“Don’t think too much about this dude. She’s just a girl. An ambitious one,” Parami tried to console Rahul.
Rahul’s voice cracked. “She really liked me.”
Parami rolled his eyes. He spoke into his headset calmly. “Rahul. Please shape up. We have much work to do”.
Parami hung up and slinked back in his gamer chair with a deep sigh.
Although he was confined to this dark room, Parami played an important role in the political upheaval happening outside. Armed with a supercomputer and information streams, his realm of work is that of the ultimate go-between.
Parami looked around his dark abode. A faint neon light bathed a workbench full of circuits and little gadgets to his right. Being a computer whiz kid sure had its perks. His crypto-mining rig hummed gently in a corner in the dark. All that ethereum was helping him make big purchases and him sharing the household expenses had gotten his mum off his back on the skyrocketing electric bill.
Parami looked flashed a glance at three monitors on his desk. One was for communication, one for news stream and the one in the middle was all code; the language of computers. For the average person this code was a bunch of numbers and letters, but for Parami, this had been his parlance since he was just eight. At ten he was hacking into CCTV cameras and by eleven he was hacking into banks. He got his first job at thirteen after the government caught him hacking into classified files and gave him a job as a security analyst because he was just too good to be sent to jail.
The coms-monitor pinged with a message.
It was the mysterious ‘Shani’
Till now Parami couldn’t trace Shani’s origins but with all the money that had been depositing in his bank account and the untraceable jpeg of his mother taken through a sniper’s sights, he had stopped asking too many questions.
‘What’s with the love triangle?’ Shani typed.
‘Just some stupid drama’. Parami typed back.
‘This is no drama. Rahul, Sulo and Amanda are vital components in our plans. Sulo and Amanda have their separate handlers but Rahul is under your purview. Shape him up and get him back on track’.
‘What are your plans with Sulo. He’s getting pretty famous’. Parami asked curiously.
‘You don’t need to worry about a thing…’
And Shani was gone.
Parami threw his arms up in surrender and sighed. “Who is this guy?” he muttered under his breath.
Then there was a knock on the door and Parami jumped.
“Honey, are you coming downstairs for tea?” a voice asked.
“In a little bit ma,” he hollered back.
The news screen started scrolling.
“Riot Police lead brutal charge against protest occupation”.
Parami clicked the headline and it opened a new tab.
Then the video started playing. Dark figures started materialising out of a white cloud. The sounds were frantic. An old lady lay motionless on the road. The dark figures kept advancing. A voice half coughing started to speak.
“You animals! You call yourselves Police and beat up old grandmas”.
A hail of stones made contact with riot shields and all hell broke loose.
‘Embassies caution the Government to act with restraint.’
A political pundit started ranting and raving, calling the authorities “Fascists” and “Nazis”.
Then there was a video clip generating hundreds of likes by the second. It was Sulo in the middle of the crowd with a loudspeaker calling out the authorities on abuses. He was captivating.
“Guess they found a winner here,” Parami chuckled and went downstairs for tea.
