The old clubhouse had been in the cellar of a building in Tower Hamlets. The building is gone now. The whole thing went down like this: Chinese investors had bought the extraction rights for some Scottish oil and natural gas. In order to transport these resources, a subterranean pipeline was to be built. The Chinese had slightly modified the plans of Elon Musk’s hyperloop. How. Only they knew. Gas, oil, and passengers were to be carried in seconds from the north to a newly built port at Canvey Island. That was the concept, until that Thursday at about quarter past noon when substantial parts of the tunnel imploded. Twenty-three people lost their lives—approximately. Two hundred buildings were sucked into the abyss. Which entailed only moderate financial losses because the pipeline route ran for the most part under social housing projects. So much for the disappeared hacker space of the young people who, because of a lack of acquaintances in 1.0 life, call themselves “the Friends.” The Friends have established rules for membership and talked a lot while looking at the ground to live up to their designation as Asperger-afflicted nerds. They exchanged notes about programming languages, their devices, servers, racks, cryptography, and soldering irons, and they were so excited, indeed still are, that there were other people like them. Outsiders who, because their sense of outsiderdom was so strong, felt a calling to fight for all outsiders. They’d found a mission that was bigger than themselves. Young people who stutter, who are incapable of looking others in the eyes, who have no connection to other sorts of people because none of them have a clue what other sorts of people talk about. Concerning the 20 million IP addresses that had been blocked by the government in the last few months. “WTF is an IP address,” they would ask, the normal people, with blank looks.

The Friends. Who now sit around an old factory celebrating the collapse of the financial system, because if not for the country’s market restructuring, this area here would long since have been developed into condos and organic cafés and yoga studios. They’d found it in the course of a targeted search. Very much like the climate mission GRACE, which supposedly measures the earth’s gravitational fields, primarily looking for disappearing water resources so that Western military forces can be deployed to places in the global south in order to keep people from fleeing drought-prone areas. Similarly, the Friends had looked for interesting data on the cloud from the most popular fitness tracing app. And found this pearl on the edge of the city. Not a soul jogged here. No heat cluster, no network. Meaning: there were no surveillance cameras here. Meaning: there was nothing here. No animals, no drones. No drones linked to robot dogs. Nice neighborhood.

MI5 PIET

Chokes on a sip of pinot noir.

THE FRIENDS