My Linh and Hoc laughed, though, and finally Hoc relaxed with a sigh and sat down. Finally, My Linh thought. He’d begun to get on her nerves. And then she was in.
“Got it,” she said, sounding very relieved all of a sudden.
“Got what?” Hoc blurted loudly, as Huong rolled her eyes at his recurring panic.
“I’m inside the Communication Ministry’s system, and …” My Linh stopped, her eyes running over a phrase again as her breath caught in her throat. “I gotta text my dad,” she said, her hands trembling as she scrambled for her phone.
There was nothing to do but finish up his preparations and wait for the first mob to arrive, so Yoon-Seok rolled out the last cooler of ice, made sure he had a generous supply of paper cups on the table, and then took his place at the doorway of his uncle’s airbag factory. To pass the time, he tried to pick out which of Bin Duong’s factories were burning, and which had bribed the right officials for advance warning.
Some part of him had been waiting for this day for years, since his uncle had decided—against his advice—to make mandatory Focus prescriptions official company policy for all workers. Stupid Uncle Min-ho, and his all-important bottom line. Why invest in robotics, however affordable, when you could just dose your workers and save the maintenance costs? Uncle Min-ho hadn’t factored in the costs of dealing with an angry throng of locals with nothing to lose. He’d spent five whole days in Vietnam the last five years, and here, he’d spent all five on booze and golf. To Yoon-Seok’s objections, all he’d offered was a dismissive shrug and a grin. “It’ll be fine,” Min-ho had insisted, and that was that.
Still, Yoon-Seok had successfully dealt with such situations before; between his Vietnamese skill—he’d soaked up the vocabulary and grammar in six months, thanks to Focus—and his understanding of Vietnamese culture, he’d quelled several riots the old-fashioned way: respectful lip service, some ice water all around, and good old cooperation. And that had been without the added security prepared today.
The heat troubled him more than his anxiety, what with no air-conditioning inside the darkened factory. The stick-on patch on the inside of his left bicep itched beneath his white shirtsleeve. He did his best to ignore it, for fear of loosening the adhesive if he scratched, and returned to his place beside the massive, blue iron entryway door that stood open to the world. He smiled patiently, a well-practiced, understanding look in his eyes.
The sky-darkening swarm of drones above astonished My Linh as she looked up from the back of Huong’s whining scooter. The drones sported the logos of all the local news networks, but also many foreign and online ones, along with lots that were illegally unmarked. Squeezing her knees hard against Huong’s hips, she checked her smartphone for a tracker pingback from her dad’s phone, but the city’s 5G network was completely clogged.
They were overloading the system, she realized with a rueful shake of her head. More con viec nha, for all the good it would do. Not everyone on the street was heading to Binh Duong, but surely a number were: young punks, dissidents and malcontents who’d done their years on Focus through high school and uni still wound up penniless, those born early enough to miss out on universal dosing … anyone who had a right to a grudge was headed straight for the industrial zone.
My Linh suddenly wished she had an unmarked drone of her own that could track her dad through crowd-pings—the least blockable of all network systems—but Hoc had crashed it months ago and still hadn’t worked up the cash to buy a replacement kit yet. She tried to set up a ping through the drones—they were all networked anyway, to prevent aerial crashes—but all she could get back from them was a bird’s-eye view of Binh Duong’s main thoroughfares, which resembled hopelessly clogged arteries through a haze of dust and black drone-exhaust.
Then a pingback came through. Somehow, her dad’s phone had responded to hers despite the chaos and the overload.
“Huong!” she shouted, but when Huong didn’t reply right away, My Linh looked up ahead to see what the distraction was. She saw a brutal pile-up of five scooters, dark bodies tangled among the wheels and broken machinery. A cop stood, talking to a young, well-dressed, pale couple beside a sports car with a nasty dent on the left side. The young man had his wallet in his hand, as the cop waved his phone toward a nearby camera mounted on a lightpost.
She stared, disgusted at the scene. All they’d done so far was only a small step. As she and her friends roared past the sordid scene, she frowned. The factories weren’t the only thing that needed to be burned right down to the ground … .
Just then Hoc pulled up alongside them, driving one-handed as he punched a button on his phone. He’d gotten video of the cop, she realized, and was uploading it now, for the world to discover—and castigate—when the dust settled. It was enough to make My Linh smile a little, as she turned back to her own phone and zoomed the map till she could see where her dad was. “Doobong Autofact,” it said.
It wasn’t until after she’d squirted the text to the nav screen of Huong’s scooter that she recognized the name.
The Korean manager—Tuan couldn’t remember his name, though he recognized the man’s face, his dull eyes—stood alone at the doorway. That was … brave, if nothing else.
“Come in,” the man said, smiling graciously, waving the mob into the factory with a well-coiffed hand, the nails trim and the fingers clean. It was a soft, feminine hand, to be welcoming a mob armed with baseball bats and
