Maggy sits next to Hannah on the dirty sofa. She figured out the trick with the chips, or, let’s say, the location and surveillance implants, at a funeral. More precisely her grandmother’s funeral. More precisely, when her grandmother, who was only fifty, was beaten up by Nazis, and it went like this. Maggy was on the way to a food pantry with her grandmother. That should make it apparent that the pair’s financial prospects were negligible. Maggy’s mother had taken off for India a few years before. “Don’t be so egotistical,” Maggy’s mother had said to her weeping daughter. “I have to take this path for myself; it’ll be useful for you, too, to be able to learn from my experiences later.” With that she left, and Maggy moved in with her grandmother in a one-and-a-half-room flat in the south of the city. Her mother now lived in a commune on the beach. Pumped full of hallucinogenic drugs all day, which makes the colors look amazing, and the ocean, man. The ocean. Such a cool setup, and best of all reality just disappears.

The reality

Is that the commune is on the edge of an emergent Indian IT city, the residents of which despise the filthy tourists who take drugs, fuck, and piss in the bushes. Maggy’s mother is extremely malnourished, tanned to leather by the sun, and she laughs a lot. Including at the five locals who surround her and toss her around like a doll until she collapses, then kill her with a rock. They didn’t even want to fuck the filthy woman.

But back to the grandmother and the food pantry. You could almost call it a family curse, because when Maggy and her grandmother were on their way to the food pantry, they were surrounded by some Nazis, who shoved her grandmother to the ground and then stomped her with their boots. The result was severe brain damage and her demise after a few weeks in a coma. And it’s strange—that on the one hand the death penalty had been reintroduced and negative points were given out for fistfights, quarreling with the neighbors, and even giving the middle finger, but on the other, violence against the poor entailed no consequences whatsoever for the attackers. But back to the point. At the funeral, Maggy noticed that chips weren’t removed from the deceased. They also weren’t voided or erased. Nothing happened, which might have something to do with the excessive demands on IT personnel. Which meant there’s nothing more to do than remove chips from the deceased, which is relatively easy, as the dead are of no consequence for capital growth, which is evident in the custody of the dead, in the laughable locks on morgues, in the fact that morgues are not even equipped with surveillance cameras.

The only thing you need to get hold of chips are a blade, bodies, and patience.