‘Wow. You are vicious.’ He seems hurt, and because I need him to hurry up and get this out of the way, I kiss and make up.
‘I’m sorry, Mpho. I’m ratty when I’m sleepdeprived. You should tell the product designers it should be a hanging mobile rather than a button. You want something the little shit will want to play with, something sparkly or dangly that he’ll reach for anyway, and then it just happens to make a cute sound or play a lullaby or whatever.’
‘Rockabye.’
‘Yeah, okay. That too.’
‘That’s actually brilliant, Lerato.’
‘I know.’
‘You should be in design. You should be heading up design!’
‘Oh, I know.’
It takes twenty minutes to work out the details of how the interface needs to work, and then I chase Mpho off so I can focus on the programming. I have an idea I can patch in a fair amount of the code I used in a previous job (the PlayPlay Pterodactyl Robot Friend), but it’s still going to take me most of the morning, and I run into trouble with a finicky bit with the voice recognition, getting it to filter out baby’s babblings. Of course, the real solution here would be to program it to recognise the different gooing and gurgling and translate it into English for mama. Didn’t I read some pushmag thing on the theory of baby communications? If I could figure out baby’s language code, that would be a product feature. Let’s call it Radio Gaga.
Toby calls, just as I’m about to crack it. Okay, so I’m nowhere near cracking it, but I tell him it’s his fault anyway. He’s not sympathetic. ‘Don’t dump me with your dilemmas. I need serious work-related tech support.’
‘Uh-huh?’ I say, carefully neutral, surreptitiously activating privacy on my cubicle so the audio dampeners kick in, just in case he’s stupid enough to make any passing reference to the adboard. There still hasn’t been an official report. Not that I don’t know that invoking privacy means that Seed automatically tags my conversation, all phone calls will be recorded for quality assurance purposes blah blah blah, but I’ve got misdirects in place. I have a mix of prerecorded conversations, from the polite and cursory catch-ups with my sisters (when Zama can be bothered to call), to a variety of hot and heavy that gives the spyware controllers upstairs something to do with their hands. The only hassle is constantly updating them, so the monitoring boys don’t get suspicious. I needn’t have bothered on this one. Toby’s ‘dilemma’ is almost a legitimate request. Easy enough. And fucking hilarious.
‘Whenever you’re ready, sweetness,’ Toby says, put out, which only makes me laugh harder.
‘That’s a new record in lame, Toby.’
‘Yeah, let’s see how you handle getting cut off from your trustfundable by your motherbitch.’
‘Oh nice, Toby. Real nice.’ The only thing I ever got from my parents was a kickstart into corporate life.
‘You know what I fucking mean. Don’t get touchy.’
‘Fine. But you owe me.’
‘Rack it on my tab.’
‘And you’re still king lame.’
‘Love ya, babe. Gotta run, got little kiddies to kill for fun and profit.’
It takes a minute and a half to reroute Toby’s IP address so it looks like he’s logging in from Melbourne rather than Cape Town, which should sort out his little problem.
And then, at last, the adboard call comes in. I’m not technically involved in the maintenance process, but I have access to the job sheets, and it’s not unusual for coders at my level to monitor the execution. Yusuf and Petronella get the call as the closest technicians in the vicinity. I couldn’t have calibrated it better myself. Yusuf is smart but lazy, and Petronella is just plain lazy. They’ll be more worried about the damage Toby and his friends have done to the hardware than any inconsistencies in the software. Assuming my code holds, all will be well.
And it does. And it is.
There’s a surplus of people who do what I do, to the extent that I’m surprised they don’t consider culling. Good programmers are as easy to score as a blowjob on Lower Main Road, and just about as cheap. You really have to distinguish yourself if you’re going to make any progress.
It was easy getting noticed at nineteen, but I’m getting on, and if you haven’t cracked management by twenty-eight, your chances of doing so decrease exponentially for every year you add to your CV. I’ve still got a few years, but I’m not ending up like Jane. Rather be a startling failure than a benign success.
I figure my options are pretty limited within Communique. But with the penalties for intercorporate poaching running into hundreds of thousands, it’s going to be difficult to persuade another corporate that they need me, when they can get fresher and younger talent straight out of the skills institutes for much, much less. Unless I have something to sweeten the deal. Like a backdoor, say, installed in their rival’s security software on the adboards that allows you to access Communique’s proprietary information, track the data and the response rates. Call it market research. ‘Corporate espionage’ is so over-dramatic.
A monarch alights on my keyboard, flexing its wings, flashing the striations of velvety orange and black. Strayed too far from the nest, little guy. They don’t like that around here. I crush it delicately under my thumb.
Toby
Digging through my laundry to find something relatively fresh and suitable for public consumption, I happen upon Jasmine’s scarf, which she left here after the raid last night. It smells like her, very faintly through the musty wool and the overwhelming notes of Fairtrade caramel butter, cos Jazz isn’t the kind of girl to wear perfume, but she’s not the great unwashed specimen of activist either, which I appreciate. I take a deep breath of that warm girly goodness, and then trash the thing. Hey, it’s not like she’s going to be coming back to get it.
I stagger over to my console, clip the Moxy chip into the game socket and, instantaneously, there are little blobby monsters bouncing around all over my projecta walls and singing. This, after all the sugar, and with the residue ache of being sucker-punched in the face, is a very bad thing, kids. My cheek has turned a bluish-yellow where that bastard Tendeka got me.
I reduce the display to just one wall, skip the jangle, choose the first character I’m offered (some furry blue thing with oversized paws – RomperStomp, special move the ShakerQuake) and connect to the gameworld along with the 1,487,763 other players currently online, 99% of whom are in the eight-to-twelve demographic. The remainder are like me, gatecrashers cashing in on the system, or maybe paedophiles looking to hook up. I suspect the former group may be the more evil of the two.
The trip connects, and RomperStomp shimmers into existence in some cheesy-ass neo-classical archway in a candy-coloured jungle, swampy pools burping oily bubbles that pop to release weird little flittering manta rays, and, in the distance, weird looming rock things like you’d get in Vietnam or somewhere, craggy columns with a thatch of greenery on top and a path of floating step blocks leading away. It’s vomitously cute.
I haven’t made it two steps from the entry portal, let alone figured out the fucking buttons, when three furry blobs land on top of me, all claws and teeth.
‘Shit! Wait!’ The wall blanks suddenly and Moxy fills the screen. Cos Moxy is always watching. He waves a stubby little paw in disapproval.
>>So sorry! You have been booted from Kiwi Pop for bad behaviour! If you promise to play nice and not swear any more, you can play again for sure!
I’d forgotten the vocal interactions. I turn it off, no sense betraying my age by my voice, and click on the ‘I promise to behave’ button.