That liquid is highly toxic before the fixing chemicals are applied. Pay: ten cents a batch.

  The brunette posed next to him, adjusting the collar of the shirt, looking so beautiful it made him ache for her. But against that backdrop, with the sounds of people coughing as they hauled the dripping racks out of the vats, it felt awful.

  He’d seen enough. “JJ, end mersive.”

  The brunette looked at him with a seductive smile. “Don’t you want to see the forced labour camps where they make the fabric?”

  And then, with a jolt, he was in his room again. “JJ, confirm mersive has ended.”

  “It has. Would you like me to delete the file? You seem distressed.”

  “No. Not yet. Just make sure it’s not... doing anything in my chip, okay?”

  “There are no viruses or threats detected.”

  He sat up, feeling sick. At least he knew where to look now. Something was wrong with the locations module. “JJ, put an urgent call through to Linette Rogers. Voice only.”

  She was clearly expecting his call. “Jordan. I know and I’m handling it.”

  “What the fuck happened? It’s your module, isn’t it? Were you hacked? I thought that wasn’t possible. You lied to me.”

  There was a pause. “I know you’re upset, but you need to remember that we’re both professionals and that right now, I am the only person who can fix this.”

  He drew in a deep breath. “Sorry.”

  “The locations module was subcontracted and those elements were pulled from their servers in real time to render the environments. It looks like one of their employees was a hacker who faked his identity and credentials and deployed the new code this morning.”

  “How the hell could this happen? Aren’t there safeguards against this sort of thing?”

  “You wanted to keep costs down and this was the way to do it. We basically outsourced the chunk of code that renders the environments, and that code was served from that start-up’s database, not ours. Our product gave it the basic data it needed to tailor to each consumer, and then their product interpreted it and drew from their database to create the backdrops. Only it seems that the hacker changed their server-side code so that no matter what was requested by our server, it would always tell the database it wanted those... factory interiors and rendered them for every consumer in real time. It was actually quite a brilliant hack. Very hard to detect, even when we were looking for it.”

  “When will it be fixed?”

  “They fixed it just as you called. We’re doing a forced refresh of all the downloads now, just to be certain. Anyone downloading from now on will get the correct version. This will all be over in about ten minutes.”

  “And the hacker?”

  “Gone. No way to find them. They were really, really good. And don’t even think about throwing me under the bus over this. I logged my security concerns with my supervisor at the time, and I told you we should have just brought them in-house but you didn’t want to budget for that. This is on you.”

  “Fuck you very much,” he snapped and ended the call.

  It was damage control now, more the damage to his career than to the brand. He dashed out the report, taking care to gloss over his part in the decision to outsource parts of the dynamic experience, instead choosing to present a plan for ensuring this could never happen again. In fact, it was going to massively lower the value of the start-up, so they’d be able to buy it at a fraction of the price now. As long as he got ahead of the narrative in the feeds, managed to persuade people that this was a malicious hack with no basis in truth, this could actually be to their benefit.

  But even as he sent off the report, the feel of the air in the sweatshop lingered. Was that really how the shirts were produced? All he knew was that an order was mixed up, the wrong chemicals were used for the dip dye and it created the opposite effect to what the designer wanted. He just happened to see the retail sample at the crisis meeting and had the idea to make the most of having ten thousand units to shift.

  He waited with sweating palms, wondering if he was going to get that promotion after all. Only seven and a half thousand people worldwide had experienced the hacked mersive. None of them were influencers. The negative coverage would fizzle out. He checked the data again and saw that there was already an uptick in new downloads, as people were no doubt curious about whether the weird rumours were true. Hell, if he’d waited ten more minutes before writing the report, maybe he could have spun this as a positive event!

  “Incoming call from Jobeda Bannerjee.”

  “Right, now we know what happened, see to it that the company that was hacked is bought,” she said. “Draft a letter to the people who downloaded the mersive in the danger window, explaining it was a malicious hack that exploited a third-party system and was beyond our control. I want to sign it off before it goes out. Once that’s ready, get the social media AI to give a free shirt voucher to all of them with the letter and monitor their feeds closely. Our lawyers say we can handle anything that arises.”

  “Consider it done. Have you seen the latest spike in downloads? It looks like it was a blessing in disguise.”

  “That’s one way of looking at it.” She sounded unconvinced and then ended the call.

  By the end of the day, everything was not only sorted out, but the download spike had translated into a sales spike and he was feeling pretty damn pleased with himself. Yes, something bad had happened, but he’d handled it.

  But when he lay in bed that night and shut his eyes, he saw that room again. He felt that heat, recalled that smell. He wanted to rinse it out of his brain, like the corrupted mersive had been effectively rinsed out of the internet. He couldn’t imagine doing his job before the riots, before the gov-corps made it so hard for people to save copies of mersives streamed directly to chips. Back then, that hacked version would have been flying around the internet forever, fading from the global conversation only to resurface again, maybe years later, like social media shingles. His career could have been ruined.

  What had that hacker hoped to achieve?

  An email notification made him frown. JJ should have blocked that, it being half one in the morning. Perhaps it was from Jobeeda. “JJ, read that email to me.”

  “If you’re struggling to sleep because of what you saw, perhaps you have a conscience. That place was real, those people are real. They are working there, right now, two cents a shirt, working sixty hours a week just so they can feed their families and survive. Gaborcorp makes a profit of over fifteen dollars per shirt, even after distribution and the likes of you have been paid. Stefan Gabor’s personal fortune is estimated to be over one hundred and twenty billion dollars and is likely to be twice that by the end of this year. You are part of that machine, Jordan. But it doesn’t have to be that way. A man of your talents could help us to change the world. I’m waiting for your reply. Just tell your APA that you have a conscience and it’ll know how to get in touch with me.”

  He sat up in bed and opened his inbox. There was an email from Jobeeda, several from various colleagues and one from his kid sister, but nothing that looked suspicious. “JJ, show me that email you just read me.”

  “That email has been deleted.”

  He groaned. This was some hacker bullshit and he didn’t understand any of it and it annoyed him. He wiped the sweat from his upper lip and opened the email from Jobeeda.

  “I wouldn’t go so far as to say I’m impressed, but you handled things well today and the board agrees with my recommendation for your promotion. Thought I’d let you know now, before the formal offer comes through from HR, so you can spend the weekend deciding if you want a pool or a view. Choose wisely.”

  He laughed. He’d done it! He’d got exactly what he wanted. He closed the interface and dropped back onto his pillow. He wanted a pool. He closed his eyes and imagined plunging into it, alone, no-one else to schmooze or impress while trying to exercise. Just him and the water and his swanky apartment. He forced the memories of the sweatshop away with the promise of future pool parties, of champagne and skinny dipping with someone gorgeous. He couldn’t do anything about the way the world worked, could he? He didn’t force those people to work in those conditions. He wasn’t going to let some stupid, idealist hacker get in the way of his career and the trappings of his success. He’d worked sixty hours a week for years and this was his reward. He was getting the apartment with the pool because he’d earned it. He deserved it.

  Didn’t he?

  What Travis Built

  They stood outside the chicken coop. There was a square shaped hole for a window, a rectangular one for the doorway and a ramp leading up to it. Travis wiped his hands on his jeans and grinned at Carl. “All done. They’ll love it.”

  Carl’s arms were folded across his chest, his expression that of a man shown a wheelbarrow and being told it was his transport for the day. “You’re joking, right?”

  He wasn’t. Travis scratched his head, waving away a bee that had strayed too close. “What do you mean? It’s got a roof, they can get in and out and they won’t get wet. What more does it need?”

  Carl sighed. “It needs to look like this.” He pulled a notebook out of his back pocket, a crumpled, dog-eared thing and thumbed to the correct page. There was a detailed schematic that made the coop look like a sketch compared to an oil-painted masterpiece.

  Travis looked up from it with a raised eyebrow. “You’re joking, right?”

  Carl didn’t seem to appreciate having the same question thrown back at him. “I know it looks complicated, but all the materials and tools we need are in the shed. Chickens lay more eggs if they have the best coop. And they’ll be bigger.”

  “Carl-”

  “And the bigger and better quality they are, the more they sell for at the market.”

  “There’s a market?”

  “Of course there is.”

  “Shit, don’t tell me you actually go to the market and sell the stuff you grow?”

  Carl shook his head, much to his relief. “Nah. I get a drone to collect it all. I’m not into that side of things. Too many people.”

  Travis nodded, swatting away a fly. He looked past the farm’s boundary at the forest. There were no other structures in sight, no sign of civilisation anywhere, other than the road that ran through the creek and up to the farm. No vehicles were on it though. He and Carl had very different ideas about how many people were too many.

  He was tired and it was hot and there were too many bugs. Carl was looking down at the picture in his notebook and then back up at the coop, like he was building up to saying something difficult. Travis could predict what it was going to be and didn’t want to argue about having to rebuild it. “Why are there so many bloody insects?”

  “Because we’re in the countryside,” Carl replied as if he were an idiot.

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I have the realism settings dialled to max.”

  “Can’t you just turn the bugs off?”

  “No, we need them for pollination and for the-” He stopped at Travis’s second audible sigh.

  “We don’t though, do we?” Travis said, trying to be patient. “I mean... it’s just a game. We don’t need to worry about pollination, not really.”

  “Yeah, but if you...” Carl trailed off. “You don’t like it, do you?”

  “No! Yes! I mean... I do like it. I just...” Truth be told, he hated this game. But he loved the way it transformed Carl, the way his shoulders dropped and his smiles were real and the earnest determination with which he dug over the vegetable patch. He wasn’t painfully thin here, as if his brain interpreted the way this place made him feel and filled out his avatar’s cheeks and gave them a ruddy glow.

  Travis took a breath and added a smile for good measure. “It’s just not like anything I’ve ever played before, that’s all. It’s far more...” he looked back at the coop then held out a hand for the notebook. Carl gave it to him and his heart sank at the sight of all the labour that design required. “...hands on.”

  Carl smirked. “It might be good for you, if you gave it a try. After all those years of-“ His eyes flicked away to an incoming message. Travis stayed silent, knowing his Artificial Personal Assistant would only allow through messages marked urgent when they were playing ‘Grow Your Farm’. “Shit,” he muttered under his breath and then looked at Travis. “I have to go. Something’s come up.”

  “Is it Dee?”

  A pause. “Sorry, I can’t say. I guess you’re off the hook. Next time we play, I’ll give that strategy game you like another go. It’s only fair.”

  He leaned closer and then just brushed his arm with his fingertips in that maddening way Carl always did, as if wanting a kiss but then not being able to commit to it at the last moment. Travis let his frustration go. He knew why Carl was like that. He just had to be patient. He watched Carl jog over to the farmhouse and go inside, a notification that he’d left the game popping up in his visual field moments later.

  For a while Travis just stood there, unsure of what to do. He’d psyched himself up for twee nostalgic crap that needed to be tolerated for the sake of making Carl happy and relaxed. The last time they’d spent an afternoon here, Carl had actually embraced him and rested his head on his chest when they took a break from fence building. He was playing this game for a totally different set of rewards, and now Carl and any hope of gaining his trust were gone, he was at a loose end. He didn’t feel like switching out and being a general commanding futuristic armies or being a prince in ancient Egypt.

  Something was unsettling him, making him shift from foot to foot. Then he realised it was the silence – or rather the lack of human made noise. There was only birdsong and the buzzing of the insects. No gentle hum of electric cars nor the sound of their tyres on tarmac. No planes or drones... nothing but... he shuddered... nature.

  Looking for some sort of distraction, some anchor in the midst of the lack of stimulation, his gaze rested back on the coop. He glowered at it, seeing it now with Carl’s critical eye and knowing that it would never do.

  He flipped through the notebook, wondering if Carl had deliberately left it with him in the hope he’d take a look. It was filled with planting schedules, optimal conditions and care for a wide variety of crops, and all sorts of additions to the farm like grain silos and an irrigation system and a cow shed. They were all written in neat handwriting and the pencil sketches were smudged in places where an eraser had been used. He’d created this by hand, in-game by the look of it. Maybe on another play through. Where did he learn all this stuff? From trial and error, or did he research it all in meatspace and memorise it? The realism settings they were playing with made it impossible for it to be gleaned from an APA here. There wasn’t even a virtual internet in this game.

  Not even knowing why he was bothering, Travis tucked the notebook in his pocket, drifted over to the shed and opened the door. He’d never set foot inside, Carl always being in charge when it came to whatever needed tools, and he was unsurprised by how neat and tidy it was. There were spiders in the corners, their webs the only thing out of place. Then it occurred to him that they weren’t out of place at all, they made perfect sense here.

  Moving inside, it took a moment for his eyes to adapt to the darker interior. The wall opposite him was covered in tools, each hanging in its own defined place with a painted outline around it. He had no idea what half of them would be used for, his attention darting from one to the next without even knowing what most of them were called.

  Then his gaze skimmed over a chisel and darted back. It was familiar, somehow. The floorboards creaked beneath his boots as he crossed to unhook the tool from its spot, leaving just the painted shape of it and the nail it hung from. He flipped the tool over, the sharp edge of the chisel now on top and looked at the base of the metal, just above the wooden handle. As he’d expected, a tiny gold logo was stamped into it, too small to make out properly in the shed’s dim interior. But he didn’t need to take it outside to know what it looked like; a tiny celtic knot used by the same company that his grandfather’s tools were made by.

  And in that moment, he wasn’t standing in a virtual shed in the middle of an artificial farm being generated by his neural chip. He was in his grandfather’s workshop again, watching the old man stooped over the chunk of wood he was carving, held still by huge clamps.

  He could still remember watching the wood shavings spiralling to the floor from each stroke of the chisel, the smell of the sawdust and his grandfather’s ancient cologne. He sat for hours, watching the owls being excavated from the chunk of wood by his grandfather’s skill.

  “But Papa, why don’t you just print it?” he asked on a particularly hot afternoon, feet swinging back and forth as he sat on the high stool in the corner.

  His grandfather straightened up, stretching out his back and running his hand over the nearest owl’s wing. “You know what this is for?” When Travis shook his head, Papa smiled. “This is one of the legs for your Nana’s new kitchen table.”

  “But... but won’t it need four legs?”

  “Aye, it will.”

  “But it’s taken you days and days to do that one and it’s not even finished yet! If you need four, you should definitely print them! I can show you how. I can make all sorts with it.”

  Papa laughed. “That’s not the point, Travis. It’s not about getting it done as quick as we can. I’m retired, I have all the time I need.”

  “But it’s so hard! It makes your back ache and makes you sweat.”

  “That just proves I’ve been working.” He came over then and put the chisel in Travis’s hand. “If Nana wanted a printed table, she could make it herself. You know she wrote the software that they use?”

  Travis shook his head as he passed the chisel from one hand to the other, still feeling the warmth his grandfather’s labour had left in the wooden handle. “Did she ask you to make it by hand?”