Ghost Hardware by Tim Maughan

Author:Tim Maughan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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 McDonalds, grinning Colonel Sanders, and hyperactive anthropomorphic M&M’s. At one point—when some Z-list virt celeb is trying to ram a nonexistent 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 in an attempt to substitute the disguise. But he knows it isn’t really going to work, so he puts them back on, and 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 rent-a-cop 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 stenciled a still-fresh-looking, thirty-centimeter square QR code onto Track and Field’s window.

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

Grids looks at the QR code, 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, disorienting—and it takes a second or two for Grids to realize it’s more spex cam capture, but even more illicit this time, like it was filmed secretly, by someone who really shouldn’t have been 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 sit 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, its 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.

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