Lost Worlds Read Online Free

to make a lot of money. You
have the opportunity to not get your arms and legs broken. Everyone is happy, apart from the people who lose their money and jewellery and mobile phones, but even they can claim on their insurance,
so they are happy as well in the end.’
    ‘Can I . . . think about it?’ Gecko asked.
    ‘Do not think too hard. Thinking is a dangerous hobby. In Eastern Europe, we are fatalists. We believe that what happens is meant to happen. You are meant to work for us, committing
burglaries. It is fate. Accept it.’ He moved towards the door. His silent companion stepped to one side and opened it. ‘We will return tomorrow for your answer, which will be
“yes”, but we would rather you came to that conclusion of your own free will than be forced into it here by us.’ He stopped, and pointed a finger at Gecko’s face. Either by
accident or design, the way he held his hand made it look like he was miming a gun. ‘Do not talk to the police. Do not talk to your friends. Do not talk to
anyone
about this. It is
between ourselves, yes?’
    ‘Yes,’ Gecko said quietly, but he was talking to a closing door.

CHAPTER
two
    T ara Flynn’s bedroom was like Tara Flynn herself – small, dark and chaotic. She sat on her bed, tablet computer propped up against a
pillow on the duvet in front of her and a Bluetooth keyboard perched on her lap. Her long brown hair fell in front of her face like a curtain, shutting out the world.
    A window popped up in the corner of the screen, accompanied by a soft chime. The words
How’s it goin’?
were highlighted within it.
    Tara clicked on the window, and typed a response:
No luck yet.
She pressed , and an application on her tablet encrypted the message and sent it out over the ether.
    She went back to what she was doing: attempting to find a way inside the security firewalls of a big and remarkably secretive company who called themselves Nemor Incorporated, but about which it
was incredibly difficult to find out anything. She’d only discovered their internet presence by following a link from an email that had been revealed on WikiLeaks. Nemor Incorporated
didn’t seem to have an openly available, easily accessed website for those people that wanted information on what the company did, or wanted to apply for a job. It almost seemed like you
needed to already know about the website in order to find it: you couldn’t just look up the company name on Google or Bing and link to it. In fact, when Tara had tried to do just that
she’d got no hits on the name, which almost made her think that Nemor Incorporated was actually paying the big search-engine providers to keep their name
out
of searches.
    Another soft chime alerted her to a response – one that her app quickly decrypted before displaying it. Tara and her friends never communicated using unencrypted messages. Stuff that moved
across the internet could be easily captured and read by anyone. That was how Tara and her friends got most of their information in the first place.
    Nemor’s some kind of big fish in commerce, that’s for sure
, the message read.
Their name crops up in emails from defence contractors, the US government, large tech
companies – all kinds of places, some quite nasty. They’re into something big. What are the chances you can get in?
    Tara snorted.
Chances are 100%, moron
, she typed, and sent the message.
    While she waited for a response, she brought up the Nemor Incorporated website in her browser. There were some generic pictures of bright young people with neat smiles, neat haircuts and neat
suits that looked like they’d been provided by an advertising company, and some close-ups of generic scientific stuff like silicon chips and chemistry-lab equipment that looked like
they’d been ripped off from somewhere else on the internet – nothing which actually said what it was that the company
did
. There was a short paragraph that said absolutely
nothing in 200 words, and a