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"What about Glenn?" said Zeb.
"Check and mate," said Pilar, toppling his king. She stood up, smiling. "Glenn will make his way," she said. "He doesn't know they killed his father. He doesn't know yet. Or not directly. But he's very bright."
"You mean he'll figure it out," said Zeb.
"Not too soon, I hope," said Pilar. "He's too young for that kind of bad news. He might not be able to pretend ignorance, unlike you."
"Some of mine's real," said Zeb. "Like, right now, where do I switch identities? And how do I get the pass?"
"Go into the MaddAddam chatroom, there's a full package waiting for you. Then scramble your present gateway. You can't afford to leave your footprints on these computers."
"Does any of this involve differen
t facial hair?" Zeb asked, to lighten things up. "For my new identity? And dorky pants?"
Pilar smiled. "I've had my beeper switched off all this time," she said. "We're allowed to do that on barbecue days, as long as we're in full view. I'm turning it back on now. Don't say anything you don't want overheard. Journey well."
Scales and Tails
Zeb retrieved his thumbdrive from the desk drawer where he'd hidden it, removed the cough drops that were stuck to it like barnacles, activated Intestinal Parasites on his computer, then slipped through the voracious maw of the blind nightmare worm and thence by lilypad into the chatroom of MaddAddam. Sure enough, there was a how-to pack waiting for him, though no clue as to who had left it. He opened it, assimilated the contents, and scuttled backwards, whisking away his trail as he went. Then he ground the thumbdrive underfoot - or, more accurately, he placed it under one of his bed legs and then jumped on the bed, several times - and flushed the bits down several toilets. They wouldn't have gone down easily by themselves, being metal and plastic, but if you embed ...
"It's okay," says Toby. "I get the picture."
Zeb's new name was Hector. Hector the Vector, was what he figured. Someone had a reasonably foul sense of humour, but he didn't think it was Pilar: she was not so much the humorous type.
But of course he'd only activate his new Hector identity once he was outside the walls and away from the security cameras of HelthWyzer West. Until then he was still Seth, a minor code-slave chained in the galleyship of data entry, in his geekwear with the brown corduroy pants. If anything, he was betting his change of identity would score him better pants. There was said to be an outfit waiting for him in the pleeblands, stashed in a dumpster he hoped no tramps or crazy people or sacked middle managers would be picking through before he could get to it.
The cover story for his Seth persona was that he was making a service call at a local branch of a beauty-and-mood-enhancing Corp called AnooYoo, which was a dubious affiliate of HelthWyzer. Health and Beauty, the two seductive twins joined at the navel, singing their eternal siren songs. A lot of people would pay through their nose jobs for either one.
HelthWyzer's products - the vitamin supplements, the over-the-counter painkillers, the higher-end disease-specific pharmaceuticals, the erectile dysfunction treatments, and so on - went in for scientific descriptions and Latin names on the labels. AnooYoo, on the other hand, was mining arcane secrets from Wiccan moon-worshippers and from shamans deep in the assassin-bug-rich rainforests of Dontgothere. But Zeb could understand that there was an overlap of interests. If it hurts and you feel sick and it's making you ugly, take this, from HelthWyzer; if you're ugly and it hurts and you feel sick about it, take that, from AnooYoo.
Zeb readied himself for his mission by putting on a newly laundered pair of brown cords. He rearranged his face into his marginally shambolic Seth persona and winked at it in the bathroom mirror. "You're doomed," he said to it. He wouldn't be sorry to part company with Seth, who'd been foisted on him by Adam in an act of older-brother I-know-better bossiness. He longed to see Adam in person, if only to berate him for that. "You got any fucking idea of what those pants put me through?" he might say.
Time for Seth to go. He ambled in the direction of the front gate, exit pass in hand, humming to himself:
Hi ho, hi ho,
To jerkoff work I go,
With a hick hack here and a hick hack there,
Hi ho, hi ho, hi ho, hi ho!
Now to remember the cover story of Seth, junior code plumber. He was being sent to investigate the AnooYoo website, and to discover how it had been tampered with. Someone - maybe a jumped-up teenaged hacker like his own younger self - had altered the online images so that when you clicked on any of the mood-enhancing, complexion-improving products, a squad of puce and orange insect animations would nibble into them at hyperspeed and then explode, legs twitching, yellow fumes coming out. It was silly but graphic.
HelthWyzer West didn't want anyone working on the problem from inside their own systems, naturally: the thing, simpleminded though it looked, could be a trap, with its planners hoping for just such an intervention so they could ram in through HelthWyzer's firewalls and filch its valuable IP. Therefore someone had to go to AnooYoo in person: someone minor and - since the gang-riddled pleebs were hazardous - someone expendable. That would be Seth, though at least they were providing a HelthWyzer car, with a driver. Nobody would likely go to the trouble of grabbing Seth for brain excavation: he wasn't inner circle. But still.
AnooYoo didn't want to find out who'd done the hack job, or why: that would be too expensive. They just wanted their firewall repaired. Their own guys hadn't been able to do it, ran the cover story, which wasn't - to Zeb - ultra plausible. But then, AnooYoo was a cheap operation - this was before its plusher days, when it set up the Spa-in-the-Park - so its IT bunch wasn't the A team, and maybe not even the B or C team: ultrabrights got snapped up by richer Corps. They were more like the F team. Obviously, since they'd failed.
But they were going to have a long wait, thought Zeb, because within the hour he would morph into Hector, and Seth would be no more. He had the chess bishop; it was in his baggy corduroy pants pocket, where he was also keeping his left hand just in case, and if anyone was looking they might conclude he was engaged in an act of self-abuse. Which he simulated in a restrained way, in case the car was equipped with spyware, as was likely. Better a wanker than a defector, and a contraband smuggler to boot.
AnooYoo was located in a seedy piece of real estate on the edge of a grey-market pleeb. So it wasn't alien to the streetscape to find an overturned SecretBurgers stand blocking the way, with a full-scale red-sauce fracas going on and a corona of yelling and honking surrounding it, plus flying squadrons of airborne meat patties. Zeb's own driver leaned on the horn, though he knew better than to roll down the window to yell.
But before you could say prestidigitation, the car was mobbed by a dozen Asian Fusions. One of them must've had a digilock popper keyed with the HelthWyzer car's passcode because up shot the lock buttons. In about one second the Fusion thugs had winkled out the thrashing, yelping driver and were going for his shoes and shucking him out of his clothing as if he was a cob of corn. Those pleeb gangs were fast and professional, you had to hand it to them. They'd get hold of the car keys, reverse, and be off like a shot, to sell the vehicle whole or strip it for parts, whichever paid more.
This was Zeb's moment. It had been paid for in advance: the Asian Fusions were dirty but they were also cheap, and happy to take small jobs. Checking first to make sure the driver's sightlines were blocked - they had to be, his entire head was now covered in red sauce - Zeb dove out the back door and frog-marched himself down the adjacent alleyway and around the corner, then around another corner, and then a third, where he kept his rendezvous with the designated dumpster.
The brown corduroy pants went into it, good riddance, and some well-aged jeans came out, with accessories to match. Black pleather jacket, black T that read ORGAN DONOR, TRY MINE FREE, reflector shades, baseball cap with a modestly sized red skull on the front. Gold clip-on tooth cap, fake 'stache, newly minted smirk, and Hector the Vector was ready to saunter. He'd taken care to keep the chess bishop safely to hand, and now he zipped it into the inside pocket of the pleather.
