My Clocking In System

Chapter 3: Claim

"Go on, then," Danny said. "Claim it."

And nothing happened.

He sat on the scooter in the rain, waiting, feeling more foolish by the second. The screen went back to his home screen. The time read 23:47. The cracked corner. The photo of nothing he had never changed.

"Course," he said.

The empty laugh again. It fit. Talking to a virus on a wet street at half eleven, waiting for it to make him rich.

He turned the phone dark, and his stomach turned over loudly enough to hear, and that was the thing that finally moved him, not the app, not the cold, just the simple animal fact that he had not eaten since the morning, and the morning had been two eggs and the last of the milk, seventeen hours ago.

There was a Tesco Express on the corner with the lights still on. He had twenty-seven pounds.

A meal deal was three twenty-five and it would carry him to tomorrow, and he could find out something while he was at it. The card declining at the petrol station had been his money.

If he was going to believe a word of what just happened on that screen, he wanted to watch real money leave his account on something he could hold.

He went in, out of the sleet, into the flat white light and the hum of the fridges. Cheapest sandwich, the egg and cress nobody wanted.

A packet of crisps. The bottle of water, because the fizzy drink was the same price and water lasted longer. He took it to the till, tapped the backup card, and watched the little screen.

Approved. Twenty-three pounds and change left to his name.

Real money, real sandwich, real twenty-three pounds. Whatever he had seen on the phone, the world was still the world, and he almost felt steadier for it. He picked up the bag.

His phone buzzed.

Not a text. The screen had lit itself, the dark square with the gold line open again, the words writing themselves slow and patient as before.

[ Before your reward, a choice. ]

[ The host requires transport. ]

[ Select one. ]

And underneath, two pictures. Not stock photos. Clean little renders, turning slowly, the way cars turn on a showroom website.

A Tesla. White, low, the kind of car that slid past him on the King’s Road driven by people who did not see him.

And a Vespa. Pale green.

The proper kind, the one that sat in the window of the shop three doors down from this very Tesco with a price Danny had read exactly once and then made himself stop reading, because it was a year of saving he did not have for a bike he wanted and could not justify.

"You all right there?" The girl at the till, eyeing him standing frozen by the lottery stand.

"Yeah. Sorry." He stepped aside.

It was a game. It had to be a game.

The smart thing was to put the phone away and eat his sandwich. But it had answered him on the street twice, and if it was a game then he would play it the way you played a rigged game, like a man who already knew it was rigged.

He looked at the Tesla, and the part of his brain that worked angles for a living got there before the part that wanted nice things.

A Tesla was a question on wheels. A bloke from Pembury in a Tesla got stopped, talked about, noticed, and being noticed was how you lost things.

And past all that, the simple sums: a Tesla had to be charged, and charging meant a wallbox he did not have at a flat that was not his, or hours at a public point he did not have time to sit through, and money for the electric on top.

A courier did sixty drops a day. He did not have a spare half-hour to babysit a battery, and he did not have the spare money either. A Tesla was a rich man’s toy, and Danny was a working man with no time and no plug.

The Vespa was nobody’s business. A courier had a scooter.

A courier had always had a scooter. It sipped petrol, it parked anywhere, nobody looked at it twice, and he had wanted that exact one for two years and watched it sit in the window because four grand might as well have been four million.

"The Vespa," he said, half to himself, expecting nothing.

The pictures vanished. The Tesla gone like it had never been. The words came back.

[ An interesting choice. ]

[ Most would select the car. ]

[ The host selects the bike no one will look at, over the car everyone would. ]

[ That is wisdom. The Concierge did not expect it of you. ]

"Yeah, well." He did not know why he was answering. "Don’t get excited. It’s a picture of a scooter on a free app. I’ve not exactly got it, have I."

[ It is in the residents’ garage beneath your block. ]

[ Bay nineteen. Pembury House. ]

Danny went still.

He had not told it that.

He had said a few words on a street and chosen a scooter off a screen, and it knew his block, knew there was a garage, knew the bay he had given up the lease on two years ago when he could not make the rent and the rent both.

The crisps creased in his fist.

"How do you know where I live... ?" he said, low, and the warmth of the shop felt suddenly thin. He looked at the dark window, the parked cars, half expecting someone in one of them to be looking back.

"Is someone watching me. Because that’s not funny. That’s a proper not-funny thing to do to a person."

The phone did not answer that. It gave him something worse.

[ A further reward. ]

[ £10,000 deposited. ]

A second later, before he could read it twice, the banner slid down over everything else.

Ding!

Gmail Notification.

HSBC: A payment of £10,000.00 has been received.

Danny stood in the corner of a Tesco Express with a meal deal in one hand and his life going strange in the other, and opened his banking app, because the email could be faked and the app could be faked but he needed to see it in the one place that had never once lied to him.

The small wheel in the top corner turned. Turned as the app refreshed itself.

£10,023.18.

He laughed, wrong, too loud, and the girl glanced over.

He turned to the window so she would not see his face, because his face was doing something he could not hold, somewhere between a grin and crying, his eyes stinging. He pressed his knuckles to his mouth.

Ten thousand pounds. This morning he had eaten two eggs because it was the eggs or the milk and not both.

He had ridden four hours in the sleet, been called a liar by a man in a dressing gown, and watched his card decline in front of a queue.

And now there were ten thousand pounds in the app, the one place that did not lie, and they did not vanish when he refreshed it, and not the second time, and not the third.

"Okay," he whispered. "Okay. Okay."

Half of him wanted to sit down on the Tesco floor.

The other half, the older half, the one that had never been allowed to want anything in peace, was already going what’s the catch, what does it want, nothing is free, and watching the window for whoever knew his address.

"Right," he said to the phone, voice only shaking a little. "Ten grand. Lovely. Cheers. But the second you ask me for a card number, or a fee, or anything, you’re gone. First weird thing, I’ll uninstall you."

[ You have already tried to uninstall the Concierge. ]

[ Three times. ]

Danny shut his mouth.

He nearly missed the third notification under it, smaller, plainer, the kind he actually knew.

Ding! Another Gmail Notification.

Deliveroo: Today’s earnings, £64.40. Paid to your account.

His shift. Eleven hours, six boroughs, the sleet, the lot, minus the Kensington job that Halloran had got marked refused. Sixty-four pounds and forty pence for a day that had taken everything he had.

He had earned sixty-four pounds and the system had handed him ten thousand for walking through one door, and the two numbers sat side by side on his screen and told him, more plainly than anything else had, exactly how the world had been priced against him his whole life.

He put the phone away. Took it out again, because not looking was worse. Then he made himself put it away properly and ride.

The rusted PCX coughed twice and caught on the third try, the way it always did, because the Vespa was a picture on a phone and this was still the bike he actually owned. He pulled out onto the Battersea backstreets, the rain down to a fine drift now, his soaked jeans gone cold and stiff against the seat.

At the lights by the railway bridge a knot of men spilled out of the Feathers, last orders done, loud with it.

One of them, big, red-faced, a Saints scarf on though the Saints were nowhere near London, clocked Danny on the scooter and decided he was the night’s entertainment.

"Oi! Oi, mate!" He swayed off the curb, grinning, arms wide.

"That a hairdryer? You riding a hairdryer? Get a proper bike, you nonce!"

His mates wheezed behind him.

"My nan’s got more cc than that!"