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"More than Zeb. It was a bunch of us -- him and us, and some others," said Shackie. "Top scientists -- gene-splicers who'd bailed out of the Corps and gone underground because they hated what the Corps were doing. Rebecca and Katuro were in it -- they helped distribute the product."
"We had a website," said Croze. "We could share our info that way, in the hidden chatroom."
"Product?" said Amanda. "You were pushing superweed? Cool!" She laughed.
"No way. We were doing bioform resistance," said Croze importantly. "The splicers put the bioforms together and Shackie and me and Rebecca and Katuro had top identities -- insurance and real estate, stuff like that you could travel with. So we'd take the bioforms to the locations and let them loose."
"We'd plant them," said Oates. "Like, you know, time bombs."
"Some of those suckers were really cool," said Shackie. "The microbes that ate the asphalt, the mice that attacked cars ..."
"Zeb figured if you could destroy the infrastructure," said Croze, "then the planet could repair itself. Before it was too late and everything went extinct."
"So this plague, was it a MaddAddam thing?" said Amanda.
"No way," said Shackie. "Zeb didn't believe in killing people, not as such. He just wanted them to stop wasting everything and fucking up."
"He wanted to make them think," said Oates. "Though some of those mice got out of control. They got confused. Attacked shoes. There were foot injuries."
"Where is he now?" I asked. It would be so comforting if Zeb was there: he'd know what we should do next.
Shackie said, "We only talked to him online. He flew solo."
"CorpSeCorps nabbed our MaddAddam splicers, though," said Croze. "Tracked us down. I figure some creep in our chatroom was a plant."
"They shot them?" Amanda asked. "The scientists?"
"Don't know," said Shackie, "but they didn't end up with us in Painball."
"We were only in there a couple of days," said Oates. "In Painball."
"Three of us, three of them. The Gold team -- they were beyond vicious. One of them -- remember Blanco, from the Sewage Lagoon? Rip off your head and eat it? Lost some weight, but it was him all right," said Croze.
"You're joking," said Amanda. She looked -- not frightened exactly. But concerned.
"Tossed in for trashing Scales -- killed some people, sounded proud of it. Said Painball was like home to him, he'd done it so much."
"Did he know who you were?" said Amanda.
"Definitely," said Shackie. "Yelled at us. Said it was payback time for that brawl on the Edencliff Rooftop -- he'd slit us like fish."
"What brawl on the Edencliff Rooftop?" I said.
"You'd gone
by then," said Amanda. "How did you get out?"
"Walked," said Shackie. "We were figuring out how to kill the other team before they killed us -- they gave you three days to plan, before the Start gong -- but all of a sudden there were no guards. They were just gone."
"I'm really tired," said Oates. "I need to sleep." He put his head down on the bar.
"Guards were still there, it turned out," said Shackie. "In the gatehouse. Only they were kind of melted."
"So we went online," said Croze, "The news was still working. Big disaster coverage, so we figured we shouldn't go out and mingle. We locked ourselves into one of the guardhouses -- they had some food in there."
"Problem was, the Golds were in the guardhouse on the other side of the gate. We kept thinking they'd whack us when we were sleeping."
"We took turns staying awake, but it was too much strain, just waiting. So we forced them out," said Croze. "Shackie went through a window at night and cut their water lines."
