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  No, the only thing that matters here is cashflow. It flows in and it flows out –

  in huge, armoured, aerial-drone-tracked security vans. And that’s all it does. Nobody lives here, nobody works here for long, and the money doesn’t stick around. Grids ain’t no sociologist, but he’s pretty sure that’s not how a community is meant to work. And even if it is then he’s still not part of it, because he’s got no cash. Never has. And down here that makes him irrelevant, an outsider. It makes him insignificant.

  Except right now he can feel his significance rise. Partly it’s because he’s rolling seven deep – most of his crew fronting behind him as he strides in, the rest already on site waiting for the green light. But largely he can feel the wrong kind of significance radiating onto him, from the top of the poles and the sides of the pylons that litter the two-thirds-empty car park, he can feel the cameras twitching like the crows and seagulls, tracking their moves, trying to place their faces. There’s nothing much they can do to avoid the knowing gazes apart from keep their stormsuit hoods up, their cap brims low and their spex polarised. Depending on what version the cameras are running it might be enough, but even if it’s not then legally it shouldn’t be an issue – they’re all under-age, and most of them have never been cuffed for anything major, so their faces shouldn’t be on file. But Grids knows where there are laws there are loopholes, and it’s more than likely the cameras are trying to match his face with timeline pictures, retail security wikis and the pupil data that Bristol City Academy dumps online for a small fee.

  But fuck them. Fuck the cameras and the wikis and the school that sells out its own kids. Fuck them all. They’ve got nothing on him, fucking zero, and even if he is out here in the wasteland where he doesn’t belong, he’s rolling with his crew seven deep. Shoulders back, hoods up, heads high. You don’t like it, then what son? What?

  “Oh shit, here we go,” he hears Melody say beside him.

  From out of the gloom of the overpass he hears the pathetic whine of electric motors as a golf cart pulls in front of the group, blocking their path. Big fat fucker in the driving seat squints at them through crappy unbranded renta-fed-issue spex as he sticks a McDonalds coffee in the dashboard cup-holder next to a bag of Greggs sausage rolls. He’s got Group 4 Retail Response embroidered onto the polycarbon body armour that barely fits over his beer gut, and he winces from back pain as he heaves himself out of the driver’s seat.

  “Alreet then boys,” he says in a deep Bristol drawl, attempting to pull his sagging trousers up over his fat arse, “Where’s you to today then?”

  “What? Who you calling boy? What you blind?” Melody fronts him, screw-facing.

  “Alreet me babber, no need for all that is there? Just answer my question now, where you going?”

  “Going get a burger,” College chips in. “What?”

  “Ah right. And you got money for that burger have you? All of you? Let me see your wallets.”

  “What?” says Grids, “Wallets? We don’t carry cash granddad. What is this the nineteen-nineties?”

  “Let me check the credit on your spex then. And you,” he points at College, “Show me what’s in that backpack of yers.”

  “What? You can’t check our spex or search him. You ain’t real feds.”

  “Fucking renta-shop-cop,” someone murmurs behind him.

  “Under section 12, paragraph 18 of the 2014 Anti-terrorism, Illegal Protest, Sporting Events-Related Violence and Retail-Slash-Enterprise Zone Security And Management Act,” Grids can tell the guard is reading off spex-prompts now, “any privately employed retail-slash-enterprise zone security or management employee with reason to suspect potential antisocial behaviour or incitement to civil unrest can order the—”

  “Fuck you man,” interrupts College, “you ain’t looking in my bag.” Grids feels his stomach turn. College’s bag is full of goodies. The sort of grey-to-black-market goodies that could get him in a fresh pile of shit.

  “Come on son, don’t make this all unnecessary now.” The security guard reaches out an armoured arm to grab the straps of College’s backpack.

  College slaps his hand away. “Get your fucking hands of me you fucking paedo!”

  Suddenly the whole crew is crowded around the security guard. Grids likes the feeling of strength he gets rolling with them, but right now he can feel plans and any vague sense of control he had out here slipping away. He can feel things about to kick off before they are meant to, and not how he had sketched them out.

  And then there’s a beeping sound, a pinging from the golf cart and the guard’s spex. He holds a hand up to the kids as if to signify shut-up, turns his face away and sticks a finger from his other hand in his ear. “Received. On my way.” And then he’s awkwardly clambering back into the tiny little toy-town car and speeding – if it can be called that – away.

  “That’s right, you fat pussy,” shouts College after him, “Go run your way back to Krispy-K for some donuts!”

  “Fucking wasteman,” says someone else.

  “Yeah, get back in your milk float granddad.” Everyone starts laughing.

  “Fuck,” says Grids to Melody, “Shit was close there fam.”

  “Did you hear the message tho?” she replies. “Some-ting about trouble at Track and Hood.”

  “Serious? You could hear that?”

  “Yeah, I swear down.”

  They watch the stupid little vehicle and its oversized driver wobble away across the tarmac. Grids sucks his teeth, worried some other crew has beat them to it.

  “Guess we’d better go scope what’s happening then, innit.”

  ChildLaborWatch

  Leaked footage shows appalling conditions in Vietnamese shoe factory »blink« #thisismyworldnow

  Everyone in Grids’s crew is pay-as-you-go, standardly. Which means they can’t opt-out of ads, and they spend the walk over to Track and Hood swatting away floating Ronald McDonaldses, grinning Colonel Saunderses and hyperactive anthropomorphic M&Ms. At one point – when some Z-list virt celeb is trying to ram a non-existent Greggs sausage roll down Grids’s throat – it gets too much and he actually takes his spex off for a bit, pulling his scarf up over his face at an attempt to substitute the disguise. But he knows it isn’t really going to work, so he puts them back on. They’re all back there again; up in his face, reminding him how hungry he is.

  Anyway, when they get there it’s clear – to his relief – that it wasn’t another crew making a Smash/Grab raid on Track and Hood. The fat rentacop and one of his buddies are dragging some guy away, kicking and screaming – although the screams are muffled by the black-and-white-splattered gas mask he’s wearing. His clothes, some knackered-looking old stormsuit, is splattered in the same black and white too, and Grids guesses it must be some kind of paint. Then he clocks something and it all falls into place – the guy they’re dragging away has stencilled a still fresh-looking, 30-centimetre-square QRcode onto Track and Hood’s window.

  “Don’t you be blinking that man,” College says to him. “Probably sketchy as fuck. Malware, believe.”

  Grids looks at the QRcode, then at the vexed guy they’re dragging off, and back at the code. He blinks it.

  The surface of Track and Hood’s window starts to shimmer and flex. A large black rectangle – something like a screen – pops away from the glass and floats in the air, video footage starting to fill it. It’s rough and jerky, disorientating – and it takes a second or too for Grids to realise it’s more spex cam capture, but even more illicit this time, like it was filmed secretly, by someone that really shouldn’t be filming at all. Wherever they are is fairly dark, apart from these long tables that are lit from above by painful fluorescent lights. Lots of people in matching yellow hats sat in rows along the tables – lots of people. Mainly women it looks like, hunched over. No, not women, children. Chinese looking, or Thai, or something. Grids isn’t sure. Is it a school? He can’t see what they are doing. The camera/spex-wearer’s head pans around the room �
� which is huge – no, it’s not a school. Looks like a warehouse, or a factory. The wearer gets closer to one of the tables, the kids look exhausted, sad but concentrating faces. Some of the girls look tiny, like less than his brother’s age, maybe just ten years old. If that. The wearer goes up to one, who glances up and then looks away, ashamed or scared. Over her shoulder he can finally see what she’s doing: stitching, with a needle. The middle of the table is a conveyer belt, along which come objects – he can see what they are now, shoes. The girls reach out and grab them as they pass, work on them. They’re trainers, white leather with grey plastic details. The girl in front of the wearer grabs one, and with tiny hands he can see she is stitching something in flickering OLED thread, filling a printed outline. A signature. Eugene Sureshot. Underneath: Limited Edition. This Is My World Now.

  She looks back up at the camera again, tired and frightened. Freeze frame. Scrolling text – average ages, hours worked, amounts paid. Grids feels the hairs on the back of his neck prick up.

  “Fuck me,” he says slowly.

  “What?” asks College, turns to look at him. “Ah man you blinked it, didn’t you? Oh my days. Nice one G. You better not be infecting my shit, yeah?”

  “Nah man, not malware,” Grids shudders. “Just nasty.”

  “I told you not to blink it. Fucking great.”

  “I’m telling you, it ain’t malware. Just a video file.”

  “What is it Grids?” asks Melody.

  “Probably a fucking trojan,” Says College. “Dickhead.”

  “Shut it College. Just a video Mel, bit murky. Don’t stress it.”

  “Yeah, well. Assuming you ain’t just fried all your apps, I suggest we do this thing, yeah? Y’know, why Fatty and his mate are busy hauling off that angry hipster?”

  “A’ight, yeah,” Grids tries to snap himself back into alert mode. Go mode. “Send that message out. Let’s do this fam.”

  NextOne

  TEN DAYS! These new Eugene Sureshots look NEXT LEVEL and they in #Bristol already! »Blink« #thisismyworldnow

  College doesn’t know where the Smash/Grab servers are hosted, or who runs them, but he’s heard all the rumours. He’s heard the one that says they’re carried around by a swarm of autonomous, solar-powered high-altitude drones that never touch down, and are maintained remotely by a collective of hacktivists on the east coast of the US. And the one that says a Russian gambling oligarch hosts them in a stolen nuclear submarine illegally patched into a mainline cable on the floor of the Baltic Sea. Then of course there are the tin-foil-hat theories that actually the Feds run the whole thing in order to catch kids like him, and even take a cut of the betting profits. College don’t know which is true, if any, but he’s pretty sure the last one is bullshit. He’s been running Smash/Grab games for a nearly a year now, since someone at school explained the whole set-up to him, and he’s never been caught. The Feds have never come and knocked at his door, never surprised him with an unexpected visit at school. Yeah sure, first few times they did a run he nearly bricked himself every time he turned a corner near the ends and there was a squad car parked up, but nothing ever happened. Beyond the standard stop-and-searches he never got any hassle, and they were so regular these days that he doubted they were ever connected.

  So no, he doesn’t know who runs Smash/Grab, and he doesn’t really care as long as they keep it locked down. He logs into the server right now, blinking and focusing through layer upon layer of passwords and image security, until he gets to the game he prepped earlier, before they’d left. He spent a good hour this morning checking everything was right: setting up objectives and registering the players from both crews, making sure their profiles were up to date and negotiating odds with the server’s automated agents. He even managed to pick up some sponsorship, a couple of glazing and security alarm companies took the bait – or at least their autonomous ad-buying spiders have, giving them plausible deniability if anyone should ask any questions. Though as far as College knows no one ever does.

  Anyway, the game looks set. He gives it all one last check. The players are all there, their avatars rotating slowly in a grid; stats unfurling when he lets his gaze hover over them. Followers, rankings, products liberated. Most common stolen and destroyed brands. Panes broken. Fires started. And the two most important of all: the smash and grab scores. The grand total value of damage caused and items robbed.

  Now College knows there are some big hitters out there. He’s seen kids in Malaysia walk out of smashed-up shopping malls with TVs the size of a tennis court. He’s seen a gang of girls in Tehran cover an armoured personnel carrier in pink paint and dance topless around it while its crew ran from the black smoke that poured from its doors and slit-like windows. Mad points, big rankings. A different league. But scale things down to a city level – so you’re just looking at the rankings for Bristol – and his crew ain’t too shabby either. Filter the tables by postcodes and really it’s only the hippysters, the self-proclaimed People’s Republic of Stoke’s Croft, that give them a run for their money – but those soap-dodgers have got a different strategy on the whole game, and it’s reflected in their scores. They’re well down low on the rob scores, up much higher on the criminal damage achievements. Those kids just like burning shit. He’s watched them – both on Smash/Grab and out on the streets – set fire to a Nandos full of perfectly good chicken, smashing bottles of Peri-Peri sauce off of balconies in Cabot Circus while his crew’s stomachs rumbled. They say it’s because they want to make a point, because they’ve got a political agenda – but to College it’s just another way of playing the game, a different strategy. It’s wasteful to him and the crew he rolls with – to people who ain’t got the shit they want, the shit they’ve been told since they were toddlers they need to get – but he can see how it works for them. Keeps them clean, burning the evidence. He’s seen more gamers get busted through stop-and-search or random raids on cribs full of illicit stock than through CCTV footage or timeline track-backs, so it kind of rules all that out. Plus those hippysters claim they don’t want any of that shit anyway, which is why they’re doing it. But College ain’t always buying that. He sees them, with the latest spex and augmented clothes, buying bread from their artisan bakeries and eating locally sourced chicken in their organic restaurants up in Montpelier, where he could only dream of being able to afford a cup of free-trade coffee. Nah, he thinks, fuck their political agenda. It’s just a cover, they want shit like everyone else – it’s just different shit they buy with the money their parents out in the suburbs give them. But most of all, like everyone on Smash/Grab, they want to be seen, they want the props. Like everyone on the timelines and off, they want the significance.

  That’s what it’s about today. Significance. And those fucking peng-looking Sureshot kicks, son. He blinks ‘PLAY’.

  The server plays him a quick siren sample in confirmation, and unseen to him starts to stir into life. Two hundred thousand dummy profiles start talking to a combined follow-mass of over six million, dropping updates and spamming forums, hijacking hashtags and spawning new ones. Botnets start subtly looting resources to host anonymous video streams. Ripples expand in socialspace.

  College is out of the server for a second, blinks open the Throne of Shadows messenger client, struggling to read text in the hilariously cheesy-looking fantasy font it insists on using for everything. In between sighing at the neck-beard bullshit he manages to shoot out a message to both crews. Go time.

  Smash/Grab998677

  IT’S ON! New game! Bristol (UK) trainer raid! Tune in and place your bets NOW! »blink«

  Grids get the message, pulls his cap down tight, checks his scarf is round his face, checks his hood. The tiny Smash/Rob window pops open in his periphery. He’s already got 634 followers, climbing. Who knows who they are? Bored office workers, slum kids, stockbrokers, fashionistas, online griefers, lazy journalists, housewives, angry Daily Mail readers. Better give them something to watch. Go time.

  782 follower
s. Nerves start to churn in his empty stomach. He glances across the car park and here they come, spilling out of McDonalds and Costa Coffee, the rest of the combined Lawrence Hill and Barton Hill crews, rolling nearly thirty deep, hoods up, caps low, spex and bandanas, black, white and brown skin all but disguised. Girls and boys, some young youths, some older soldiers. Moving en masse towards him, on point, on cue. The nerves steady, adrenalin kicking in, significance taking over.

  1000 followers. Achievement unlocked. 10x points multiplier.

  And then him and Melody are through the doors into Track and Hood, on point, the others cramming through behind them, and it all goes off. Most of them are just grabbing shit, throwing it to the floor, kicking over displays. Some kiddie has bust open a tube of tennis balls and is lobbing them across the store, sounds of laughing and cheers and unadulterated joy. Playtime, pent-up frustration and drab boredom channelled into expression and dance. Grids and Melody are more focused though, that’s why they’re on point. He grabs a cricket bat, Melody finds a golf club. They laugh and whirl, raining stock from shelves with their new-found toys, for once enjoying their youth and innocence; free from judgement and control. They smile as one, the whole crew, a shared moment of ecstasy and belonging.

  Grids smashes glass display cabinets full of over-priced AR fitness gadgets –

  run trackers and pulse monitors – and coins dance in front of his face, clocking up points to a ker-ching ker-ching ker-ching video-game soundtrack. He crushes boxes with his foot like Mario stomping mushrooms ker-ching ker-ching ker-ching.

  3000 followers. Achievement unlocked. 20x points multiplier.

  WhiteVanStan

  Check my stream! Little chav kids kicking off at Avonmeads! Streaming live now! #Riots »blink«