Out in the hallway, Hoc was grinning like a maniac. “It worked,” he half-shouted.
“Of course it did!” My Linh said, almost convinced by her own bravado, though deep down she was worried it’d all backfire and about what might happen if enough arrows pointed in their direction.
“No, I mean it worked! Look,” he said, holding up his cell phone. The graph on the screen wasn’t so much an exponential curve as an almost-vertical line. “That’s way beyond viral. That’s nuclear.”
“Let’s go,” Huong hissed anxiously.
“Yeobo,” Yoon-Seok said sweetly into his phone, looking out across the nearly empty dorm managers’ cafeteria. “Uh, I think I’m stuck in Binh Duong for tonight. Maybe.”
It was a courtesy maybe: When riots broke out, there was no uncertainty about his being marooned in the industrial zone for the night. Especially when a power cut had shut down all but the emergency power supply to the factory.
“Are you safe?” was all his wife said, her voice flatter than it should have been: he hadn’t said a thing about this to her the night before.
“Yeah, it shouldn’t be a problem. We’re well-prepared,” he said as their baby son squawked hoarsely in the background. That was the understatement of the year, he thought.
“Good,” she said, after a moment’s hesitation. Their son’s voice crescendoed into a shrill howl. “I, uh …”
“That’s fine, yeobo,” he said. “I’ll call you later.”
“Mmmm,” she said and disconnected.
Yoon-Seok glanced at his lunch, but he wasn’t hungry. He gestured for an attendant to remove his tray, and the nameless Vietnamese woman who took it thanked him with heavily accented Korean, an inauthentic smile on her face. He half-expected her to frown: people as badly paid as their workers didn’t waste food this way, after all, and staff protests had exploded over such waste in the past.
Of course she didn’t, not with what that woman had flowing through her veins. Yoon-Seok knew what it was like to be Focused: he’d dosed himself back in college, secretly, before everyone had started using it. He’d studied through things that had sent other students into the streets in droves. You could tell who was on Focus at the time: they were the only people left in the library, the only people whose priority was grades, and not ousting a corrupt president or opposing the sweatshopification of newly liberated North Korea. When the woman emerged, he found himself looking into her blank eyes, wondering if he’d unsettled his friends back in university the way she did him now. His wife sometimes complained when he had one of his episodes, but he’d come to enjoy the passivity they brought on, the silent … well, not contemplation, but just single-minded attentiveness. Sometimes, it was more confusing than peaceful, sure, but that was only occasional.
Without a word to the attendant—she wouldn’t care anyway—he walked out into the factory’s courtyard, ignoring the automated clank of the building’s massive steel locks behind him. He was alone now, the security guards stationed inside the dorms at his insistence, to keep the Focused workers and the Korean management safe. That was how sure he was of his plan, of the facts on which it was founded.
But Yoon-Seok did not feel afraid: he only stared up into the smoke-clotted sky, as the noise of the tumult several streets away washed over him. Despite the reek of burning plastic, the shouts in the distance, he was calm. The gentlest of breezes, almost undetectable, cooled his face as he made his way to the main factory building.
“Together, we’re strong!” Tuan repeated, and the crowd marching with him repeated the words in unison. “Together, we’re brave!” he shouted, and he knew that if they repeated the words often enough, they would be brave.
They would need it: Binh Duong was about to become a war zone: factories burning, exploiters cowed into submission, the people finally rising to frighten those who abused them into good behavior. You could never quite win against the factory owners—Tuan had fought through more than enough uprisings to know that—but you could force them toward human decency.
He looked into his group’s faces: Binh, the young orphaned woman who’d been fired from her textile factory after ten years’ service because she’d missed a week of work taking care of her stricken sister. Thanh, a middle-aged man who’d lost an arm to a laser cutter and then been “retired” with a paltry compensation package. Quy Thi, a elderly woman struggling to support her granddaughter, whose mother had slammed her scooter into a tree and died on the way home from a factory that didn’t subsidize the Focus antidote patches, only the on-shift doses.
Everyone had a story, and Tuan knew every story mattered.
“Now!” he shouted, and they marched.
“How’d you cut the industrial zones’ power supply without knocking it out everywhere else in town?” Huong asked it a little too loudly, her eyes bright with excitement.
But My Linh just grinned and shrugged as she continued to type on the ancient netbook’s keyboard: Huong wouldn’t understand, even if she did explain. After all, that was nothing compared to anonymously springboarding SMS updates across the cloudnet to almost thirty million cheap, pay-as-you go cell phone accounts—the sort of accounts used by the poorest, the likeliest to riot.
But after a few dozen keystrokes, her confidence wilted. She frowned at the netbook’s dim little screen.
“What is it?” Hoc blurted, trembling with worry.
“The VPDN,” My Linh said. “I dunno why, but it’s down.” She tapped a few more commands into the thing, frowning as each seemed to fail.
Hoc gasped. “What if they’re tracing you back …” he hissed, his voice diminishing to a whisper, “… to here?”
Huong wasn’t worried, though: “It’s just someone doing con viec nha, ” she quipped. Housekeeping: that
