19

KEEPING IT UNREAL

A small rectangle with the words SPEED RACER COMIN ROUND THE TRACK flashed in all caps across Jojo Huffman’s monitor screen and kept flashing. He barely had time to delete the warning before his supervisor came hurtling down his row, the ex-knight’s Popeye forearms making the wheels on his wheelchair spin like a washing machine. The code monkeys at the hack factory had started pinging Anson Brown out of self-defense. Being so low to the ground made him hard to spot as he tooled around on the smooth concrete floor, mostly silent except for the soft sucks of rubber compressing and unpeeling from cement. It had been Anson’s idea to remove all the cubicles and stack the code monkeys next to each other so that the buttsuck had a racetrack to zip around on. It was to maximize space and foster team effort, he’d said. They were all Templars, there to keep secrets from other people, not each other, he’d said.

The bag-biter said a lot. Like, right now, Anson was saying, “Hurry up and finish what you’re doing, people!” Calling it over Jojo’s shoulder, already come and gone. “There’s some weird shit happening with birds on the Lower East Side, and I need someone on it!”

“There’s weird shit happening everywhere, dumb-ass,” Jojo said in his dreams. Any fool could see that the city’s mainframe was crashing and all kinds of magical malware was getting in. Code monkeys had started grabbing sanity naps on cots set up in the corners. Jojo himself was on his too many-ieth power drink, and he hadn’t had a good bowel movement since yesterday. His eyes were poached, his teeth hurt, and his tongue was wearing a fuzzy condom.

“Yeah, Mojo,” Sam “Samwise” Stevens muttered on Jojo’s right. “Do that thing where you push that button to finish that stuff.”

Jesse “Hackerman” Ackerman snickered on Jojo’s left. It was gospel among the workers in the hack factory that Anson didn’t really know how to code. The ex-knight had learned to push a few keys around, but calling that penile wart a programmer was like calling someone who painted by numbers an artist.

Jojo was the artist. Jojo was laying some line mines, trying to get a blogger to download a virus that would open up all his cyber secrets to Jojo’s prying little eyes. The blogger kept trying to post the same feed about a fire being started by a small man who turned into flame. Normally, Jojo wouldn’t have sweated it—bloogle like that actually made Jojo’s job breezy—but this blog clog had gotten all aggro when he twigged on to the fact that the fire truck responding to the fire was from a fire station much farther away than it should have been—and who noticed things like that, anyhow? The town scryer was riding all over the Internet, yelling questions nobody wanted asked.

Some way, some play, Jojo was going to get some leverage on that dicksicle.