dotmeme

by Mike A. Lancaster

  Joe had talked to Abernathy, who’d been skeptical about his plan for a next move, but had ultimately agreed because the simple truth was that there really was no other way to proceed when all leads had gone cold. Abernathy had insisted on “a safety net” of his own, and had made some discreet calls to select numbers in Luton.

  So, on his second day in in the city, Joe had become homeless himself.

  He’d taken advice—and tips—from the social worker, raided a charity shop bargain bin for clothes, ditched his phone and cash in the cheap hotel room that was starting to look pretty darned homey in comparison to the life he was about to embrace, and then he’d hit the streets.

  As plans went, it was a long shot at best. The one thing he had going for him was he was pretty much the same age as the missing kids. If there was a sinister cause behind the disappearances, and even that was uncertain, then maybe he could engineer an encounter with the same person that the other six had.

  A long shot.

  It took a little less than fourteen hours for it to pay off. Fourteen hours of boredom.

  He’d just put his bed together for the night, arranging some flattened boxes he’d salvaged from the back of a supermarket, when it had started to rain.

  “You listening, Abernathy?” he’d growled, knowing that someone at YETI HQ would be monitoring his inboard systems, tuned in to the open channel that was implanted in his head. “That’s rain you’re hearing.”

  “Joe,” Abernathy came back a short while after, “how’s my supertramp doing?”

  “Hey, careful with the hatespeak. We don’t like the word tramp around these parts. We prefer residentially challenged.”

  “Raining, huh?” Abernathy said, ignoring him. “Bet you don’t think this was such a good plan of yours, now, eh?”

  “Abernathy, didn’t you read the files the social worker sent us?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “We got three dates that are supposed to be spot-on for three of our disappearances.”

  “And?”

  “It was raining on two of them.” Joe scanned the road, his brow furrowed. “Look, I gotta go. Stay where you are. I may have something.”

  Joe watched the taillights of a white van that was suddenly speeding up, getting farther and farther away. He was sure it had slowed to a crawl as it passed him. Just as he was sure that the same van had passed by a few minutes before. This time, he committed the license plate to memory—even though they called them “number plates” on this side of the pond. Joe had never managed to pick up the phrase. It wasn’t even correct. The plates had a mix of letters and numbers. He settled down onto his cardboard bed and tried to look as miserable as possible.

  “Okay, I have a minute,” he told Abernathy. “A suspect van just did two drive-by look-sees. Could be nothing, but here’s the tag.” He gave Abernathy the plate number. It was already being run when the van came back around again.

  This time it stopped right next to Joe. A thirty-something guy with dark hair and exaggerated eyebrows came toward him, hunching over, with his jacket pulled up to take the edge off the rain.

  “Hey kid!” the guy said. “Are you okay?”

  Joe felt a thrill of anticipation, but managed to hide it behind a veil of careworn indifference.

  “Yeah,” he said, “I guess.”

  The guy kept walking until he was just about standing in Joe’s cardboard front room.

  “You get kicked out of your house, or something?” The man had a concerned tone to his voice, but it was manufactured, no more than word-deep.

  “Something like that.”

  “Bad scene, bro,” the man said. “You don’t have a friend with a sofa?”

  Joe shrugged. “Already used them all up,” he replied. “Friends and sofas, both. Thus …” He gestured around at the squalid surroundings.

  The guy nodded, then shook his head. Not yes and no, but rather agreement followed by feigned empathy.

  “Be lucky, man,” the guy said, and started to turn away.

  Joe thought he’d struck out, but then the guy turned back.

  “Hey,” he said. “I just thought of something. Some guys I know are hiring. Nothing glamorous, but at least it’ll pay a few quid to get you back on your feet. I think they can even provide accommodation. Bed and breakfast. Again, nothing flashy, but better than …”

  He gestured around to finish the sentence.

  “What sort of work?” Joe asked.

  “Light manufacturing or assembly or some such. They’ll train you. It’s a bed for the night … Maybe a chance at a new beginning.”

  “How do I get in touch with them?” Joe asked.

  The man looked at his wrist, where a pretty high-end watch made its home. Rolex. Gold. This guy was into something. Unless all Luton van drivers made enough money to buy timepieces like that.

  “Look, I’ve got a few minutes. I can take you there, if you want.” The guy jabbed a thumb over his shoulder toward the van.

  Joe found it incredible that anyone fell for such an obvious tactic. A stranger offering a new beginning, and all you had to do was get into the van with a man that wouldn’t know sincerity or empathy if they bit him on the ass.

  You’d have to be insane to get in that van, he thought. Insane or very desperate.

  Joe tried his best to look grateful.

  “Thank you,” he said. “Thank you so much.”

  He had no belongings to gather, so he followed the man to the vehicle, got into the passenger seat, and the guy started the ignition and pulled away.

  “Yes,” 666 said, “I’m in charge. Now, who the hell are you and what are you doing in my gaff?”

  To Joe, a gaff was a hook or spear, but he figured from the context that it probably meant “place.”

  “I thought I’d explained myself pretty well,” he said. “Who am I? Joe. What am I doing here? Looking to buy some kids. You want me to text it to you, maybe with an emoji, to hammer it home, or have you got it now?”

  He knew that he was pissing 666 and his buddies off, but it was a pretty good plan when you wandered into enemy territory, because it kept them wrong-footed and confused them about the power dynamic that was developing. Or maybe he’d already decided that this wasn’t going to resolve itself peacefully and he was getting himself ready, mentally, for what was going to go down awfully soon.

  “Sling your hook, wise guy,” 666 said. One of his “muscles” did a teeth-baring thing that was more than a little weird, and nowhere near as threatening as he’d hoped. It was actually pretty funny.

  “Sling my hook?” Joe asked. “See, to me that’s interesting. A moment ago you said the word ‘gaff.’ A gaff is a kind of hook. Then you tell me to sling my hook. Coincidence? Freud would say that things like that are never completely accidental. Maybe you’ve got something about fish? Anyway … Kids. Cash money. Can we make a deal here?”

  666 got to his feet, and it caused a ripple effect through his minions, but they were still seated, like they were in church for the first time and a hymn just started up and they didn’t know the correct etiquette.

  Joe logged each move, modeled the change of environment in his head, and took another step forward. He was already accessing the chip in his head for combat strategies, and felt the digital suggestions gelling with his own, natural ones.

  “You’re a nutter, mate,” 666 said. “A bloody lunatic. I reckon it’s time you turned around and got out before things get a little tasty.”

  Tasty was a bit of slang Joe knew, but its usage here was sloppy. It was used to describe a person that was good at fighting, as in “he’s a bit tasty,” but Joe had never heard it used as a threat. Still, it would be rude to let an opportunity to get things going slip away.

  He unleashed the chip’s potential and felt its effects on his muscles.

  He smiled and then began.

  If you’re into something dicey—like kidnapping vulnerable kids off the streets, for example—then it’s a bad idea to pic
k up a teen secret agent with a chip in his head that has, among other things, an open channel to HQ and a GPS-locating device.

  That was the thatched-eyebrow-white-van-man’s latest mistake, but judging by the cursory, even clumsy, way he’d picked Joe up, he was sure to have made more. Joe figured that if you went back through this guy’s life, you’d find a whole lot of mistakes.

  Still, as mistakes went, this was a biggie.

  They’d barely made it two-hundred yards from their starting point when the van driver suddenly found himself boxed in between two SUVs, and by then, it was far too late. The trap was already sprung. A guy got out of the passenger side of each SUV, each carrying a pistol, and quickly moved to either side of the van. The guy on the driver’s side tapped his gun against the window and used it to gesture for the driver to wind down the glass.

  The guy with the eyebrows did as he was instructed.

  The man leaned in.

  “Save yourself a lengthy stay in an off-book detention center,” he said, and pointed to Joe. “Answer the kid’s questions.”

  The van-guy held out for a little over twenty seconds, then spilled his cowardly guts.

  First, Joe moved right up close and personal to 666 and faked a punch, moving his right hand just enough to make it the expected move, before he reached out, grabbed two big fistfuls of 666’s shirt, and pulled him sharply forward as he drove the crown of his forehead to meet him. It was called a head butt, or a Zidouken, or a Glasgow Kiss: a sharp, brutal way to put your opponent down. Fast. A simple use of two forces colliding—Joe’s hard bone against 666’s much softer face, with the surprise factor added into the mix. It was a perfect execution of the move, too: straight into the bridge of 666’s nose. The kid was out with barely a second on the clock.

  Two of the thug underlings hadn’t even achieved standing, so they were next up. In Joe’s fighting lexicon, “halfway out of your seat” was “critically unbalanced.” His chip gave him both speed and power, and he pushed the first one back with a flat palm to the ribs, watching as the guy tumbled back and got himself all tangled up with the chair; then, pleased with success of the move, simply repeated it on thug number two.

  A fist from the last of 666’s rather predictable “muscle” whizzed past a cheek that moved too quickly out of its path for it to connect, and Joe took advantage of the heavy swing by grabbing the arm the fist was attached to, and helping its travel on its way by applying a fair amount of force. As a result, the guy stumbled forward—another thug unbalanced—and Joe stamped heavily on his left shin.

  It was a leg that wasn’t going to be functioning properly for a long time, and it put thug three out of the fight. Thugs one and two, of course, were only temporarily floored, but Joe made that a longer-term situation with minimum of effort and a precise exercising of force. In the case of thug one, that was a simple matter of waiting until he lifted his head from the floor and putting it back down with the stomp of his boot measured to keep him prostrate without risking serious injury. In the case of thug two, it was a body slam across the abdomen that took all the air—and fight—out of him.

  Joe got back to his feet, looked at the other three kids who were sitting as if welded to their chairs. They’d seen how easy the fighters of the group had gone down. None of them were going to offer up their own bodies to a war that was already over.

  “Where are the kids?” Joe demanded, pleased to find that he wasn’t even breathing heavily.

  One of the seated pack pointed out toward the bowling lanes. Joe narrowed his eyes in a silent “are you sure?” and got a full round of nods in response.

  He headed into the bowling alley proper as the three still capable of movement scurried out the door, into the hands of the authorities waiting outside.

  The human ability to be a complete asshole and somehow think it’s all right to behave like one just because it benefits you, never ceased to amaze Joe. It was the reason for a whole bunch of the world’s problems including crimes and other atrocities. As soon as you put your own needs and wants over the needs of wants of others, you were well on your way to becoming a sociopath.

  Empathy was what the world needed, the ability to see other people as equally deserving of all the things that you, yourself, want and definitely don’t want. If Joe had one wish for the world, it was a sudden outbreak of empathy.

  He certainly saw little of it in evidence today, here, at a crappy bowling alley in the badlands of Luton.

  Two whole lanes were taken over by a huge metal cage in which a bunch of kids toiled. This was where the missing kids had ended up.

  In a cage.

  Joe felt anger boiling inside him as he approached. Through the bars, he could see that the kids were thin and malnourished, dirty and defeated, with a glazed look in their eyes and a near-robotic quality to their movements. They wore a uniform—white T-shirt, white slacks, and white shoes. There were benches inside the cage, and the kids were attached to the benches by wires attached to bracelets on their wrists. Anti-static wristbands that grounded the wearer to protect delicate components from electrostatic discharges that would damage them. Most of the kids had soldering irons in their hands, and they were working on circuit boards under fierce fluorescent lights, hunched over to concentrate on their tasks. The others were assembling the completed boards into plastic towers.

  It was a sweat shop. A factory that had found a new way to make its products even cheaper than farming them out to the China or Korea.

  Slaves.

  Picked up off the street with promises of a new beginning, then locked into a cage and forced to work.

  None of the teens even noticed Joe as he approached. He saw that some had bruises on their faces. He took in the buckets in the corner of the cage that they used as toilets. He saw the folded camp beds and thin sheets that would act as their beds when the shift was over.

  “Hey!” he said, and the kids looked up from their work. “I’m closing this place down. Anyone wanna clock out? Permanently?”

  He watched confusion turn to hope, and wished he’d smashed 666’s face even harder.

  Then he called in the cavalry. The go phrase was: “Drawbridge down.”

  Five minutes later, the kids were free. Most of them were crying, not from the horror of their situation, but from the sheer joy of being released.

  Sometimes being in YETI meant Joe got to save the world. Today, he’d saved about a dozen kids.

  He wasn’t sure which one felt better.

  CHAPTER THREE

  IS THIS BATTLETOADS?

  Ani was frustrated.

  She told Gretchen about it over dinner.

  “I’m getting nowhere.” She said. “And I mean nowhere.”

  Gretchen chewed her hickory-smoked tofu and put down her fork.

  “It’s only been three weeks,” she said. “Depending on the time frame of the next phase of victorious’s operation, that might be just what you’d expect.”

  “But they’re getting ready for something,” Ani said. “I mean, I know they are. I feel like I joined too late to be considered for inclusion in it.”

  She put her cutlery down, too. They’d eaten a huge medley of vegetarian fare and, honestly, she’d probably eaten enough about ten minutes before. It made her think, suddenly, of home in Cambridge. It was no longer the homesickness that had gnawed at her for her first week or so in London, but rather a gleeful feeling of how things had changed for her. Her dad had never been a good, or even frequent, cook, and she had often ended up eating whatever was left in the cupboards, however mismatched and unappetizing that might be.

  She felt herself smiling as the other changes played through her mind.

  “What?” Gretchen asked, noticing a shift in her, and becoming concerned.

  “Nothing bad,” Ani said. “Just thinking about my new life and how it kicks the hell out of my old one.”

  “Your old one just didn’t quite fit,” Gretchen said. “It was a couple of sizes too tight for you. You’re
just growing into the life you deserve.”

  “I don’t want to lose it, that’s all. Not now that I know I really really want it.”

  “You’re not going to lose it.”

  “Well, I’m hardly making progress breaking into victorious, now, am I?”

  Gretchen thought about that for a couple of seconds, then asked, “Look, if a piece of software you build isn’t working for you, what do you do?”

  “Go back and look at the code, see if I can find another way to get it to behave. But that’s a logical system …”

  “Hey, Ani, people are systems, too. And they can be pretty logical if you know what makes them tick. It’s the same with their organizations. So what do you do?”

  “I change the approach. I inject myself into their plans, and make them think it was all their own idea.”

  “When the best leader’s work is done, the people say, ‘We did it ourselves.’” Gretchen agreed.

  “Fortune cookie?”

  “Attributed to Lao Tzu, Chinese philosopher and poet. But yeah, I got it out a fortune cookie. Or a book. I can’t remember.”

  Ani laughed.

  “Because you’re so renowned for having gaps in your memory I bet you can point me in the direction of six or seven books that contain that quote …”

  “Eleven,” Gretchen corrected, “not counting books of quotations. Dessert?”

  “Sure, why not?”

  After getting a thumbs-up from Eddie Wells, Ani had expected things to happen pretty quickly, but the reality turned out to be far from the actual triumph it was supposed to be. She’d been sent a scuzzy piece of code to clean up—it had taken her about ten minutes, surely a test but not a particularly demanding one—and they’d sent her links to a couple of addresses that were little more than holding pages for tor.onion sites that were yet to be constructed.

  In terms of entrance to the secret world of victorious, it was little more than a series of dead ends. The only person whose face she knew was Eddie’s, and he was back in Yeovil, and surely not high on the victorious pyramid.