A Trick of Light

by Stan Lee

  And Aria Sloane buries her face in her pillow and starts to scream.

  ENCRYPTED MESSAGE INCOMING

  From: Olivia Park

  To: Team Alpha

  Subject: Priority assignment

  OPTIC algorithms have identified a pattern of disruptions, estimated 94 percent likelihood that events are linked. Please review attached files on the hacks of Daggett Smith, Ford Freeman, and Aria Sloane, and conduct relevant analysis. Cameron Ackerson is pissing in our pool; I want to know who he’s working with.

  16

  Mixed Messages

  The coffee shop is the perfect spot: midway down a tree-lined street in trendy Ohio City, away from the bustle and crowds of the open-air market a few blocks away. Inside, it’s quiet and cozy, the morning rush long finished but the lunchtime crowd not yet arrived. Cameron steps up to the gleaming counter and grins at the black-aproned barista, who looks a little spooked in response. He knows he probably looks like an idiot, but he just can’t help it. After all, he’s about to cross one of the all-important thresholds of human experience.

  Today, for the first time in his long life of lonely singledom, he’s going to buy coffee for a girl.

  “One large red-eye and a pink spiced spring latte,” he says, then leans in to add, “for my lady friend, of course.” He shifts his eyes toward Nia, who is perched lightly on the arm of an overstuffed chair over by the door. She gazes back at him and cocks her head a little, as if to ask what’s taking so long.

  The barista flicks his eyes in Nia’s direction, then resumes giving Cameron the stink-eye.

  “I don’t care who it’s for, man,” he says. “Total’s nine eighty-eight.”

  Cameron tips him a buck anyway. Nothing’s going to spoil his good mood—not today. He and Nia are on a date. Not a chance meeting, but a real date, the planned-in-advance kind. Her text message lit up on his lens display earlier his morning, just as he stepped off the bus in front of City Center High—another significant milestone, although not nearly as exciting. An hour ago, Cameron turned in the last of his final exams; his high school career is finished, except for that last walk across the stage.

  My father is away working all day, Nia’s text said. Let’s meet? Spiffy Bean at 11am.

  He had to set a speed record on his physics final to get here in time, but was it worth it? Hell yes, it was.

  His determination to feel terrific lasts as long as it takes for him to approach her with the cup, which is extravagantly decked with a sky-high tower of pink whipped cream and flecked with little pink sugar crystals.

  “Here you go,” he says, but instead of taking it from him with the expected squeal of delight, she recoils with a faintly distressed look on her face.

  “Oh, Cameron, I’m sorry,” she whispers. “I don’t drink coffee.”

  Cameron’s hand stops abruptly in midair and the whipped cream tower wobbles dangerously, threatening to collapse.

  “You don’t? But . . . then why would you want to meet at a coffee shop?”

  Nia’s brows knit together with worry. She glances around nervously. “Was that wrong? I thought this was where everyone meets.”

  “Yeah. To drink coffee,” Cameron says, laughing, but Nia doesn’t even crack a smile. Oh God, I’m blowing it, he thinks, desperately, and then realizes that his humiliation has an audience. The barista is now openly staring. He tucks his own coffee into the crook of his arm and grabs the door, pulling it wide. “Here, let’s talk outside.”

  Nia must be as embarrassed as he is, because she practically runs out the door.

  * * *

  Her expression stays glum as they begin walking, her arms hugged in close to her chest. Cameron thinks about grabbing her hand and making a dramatic plea for forgiveness—I’m sorry I got you the world’s most ridiculous coffee, please don’t hate me—but he’s holding a cup in each hand.

  “Hey, Nia, my bad. I just thought you’d like one because, you know, you said to meet here? And most girls like this drink.”

  It occurs to him as he says this that it may not even be true; in fact, he has no idea if the seventy-odd girls who tagged photos of the pink spiced latte on social media ever actually consumed it or if they just ordered it because it looks cute in pictures. And either way, Nia isn’t having it. Actually, she’s scowling at him.

  “Well, I don’t want it,” she says.

  “Hey, that’s cool. More for me, right? I’ve, uh, always wanted to try one of these,” Cameron says, lying through his teeth. He takes a sip of the pink confection; it tastes like someone wrapped a marshmallow Peep in a cotton candy cocoon and drowned it in a toilet full of weak tea. Nia’s eyebrows leap skyward.

  “How does it taste?”

  “I sincerely apologize,” Cameron says, “for thinking that you would want to drink this.”

  “But all the girls like it,” she says, and now she’s really scowling. “That’s what you said.”

  “What?”

  “Like those girls you saw the movie with. Like Emma Marston, maybe.”

  “Emma Mar—What?” Cameron stops short, gaping at Nia. “Wait. Nia, are you mad at me? Oh shit, you are. You’re mad about . . . what, about the movie?”

  It was a stupid question, he realized. Of course she was mad about the movie—and he’d practically forgotten all about it in his excitement to see her, even though it was just last night. After all the amazing week they’d had pulling off the latest round of Operation Cosmic Justice, all Cameron had wanted was to finally introduce Nia to his friends—Juaquo, particularly, had been getting increasingly agitated about meeting her—and a group outing to the new superhero blockbuster with a whole bunch of people seemed like a perfect way to break the ice. To keep it casual. Even Dr. Kapur, who was always cautioning him about neglecting his friends and family in favor of spending time online with Nia, gave the idea a thumbs-up. But when he told Nia yesterday that some friends would be coming with them, she suddenly told him she couldn’t make it and abruptly dropped offline.

  Cameron had tried not to read too much into it, especially when she didn’t bring it up again the next time they talked. But maybe he should have. Maybe Nia had been doing that thing where you say everything’s fine but you mean completely the opposite—except Nia never did that. And with the tickets already in hand and only a couple hours until showtime, what was he supposed to do? So the group date had turned into a regular night out with Juaquo and a few friends from school. And yes, some of the friends were girls . . . and yes, they had posted pics from the evening that Nia would have seen.

  But she was the one who canceled. It didn’t make sense for her to be mad about it. Unless . . .

  “Hold on,” he says. “Are you jealous?”

  The question comes out sounding way too gleeful, and Cameron feels instantly stupid: what kind of dumbass asks someone if they’re jealous, an emotion that no person in their right mind would admit to feeling? Only . . .

  “Yes!” Nia says, her expression brightening. “Jealous! That is exactly how I feel.”

  Cameron’s jaw drops to what feels like knee level.

  Nia seems to mistake his surprise for confusion. “Don’t you understand? Because I was so happy when you asked me. I was excited to see a movie with you! But then I couldn’t go, and those Emma and Amber girls did, and they got to have the experience that I wanted. They got to be with you when I couldn’t. And I’m jealous about it!”

  Cameron can’t help it: he starts grinning. A giant, cheese-eating, swoony grin. His stomach feels like someone is tap-dancing inside of it. She’s jealous, he thinks, the two words humming through his mind like a miraculous mantra. Jealous! It was the greatest thing ever!

  “Well, I’m sorry. I didn’t know you were the jealous type,” he says, finally.

  “Me neither,” Nia says, sounding surprisingly cheerful. “I never felt that way before.”

  * * *

  Just expressing her feelings out loud seems to have eased Nia’s unhappiness, and they
begin to talk more easily as they wander the city, the business district fading away behind them. Ahead, a bus stop sports a poster for next month’s big event at the I-X Center outside the city: HACK YOURSELF, it screams, and Nia points at it.

  “What is this?”

  “Body-hacking,” Cameron says, grinning. “Bionic limbs, smart tattoos, ingestible microchips, and augmented-reality everything. Blurring the line between man and machine. Not gonna lie, this is right up my alley. Hey, and yours, too—check it out, they have e-sports. Your killer aviatrix could murder someone else for a change.”

  Nia’s eyes go wide. “What? That’s amazing!”

  “You want to go?” Cameron says. “It’s been sold out forever, but I am a sort of local celebrity. I could probably pull a couple strings, finagle a couple of tickets.”

  “I’d like to go.” She sounds wistful, and looks at him shyly. “I’d like to go with you. I wish . . . I wish I could be with you more.”

  “Well, hey,” Cameron says, feeling himself blush with pleasure. “Me too.”

  Nia looks thoughtful. “It’s hard to be lonely, isn’t it? And so many people are. Even when they’re in the same place, it’s like they’re disconnected. Like those people.” She gestures at a passing couple, walking together in silence, each looking down at the phone in their hand. “They’re both somewhere else, inside their heads. They’re not reaching out or trying to understand.” She pauses, sighing. “Wouldn’t it be great if people could just connect directly? Brain to brain, so everyone would be in the same place on the inside, too.”

  Cameron grimaces and chuckles. “You haven’t seen The Matrix, have you?”

  “No. What is it?”

  “A movie. Or a trilogy of movies, I guess. They do something like what you’re talking about.”

  Nia’s expression brightens. “They do? What happens?”

  “Uh,” says Cameron. “I don’t want to spoil it for you, but it doesn’t go well.”

  She frowns. “Why not?”

  “Because the sentient machines take all the plugged-in people and brainwash them, and start harvesting them as an energy source.”

  Nia lets out a little shriek, and Cameron laughs.

  “But that’s terrible,” she says. “That wasn’t my idea at all.”

  “Well, of course not,” he says. “Because you’re not an evil robot who wants to enslave humanity. But you’re right. People are disconnected. That’s the irony of the internet: it was supposed to stop all that, but I think it’s only made it worse.”

  Cameron shakes his head, thinking about the awful things he sees every time he opens his mind and plunges into cyberspace. “Everyone is walled off behind their screens. Alone, anonymous—and when people feel anonymous, they stop acting like people. They stop treating other people like people. Everyone who’s not them isn’t really human; everyone who’s not a member of their tribe is evil and has to be destroyed.”

  “Their tribe.” Nia frowns.

  “It’s bullshit,” Cameron says. “Just a bunch of arbitrary lines in the sand. Too bad we can’t wipe them away.”

  “No tribes,” Nia muses.

  “Or only one,” he replies. “We’re all human. If everyone just remembered that . . .” He trails off, shaking his head. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s impossible. And maybe there’s a tradeoff. The loneliest people can be really creative, you know? Sometimes they make beautiful things.”

  Cameron concentrates, using his lenses to project a colorful cloud of butterflies in the air around Nia’s head, then syncs the clip to his phone and sends it to her. She jumps a little, digs into her pocket, and pulls out her own device, smiling broadly as she sees what he’s done.

  “You made this. I’d love to live in a world like this.”

  * * *

  A world like this.

  The words are a seed that takes root in his mind as they walk, a companionable silence falling over them. It’s not until Cameron’s foot begins to ache that he looks up and sees that they’re approaching a familiar sight—the overgrown, hulking silhouettes of the grand mansions that nobody wants to save, standing on borrowed time until they finally sag into ruins. Without meaning to, he’s begun retracing his route from the day of the accident. And as he looks at those empty houses, relics from another time, the seed blooms into an idea.

  “Hey,” Cameron says, stopping. “What if we made a world? One where we could visit with each other whenever we wanted—at least until your dad decides to relax the rules a little.”

  “Made one?” Nia asks. “How?”

  “We wouldn’t even have to build it from scratch. It would be more like . . . renovating.” Cameron gestures at the lens in his eye, the phone in his hand. “You were right. I couldn’t get into Oz before, but I could now. We could. We could transform it from something deserted and ruined into something great.”

  “Just for us?” Nia says. “Oh, I like that. It would be like they have in the movies, a clubhouse.”

  “A headquarters.”

  “An underground lair,” she says, giggling.

  “That’s the spirit,” Cameron says. “And it’ll be secure, which is good, because we need to do some brainstorming about who the next target of Operation Cosmic Justice should be.”

  Nia claps her hands together. “No, we don’t. I have someone.”

  Cameron raises his eyebrows. “Who?”

  “I don’t think they have a name,” she says, frowning. “It’s not one person. It’s more like an entity—or an evil machine, like you were talking about. Do you remember all those dummy sites that went dark when Daggett Smith disappeared? There’s a connection. Something big. I’ve been digging into the data on my social networks, and there’s a rogue algorithm flowing through every single one. Someone is manipulating what we see on social media, playing to people’s biases, siphoning off massive amounts of data. I don’t know what they’re using it for, but—”

  Nia is still talking, but Cameron is only half listening. The idea of a rogue algorithm running like a secret stream beneath every social network sounds like a bonkers conspiracy theory; surely it’s the sort of thing he would have noticed himself. When he returns his full attention to Nia, he finds her smiling at him.

  “You look unconvinced,” she says.

  “It’s just that I haven’t seen it myself,” he says.

  “Maybe you need to look with fresh eyes.” Her tone is teasing.

  “I will. But if it’s what you say . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “It won’t be easy.”

  “Don’t tell me you’re afraid of a challenge,” she says.

  He grins. “No way. I’m with you. Whatever it is, we’ll take it down.”

  Together, they turn and begin walking back the way they came. A soft breeze rises off the lake, and the sun is warm and bright. Cameron turns his face toward it. An early-summer afternoon, a walk with a beautiful girl; sometimes he thinks the real world isn’t so bad. The bus stop they passed earlier looms ahead, a city bus pulling up alongside it. Nia points, moving toward it.

  “I should go,” she says, then hesitates. “But can I ask you a question?”

  “Sure,” Cameron says. The bus reaches the curb, swinging its doors wide.

  “That world we’re going to make. The one just for us.” She pauses, biting her lip. “Except, does it have to be just us?”

  “What? You want to invite someone else?” Cameron says. Now he’s feeling jealous—but only for a moment. Nia’s eyes widen just before she answers:

  “In our virtual reality, could there be . . . a dog?”

  He bursts out laughing. “Yeah, Nia. There can be a dog.”

  She gives him a thumbs-up before she turns and hops aboard the waiting bus. Cameron waves, watching her go. The driver gestures at him.

  “You getting on, kid?”

  “Nope, I’m headed downtown,” Cameron says, still grinning. He waves again at Nia, whose pale face is visible through the window. The driver r
olls his eyes and grumbles, but Cameron barely notices. He’s filled with a sense of purpose, of possibilities—and he has a sunny afternoon and a pleasant walk ahead to think about all of them.

  * * *

  Hours later, Cameron sits in the dark of the basement, his fingers flying over the keyboard as his mind converses with the software, trying to sense the presence of the algorithm Nia was so certain is there. If it’s what she described, he can’t fathom how she found it. It would be designed to pass unnoticed, to appear organic to the system; hunting for it was like gazing at a fast-moving stream of water and trying to see a single, anomalous ripple in the surface.

  Maybe you need to look with fresh eyes, she’d said. But fresh eyes aren’t what Cameron needs. He needs a new perspective. Nia’s perspective. He knows her well enough to know that she sees things differently from most people. Not just differently; she sees more. Nia can dig one layer deeper when the data seems impenetrable, can spot patterns in a vast sea of information where he sees only noise.

  Patterns, he thinks. In his brain, something stirs. His heart starts to beat faster.

  I’m looking too closely.

  And when he concentrates, trying to see the web as she does, zooming out to see more and more even as he dives deeper into the code—he nearly gasps aloud. In Cameron’s mind, the code springs into view, laced so elegantly into every network that you’d never spot it unless you already knew it was there. He wonders afresh how Nia ever found it; even now, it seems to shift and shimmer under his scrutiny, like a mirage that disappears if you try to look directly at it. To trace the origins of something like this will take all his skill, and probably all of hers, too.

  * * *

  As Cameron gazes motionless into the depths of the web, a shadow slinks past the basement window and moves quickly down Walker Row. The unseen observer passes unnoticed—she has all week, crossing in front of the Ackerson house early in the morning as Cameron leaves for school, or sitting a few seats behind him when he rides the bus downtown, or standing across the street from Dr. Kapur’s home office after his Monday appointment.