Belgrade Noir

She didn’t feel someone else’s hands lifting her onto the hospital bed, but she heard voices that mumbled an apology and greeted her copy. She watched the concrete ceiling of the hallway as they pushed her toward the elevator, then a clear night sky with the reflection of the ambulance’s rotating lights, before the view was replaced by the inside roof of the ambulance. The door closed. Her companions were silent while the vehicle moved with the sound of the siren. She tried to estimate how long it would take until they reached Učiteljsko Naselje, and then she gave up. She wondered how this new her, Marija 2.0, would explain to Isak why she had changed her mind. And what would she tell Tamara and her other friends?

I will disappear and nobody will notice. Because, of course, I will still be here.

At some point, her pupils narrowed in the presence of the glaring light of the laboratory. The director’s face appeared before her.

“Perfectly faithful to the original,” he said with undisguised admiration. Marija heard his words, saw the bright light and his face, but she still couldn’t feel her own body, she couldn’t move, blink, speak.

“Are we following the plan?” someone asked outside of her field of vision, probably one of the technicians.

“Yes,” the director replied. “The object is to be recycled. We’ll look for an error in the software. There is certainly a trace somewhere, something that will indicate the moment when there was a deviation from the programmed behavior.”

“Look,” said a technician, his finger touching her right eye, then immediately removing it, shining with moisture.

“Tears,” the director said. “Unusual.”

While the technician pushed her on the stretcher toward a small room, he closed her eyelids. Now she had only hearing left — the crunch of rubber wheels on the floor, the distant buzzing of the appliances, and the quiet hum of the air conditioners — and smell: a sweaty technician tilted over her, traces of the cigarette she had smoked on the way from the airport, and hints of the heavy, sweet smell of the expensive perfume that she had used that day, spraying it on her neck, behind her ears, on the insides of her wrists. If she could move her facial muscles, she would have smiled ironically to herself.

It was the perfume she hadn’t parted with in more than three years.

Mombasa.

The RAT

by Misha Glenny

Dorćol

Miloš calculated that on average, during a six-day week, he was completely bored roughly 61 percent of the time. Eighteen percent of the time, he was able to distract himself by playing Xenonauts 2. He was impressed by the transition from the original Xenonauts which featured 2-D sprites. Although he loved these sprites, like most Xenonauts devotees, he was surprised and genuinely impressed by the transition to 3-D graphics in the updated version.

As long as his boss wasn’t around, he could play. The assistant manager, Jovana, didn’t care, while Bane was so in awe of Miloš that he wouldn’t dare snitch.

The remaining 21 percent of his time was taken up dealing with customers. This being Knez Mihailova, a notable proportion of the customers were well off. Miloš had quickly noticed that there was no apparent correlation between wealth and intelligence. The richer the client, the more they struggled with their smartphones. Almost all had mastered turning the device off and on. Beyond that, most could usually manage phone calls, WhatsApp messages, SMS, and playing music. But even these simple functions still baffled some.

Miloš pondered long and hard as to why people were so stupid, but he struggled to come up with any answer. It didn’t really bother him. Quite the contrary — their incompetence provided him with endless entertainment. Whether selling a new phone or just swapping a SIM card, he had ample time to install the custom malware that he had written which acted as a Remote Access Tool (RAT). The customers, of course, had absolutely no idea what Miloš was up to. Nor did the service providers, nor did Google or Apple, who had created the environment in which Miloš liked to play.

Instead, the customers squealed with delight when Miloš got their shiny new phones up and running and demonstrated how to play Flappy Bird which, again to his surprise, they considered to be some form of achievement (here I differ from Miloš as I believe that Flappy Bird is irritatingly difficult and that Miloš underestimates his facility with this game — of course, by his standards the Flappy Bird trick is indeed unremarkable).

Having safely built his RAT a new lair on the customer’s device, he would stroll back home across Studentski Trg and down Dositijeva before he arrived at his father’s large, ghostly apartment.