Читать книгу Tuesday Falling - S. Williams - Страница 16

It’s not hard to hack a computer. Anyone who says differently is a liar. It’s like lock-picking, or face-reading: all you need is the right teacher, and the correct motivation. All these films showing nerdy kids sitting around watching Star Trek, and Quantum Geek, and hacking into NASA or whatever, it’s just bollocks. Just another way to bully the weirdies. Box them in. Make them this. Make them that. Make them sit alone in the dark.

Mind you, I like sitting alone in the dark. It means nobody else is there.

Most of the tube stations have Wi-Fi now, including Holborn, so all I had to do to get a signal was set up a booster along the running tunnel between there and the British Museum Station. It’s not hard. There are so many redundant cables and junction boxes down here that finding a power source was easy, and disguising it unnecessary. The walls look like something out of Alien, all rubber-coated armoured cable and danger signs. No one can tell what belongs to what, down here. That’s why they never remove anything. Pull the wrong thing out and a train stops moving. Or all the lights go out. Something awful might happen, so leave it alone; that’s the thought process.

Works for me.

I’ve made my crib in the part of the station that was used as an air-raid shelter, the deepest part of the structure. It’s still got the ‘Dig for Britain’ posters on the walls. I’ve got fairy lights hanging from the ceiling, a camp bed, a laptop with remote speakers, and a rail for my clothes. There’s still a working toilet in the main part of the station, although I have to fill it with water from a stand-pipe in the running tunnel. Really, It’s more home-y than home ever was.

I’ve got other cribs in other stations for other things, scattered all across London … I don’t like to have all my eggs in one basket in case one of them breaks.

There’s three ways out of this crib, so I feel OK. Any less and I start getting jittery. I set the alarms, tune the laptop to the World Service, and lie down in my cot. I stare at the fairy lights sparkling above me, their little twinklings reflected in the millions of tiny dust particles that are no doubt poisoning my lungs. The computer is all news speak. Fucked-up country this. Fucked up climate that. All happening in a world I’m so separate from, it might as well be made up. I tune out and just lie here, looking at the tiny porcelain tiles that make up the ceiling. Honestly, it must have taken them years to fit all those bricks in. Why did they do it? Why did they make the bricks so small? And where did they make them? I can’t think of an answer so I stop thinking about it, and just lie here, breathing in and out.

Like I’m alive.

That’s about it really.

Lights out. Night-night.