Murder with Bengali Characteristics by Shovon Chowdhury

not the hideout of Tiger Face Bo,’ said Li.
    ‘I built them too well, that’s the problem,’ said Crazy Wu. He was a small, bespectacled man with long hair and sallow, unhealthy skin, thanks to years of living in maximum-security basements. ‘They may be virtual, but they have personalities of their own. I’ve tried to train them to stand and snarl, but they’re too eager to tear out throats. I think they read what’s in my mind. Wait a minute! I have a message coming in from the Great Firewall.’ He closed his eyes, lying back on what looked like a second-hand hospital bed. The backrest reclined automatically. As far as Li could see, no levers or buttons were pressed to achieve this.
    Li sat down gingerly on a broken chair. It was a large room, dimly lit. Banks of servers hummed away on one side. The other half was a jungle of keyboards, screens and cables. Every flat surface, the tables, the walls, most of the ceiling, was alive with numbers, words and images. So was Crazy Wu. Shimmering pictures and streams of integers crawled across his arms and his legs and his cheeks and his forehead, and across his T-shirt and his filthy track pants. The only static part of him was the image of Chairman Mao in a pink frilly ballet costume on his chest. In the matter of clothing, hackers were allowed some leeway.
    ‘The 5th Rifle Division is three miles away,’ he whispered, ‘inform them of the mass incident, and send a drone to guide them. If they kill more than ten people, give the commander bad dreams tonight. I want him to wet his pants.’
    He opened his eyes and looked at Li. He smiled. His teeth were terrible. ‘What’s up, Li? How’s that hot ex-wife of yours? She’s the queen of prettypretties! A lot of the boys want to spy on her, but I make sure they don’t. It’s a thing I do for you.’
    ‘Thanks,’ said Li, meaning it. ‘I know how busy you are.’
    ‘I never agreed when the Happy Cow Army decided to join the government. We’re too cool for things like that. We wanted to be just like Anonymous. Our dream was to take them down one day, and be mysterious and admired and get lots of girls. We never seem to get any girls, unless we make them wear helmets. We even have Happy Cow masks, just like the V masks that members of Anonymous have. His name is Chengu and he’s very cheerful and reassuring, like the characters in
Kung Fu Panda
. His appeal is universal. Who doesn’t love a cow? We could have been rock stars. But the others felt it was our patriotic duty to help the rise of China. Our contribution isn’t valued. Look at my condition. No one ever gives me nice furniture. I don’t have cushions, or a private fridge thingie. I’ve always wanted one of those private fridge thingies. Gloop.’
    His eyes rolled back in his head. He froze, mouth half-open. Faint tremors ran across his cheeks. The displays on his skin and his clothes kept moving, like ants marching over a corpse.
    ‘I think he’s dead,’ said Sexy Chen. ‘Can we go now?’ He was mortally afraid of Crazy Wu. No one knew exactly what he did down here, but there were rumours. A few of the people who’d come down had emerged not quite the same. One or two were rumoured to have disappeared altogether. Since Crazy Wu was in charge of most information, it was hard to discover the truth, unless he chose to reveal it.
    ‘Duplicate overload,’ said Li.
    When they had embarked on their grand mission of uplifting a nation, the Chinese Communist Party had realized that keeping an eye on a billion people was never going to be easy. Galloping disloyalty had made their job harder. Money was never a problem. They had the largest internal surveillance budget in the history of mankind. Their problem was manpower. The number of observers had increased dramatically, but so had the numbers of those in need of observation. Technology had come to their rescue. Most members of the Happy Cow Army had been duplicated and installed on machines across the