“So, are you good to help me track down our unhappy couple?” Shirin asked.
Leah sat in the fold-out chair beside Shirin at the work station. “Where do I start?”
Leah browsed over to a window open to Persona, the social network, which had its own problems with data privacy. “Mallery made a backdoor, so you can browse all accounts as if you were friended. I’ve cross-referenced three of the six hospital sweethearts with Anna already; I want you to run down the other three.”
“We have her name and a picture.”
“So that’s where you start, assuming she uses her real name on the site. If not, search for people named Anna connected to the patients’ accounts, and you’ll need to go at least one degree of separation based on closest friends and family members.”
“So, I get to spend all afternoon Persona-stalking these people?”
“It could be worse. You could be interviewing for a job like King and Roman. You ever want to get Roman upset, tell him he has to wear a tie.”
“Noted. What are you going to be doing while I’m doing this?”
“Two things. One, resting my eyes. Too much time in front of LCD screens gives me a migraine. Two, I’m going to spend the rest of the afternoon in the gossip magazines and on local discussion groups to keep an eye out for any rumblings, especially about Kyle Randal’s party.”
“Please tell me we won’t have to go,” Leah said. “I had my fill of frat parties when I was actually in school.”
“Jury’s still out on that one, I’m afraid. If we have to go, it’ll likely be you, Mallery, and Roman. King is not especially fond of this world. He prefers the dramas.”
Leah nodded, and Shirin took up position on the couch, reclining with a book by her side.
Shirin left Leah with the trio of screens all filled with browser windows, a zillion tabs open between them.
She plugged in the earphones sitting by the workstation, cued up some techno, and got down to the social hacking business.
First up, Kevin French.
Leah browsed through all twelve-hundred and thirty-eight of Kevin’s photos, keeping an eye on tagged names and untagged faces. Persona did its damnedest to fill in every possible bit of data, but some people resisted. She kept the photo of Anna that Mallery had taken at the ready, using it plus her own memory to try to filter through the pictures and look for a match.
Once she finished the pictures, she started over, sorting through any friends named Anna. And after that, she trolled the woman’s timeline, checking for anyone who might look related, or who might look like they could be either of Anna’s friends.
All of that took a good half hour. She put an X next to Kevin French and moved on to the next name, Oliver Brown.
Three hours of eye-straining, mouse-scrolling mundanity later, she hit pay dirt.
Theo Long, candidate number three. He was Han Chinese (judging by the clothes he wore in old family pictures - Leah could tell one of her people), in his late twenties, with hints of worry lines at his brows. He didn’t have much of a Persona presence, but in the handful of pictures that he had up, Anna Grace was in fully half of them. There were pictures of the pair dancing in a studio, some kind of ballroom, from the look of it. Dinners, drinks out with friends, and more. Nothing in the last three weeks, however. The last two posts on his Persona account were a post from his mother talking about how Theo was going to be getting out of the hospital soon, how attentive (and pretty) his doctor was, and then one from Theo himself, with a picture of him walking out of the hospital with a crutch.
There were some wrinkles.
Theo’s Persona page said “Engaged,” where Anna’s said “It’s complicated.” And Anna’s page had pictures of Theo, but they’d all been untagged.
Leah gestured Shirin over to take a look. “That’s a red flag for us if I’ve ever seen one.” She laid out the connections in several tabs across the multiple screens, then scooted aside to let Shirin look at the results.
“I think you’ve got a winner here, newbie. Write it up and send it out to the team. They’ll do a first-contact pass today, then we meet up to run down their story tonight so we can start building the patch.”
“Can I take a break first?” Leah asked. “I kind of got in the zone, and I think your headache came back to the computer so it could hang out with me.”
Shirin patted Leah on the shoulder. “Sure. But don’t wait too long. Mallery is out there spending HQ’s money, and King’s the one who has to write expense reports this mission.”
“Got it.” Leah stood and walked over to the couch, flopping facedown to shield her eyes.
And promptly fell asleep.
She woke up, not having meant to sleep. Checking the clock, she’d been out for all of five minutes, just long enough for her arm to go numb and for her to be totally disoriented.
King stood in the doorway, arms crossed. “Shirin tells me that you found a match. Let’s not make the team wait anymore on that report, shall we?”
Leah leapt from the couch to the workstation in a single bound, which was tricky, since she had to scale the couch to get to the other side in order to reach the workstation. She managed not to fall over, but only just.
Within an hour, the team had come back from the field and sat in the living room, ready for the report.
Her report.
Don’t screw this up, her teammates’ eyes said, all watching, waiting.
It’s just another story. Tell the story, Leah, she told herself, and began.
Chapter Five
Meet Bachelorette Number One
Leah pointed to the board. “So, our lead candidates are Anna Grace and Theo Long. Mallery and I saw Anna this morning, jogging with friends in Central Park. I dug through the Persona pages of the six people admitted to hospitals with engagement rings over the last month, which led me to Theo Long.”
It was like her hands were asleep—she couldn’t help but be incredibly aware of them and feel awkward. During a set, she had the mic as her woobie, could focus her body language on working the room, shifting the mic, and so on. She tried to use the dry-erase marker in the same way, but then it ended up looking like she thought the marker was a mic, which was just silly.
Roman swiped through the report on his tablet. “These Persona pages tell a pretty messy story.”
“Sure do,” Leah said. “So, I figure we need to get in there and get both sides of the story, then start working on a way to make a happily-ever-after, right?” She looked to Mallery, who nodded.
Mallery stood. “Thanks, Leah. I can take it from here. King, you and Roman will make contact with Theo. See if we can’t get him to do PT at your gym, and if not, we’ll see about tweaking his insurance so that he ends up there anyway. In the meantime, get a tracker on him and see if you can’t manufacture a meeting to get yourselves into his life, bro-style.”
“Bro-style?” Leah asked.
“Doing that emotionally-repressed around all other men unless you’re drunk because only then is it okay to cry because the Patriarchy sucks. You know, bro-style.”
“Got it.”
“Leah and I will make contact with Anna, posing as a Wise Lesbian Couple so we can get her side of the story. We’ve got her tracked to her home, so we just need to pick up the trail when she heads out to dinner or drinks or whatever tonight.”
Working the archetypes was standard procedure—fill an established role and it was easier for people in story worlds to fit you into their life without question. Since Shirin had told Leah a couple of days before that Mallery was very out as a lesbian in real life, not as much would be acting.
“Wise Lesbian Couple?” Leah asked. “Shouldn’t it be Anna’s Gay BFF if we’re in a Romantic Comedy?”
Roman cut in. “I’m the one who does Gay BFF, but I’ll need to work with Theo. Can’t work both threads of the story at once.”
“Gay BFF isn’t in my repertoire,” King said. “Never got the hang of it. Veers too close to Magical
Negro, and I hate that shit.”
For a moment, Leah was back in her comedy troupe, people arguing over roles. The familiarity was comforting, even if she felt a little bit out in left field as the others talked about their specialties and preferences.
“Why can’t we just use a PPM to change up our appearance and be able to play multiple roles?” Leah asked. The Personal Phase Manipulators allowed the Genrenauts to disguise their appearance and voices.
King shook his head. “PPMs are very expensive, and hard to replace. We’ve lost three already this year in missions gone wrong. Council’s keeping them on reserve.”
Mallery made the move-it-along hand gesture. “More’s the pity. They’re dangerously fun to play with. Shirin, you’re on logistics duty. Coordinate between the teams, feeding information back and forth. Mostly, I want you designing our Grand Reconciliation. Tomorrow’s party will be too soon and has too high a skeeve factor, so look farther ahead.”
Mallery looked at the board, taking it all in. “We’ll probably need to go to extra innings on this one, so King, let’s get ready to make our appeal to stay for, say, nine days? I think that’ll be enough time to lay in groundwork. Assuming this story can actually be fixed.”
“HQ has been denying extension requests left and right, especially since...” King said. “Let’s see if we can’t make it six days. We’ll reassess at five.”
“That’s fair. Okay, everyone know what we’re doing? Leah, you’re with me. We have to get our covers sorted before we go visit our Leading Lady.”
“Roger,” Leah said.
Walking back to the master bedroom, Mallery launched right in.
“So, for this story, we’re going to want to insert ourselves into Ms. Grace’s life as seamlessly as we can, but not in such a big way that we leave a hole when we leave.” Mallery turned into the bedroom and threw open the stand-up dresser, revealing her wardrobe as if it were an arsenal. Which, really, it was.
She pulled down three dresses, stacking clothes together, arranging and rearranging. This is why Mallery’s bag was twice as full as anyone else’s, Leah realized. In Sci-Fi or Western World, Roman brought the big bag of guns. Here, Mallery had her wardrobe.
Absently inspecting one of the dresses, Mallery continued. “If there’s one thing Shirin goes overboard on, it’s making herself indispensable. I read the report from your trip to Azura-3. She’s pushing the boundaries of long-term involvement there, and we won’t need to be as blatant with this one.”
Mallery held up a dress, looking in the mirror. “That won’t do with this hair,” she said under her breath, then continued. “We’re going to do a drive-by fairy-godmothering. We should be tourists instead of New York residents. That gives us a built-in departure.”
“Sounds good,” Leah said. “Can we be visiting from somewhere that doesn’t require accents? I can only do Minnesota and Chinese. Never got into the impersonations part of comedy.”
Mallery chuckled. “That’s fine, darling.” She dropped into a Georgia accent, thick as molasses. “I’ll go big with mine and it’ll draw the attention. So, who shall we be? Honeymooning actresses? Hippies on a food tourist adventure, adventurous enough to go to the Big Apple but not rich enough to fly to Kazakhstan?”
“I like the actress idea,” Leah said. “It’s high-status, so it’ll grab attention, and it will cover for a good amount of the story talk. We can get meta on it, helping her fix her story within her ‘real’ world.”
“Let’s not get too close to the nose there. That can throw things off. Actresses it is. How did we meet?”
“Working a TV show together. No, auditions! We were rivals for a role but went out for coffee after encouraging one another. Neither of us got the role, but the consolation prize was pretty nice.”
“And that’s how you’ll tell the story. Just like that.” Mallery looked over her shoulder to Leah. “Now, what are we doing in NYC?”
“Museums and taking in the Broadway shows before they go on tour. You’re looking to get into musical theatre, since you never got to put your triple-threat chops to sufficient use in Hollywood.”
Mallery rolled with it. “I got frozen out of the high school musicals, since they were all about the White Girl Soprano, and I, alas, am a mezzo.”
“So, you’ve got the song-and-dance chops to back this story up?” Leah asked.
Mallery launched into a waltz, holding her dress as her partner, dancing backward as she sang a song from My Fair Lady.
“Song-and-dance chops, check. That makes me the comedienne?”
“Indeed. Hollywood takes you as exotic, but roles for funny women that aren’t white are pretty thin on the ground.”
“Also, I’m not that thin.”
“We needn’t focus on that. You’re lovely.” Mallery looked in the mirror. “I’m barely thin enough for Hollywood, and I put in twenty hours at the gym every week. The only person with more time logged there is Roman.”
Mallery found her outfit, then took to helping dress Leah, continuing to weave together their backstory. Mallery was not quite as hands-on with the makeup this time, thankfully. Plus, the air was on in the bathroom from the start.
Properly snazzed up and armed with a solid-enough backstory, Mallery loaded the software for the tracker they’d slipped into Anna’s hoodie and they headed out to hail a cab.
“No Ultra?” Leah asked, figuring they’d use the super-convenient but ethically suspect app-based car service.
“Never Ultra,” Mallery said, her face sour. “Plus, we never have to wait for a cab, remember?” Mallery whistled and waved a hand, and a yellow checkered car turned the corner and rolled up to a stop in front of their building.
“Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic” played in Leah’s head as the pair climbed in and headed out to intercept their Leading Lady.
———
The GPS placed Anna in Times Square, which earned a small sigh from the cabbie, who was probably about to get off shift and would have rather not picked up a fare that would require him to drive into and out of a clusterfuck of traffic one more time.
Mallery dove straight into character, the Georgia coming back out. It was smooth enough that Leah wondered if this was the woman’s native accent, one she’d rounded out toward the Central Ohio Valley default.
Mallery followed her GPS, looking like a capital-T Tourist—head down, ignorant of the flows of people, leaving Leah to watch out for her.
Except even the distracted bit was an act. Mallery wove through the crowd, looking like she was going to bump into people but never managing to do more than brush by their jackets.
All the while, she chattered, loudly.
“Ain’t this the most amazing thing, Toni?” Leah was Toni, Mallery was Susan.
“Remember to look up, Susan. Can we get a picture at the top of those stairs?”
“But everyone gets a picture there. I want an authentic experience, something that really says I get New York, not ‘I followed the guide book.’”
If they wanted that, they wouldn’t be in Times Square to start, but Leah decided to hold her tongue there.
“There’s a Disney store!” she clapped with feigned excitement as Mallery turned in that direction.
They wove and wound their way through the pedestrian-dominated street, hand in hand, eventually turning out of the super-touristy area into the Broadway theatre district, ending up in front of a side-street building with a dance studio’s sign hanging on the second floor—ALWAYS EN POINTE DANCE STUDIO.
“Looks like our heroine is somewhere in this building,” Mallery said.
“Her Persona profile listed her as an instructor at a dance studio; I think it was this one.”
“It was this one, yes. So now we go in and talk our way into the class. We want the authentic New York dance experience. I’ll carry you through the class.”
“Does everything we do have to be about you being amazing and me bumbling through?” Leah regretted how hurt she sounded ev
en before she was done asking the question.
Mallery turned and dropped all vestiges of her character. “Sorry, newbie. Rom-com couples are studies in opposites. Contrast hides who we really are. They’ll see the bumbling and ignore who you are behind it. We need to be just enough in Anna’s life to make a difference. It’s far better if she remembers us as that wacky pair of actresses, not as the people we really are. Or even the people we aren’t really.”
“Got it. Lean into the stereotypes. How naggy are we?”
“Newlyweds, so not very. I’d say a two out of ten.”
“But sassy,” Leah asked, worried Mallery was going to somehow bleed all of the fun out of the characters.
Mallery beamed. “So sassy. At least eight out of ten. Shall we?”
———
The studio was narrow, no more than twenty feet across, but long, with mirrors along the entire wall opposite the windows. The dancers were all dressed in black, no pointe shoes, no socks. Leah guessed jazz or modern, probably jazz, given Broadway.
Which of course meant that their makeup could stay, but the wealthy-women-about-town outfits had to go.
Anna Grace stood in the studio, listening to something on earbuds. Her hair was back and up, head bobbing to the music.
Mallery kicked off her shoes in the lobby, walking past a half-dozen women getting ready, and entered the studio. Leah avoided tripping on her shoes as she rushed to follow.
“Hello? Are you Anna Grace? I’m Susan Mallery; this is my wife, Toni Tang.” Leah had complained about the alliteration but Mallery countered that it was both adorable and appropriately ridiculous for a Rom-Com.
It could have been worse. In Hollywood, it could always be worse.
Anna looked the women over. “Hello. What can I do for you?”
“We heard about your class from a friend, Jamie, who moved out to Hollywood a while ago? We met at an audition. She was always going on about how amazing her classes with Anna Grace were, so when we decided that we’d come and visit the city, she said, ‘Oh you just have to go take a class with Anna.’ Isn’t that right, Toni?”
The Cupid Reconciliation Genrenauts Episode Three Page 5