Achievement unlocked.
Christina felt grungy, the husk of a sleepless night clinging to her. But the thought of venturing Upstairs for a shower gave her the heebie-jeebies. She had to mentally prepare for that expedition and was nowhere near full HP/MP.
She sat down at her desk. The essence of Melissa Faber and Daniel Benson hung around like stale smoke in a used car. Before the Derby, all the time she’d spent with Fremont Hills’ Hottest Couple in her entire life didn’t add up to twenty-seven hours. Their interactions consisted mostly of awkward overlaps, when William picked Daniel up before dropping Christina off, or when William and Christina got out of a movie and bumped into them in the food court.
If William, Daniel, and Melissa’s friendship was an equilateral triangle, Christina was the outlier dangling from William’s point like a stray vector. Most of the time, that was okay. There were entanglements that non–Next-Door Neighbor Friends would never understand, the insatiable need to amuse and entertain each other that had united them since the first time William had knocked on her door to borrow a bike pump.
But now she was facing a road trip full of constant reminders that she was William’s secret buddy, the basement-dwelling phantom who stalked the fringes of Fremont Hills High.
Don’t do it, Christina.
She traced a fingernail lightly against her scalp, enjoying the delicious anticipation of a future scratching. Kimberly’s speakers blasted the mordant sludge of Dethroned Kings.
You’re better than this.
Her collection of rare action figures and anime toys scrutinized her from the desk. She’d acquired them in dark web trades—all except for Kalodyn Zero, which William had gotten her for her birthday. Kalodyn Zero occupied the place of honor on top of her central monitor, his white hair combed back into a mane that scraggled down to his waist.
Her fingers tingled in proximity to her keyboard. She woke Kimberly from her slumber. The surface-level internet junk was mercifully absent. Jessa Park and YouTube and the social media circle jerk had been wiped from her screen as soon as Daniel and Melissa left.
Christina booted up her newest dark web acquisition: MKM-149, an intercept device that NSA whistleblowers had uncovered years ago. Now they floated from black market circles to private systems in the same way that old Soviet military hardware wound up in the arsenals of two-bit warlords. The MKM-149 was nicknamed “the seashell” for its ability to “hear” an ocean of data. It was as if Kimberly had suddenly been upgraded to Cerebro, Professor X’s impossibly powerful machine. Since Christina didn’t have telepathic powers, or an NSA instruction manual, the data was impossible to filter: millions of texts and emails and direct messages and online dating nudges flooding her screen, their basic encryptions rendering them useless unless she knew exactly what to pluck from the gibberish stream like a hand fisherman snatching a minnow from a river.
Before Melissa and Daniel came over, she had focused the seashell on a ten-foot radius, so that it was only sweeping the CB Lounge. Once it identified Melissa’s and Daniel’s signals, the seashell “painted” them like a patient drinking barium to highlight organs in a CT scan. Now the private words of Fremont Hills’ Hottest Couple lit up the data stream.
Christina banished the white noise and let the seashell decrypt the past few hours of Daniel’s and Melissa’s mobile lives. Her heart began to pound and she closed her eyes. She could still put Kimberly to sleep and venture Upstairs for that shower, before she saw something she could never unsee.
Had anyone in the history of hacking ever gotten this close and possessed the willpower to back off?
She opened her eyes.
The seashell had snagged a few Epheme chats from the ether, chats that were supposed to have destroyed themselves. Of course that was bullshit—nothing was ever truly gone. Daniel was obviously DB837651, which made xoxoPixieDustxoxo Melissa…but wait. There was an image of Melissa, posing in a hideous jumper or romper or whatever. Her handle was SewWhat, and she was sending the pic to somebody named Ash.
Christina’s eyes pinged back and forth between Daniel’s chat with PixieDust and Melissa’s chat with Ash.
Kalodyn Zero watched impassively from atop the monitor.
“Don’t look at me like that.” She pulled the plastic warrior from his pedestal and set him facedown on the desk. Then she copied the intercepted chats over to a blank document and began to type underneath them.
Three days after his Derby victory, William woke from a chrome-tinted dream to find the Driverless car parked in his driveway. He stood at the bedroom window in his boxers and marveled at the vehicle. It must have dropped itself off sometime during the night, creeping softly through the dark streets, spooking the Fremont Hills Jesus on his bicycle trek to nowhere.
Whenever his mother came home late, the lights of her ancient Camry blasted through his wonky blinds, sweeping across the X Games panoramas on his wall and splintering his sleep with white-hot urgency that left him sitting up in bed, panting and confused. Autonomous must have killed its headlights before turning into his driveway.
He wondered if the car was designed to be courteous or if it already knew about his shallow sleep. The incident with the Smiths song had occurred to him fleetingly over the past seventy-two hours of podcast interviews and email exchanges with reporters from Motor Trend and Car and Driver and an extremely pushy guy from Wired. He’d dismissed it as a product of his sun-scorched mind, but he couldn’t shake the crisp blue letters coalescing into William, It Was Really Nothing. Even while accepting the memory as fraudulent, it had evolved into an unlikely theory: Autonomous had selected him. The car had wanted William
