Moneyland (Lockdownland Book 1) - Michael Botur

Moneyland (Lockdownland Book 1) - Michael Botur

Book excerpt

Dipped in black and blue light that made us glow like ghosts, I stood against a neon bar with Chan and Eli and Kane, the hottest boys in my group, as DJ Gershw1n, this amazeballs Mech DJ, piped music into our earbuds. The beats were optimised to make us feel slutty at first, then excited, later loose and reckless, and drowsy and swooning as the night thinned and people pashed and fingered each other in the corners. Acoustic engineering, baby: just another way we make Mechs work for us. At least, we tried to convince ourselves we had the upper hand. Everywhere you went in the city – the convenience store, the doctor, the movies – there was always a panel with tiny red eyes checking you out. Here, too, in our school hall. Mechs filming us. Trying to suck away everything they were jealous of.

Tuxedo jackets draped over their arms, the boys all had their organisers out and were using this app to put bets on the big robot boxing match that was on that night. Dumb hunks of metal entertaining dumb hunks, I thought to myself, and giggled. The boys were total cavemen. Everyone’s dependent on their orgs – you get your org implanted immediately after you’re born, though, so no surprise everyone grows up thinking their org is part of them. My prom boys cared about the roboxing way more than they cared about tomorrow’s experiment. They thought the Survivor Island experiment-thing was a write-off, like zero chance of getting in.

“But our school nominated us, right?” I tried to get them to talk about Eden-stuff instead of their caveman crap. “They pulled me out of class to interview me, didn’t you guys do those questionnaires too? I thought everyone in the whole country was in the mix.”

Chan took his ear buds out and his Ca$h Money Billionaire$ cap and checked to make sure it still had the price tag on then repositioned it perfectly on his head. My beautiful boy always cared about looking perfect. “We’d ace that shit. If they chose our asses, I mean.”

“Hope y’all been saying your prayers,” Eli said. “Getting chosen ain’t easy.”

“As if that religious bullshit’s gonna help,” Kane snorted. His sister KT came up beside him and massaged his neck playfully. KT was official president of the Social Club (I was Acting President when she couldn’t be there). KT’s prom night was all about making sure everyone partied. Since we’d all brought friend-dates instead of date-dates, we could play it cool. Hook up or not, it didn’t matter. In my group, you came in a limo with your people and after a night of flirting, if you wanted to go with someone at the end, that was all G. It was like a lotto to see if your status went up or down, depending on whether you hooked up with a hotter or less-hot person. Unless you were a pauper like Adam Turing. Then you spent the night serving drinks to normal peeps.

Eli slapped Kane’s head for dissing his churchy stuff. “Show some respect,” he said. No one else could’ve gotten away with smacking grumpy Kane like that ’cause Kane’s always looking for fights. Eli was from the Hood and he was training to be a youth pastor ’cause his people feared God heaps and there was tons of Luddite gangs on his street. I’d heard Eli actually wanted to go in the experiment so he could give his million to his church.

Kane and Eli and Chan kicked each other’s shins for a minute, giggling and making Luddite L-shape gang signs with their fingers, then got interrupted by these waiter robots wheeling through the crowd with trays of lite champagne. Waiterbots have this gyroscope that gives them perfect balance so you can kick them and they get back up straight away and don’t even spill the drinks. It was like a fun game for the boys to try trip them and waste as much drink as possible. Kane went extra-aggro and spat on the Mechs and tried to unlock their input pads.

“Where’s your botsucker friend?” Kane sneered in the Mechs’ artificial faces.

I could tell Adam was avoiding our corner. Stay cool, do as good as the waiterbots, get paid, take his paycheque home to his broke-ass dad. That was Adam’s mission.

My group and I talked smack and sort-of flirted in pairs. It was hard to tell who was gonna hook up with who. We were all trying to shuffle closer to losing our virginity without being too obvious. That clingy boyfriend-and-girlfriend-going-steady stuff? Only Esther and Chan were doing that. Pretty old fash, really.

I snapped back to reality, in my dark corner of the dance hall all striped with lights, and discovered Watson halfway through a rant about some sciencey-junk. He was arguing with Eli about the experiment, I think. Something about ethics. Watson was like 99 per cent geek and everyone thought he had Assburgers syndrome or whatever that fussy nerd condition is called.

Maeve elbowed me and asked if I thought Wats should shut the hell up. Maeve always asks me to back her up. She’s my BFF but she’s been a total wide-eyed copycat ever since I screamed at these bullies to leave her alone in the sandpit when we were, like, five years old.

In true caveman style, Kane dragged Maeve away for a dance as she squealed in protest (if you can call Kane lying on his back on the dancefloor and benchpressing Maeve dancing). Eli danced too, pulling the arm of this girl Anya till she peeled off the wall. I was surprised anyone had even invited Anya. Anya was a total outlier. Hard and lanky, with square shoulders, she was the tallest girl in school, this real sporty kinda tomboy from that country that got all mechanised and polluted with acid rain and stuff and had that war in the snow and made all the Fleshies refugees. Anya had been marching over mountains dragging a suitcase since she was, like, two, which was why she always won most stuff on Sports Day.

I was getting ADHD. I searched my group for someone to lol with. It was hard to interrupt those lovebots Esther and Chan. Esther’s real bubbly and always has these real pretty haircuts and, like, barely even acknowledges that she’s in a wheelchair (except for her Youth Paralympics medals she always brings to Show and Tell). Even with that Mech DJ Gershw1n pumping the beats, I could hear Esther prattling on about her vaccination summer camp in Vietnam with the Peace Corps, trying to eradicate malaria or whatever. Chan was nodding like he was interested, but I reckon he was faking it. I reckon he was secretly nodding at me, like giving me a signal. I loved Little Miss Perfect to bits, but Esther didn’t seem right for Chan. I mean, I’d never seen a movie where one person makes love to another person in a wheelchair. Like, couldn’t Es find someone a better match for her? Someone from ParaYouth?

Fatima and KT came over all shrieking and whooping as their favourite song came on and grabbed Esther’s chair and wheeled her on to the dancefloor for a spin. Es can control her chair herself with a joystick, but wheeling her is a chance to seem like you’re friends with someone respectable. The dances and the lols and the conversations were all good but losing my V card was majorly occupying my brain. I doubted Chan was going to whisk me away tonight. I would’ve settled for almost anyone just so I could tell Maeve I’d done it before her. Maeve had brought up the V word six times in the last month and it was getting hard to come up with excuses when she asked me if I’d gone to third base with anyone.

Just when I thought I was gonna have to message Mumshine to pick me up, I spotted Omar, tall and shaggy as Bigfoot, lumbering from group to group, being all gangly and wild. I tugged him away from the table where he was filling the pockets of his camouflage pants with almonds. Omar always thinks the zombie apocalypse is about to happen and he’ll need food supplies, which is why he always goes climbing trees and exploring sewer pipes after school, finding gross wild toadstools and hazelnuts. It’s not like he would chat with our group online after school anyway. He’s like wayyyy dyslexic.

I loved Omes ’cause I didn’t have to impress him. He was too obsessed with survival stuff to worry about his popularity level. He hadn’t trimmed his beard for prom and, with his cap and button-down pockets, he looked like a duck hunter. Omes and me had a quick twerk and I rubbed my butt all over him but it was just stunting. Our dance was over in like three minutes cause Omar was more interested in the waiterbots’ canapés than me.

“YOU OUGHTA STORE ENERGY,” he yelled into my ears, spitting aïoli on my face. “You never know when you need a reserve of fat.” I was like vomit. I told him if I got fat I’d look exactly like Maeve, but I took a canapé anyway and snapped a photo and posted it on my page. I only ate the salmon off it ’cause the cracker had too much gluten. Me and Fatima, this jokester from my accounting class, had both thrown up in the bathrooms at Maeve’s place so we could fit into our dresses. I wasn’t going to waste my body on a cracker.

Nerdy-ass Watson was too stiff and robotic to dance but he made some conversation with me, mostly speculating on that experiment that was kicking off tomorrow, analysing the statistical probability that our school would get chosen. He blabbed nerd-words; I made fun of his nerdiness then pinched his flabby nerd chest to let him know we were still buddies. That was the kind of banter we did while waiting for maths class to start, the nerds gossiping in the corridor about science while me and Maeve made fun of Adam’s doodles of pyramids on his graph pad and Adam got all red in the face, screaming, “IT ISN’T A PYRAMID, IT’S A ZIGGURAT,” and going and hiding behind Anya. I couldn’t imagine being stuck under a dome with those dropkicks.

Eventually Adam’s manager-Mech aimed its laser pointer at our group and Adam was told to drag his ass over before he got fired, carrying his own drink tray, doing Mech work. The prom was getting boring and we were glad to have some fresh entertainment.

“Omigod you guys,” I said, clapping, getting my group to look at me, “I saw Adam fully scavenging at the supermarket.” I pressed my belly button, opened the photos on my organiser, pushed towards my friends a hologram of Adam cradling a paper bag of rubbish like an infant.

Maeve squinted at me, all concerned. “You didn’t give him any food, did you?”

I dodged the question and watched the sideshow that had broken out. Kane sang, “Rock-a-Bye Baaaabyyyyy, BABY!” in Adam’s face and Adam tried to keep on being a waiter, keep on working as hard as the waiterbots but Kane finally broke him when he made this crack about Adam’s dad having sex with Adam’s dead mum with a cybernetic dick while singing Rock-a-Bye Baby and Adam limped away without even crying, without fighting back, just sagging like his spine had been snapped. Esther wheeled up and slapped Kane’s arm and told him he’d gone too far and you shouldn’t talk about people’s parents and Fatti threw in some jokes about her weird-ass family praying all the time, praying about food and how precious it supposedly is and how going to the market’s like apparently some massive blessing and everyone started talking about their parents all at once. Heaps of our parents had gotten redundant or had to retrain and stuff like that. The stress was kind of getting to us, even though it wasn’t really our problem. Like, my dad had been made redundant and hired back again like three times already. Beause my dad works for the university, he’d been the first to tell me the Millions Test was coming up and he kept ribbing me at the dinner table till one time I was like: “Dad: do I seriously have to earn pocket money for you?”

“OI, YOU GUYS,” I interrupted my group. “Where d’you reckon they’ll make the kids do the experiment? Ecuador or something? The Sahara? If that was me, I’d fully spear a pig. Wild venison with a red wine vinaigrette: mmm.”

“Venison’s deer, dear,” Omar went, taking yogurt-covered raisins from a waiterbot and stashing them into a pocket on his tux. “I’ll have to take you hunting some time.”

“Piss off. I don’t kill innocent animals.”

“Anyway, my money’s on India. They’ll send us there.”

“Us?”

“Oh come on, Ede. Your dad’ll pull strings. He wants you to get the cash. Guarantee it.”

“Whatever. He loves having me home more than money. Yo, did you do that screening questionnaire? The one that asks you your allergies, your diet, your family’s income…”

Esther waved her hands, cutting us off. She looked a little scared. “They asked me who the bottom five least popular-est people at school are.”

“Omigawd: Adam Turing, right?”

“Adam any day,” KT said. “I mean no day, lol.”

“I chose Adam too,” I said. “I mean, I chose not Adam. I’d rather have sex with a Mopomatic.” All of us girls cracked up and hugged each other as we laughed.

We partied until our perfect night spilled into a new day. Around 2am I checked my org and there were like 20 messages from Mumshine, her going, “You’re In You’re In You’re In,” which probably meant, “You’re inside, I’m waiting outside,” and I was about to message her like, “Yawn, Mumshine, tell me something I don’t know,” when she sent me another message that just said: “Check th news.”

I was breathless as I looked at my group.

Everyone already had a news bubble open. There were heart attack words on a ticker scrolling across the bottom of the screen under the market report, and all the words were our names.

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