The weekend had been spent in hasty, quiet, covert observations and conversations. On the Sunday night, Nicole gathered in a copse on the outskirts of town with Charlotte Madison, Beatrice Barthel, and Miriam Nystrom.

All four of the young women wore copious amounts of Mandatum blue, as much out of a desire for street camouflage as anything else. Otherwise, they had one thing in common; they weren’t happy about it.

Charlotte had not only hated the way her parents had bought into the Mandatum offer from the start but had been confident for almost as long that something else had to be suspicious about it. It wasn’t like her mom and dad to listen to others, they’d spent years talking about doing it their way, and they’d converted across so quickly that, unlike Tammy’s slow fall, it had roused Charlotte’s suspicions from the start.

Neither Charlotte nor Nicole were entirely clear on why Charlotte had been so little affected afterwards. A few years older than the others, Beatrice, by contrast, had seemed to be one of the earliest adopters of the Mandatum blue; it had turned out, however, that this had been simply an accident of when she’d dropped by Rocky Wear looking to update her wardrobe.

She was known for spending a good chunk of her time outside town limits on the mountain paths that were sometimes the only sign of human activity in the higher parts. Beatrice spent a lot of time with her easel up there, and had been doing so even more than usual as, in her words, Bankhaven had “gone corpo-crazy”.

Miriam, like her mom, had been slower to adapt to the new corporate entity in their midst. As Nicole had found out on Saturday, she and her mom had both thought the whole thing was ridiculous. Their focus had been elsewhere.

“What that doesn’t explain,” Nicole was saying, as they all met as a group, “is how you guys avoided it. Now, I didn’t - don’t worry!” She almost barked that last out in her haste to reassure the others. “I’m free now, I promise. I had a… seeing what happened to your mom was a shock to the system,” she said apologetically. “It woke me up. And honestly it was only after I woke up that I realised that things, you know, had changed.”

She looked around them all. “But Charlotte, Miriam, you just don’t seem as affected as most. And Beatrice, it almost feels like you haven’t been affected at all.” Which was true; of course she must have been, they all had, but if not for that unavoidable, obvious fact, Nicole would have assumed Beatrice had escaped the whole thing. Not only had her hobbies and interests not changed but they weren’t even that monetisable. “If we’re going to do anything, we need to understand that.”

The other three young women nodded. Everyone had their own family in Bankhaven. Nobody considered just leaving the town as an option.

“It seems to me,” Miriam said, “that there has to be some common factor we’ve avoided, or been exposed to less. And if that’s right we can use you as a control factor, Nicole.” She hesitated, flushing, as she realised what she’d just said. “I mean-”

“Science control, not town control,” Charlotte interrupted. “We get it.” Miriam nodded gratefully to her.

Beatrice unslung the backpack she always wore and let it thud down onto the soil in front of her. “Okay,” she said. “Let’s start comparing notes.” She pulled a large tablet out of her back and powered it up, her attention on the device as she opened the Notes app. When she looked up at the other three, she realised they were all staring at her.

“What?”

“That’s not an M-Phone,” Charlotte said. “But it’s working.”

Beatrice looked down at her tablet again, then up at the others. “Yes,” she said. “Why wouldn’t it be?”

“Because they all shut down,” Nicole said. “And they haven’t started back up.”

“When?”

“Oh, shit,” Charlotte said. “Just a couple of days before everything started to go weird. And in the meantime…”

“In the meantime, Mandatum gave everyone a complimentary M-Phone,” Nicole said. “As an apology for doing something that messed with their phones, and to persuade us not to get angry in public. Didn’t you get one?”

“I forgot I had it, to be honest. I just left it in the box,” Beatrice said disinterestedly. “What does this have to do with anything?”

“That’s got to be how they’re doing this,” Miriam agreed firmly. “Mom and me, we’ve always had screen-free evenings to spend time together. I always hated it but that must be what saved us.”

“How would you even do that?” Charlotte asked. “And why does your tablet still work?”

There was a long moment of silence as they considered the question. “When did it start working again?” Miriam asked, and Beatrice shrugged.

“It’s never not worked.”

“How about your phone?”

“Same.” She pulled it out of her pocket, tapped the power button, turned it so they could see the glowing screen. It was honestly strange to the others to see a model that wasn’t an M-Phone at this point.

“Oh, shit,” Nicole said. “I bet I know what happened.” She looked directly at Beatrice. “I bet if we could remember when it happened, you’d have been up in the mountains when the phones went down. Yours just never got hit.”

“I think you’ve got it,” Charlotte agreed. “And I just don’t time to use mine much. I must have some of the stuff they’ve sent rattling round in my head, and it just hasn’t broken through yet. Like you,” she said to Miriam, who nodded.

Nicole, Charlotte, and Miriam were all wearing tops with plunging necklines, their chests on clear display. It occurred to none of them that their fashion sense had significantly changed in the previous months.

“So they shut down the phones,” Nicole summarised. “And the M-Phones do something.”

“There must be some signal.”

“Right.” She nodded. “And it’ll be coming from the Maple facility.”

“Can we be sure of that?” Miriam asked. Mandatum had an effective presence over most of the town.

“I think so,” she said. “Think about it - when all this started, that’s all they had, and something powerful enough to overrule cell towers has to be big. There’s no point moving it when they still have that.”

“So what do we do?”

There was a long silence as they all considered the question.

“Errol Allen’s in charge, right?” Charlotte said in the end, breaking the silence. Nicole nodded.

“And it’s a family business,” she continued, oblivious to Nicole’s shudder of distaste as she remembered the Debbie video. “So they would want him to be in overall control.”

“Right.”

“He doesn’t strike me as the technical type,” she continued.

“If his son’s any indication, he’s an idiot,” Miriam put in hotly. Nicole laughed, and was startled at herself for it; she had been so tense. Now all of them were smiling, quiet little shy smiles of amusement and relief.

They looked around their circle, making eye contact one by one. Nicole felt a growing confidence among them.

They could do this.

“I mean, sure,” Charlotte picked up her thread. “But the point is, he won’t be messing around with computer code. Dad’s old till had some weird software he had to configure every time we changed the menu but the new one, someone else does that and you just push buttons.”

Nicole got it at last. “So somewhere, there’s a control system where you can just make it work.”

“Exactly. We just need to figure out where.”

“It could be an app,” Beatrice pointed out. “Carry it around on your phone, he’d always have access.”

Nicole shook her head. “I don’t think so,” she said. “At least not to start with. They told us the M-Phones were a gift but our old phones would turn on again in the end, right?”

“Right.”

“But we know what they wanted now. They needed us to keep using those phones. So it wouldn’t just be easier to brick them completely, it’d also prevent us from going back to them.”

“What’s that got to do with this not being an app?”

“Safer not to have their phones live when they run that. So you do it from a computer physically plugged into your broadcast system. And I bet the Maple facility’s shielded. Beatrice was outside range, the Mandatum employees had theirs protected by being in the office.”

They considered the idea for a few moments. It was Miriam who voiced the one concern they all shared.

“I don’t like it,” she said. “Not the idea, like, I think you’re probably right. I don’t like that we can’t test it.”

“This is corpo culture,” Beatrice answered. “The simplest solution is the one they’ll go with. Especially when it’s the cheapest.”

“Oh,” Charlotte said, “I don’t think corporations are as bad as this usually-”

“Mandatum’s figured out a way to get away with it first,” Beatrice said flatly. “You think they wouldn’t if they could?”

They considered the idea silently for a while. A company town full of people who would spend company wages on company products. Give back to the company. Become - Nicole shivered at the idea again - company ‘broodmares’ growing the family. Growing shareholder value.

If Bankhaven went that way, it seemed like a sure bet that Mandatum would find another isolated town and repeat the experiment. Maybe on a bigger scale. And then bigger, and better, unless some other company stole a march on them.

It didn’t bear thinking about.

“There won’t be an undo button,” Miriam said.

“No, of course not. But if it’s set up so Errol Allen can use it without fucking up, there’s got to be a slot where he can write in the message he wants them to absorb,” Charlotte answered. “So we just need to find the input and tell them…” She trailed off, unsure how to express it.

“Tell them to become aware of how fucked up everything is,” Beatrice said.

Charlotte gave her a grateful smile. “I like you,” she said. “How come I never realised?”

“Because I’m only in Bankhaven when I have to be,” Beatrice answered honestly. “I don’t like people. Crowds, I mean. So I avoid them. And if there are people in those crowds I might like…” She shrugged. “It’s a sacrifice I have to make.”

Charlotte looked unsatisfied and as if she wanted to argue with that, and Nicole decided to cut that off before it could be a problem. “I’ve got my security credentials,” she said. “They want to encourage us in corporate ways. That means early starts, late nights, working weekends.

“Honestly I think they’re monitoring how much voluntary unpaid overtime we all put on ourselves while we try and make a good impression.”

“I read somewhere,” Miriam said, “that it’s not like that with salaries most other places. Like, you might work longer than normal but it’s not expected.”

“Fucked up either way,” Beatrice answered.

Nicole had already stood up. “I’m going to go take a look,” she said. “Snoop around. See what I can see, you know?”

“Are you sure? Like you said, some people work weekends.”

“Less of them, though,” Nicole said. “And they probably pay attention to who else is there less. I mean, we’re all brainwashed anyway, so why bother anyhow?”

Grudgingly, the others nodded a concession to this point.

“Wish me luck,” Nicole muttered as she left.

*

The Maple Street facility was quieter that evening than Nicole had expected it to be. She recognised most of the cars in the parking lot, too; all locals. The technicians imported from out of town - the ones who must be the brains behind the brainwashing systems in the phones - were away from the operation.

Nicole breathed easier on realising that. She nodded politely to Joe Mac as she turned into the lot - he was working security now, and looked surprisingly cheerful about it - and crossed the lot at a tiptoe before realising that was only going to make her seem more suspicious. At the door she forced a smile back onto her lips and as she made her way down the corridors she trod as lightly as she could, trying to keep her tension from out of her body language.

She thought about her mom - the real version of her mom, Tamara, not the sexualised parody she was slipping into as Tammy - and the work she’d always done to keep any frustration or worry out of her body language. “Upset, uptight bartenders don’t get tips and they don’t even make so many sales,” Tamara had told her more than once. Nicole had lived with a perfect study for this. She applied those lessons as best she could now.

A young woman moving stealthily, acting like she didn’t want to be there, or even just behaving like work wasn’t what she wanted to do most at that moment in time, would immediately have been noticed. With a professional smile in place, she looked completely like she belonged, even if she wasn’t quite dressed to code.

It was easy to imagine that she’d come in abruptly, unprepared, when it suddenly occurred to her that there was a task that needed doing. The people they were working with would believe that implicitly. They’d primed the people of Bankhaven - especially the women of Bankhaven - to have that kind of dedication to the company. The kind of dedication what would offer up bodies after the minds had already been bought.

Nicole started her search from first principles. It was safe to say that the system wouldn’t be anywhere the work study had been assigned to, and working for her executive she’d had the chance to learn a lot of those locations. So she began by ignoring the areas of the building she already knew - she could go back there if it turned out she was wrong.

From there she narrowed it down further by considering the layout of the building. Especially in this mountainous area, a broadcast system wanted to be placed high up, and while the complex was mostly only a couple of storeys high, there was one rise to four or five stories, not quite enough for it to seem like a tower. That was where the antennae were mounted, and based on their theorising, that was the way to go.

Nicole wasn’t surprised to encounter some locked doors on the way to that part of the building on the ground floor. She doubled back, passing Danni Brough in the corridors as she did and returning her broad, vapid smile. On Friday she’d overheard a betting pool among the senior Mandatum employees that marked Danni as one of the top candidates to be “the second broodmare” in town.

Nicole shuddered again at that recollection, but now she was alone she wondered privately if that shudder wasn’t at least a little performative. She knew the idea should horrify her; she also had to concede that it excited her, at least a little, and that she had no idea whether she came by that broodiness naturally or whether perhaps some of what the M-Phone had done to her was still rattling around in her head.

She made her way upstairs; the doors were locked on that level, too. She’d expected it, but it would have been stupid not to check.

There was a possibility that her keycard might be enough to open either door, but she didn’t believe it, didn’t want to take the risk of flagging the system. Instead she went looking for a stairwell that led up to the roof.

In less than five minutes longer, she was out on the roof. She had a vague memory of some adult mentioning once that the roof exits to any building were always meant to be locked down “but so long as you can’t smoke indoors, they never will be”. Whether that was why or not, the door had been open.

She walked briskly across it to the raised not-quite-tower. There was only one light on, and she wasn’t on the side it would have a good view of. Nicole started trying windows, testing from the outside to see if any would lever up. She found one eventually, squirming her way in under the window once she’d opened it as far as it would go and spilling herself over the desk beside it.

She was inside.

She waited there for a few moments, feeling her heart pounding in her chest, before stealing across to the door.

Stealth was called for now, and secrecy. She moved along the dark corridors as quickly and quietly as she could.

Time and again, trying every door she passed, she looked into another small personal office with nothing to make it stand out, or a cramped break room, or a small, tightly confined meeting room, the kind only a compact team could benefit from.

This wasn’t a place executives came often. This was for technicians.

Wanting to work in R&D had been a pipe dream. She’d never have been allowed in here, not unless they were completely sure she was locked down.

Nicole wondered what that would take. What it would look like. What Nikki would look like, come to that.

Then she went back to her searching.

She had gone very slowly, fearing alarms all the while, needing to be thorough. She knew her fingerprints were going to be all over the restricted section now, but unless they had a reason to check and the leeway to do so, it wouldn’t happen.

She was on the floor below the top floor when she finally hit the jackpot. It was even the biggest room she’d encountered so far, or it would have been if it wasn’t for the sheer volume of engineering in the room, extending up through the ceiling, presumably linking to the antennae you could see from outside.

Green LED telltales glowed steadily or, in a couple of cases, blinked on a regular pattern. The device itself was large enough that its background hum almost reached the volume of a casual conversation.

It had been built out of several large server racks and electronics cabinets. They gave it structure, but the bulk of the thing was cabling. Nicole couldn’t even imagine how much of it there was.

She wished that destroying it would restore the town - that would be so much easier - but she couldn’t imagine that it would.

There were two screens attached to it. Getting closer, she could see that only one had a keyboard and mouse nearby; the other might just be readouts or might be a touchscreen.

It didn’t matter. She perched on the edge of one sprawling extension of the machine so she could work at the other monitor.

They hadn’t bothered to brand the UI - there was no Mandatum logo and the software windows were a dull magenta, not bright blue - but they’d clearly worked on the user experience all the same. Charlotte had been right, Nicole thought; they’d gone exactly as far as they had to for Errol Allen to be satisfied, seen no need to go further.

You could even access the previous commands sent. She scrolled back through them, feeling a chill down her spine.

All those weird ads, she thought, they’d been the delivery mechanism. Or the most obvious part of it, anyway. Maybe that was so they could more easily start doing the same thing to a broader population. She could remember each ad coming through, then the reaction of the town; now she had this list she could match it all up together.

It was an ad that had first shown her that her tits’ power should be embraced and shown off, not hidden away, she thought with an idle smile, then realised what had happened, the smile twisting into a grimace.

That wasn’t her. It felt so natural, such an obvious part of her personal evolution. But that was false. It wasn’t who she was.

Reading through the previous commands taught her they were more like suggestions. Like an intrusive thought, only tooled to be so close to where you were that you might not notice. She nodded to herself, feeling like she had a good sense of what she needed to say.

Then she found another command list. This one was blunter. Much more direct. It repeated itself a lot. She read through it slowly, her mouth opening wider in disbelief. Surely if they’d put these out on the phones, more people would have cracked. Was it for the future?

One of the words on the last line jumped out at her.

Liv.

With a mounting shock, she realised that this wasn’t a long term plan. This was what Olivia Nystrom had been taken off the street for.

She called up the other window, the one where she was sure she could add instructions, and she froze for a moment when the cursor came up. What should she say? What were the best words to get this across?

Remember how fucked up everything is, she typed. It’s not right. Mandatum are using you and

“Now what’s a pretty face like yours doing in front of a complicated machine like that?” a voice drawled from behind her.

Nicole wasn’t proud of the squeal that escaped her. She span around on the spot.

Standing just inside the doorway was Benton Allen, hands in his pockets, a sly smirk on his lips. Behind him was Jenny Phillips, still wearing the stripperific new Bankhaven PD uniform, but with bright blue Mandatum collars across her throat. She stood stiffly at near-attention, her eyes glassy.

Of course, Nicole thought. They’d have to be worked over harder if they were going to police the conversion of everyone else.

“So,” Allen continued. “I’ll be fair, this was a good effort. I’m sure Dad will hate hearing how you did it, but honestly I’m looking forward to it.” He slouched forward, hands in his pockets. “Makes it more special, somehow, that it’s you. I feel like I should have seen that coming. I’d advise you to just-”

He had taken another step forwards, and that extra closeness brought a surge of adrenaline that broke her freeze reflex. She lunged past him, then cannoned into Jenny with enough wild speed to drive the officer back a step, just enough for her to pop free and start accelerating away.

She could hear Benton screaming “Get after her!” in her wake, but it didn’t concern her. The only thing she was interested in was headlong flight. If she could get to her, car, maybe she could get away…

She didn’t properly remember her route, and in fact terror plunged her down a level below the roof she’d used for access, but the clattering of Jenny’s high heels as she ran behind her wasn’t getting much quieter, so she couldn’t be losing much ground; A part of her brain was impressed, wondering abstractedly and uselessly how Jenny had got so good at moving in those heels. Had it become part of police training?

The doors which had locked her out opened easily from within, and she just surged forwards once she was on familiar ground, feeling a rising elation as she neared the big double doors at the entrance. She was going to get out! If she could get in her car and lock the door before Jenny caught her…

She was halfway across the parking lot when she saw Maggie Drew straighten up from a place crouched behind Nicole’s car, level her sidearm, and fire. The dart caught her in the thigh with a slapping impact she hadn’t expected; she stumbled and nearly fell but caught herself, steadied herself and kept going. There was, suddenly, a roaring in her ears, her body at full strain pulling the drug out of the dart reservoir at full speed, just trying to keep everything circulating.

She managed another four steps before her legs gave out and she collapsed onto one side. Consciousness lasted just long enough for her to see Maggie and Jenny approaching their caught fugitive.