All The Lonely People - David Owen Page 0,40

had the chance. ‘It doesn’t matter, right? We’re still good to go next week without him.’

Next week. Tinker had talked about it in one of her latest videos. WonderVerse comic convention was at a venue across town, and she was speaking on Tuesday’s headline panel about online abuse of women.

‘Females like Tinker are trying to destroy men,’ shouted Tru, thumping the roof of the car. ‘And all these little boys think they’re alpha because they shitpost on message boards. Nobody is doing anything. You think Niko Denton’s going to be impressed if we hit her social media with dank memes? Or a stupid prank?’

Luke and Justin shook their head like chastised choir boys.

‘We can follow her every move – attention whore makes it too easy.’ He waved his phone at them. ‘It’s our duty to take action.’

Whatever they were planning, it was more than a prank. Kat had heard this kind of rhetoric before, though usually hidden behind anonymous Twitter accounts. If it spilled into the real world, there was no telling the damage it could do.

‘I don’t need to worry about your mate, do I?’ said Tru, locking up the car.

‘No, no, definitely not,’ said Luke, a little too quickly. ‘He’s not our mate. And he’s too much of a pussy to tell anybody. He doesn’t even know anything, anyway!’

Kat watched Tru lean down to hide the car keys inside the front wheel arch. Then he opened the garage door again. ‘I’ll be in touch tonight,’ he said.

Luke and Justin hurried away down the gravel track, while Tru carefully locked up the garage before returning to the road. Kat lingered until he was gone.

The promise of an attack on Tinker felt like another attack against her. She hadn’t fought back before, but she could now.

She laughed. It was almost perverse that the fade was allowing her to be more herself than she ever had been before it. She had always wanted to make a difference, to stand up for what she believed in, but never had the confidence. The fade gave her that.

‘I won’t let you get away with this,’ she said, scooping up a handful of the sand-coloured gravel and dropping it into her pocket. Although she deepened her voice like a wannabe hero, she knew in her heart that it was true.

15

Always Punch Nazis

There was still some time to kill before Kat was due to meet Safa, so she went home to do a little research.

First, she emptied the gravel from her pocket onto the desk, scooping it into a neat heap that would be difficult for anybody to miss. Then she dialled 999.

‘Which service do you require?’

‘Police,’ she said.

Silence, and then again. ‘Which service do you require?’

‘They’re turning my car into Swiss cheese!’ Kat shouted. ‘I need back up, now goddammit now!’

The call disconnected. As she had suspected, the automatic operator, like everybody else on this stupid planet, couldn’t hear her. She’d have to figure this one out by herself.

Next, she went online and looked up TrumourPixel. His Twitter account came up first, and Kat couldn’t help but laugh. His profile picture was him drawn as an anime character, muscles bulging out of a vest, wielding an axe bigger than his body. It was a well-worn tradition in troll accounts: anime avatars, or failing that no image at all. Certainly few of them were brave enough to reveal their true face.

She had seen his profile before, when he released the attack video against her. It had seemed innocent enough, as it did now – mostly links to his videos, screenshots from games, updates on what he was eating. There were only a few telltale signs: retweets from gaming outlets owned by right-wing media; an article about it being hypocritical to punch Nazis; frequent use of the green frog emoji.

‘Pepe the fucking Frog,’ Kat muttered to herself. It was hard to think of anything she hated more than the cartoon frog appropriated as a meme for Internet trolls and bigots.

She decided to delve deeper and check who he was following. Straight away she found more extreme accounts. Some were the usual suspects: prominent personalities who peddled hate while posing as film reviewers or video game streamers, always studiously avoiding saying anything too inflammatory. Others had blatant fascist imagery as profile pictures.

‘Nazis,’ Kat muttered. ‘I hate those guys.’

She clicked one and read its profile.

Fighting for the #truth against #whitegenocide. #AllLivesMatter #FeminismIsCancer #IslamIsCancer #Brexit #StandUpandFight. Finished with raised fist and English flag emojis. The account reposted news from thoroughly