Enemy Invasion Read Free

oppressively hot and humid, Hack developed the unshakeable feeling he was being
followed.
    First there was the guy wearing the ankle-length coat (even though it was over thirty degrees outside) waiting for the MTR train at Tung Chung station and again when he changed to the Tsuen Wan
line. Later, after trawling the electronics stalls in the city all afternoon, Hack spotted him again – sitting on the train back to Lantau Island, head buried in a book. Probably just a
coincidence.
    Or so he thought at that point.
    On Tuesday he spent the day fishing with his friend Danny and wandering the narrow alleyways of Tai-O, the fishing village where he lived with his grandfather. It was high season and by midday
the place was bustling with tourists, but there was one thin woman who seemed to follow wherever they went. Every time he looked round, she had her camera pointed in their direction. Why would
she be taking a picture of us? Danny laughed when Hack voiced his suspicions.
    He let it go at that.
    On Thursday the guy with the coat was back. Hack caught a glimpse of him in the crowd as he ascended the steps into the IFC mall on another city trip. Their eyes met and the man melted into the
throng of lunchtime shoppers like a ghost.
    By Friday, Hack was looking over his shoulder constantly, attempting to work out who was a tail and who was not. He tried staying in the house, but found himself checking the blinds every five
minutes to see who was passing by outside. School wasn’t back for two weeks and for the first time in his life, Hack actually found himself wishing he was there, just to take his mind off
things. Sick of watching him pace the floor, Grandfather sent Hack on an errand to the market stalls by the bay, where he became convinced that everyone was eyeballing him: housewives, pensioners,
even little kids.
    Had his secret finally been discovered?
    Hack thought he’d been careful enough: he never used his power in public and had only told a few trusted friends. But had one of them ratted him out? And to who?
    These questions whirled through his mind like a tornado until he finally fled back to the city and the place where he felt most at home: the Golden Chip. He needed to talk to someone, and
Jonesey, one of the few people who knew about his secret, was the obvious choice.
    The Golden Chip, or GC as it was known to the regulars, was a computer and software market that sprawled across six floors of a high-rise in the Kowloon area of Hong Kong.
    Two basement levels bustled with stalls selling every imaginable piece of junk. If you were looking for a component for a thirty-year-old games console or wanted to buy a box of motherboards for
five dollars (some of which might actually work), the basement was the place for you. On Levels 1, 2 and 3, pushy sellers touted laptops, PCs, fake iPhones, real iPads and just about any gadget you
could name (and a few that you couldn’t) at half the price of the malls. Levels 4 and 5 were the place for Nintendo cartridges loaded with fifty games, PS3 and X-Box titles selling for cents
and copies of any operating system you wanted – complete with fake seals of authenticity. Nothing had a price tag, everything was up for negotiation, and the air buzzed from dawn to dusk with
the sound of haggling.
    Hack rode the escalators past all the noise, casting his eyes over LCD screens showing a cornucopia of images and messages written in Cantonese, English, Mandarin, and often a mix of all three.
He breathed a sigh of relief. For most people, the incessant chatter, computer noise and harsh lighting would have been headache-inducing, but not to him.
    This was home.
    Level 6 was his ultimate destination – the repairs and upgrades area of the GC. A customer could start at the bottom of the building and ride the escalators to the top, picking up
components on the way, and have them assembled into any machine he or she desired. Level 6 was markedly less noisy than the other levels