondered what had been so bad in their world that his father had just upped and left. His mother had said he was a terrible man, and though the details were sketchy, Dylan did kind of remember arguments between them; his father working a lot and then going out a lot; and things like holidays or family treats being very rare. There was that time at the seaside he remembered, but it all went sour when he got spooked by a seagull trying to steal his chips and he’d fallen sideways into his dad and spilled his carton all over the pavement too. That ended up with a shouting match between his mum and dad and it was all somehow Dylan’s fault for being clumsy.
Flicking between the closing prices of the stocks on screen one and the rapidly moving prices now that the markets had just reopened on screen two, to the sell instructions on screen three, to his bank accounts on screen four, the dollars continued to roll in for Dylan. Not huge sums in one place, nothing to leave a trail, but $500k here and a million there. The $250k on a manufacturer of police riot shields tickled him as the profit flashed by on the screen. Worldwide demand was soaring now! His biggest chuckle came on seeing the $1.2 million from the portable traffic light supplier that had suddenly become inundated with orders since the original failures the previous week in NYC.
Flicking another screen to his travel plans, he got up and moved to his case to check his belongings for his trip to see his world. His precious next day’s flight to NYC to meet her was oh so close, and his plans had worked, his bank accounts filled and moved and moved through various chains all disguised with IP re-routing protocols so no one could ever work it back to him.
New York. Tomorrow.
Time to hide his case in case his mother came in. And time for sleep.