Jodi Scarfield made a tight little fist-pump, and sat back from her computer screen with a cheesy grin and the desire to laugh like a maniac. She wriggled happily in the criss-cross of seatbelts that connected her to her seat; best not to make crazy cackling noises when surrounded by other passengers. That took some serious self-control.
Some days she was good. Other days she was very, very good. Today was one of those. Of course, it wasn’t just her, it was her ‘house’, a whole group of people who’d worked in synchronised perfection day and night. She just happened to be the one to make the last, and winning, move. There was a good reason she’d been chosen to do that job; it hadn’t had so much to do with her skills as it did her location. Soon, she was going to be hard to catch, and that was just how she liked it.
“You’re looking a bit too smug, Daughter. What’s going on over there?” Marilyn Scarfield looked up from her eReader and raised an eyebrow.
“Nothing very quickly on this dopey old piece o’ crap computer.”
Her mother chuckled. “You’ve spent so much time on that ‘piece of manure’ as you call it, that nobody here knows what colour your eyes are. Anything newer and you might disappear into cyberspace altogether.”
“As opposed to disappearing into real space?” Jodi quirked an eyebrow right back at her mother. “Comparatively speaking, I don’t think cyberspace poses much of a threat. Besides, if I had a faster computer, I would probably spend less time on it because I’d be doing everything so much faster!”
“Good try but you’re out of luck, kiddo. You’ve got stuff waiting for you in Anphobos so there’s no point in carrying on now. We’ll be there before you know it and then I’m sure you’ll have enough technology to make you happy.”
Jodi nodded and kept her eyes away from her mother’s face. The woman had a way of looking into a person’s eyes and taking the most direct route to their soul. Children of such people learned to keep their eyes constantly averted, especially children who may have done some wrong things for exceptionally ‘right’ reasons.
Her mother took the hint and changed the subject. “What are you doing that’s got you looking so satisfied, anyway?”
Jodi shrugged, eyes right, and peeled a rough corner off her thumbnail. “Nothing really, just chatting with Ellie.”
Marilyn exhaled noisily and pushed her seat into the upright position. “You girls! You only just saw one another. Do you really need to chat already?”
Jodi did not look up from her screen. A good offense was only the best defence if you weren’t looking into the eyes of a mind reader. “I know what you mean, Mum. I mean, it’s not like I’m never going to see her again, is it?”
Marilyn returned to her book, scowling and frustrated. “No one can predict the future, Jodi Scarfield. The universe is possessed of infinite possibility and you’re exploring just one. I wish you wouldn’t act like this move is the end of the world.”
“Not the end of your world, Mum, just the end of mine.” Jodi almost smiled; that would shut her mother up for sure.
Jodi had other reasons to smile, though. It was one thing to successfully distract a parent, totally another thing to work a miracle. As it turned out, she’d just finished performing a miracle, one about which she could never tell her mum. There were some things parents should never know. That’s why kids lied. At least, that’s why Jodi lied.
She hadn’t been chatting about clothes and make-up with Ellie; Jodi was neither a fashionista nor a shopper. Jodi was a hacker. Not only did her mother not know she was a hacker, she also didn’t know what kind of hacking work Jodi did. If she did, she’d have a straight-up conniption fit.
Jodi worked in a ‘house’ of hackers. It wasn’t actually a house, just a group of people online who acted together as a single unit. Within the house, individuals described themselves according to what ‘hat’ they wore. White hat – security work mostly. You break through people’s security systems then tell them how to fix it. Grey hat – still security mostly, but sometimes you’d leak a little information to other customers. Black – black hats only hacked for personal gain, to thieve and re-sell information. No one in Jodi’s house ever wore a black hat. Not as far as she knew.
Today, she’d been mostly grey-hatting, but despite her successful completion of the task, it had left her in an intense, almost black mood. This afternoon, she and her house had stopped their own government from committing a heinous crime.
Their government, supposedly elected ‘by the people, for the people’, had sent remote controlled bots to a jungle – correction, not a jungle, the jungle, the last true jungle on Earth, complete with terrified villagers who would most likely die without their trees – despite protests from nearly every faction of Earthen population.
The bots were to mine what was beneath the trees. Minerals and ores that were apparently becoming too expensive to get from Mars. That’s what happened when Earthen and Martian politicians disagreed; life got to be both more expensive and much less valuable, all at the same time.
It amazed her that people, government people, skilled enough to program mining bots for such careful and specialised destruction, weren’t clever enough to build sufficient traps, filters and walls into their bot programs. All those supposedly legendary programmers hadn’t been able to keep Jodi’s house out. Maybe they hadn’t thought anyone would try to stop them. Hacker laws were strictly enforced, and punishment was always jail time, even if you were a juvenile (as all those in her house were).
She stretched her fingers and closed her eyes. She always did a quick content check on sites she was hacking, just to be sure she was where she was supposed to be. Cyberspace could be tricky like that, it was easy to get lost. This afternoon she hadn’t been lost. Her quick peek into the government bots had produced gut-churning images.
Media reels showed natives, still painted in red mud and with feathers in their hair, as they walked away from their homes.
Footage fresh from the bot cameras showed those same natives throwing themselves into bot pincers and being sliced clean in half. Pincers designed to cut down trees did terrible things to a human body. The same was true of the saws and drills. No longer were native bodies red with paint, now they were red with blood.
“Hurry up, Scar,” Angus, her Scottish hat (voted most likely to turn black) had muttered in her ear. Many of her house had turned out for the last scene in their show. They watched from their own screens, all over the world. “There aren’t so many of them, poor beasties. They cannae wait while we tweak about.”
“Look at them,” even Beattie’s British accent, which made everything sound like a tea party, had managed to sound horrified. “Like lambs to the slaughter.”
“Looks like dem natives do’n want to leave them ‘omes huh?” Nobody knew where Ainsley was from, but Jodi figured Trinidad. “They tink dey’s fightin’ monsters. Better die fightin’ dan leave wid no honour, eh?”
Had Jodi not been strapped into a public location, she would have told them all to shut up. Could they not see she was concentrating? But she was sitting right next to her mum, waiting for pre-launch checks to be completed.
It was the native faces that upset Jodi most. You could tell they didn’t understand what was happening. When the blood started flowing, when their men started dying, the women began screaming. Eyes wide with bewildered horror, the women had screamed and slapped at their heads, trying to remove the scene from their skulls. That’s when the running had started.
Media footage showed them when they were too tired to run. The media showed silent images so you couldn’t hear them sobbing.
Her house had shut down the bots. They’d cheered and screeched and laughed when Jodi made the last keystrokes and the bots had gone dead. Jodi had made that one little fisty-pump, and been interrogated by her mum.
Her house hadn’t saved all the natives, but they’d certainly recorded the truth of the matter onto numerous drives: insurance against hacker laws and jail time.
While most of Earth would rejoice at their victory, others would be less than impressed. Government people would be looking for them.
Her house had masked their source locations, and done as much as they could to cover their tracks, including using Jodi to make the last play. Now she just needed to take this last trip and she’d be safe, untraceable and hopefully untouchable.
So would the natives, and that was the point.
Jodi stretched her arms over her head and cracked her knuckles, trying to squeeze the bubbles of adrenaline and triumph out of her skin.
Ellie. Her fingers were on the keyboard before she even knew what to say. Ellie would calm her down and chill her out. Better still, she would not, technically, have lied to her mum.
They really shld pay me better.
There was a brief pause from her out-of-date computer before the reply came.
They don’t pay u at all.
Jodi chuckled.
They shld.
A delicate tinkling down the aisle behind her drew her back to reality. Jodi knew what it was, and felt blood start chilling in her veins. Ice crystals formed between muscle and bone. Her teeth chattered in time with the cart load of glassware moving slowly, slowly toward her.
kk gtg miss u.
Another moment’s wait.
U2.
The trolley, laden with tinkling glassware, arrived beside her. Jodi sighed, closed the wafer thin laptop and acknowledged the visitor. The man standing beside her in his crisp, unfriendly white uniform held up two small beakers and forced a smile. Jodi gritted her teeth. They hadn’t even the decency to make-believe. Wine glasses would have been so much nicer. As it was, her heart began its trip-hammer-stammer. The man looked down his nose at her and waited, bent slightly forward from his waist.
Just a little tipple, young Miss? And maybe a cyanide chaser?
She quelled the psychotic butterflies in her stomach with a good strong huff through her nose.
“So, this is it?”
He nodded and held up her vial of coffee-dark liquid. “This is it. Don’t look so worried. It’s not that bad. By the time you wake up, it’ll all be over and you’ll wonder what all the fuss was about.”
Jodi smirked. “I bet you say that to all the girls.” Her mum chuckled and Jodi felt a stab of sudden affection for her. They’d spent a lot of time arguing lately, but when it all boiled down, they were in this together.
She turned in her seat, clinked vials with her mum and they upended them in unison.
“Not awful at all!” her mother gasped.
“Smooooth.” Jodi fought for breath around the fumes rising back up her throat.
“Ahh well, it’s all done now,” the delivery-man-cum-nurse soothed. “Nothing to worry about now but the most relaxing sleep you’ll ever experience.”
“’Night Mother.” Unwilling to believe what she’d just done, not wanting to think about what was to come, Jodi closed her eyes, prepared to wait for sleep. This was it. She was leaving, going where no one would ever think to find her. A life of perfect anonymity awaited.
“Sweet dreams, Daughter.”
Behind Jodi’s eyelids, visions of painted natives screamed and bled. Jodi squirmed where she sat before a grey mist wafted through the scene. The noise muffled and the image pixelated. Scores of her own code appeared white, then ran to grey against her eyelids.
Jodi smiled, snuggled into the comfort of her imaginary grey hat, and let black sleep fold her under.