In a few years, Melissa Faber’s name would be on everybody’s lips.
She watched the city glide past, each block a self-contained panorama of bodegas with sun-faded merchandise in the windows, bars with obscure names or no names at all, glass-walled mega-buildings muscling in on corners while tenement walk-ups lined the side streets.
They passed Thompson, Sullivan, Macdougal. Soon this would be her neighborhood: NYU was only a few blocks away. She wondered if Otto had gone this way on purpose.
Her mind scanned fashion Terminator-style, surveying the rabid meshing of preppy guys with glinting watches and gutter punks with camo backpacks and twig-thin girls in jeggings or garish harem pants. She so rarely considered headwear, but even in summer, the city was a panoply of hats: floppy beachy things and peaked caps and snap-brimmed fedoras. Lots of black denim and black tops and little black dresses, but plenty of wild colors too, as if neon graffiti had jumped off the bricks to splash across clothes.
When she focused on specific details—spikes on a windowsill, the parting of a curtain six floors up—each aspect of the city seemed to imprint itself upon her.
“Fabes?” She broke contact with the outside world. Daniel handed her a blue-and-silver can: her afternoon Red Bull. The car was stocked with energy drinks. Half of them were KombuchaTine, which her older sister Emily guzzled every morning, and the other half were Red Bulls. Melissa hated KombuchaTine—it tasted like how mold smelled—so its only purpose was to remind her of her sister.
Daniel regarded her with wry concern. “Your meds.”
She accepted the can gratefully and popped the top.
Otto switched to her getting-shit-done playlist. The car shook with low end, and synths tickled the edges; then the beat dropped. Daniel and William began dancing with mock intensity, limbs flailing like octopus tentacles. Daniel had to bend his knees to keep from bashing into the ceiling, which lent a further undersea quality to his movements.
She laughed. “You look like a crab.”
He scuttled close and his hands were snapping claws.
They used to make up crazy dances together all the time.
She felt an overwhelming urge to get silly. In public.
She held his claw-hand and took out her phone. “We’re going to the sickest club tonight,” she announced while tweeting.
“Is it Anime Club?” Christina asked without lifting her eyes from her laptop screen.
While she was typing, Melissa realized that she had no idea what the sickest club in New York was. She left a blank space in her unpublished tweet and was about to open her browser to research locations when the tweet finished writing itself and posted automatically. She gawked at the screen, trying to figure out what had happened. Then it dawned on her: Otto had done a split-second calculation to find the hottest nightspot, aggregating lifestyle blogs and scene reports and online reviews and party pics faster than she could even write a single tweet.
The car was making a good case for being the brains of the operation.
Melissa cast her Otto-enhanced tweet to the car’s central display. Words the size of fists shimmered in the air.
New York! #AutonomousRoadTrip is taking over Azimuth tonight. Come show us how NYC gets down.
By the time Autonomous pulled up to Azimuth on Rivington Street, a crowd had gathered in the drizzly night to snap photos of the car. Melissa’s heart pounded. This was their first big public appearance, and SocialOracle had predicted that the attention could rocket her follower count above 4,000 and capture the attention of Jessa Park.
Without their knowledge—but thankfully—Otto had booked two rooms at the Ruby Soho, a chic hotel on Grand Street. That left them the first part of the evening to chill out and get dressed in luxurious solitude, instead of trying to figure out how to use the car’s privacy shrouds and fumbling with their clothes in confined spaces. She’d modeled four different outfits for Daniel. He favored an eighties throwback halter and what looked like a sheer skirt but was actually a half wrap attached to a pair of stretchy shorts.
Then he’d excused himself for an outrageously long shower and emerged from the bathroom in a cloud of steam, alert and energized, his body lobstered from the hot water, yelling to the room in a posh British accent, demanding cigars and martinis and a signed first edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses.
Melissa had picked out a simple black ensemble for him—very New York—with a loose-fitting shirt so he wouldn’t look like a steroid freak from the Jersey Shore. When she dialed down his jockness, he looked like a guy in a band. Not the kind of band Christina listened to, but a band that wrote songs people actually liked, and featured members people actually enjoyed looking at.
William rocked skinny jeans and a nondescript but acceptable shirt. She’d done the best she could on their shopping trip. There hadn’t been a lot to work with—Plattsburgh wasn’t exactly Milan—but he looked less sloppy than usual. As long as he put that hair to work, he’d be fine.
Christina was going to be a problem.
She refused to change her clothes or apply even a touch of blush to her skin. Now they were huddled inside the car, seconds from bursting into the glare of what might as well be paparazzi flashbulbs, three of them decked out for a genuine party night and Christina in black jean shorts that were too baggy and unflattering to register as some kind of anti-fashion statement and a shirt that sported a Japanese cartoon warrior with an impossibly oversize sword slung over his shoulder and a ridiculous crop of white hair that hung down to his thighs.
Christina didn’t seem to understand the gravity of a red-carpet situation.
What drove her nuts was that the girl could have a really intriguing look if she just spent five minutes letting Melissa
