The waves crashed against the sea wall, spewing froth over Mako as she followed behind Raita and her pals along the boardwalk.

  “Where are we going again?” Mako asked.

  “The hideout,” Raita said.

  “So, like, you’ve been living out here all this time?”

  “Yup. After I left MegaCorp, I had to leave Day City, too. I had no prospects, no money, nothing. Not until Anand reached out.”

  Mako stepped around a pair of seabirds fighting over a dead rat and hurried up to Raita. “Wait, you mean Anand Anand? He was just let go a few weeks ago.”

  “And he’s still upset about it. Blames you, actually.”

  “So all this time he was…”

  “Living out here, yeah. It’s not like we weren’t allowed to leave Day City — you just needed a pass to get back in. Ask him yourself.”

  Raita and the twins stopped at a wide clearing.

  Several worn-down cars, motorcycles, and boat-craft lay scattered around the area, and most of them might have been older than Mako. Grass sprouted from cracks in the concrete and culminated into the moss-covered seawall edge, where the waves continued crashing from the other side. Low, but large buildings enclosed the expanse, their walls chipped, roof seams rusted, and windows boarded up. The entire complex wasn’t so much rundown as post-apocalyptic.

  Raita waved to a trio of cyberpunks on beach chairs playing cards around a folding table. Their features — everything from tatts, piercings, and modifications — looked like they’d been plucked straight from a video game.

  “Ey, new grub?” one of them asked, eying Mako.

  “Don’t know, that’s up to her,” Raita said.

  “Trim din-din today, then?”

  “I wouldn’t say that. We may have ourselves a real upsilon here.”

  Mako wasn’t sure if she was supposed to blush or snort. Cyberspace may have been her domain, but cyber-speak sure wasn’t.

  Another one of the cyberpunks, a slim middle-aged man, suddenly stood. “Hey, wait a freon, ain’t that Tanako-san in the flesh?”

  “Do we know each other?” Mako said.

  “It’s me, JJ from MegaCorp.” A beat. “From security?”

  “Oh, right, right, right, now I remember.” No, Mako most definitely did not.

  She reached out her hand, but the three punks took turns slapping her shoulders instead. Mako left them catching up with the Teja twins and followed Raita to the building at the end of the field.

  Mako looked over her shoulder. “I didn’t know there were other ex-corpos in here.”

  “Let’s just say I’ve been busy these past years,”

  “But what exactly do you guys do?”

  “You’ll see.” Raita stopped at a pair of metal doors and pulled them open, hinges screeching, revealing… a massive rainbow flag with a hammer and sickle emblem hanging over — and Mako wasn’t sure if she was seeing it right — an office room. Raita swept her arms over an arc. “Welcome to Communism Incorporated, manufacturing the world revolution since ‘19.”

  “Wake me up, I must be dreaming,” Mako mumbled.

  Raita ignored her as she led Mako down the center aisle. All around them, edge-running cyber punks worked on neatly aligned desks, typing away on mechanical keyboards in front of computer monitors — not the flat screen type, but the thick, old-school style of monitors with cathode ray tubes in them. Bright fluorescent lights buzzed over the punks, and a ceiling fan rotated slowly, fluttering the giant rainbow commie flag hanging from the rafters.

  “Raita, what is this?” Mako said.

  “The accounts department.”

  “… accounts department.”

  “The economy isn’t going to regulate itself, now is it?”

  Mako rubbed her hand over one of the boxy computer monitors. It was real, all right.

  “Pretty neat, huh?” Raita said. “We’re totally AI-free, 100% human-powered.”

  “I figured.” Mako scanned the rest of the equipment, from floppy disks to fax machines. She just knew there must have been a dial-up modem somewhere. Amongst the colorful hunched heads of accountants, Mako thought she spotted another ex-MegaCorp employee. Raita really had been busy.

  “Come on, we’re just getting started,” said Raita, who was already at the door on the other end.

  Mako left the computers behind and caught up to her. The next room was just as large as the first one, but instead of neat rows, it contained a long oval table. Several people seated around it waved as Raita and Mako passed through.

  If the crossed-out taglines on the whiteboard were any indication, they were having a round table discussion on a new slogan. Apparently, ‘we have nothing to lose but our chains’ was outdated.

  Mako tapped Raita’s shoulder. “And this would be…?”

  “Marketing and sales.”

  “I’m sorry, marketing?”

  “And sales. The revolution’s not going to—”

  Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

  “Televise itself, yeah, I get that, but aren’t you guys communists?”

  “We are, and we want everyone to know it.” Raita handed Mako a bowl of merchandise. “Take one, it’s on the house.”

  Mako stared into the bowl of commie key-chains and stickers. That was when she gave up.

  She rooted through the pile of merch and fished out a mini Vladimir Lenin plushie, which she tucked under her elbows. “What else is there?”

  “I’m glad you asked.”

  Raita toured her around the rest of the company.

  Up next was human resources, Raita’s own division. You could tell what department it was because it had a big “Human Resources” sign on the door with the word ‘HUMAN’ in all CAPS, bolded, italized, and underlined.

  But it was the operations department afterwards that nearly blew a register in Mako’s CPU. Raita didn’t stutter when she showcased the cache of weapons and tech with which they were going to launch the revolution. She might as well have been hosting a baking show.

  And after that was the legal department.

  The legal department.

  Mako didn’t bother asking anymore.

  Instead, she asked, “So where, if ever, would I be working in?”

  “Assignment is ultimately up to executive, but you’re a shoo-in for R&D-slash-IT.”

  “Ah…”

  “Come on, I’ll introduce you.”

  Raita ushered her through the hallways, briefly showcasing other important parts such as a mess hall that could house an Olympic pool, military camp-style dormitories, bathrooms straight out of a nuclear holocaust, and a shared multi-religion prayer room that doubled as the breastfeeding area.

  Finally, they reached the tech department.

  A couple of cyberpunks lazed on a couch and on the floor around an old television set showing the news. Again, it was the old-school type of TV.

  Raita did the circuit, greeting each individual with a personalized secret handshake.

  “Any recruits today, Rai?” said one girl, who looked barely out of high school.

  “Just the one.” Raita gestured to Mako

  Everyone noticed her for the first time.

  “I think you made a mistake,” said an older man. “What’s this theta doing here?”

  “Hey, don’t judge a car by its paint job.” Raita settled into a bean bag. “Gang, meet the latest member of your team.”

  “’Sup,” said one of the bros, raising his fist.

  “Um… right back at ya.” Mako awkwardly fist-bumped him and each of the others.

  As she passed through the room, her eyes caught the TV. The news flashed several images of the military bots surrounding the Day City gates. But someone changed the channel.

  “Hey, I was watching that,” said one of the punks.

  “What’s there to watch?” said the geezer, holding the remote. “It’s the same news as always. Nothing changes.”

  “Don’t let Maricel hear you talking like that,” Raita said. “She’ll be all over your hide.”

  The guy shrugged in answer.

  Mako sidled next to Raita. “Who’s Maricel?”

  “The boss. You’ll meet her later.”

  “And Anand…?”

  “Him? He’s been down there all day.” The IT girl jabbed a thumb at the door behind her. “He thinks break time is a social construct.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  Raita hopped off her seat. “Construct or not, let’s go say hi.”

  They went out the back and down a decrepit stairway, dim lamps flickering overhead. Mako had been so focused on her steps that when she reached the bottom and looked up, she could barely register what she was staring at.

  From neon gaming setups to 90s retro desktops, computers of every shape and variety populated the basement, screens blinking, fans whirring. Mako half expected to see an Apple II somewhere, or hell, maybe even some vacuum tubes. Amongst the running computers were all manner of gadgetry and tech, from prosthetics and cyberware, to oscilloscopes and geiger counters, to 3d printers and a backup gasoline generator. Wires snaked over the floor and crawled up to the ceiling, where pipes crisscrossed like a nostalgic screen saver.

  Typing away on a keyboard in one corner of the basement was a man of about 30, with dark-ish skin, curly hair, and wiry glasses. He’d gotten thin and misshaven in the several weeks since Mako last saw him.

  “Got a newbie for you,” Raita said.

  Anand didn’t look up from the screen. “Send them my condolences.”

  “I think you might like this one.”

  “Unless it’s Nakamoto Satoshi themself, I’m not interested.”

  “I don’t know who that is, but it’s definitely the next best thing.”

  Mako looked over Anand’s shoulder at his code. “You forgot to allocate some memory for that.”

  “I appreciate the tip, but no one likes a—” His eyes made contact with hers through the reflection on his monitor. He spun on his gaming chair. “Well, if it isn’t miss science for science’s sake.”

  “Good to see too.”

  “I take it Robo Sapiens worked out?”

  “It did. It just worked a little too well.”

  Raita put an arm around Mako’s shoulders and placed her other hand on Anand’s backrest. “Can’t believe the gang’s back together. Just like old times, right?”

  “Yeah, sure...” Mako’s eyes were still on the code. She had her suspicions about what all the servers were for, and now she knew for sure. “Don’t tell me you guys are doing what I think you’re doing.”

  “Alright then, I won’t tell you.” Anand kicked back and folded his arms behind his head.

  Mako scrutinized the fiber optics tangling over the floor and into the walls. “You guys can’t have laid it out by yourselves without the authorities catching on.”

  “That’s the thing. It was the authorities that started it a few regimes ago when they wanted a sovereign intranet. They already laid out all the groundwork, but the project never went anywhere.”

  Raita said, “Just like the subway system, or the tidal power plant, or the space program, or the—”

  “I got the point,” Mako said. “But what about those computers upstairs?”

  “Oh, those? You were looking at our very own Communet^TM.”

  “Commu— ah, forget it.”

  “It’s our local network. They’re connected through these. ” Anand tapped an Ethernet cable sticking out of his system unit. “Though we can still connect our network to the internet, albeit with limits.” He gestured to a thick bundle of fiber optics that shot out from his system and into a hole in the wall.

  If Mako wasn’t mistaken, that connection was an undersea cable, which meant their network bypassed the local internet service providers altogether. No wonder they hadn’t gotten caught yet. They weren’t just diving into the deep web; they had created an entirely separate inner sea with its own protocols and connected it via a strait to the wider internet ocean.

  And here she thought this was just some happy little cyberpunk gang. But now she knew they meant business. Literally and figuratively.

  “What do you use for wireless comms, beepers?” Mako asked.

  “Well, yeah. But we also have these.” Raita took out a metal device that looked like a Game Boy and an iPad had a baby. She handed it to Mako, then took out a typical smartphone. “But we still use regular social media for our publicity campaigns.”

  Publicity campaigns. Of course, they had publicity campaigns.

  Mako took it all back. It was no less than a miracle they hadn’t gotten caught yet. Maybe the previous government really was that inefficient and incompetent.

  Mako fiddled with the device in her hand. “How long have you been working on all this?”

  “I don’t know, a year maybe,” Anand said.

  “But you had your own projects with MegaCorp. Unless…”

  Raita smiled. “That’s right. Anand here’s been our very own double agent, taking the corpos apart from the inside.”

  “You don’t mean… the weapons project!”

  “You got it,” Anand said. “Those missiles and drones were guided all right — guided by us. That was the plan until someone diverted MegaCorp’s resources to other projects.”

  “How was I supposed to know the robots would gain racial consciousness?”

  “It doesn’t matter now.” Raita put a hand on Mako’s shoulder again and the other on Anand’s arm. “What’s important is what we do next. Besides, we’ve got other plans.”

  Anand turned back to his screen. “Let’s see what Maricel thinks when she gets back.”

  “This boss of yours, where is she?” Mako asked.

  “She’s been overseas the past few days. Call it a business trip. They should be back by tomorrow.”

  “But first,” Raita said, “why don’t we get you settled into your accommodations. If you’re still up for it, that is.

  Mako hadn’t put any thought into it yet, but it’s not like she was swimming in job offers.

  Raita could see her mulling it over. “Don’t sweat it. You can give us your answer by tomorrow.”

  Ah, tomorrow. Mako hadn’t even wrapped her head around yesterday yet, much less this afternoon. One thing’s for sure, if she signed with this Communist Inc, then at least she’d have a roof over her head and something to eat.

  What could go wrong?