In face of the brainwashing team of Trudy and the Rev, Adam and Zeb took joint evasive action. What were they evading, apart from punishment? Anything that might lead in the direction of the path of righteousness, the Holy PetrOleum Path, the path the Rev and Trudy were forever urging them to tread.
In Adam’s case, this action took the form of blue-eyed lying – he could make just about anyone except Zeb think he was innocent as an egg unlaid – whereas Zeb had the instincts of a sneak thief. Time spent in the punishment closet had its upside, hairpins had their uses, and it was not long before he had the secret run of the house, tiptoeing through the bureau drawers and emails of his elders while they believed him securely imprisoned among the winter coats and outdated consumer electronics. Lockpicking became his hobby, and soon enough, with the aid of clandestine sessions on the school’s digital facilities and free time at the public library, hacking became his vocation. In his fantasy world no code could keep him out, no door could shut him in, and fantasy merged into reality the older and more practised he became.
At first he stuck to porno peepsites and pirated acid rock and freakshow music – all forbidden by the Church, needless to say: it went in for buttoned-up collars and public chastity vows, and its music sucked like a thousand Monster Leeches from Outer Space. So Zeb would earphone the Luminescent Corpses or the Pancreatic Cancers or the Bipolar Albino Hookworms while trolling onscreen for ever-new and cunningly deployed girl body parts. No harm in it really: they’d already made the videos, so what he was doing was just a form of time travel. He wasn’t causing anything.
Then, once he felt ready, he decided to up the ante and really test his powers.
The Church of PetrOleum was high-tech enabled, with a dozen sophisticated online social media and donation sites skimming the cash from the faithful 24/7. The security on those sites was supposed to be as foolproof as such things got, with two layers of coding knitware any potential klepto would have to penetrate before making off with the debit accounts. And the system did keep out such kleptos; but it had no defence against an insider job, such as the one Zeb managed to pull off so spectacularly when he was barely sixteen.
The Rev’s weak point was his belief in his own invulnerability, so he was careless; and as he had no head for number-letter combos, he wrote down passwords. Then he hid them in places so obvious even the Easter Bunny would scoff. The cufflink box? The toes of the Sunday shoes? Retro-cretin, sighed Zeb, extracting the wafers of paper, memorizing their cryptic scribblings, then replacing box or shoe in its exact previous location.
Once possessed of the keys to the kingdom, Zeb diverted the river of donations – not all of it, a mere .09 per cent, margin of error, he wasn’t lobotomized – into several accounts of his own devising, making sure that the donors got the standard grovelling thank-you and guilt-inducing pep-talk message from the church, plus a hate slogan or two directed at the Enemies of God’s Holy Oil: “Solar Panels Are Satan’s Work,” “Eco Equals FreakO,” “The Devil Wants You to Freeze in the Dark,” “Serial Killers Believe in Global Warming.”
For his stash-the-cash hideaways he used an identity pieced together from fragments he’d appropriated by stealth attacks on fuzzily fenced targets, such as 3-D avatar gaming destinations, AdoptAFish and similar bioweepy charities, and Feel-iT-enabled porno installations in suburban malls. (“Haptic feedback gives you true, stimulating flesh-on-flesh sensations! Say goodbye to faked screams and groans, this is the real thing! Warning: Do Not Expose Your Electronic Device to Moisture. Do Not Place Terminals in Your Mouth or Other Mucous Membrane Regions. Severe Burns May Result.”)