10
Malcolm stared at the bubbles racing to the top of his lager as if he’d never seen them before, like a curious cat watching a fly. He was sat with Tom in the corner of ‘The Silver Wheels’, onto his third pint of lager. It didn’t help bring him closer to any answers. It didn’t help with anything, but he needed to do something, and to speak to someone.
Tom had listened, had understood, but could not give any explanation for his predicament. He just sipped his bitter, feeling rather helpless.
“I can’t just do nothing,” said Malcolm. “Or else I’ll never know. Anyway, enough about me. What about you? What have you been up to? Where have you been hacking now?”. Tom looked around him, deciding whether or not he was in earshot of anybody else. The pub was approximately half full, and there was sufficient noise for Tom to keep his voice heard by Malcolm alone.
“If I tell you, you’ve got to promise not to breathe a word”.
“I’ve got quite enough to worry about, thank you. I hardly think that whatever you’re up to will stop me finding out why my Dad went mental”. Tom was quiet for a few moments, then leaned in closer to Malcolm.
“My source of income is fine. No detections. Well, did you know that there is a new company opening up just off the M53. Ryvak centre for medical research?’. Malcolm shrugged.
“You’re not going to hack into them?” he said, his tone rather loud. Tom’s eyes became shifty, his face turned a light scarlet, and he quickly scanned the pub for anybody who might have heard. Nobody had.
“Shhh!” he said, looking back. “Keep your voice down”.
“Come on, be realistic,” said Malcolm, “You can’t steal money from them. It’s like stealing from a charity”. Tom shook his head.
“No. It’s not. They’re going to experiment on animals, and use them for nothing that can’t be done without them. Why can’t they experiment on prisoners or volunteers? ‘cos that’s too much like common sense”.
“I thought they stopped testing cosmetics. Isn’t that banned now?”
“You think they’re going to stop that if it makes a profit? They test on the voiceless. Animals cannot protest, say no, tell the scientists to fuck off and stick the needles in their throats. You think they care about animals? Well trust me, I guarantee that they don’t.
They’re subjects. Objects to be probed and examined. Cannon fodder. Barcodes. Statistics. I don’t need to go anywhere near the place to bring it crashing down”.
“Crashing down?”.
“Well not literally. I mean they’ll start losing money, but I won’t be taking it. It will actually be going nowhere”.
“What do you mean?”
“I’ll tell you when I start doing it”.
“How tempting is it to just go there and burn it down?” Malcolm asked.
“Very,” Tom said. “It’s tempting to just go there with a machine gun, walk around the place killing everyone, rescue the animals, then burn the damn place down so it can’t be used again. Still, what I intend to do will have a similar effect, but no-one will die. No animals should come to any harm, ‘cos harm is exactly what they will come to if they go in there. So I’m going to harm them right where it hurts the most”. There was a few moments silence.
“I think it’s my round,” he said, standing up.