by Rae Mariz
She checked her intouch®, then looked at me. “You are coming, right? You should COME!”
“Where?”
“To the Physics of Hollywood walkthrough in the Lecture Hall. Palmer Phillips invited Rocket and all of us to come because they’re going to sneak-preview clips from next summer’s blockbusters.”
Ari guilted me into following along with the other Craftsters, so I logged in to one of the scheduled Hints, Cheats, and Walkthroughs.
The lesson would probably cover some momentum and trajectory physics questions, and it would be the quickest way to solve my PLAY clue. But mostly I went to be with Ari. It felt like we weren’t interested in the same stuff anymore, and I missed just being around her. I didn’t need a Newtonian equation to figure out that the distance between us would increase at a ridiculous rate if we didn’t spend more time together.
So we all logged in to the Lecture Hall. It was a grab lesson. Mr. Tom Rogers was debunking the physics of Hollywood; showing all the action scenes of bodies flying through glass windows, noncombustible objects bursting into flames, guys getting electrocuted, stuff like that. Then he used computer animation (he’s the Digital Visual Effects instructor up on fifth) to enter in equations and apply the laws of physics to the scenes.
It was actually creepier to see the scenes with the real-world effects. Gruesome. Everyone in the Lecture Hall cringed as the carnage piled up on screen. Palmer Phillips had his arm around Rocket. She closed her eyes and hid her face in his shoulder. Palmer and some of his wiseass friends were laughing, but it was nervous laughter, the tone of it a little too sharp to be genuine.
I texted Mikey.
kidzero: what do you think about mixing recordings of laughter? @MIKEY
kidzero: it would make acoustically extreme music @MIKEY
mikes: do it. @KID
I set my intouch® to record, waiting for the nervous titters. I was feeling restless. Screens never held my attention for very long, even if they were flashing a series of crumpling bodies, and my attention started to wander. Watching the wide eyes of the audience.
I noticed someone else not paying attention. I recognized her, the girl with the bird eyes from this morning. Was she following me?
I could hardly see her face because her head was bent down, focused on her desk. She was carving something into the plastic desktop.
Her hair was shaved in the back, bowl-cut on top. It wasn’t a very grab haircut, but it made clear that she wasn’t trying to be pretty. Silver earrings lined the rim of her ear and I recognized the pink circle high on her cheekbone. I couldn’t tell if it was makeup or paint or a tattoo or what.
There was a screech of car tires on the screen, a sickening crash, and the kids groaned. Then laughed.
But she didn’t look up. The slow-burning flames from the screen reflected in her straight black hair, which swayed slightly with the effort of etching something into the desk.
Mr. Rogers gave some final hints to the class about Newton’s Second Law and the forces acting on a falling object, and then the lesson was over.
I quickly thumbed in my PLAY reply: 9.8 m/s2 and hit Submit.
Ari said loudly to the Craftsters, “I swear to Google, I think I almost puked.”
They all chattered in agreement, their faces lit with delighted terror.
“Did you almost puke?” Ari asked me.
I was watching the girl write on the desk.
“Did you almost puke?” she asked me again. “That was sick, right?”
I nodded, distracted. Everyone was gathering their stuff and heading toward the exit, but Palmer Phillips was walking over to the girl finishing up the etching in her desk. She looked up to see him standing there, all broad shoulders and unnaturally blond hair. She quickly picked up her stuff to leave, and he just grinned at her. I’d heard that Palmer Phillips had his right canine sharpened to start a new trend—so far the lopsided vampire look hadn’t caught on.
“Ari?” I said, grabbing her arm. “Who’s that? Over there with Palmer Phillips.”
At the sound of Palmer’s name, Ari laser-beamed her attention to that side of the room. She frowned. “That’s Cayenne Lewis.”
“What?” I nearly shrieked. “That’s Cayenne Lewis?” I stared at her trying to stash her things into her bag and ignore Palmer. “What happened to her?”
Ari nodded. “I know, right? She looks horrible. That haircut makes her look like a Beijing special-needs orphan. I know she got dropped, that the Fashion Fascists kicked her out of the clique and everything. But come on. Did they go to her house and smash all her mirrors? There’s no excuse for looking that militantly tragic.”
“Why’d they kick her out?”
Ari shrugged. “Does there have to be a reason?”
I don’t know. Didn’t there?
I watched her as she rushed toward the exit of the Lecture Hall. Cayenne Lewis, holy shit. I looked closely at her face and could almost recognize it, that profile passing everyone in the hall, never looking at them. Her hair had been really long when she was a Fashion Fascist. She would toss it over her shoulder like she was in a shampoo commercial and laugh. That was probably why I didn’t recognize her. That carefree vacant look she had was gone. Now she looked people in the face and dared them to blink.
“I thought she moved away or something,” I mumbled.
“Who?” Ari said, then realized I was still talking about Cayenne. “Oh.”
Ari let herself get swallowed up in the activity of the Craftsters, and I took a detour to the desk where Cayenne had been sitting. I read what she had written:
Suicide doll’s suicide
Pretty, but with death there’s no way to hide
Afraid to make a cut, see there’s nothing inside
If your friends told you to jump off a bridge
You’d step to the edge and fly.
I read through it a couple of times. Suicide doll. Even though it was a pretty gruesome poem, I smiled. I glanced at my balloon-face wrist accessory. The dot-dash-dot symbol carved into the plastic desktop looked like the expression on the balloon. Cayenne Lewis had to be connected to the body-drop stunt. Somehow.
My intouch® purred a double-buzz.
mikes: i know how we can catch them. FIND ME. @KID
Mikey was being cryptic, but I knew that strangely we were thinking about the same thing. It happened all the time—it was kind of creepy.
“‘Find me,’” I said to myself, opening my notebook® and navigating to Mikey’s page. He had a really annoying animation that launched when you clicked.
I glanced at the RIGHT NOW section of his sidebar. He was logged in to the DIY Depot on the fourth floor. And he was a genius.
9 DIY DETECTIVES
Mikey had like a little rat’s nest in the DIY Depot, off to the side of the Robot Combat Arena where kids were getting ready for the prizefights tomorrow afternoon. It was the most popular activity in the DIY Depot. Everyone who wanted to compete engineered and built the toughest remote-controlled robots to battle it out in the arena. The current champion robot and its creator were featured at the entrance, along with the hardware supply sponsors who shared in the glory of the tin warrior’s continued victory.
I crept carefully into Mikey’s nest, eyeballed the wobbly tower of crates filled with electronics parts, and tried to sit where it was least likely to crush me if it fell. Mikey’s workspace was hazardous—he left live wires lying around everywhere. The instructors who patrolled the area always reminded him about safety procedures, but Mikey was hard to convince. So they just shook their heads and waited with fire extinguishers ready.
Mikey looked up from soldering something in his little robot’s brain.
I peeked over his shoulder at the splayed parts of his combat robot. “He’s not going to be ready for the fight tomorrow,” I said. It was a statement, but Mikey took it as a question.
“Yeah, of course. Look at him.”
Mikey picked up the controllers and made the gimpy ro
bot use two of its working legs to push itself around in a circle on its skateboard wheels.
He laughed maniacally. “It’s alive!”
I hit Record, trying to get Mikey’s laugh for my collection.
Mikey spent all his time working on the most pathetic little spidery-legged robot. It was raw-clumsy and adorable. Mikey called it Cripple. It got stomped in the arena. We’re talking mutilated. Mikey always fixed it up again though.
A Level 16 techboy poked his head over a pile of scrap metal.
“You’re wasting your time, Littleton. That spindly little wimp of a robot needs to get scrapped.”
“There’s nothing wrong with Cripple. You need to get scrapped,” Mikey muttered while he adjusted the delicate joints in Cripple’s skinny knees. “Jerk.”
“Hey,” I said to Mikey. “Nice deductive skills, Detective Gumshoe.” I waved my intouch® in the air, referring to his FIND ME message.
Mikey put his finger to his lips, picked up Cripple’s remote control, and moved closer to me.
He spoke quietly, tossing a glance over to the top of the partition making sure that kid didn’t pop his head up again.
“I was thinking we could use the log-on tracker in reverse.” He fiddled with the knobs on his remote control, testing out all of Cripple’s joints and continued in a low voice. “Use the scene of the crime to give us a list of suspects.”
“Why are you whispering?” I whispered back.
“Because it could be a conspiracy,” he hissed.
I laughed loudly.
“Shh!” he said.
“You don’t think it’s a conspiracy,” I whispered in his ear.
He made a big deal about tucking my hair back behind my ear, then leaned in close. “No,” he whispered. “I just think it’s really fun to be secretive and pretend to be paranoid.”
He leaned back and grinned.
“Yeah, OK.” I laughed. But I looked over my shoulder anyway. Maybe it was what that guy said this morning, how “they” were watching us, wanting to know how we made choices. And how my PLAY clue just happened to be about the physics of free fall. I was getting good and genuinely paranoid myself.
“But we checked out the scene of the crime yesterday,” I said, trying to figure out where we could apply our brilliant new spy technique, “there wasn’t anything on the fifth floor besides tampered security cameras.”
“Yeah, there was.”
Fifth floor, Audio/Viz.
“It’s really the only place they could go to edit their film so fast and upload it immediately.”
He was right. When I’d linked to the Unidentified video that morning, the time stamp said the film had gone up not even an hour after the event itself. That was a pretty fast turnaround time to edit, render, and upload.
Since notebooks® were only equipped for Network, searching on Archive, and software sponsors’ limited-time trial applications, this was the only place that had the resources to pull off the kind of postproduction used for the Unidentified film.
Mikey peeked into the window display at Audio/Viz. There was a single screen showing random clips of films that students had made.
“That’s mine. Do you see it?” Mikey said.
I saw a quick close-up of what looked like a cardboard box covered in tinfoil with flashing red lights.
“What’s your film about?”
“A zombie movie, except with robots.”
I laughed.
We logged in to Audio/Viz. When the light blinked over to green, I was suddenly really aware of how my activity was being tracked inside the Game. Stepping through the doors, I just hoped the same mechanism that let the administrators know where I was right now would give us clues as to who used the equipment yesterday morning.
This room was a lot like the Arcade, except with machines set up with digital video editing software instead of the grabbest online video games.
We walked around the store, not really knowing what we were looking for.
“What are we looking for?”
“I don’t know—evidence?” Mikey said, sitting behind a keyboard, pretending to hack.
I laughed. “This is so effing Crime Scene Extreme. Seriously though, is it even possible to view log-in records user-side?”
“Hmm, yes,” Mikey said tapping his finger on his chin pseudointellectually. “You’re right. This sounds like a job for a Crackhead.”
Mikey whipped out his intouch® and started writing a message.
mikes: where you playing? @SWIFT
swiftx: arcade @MIKEY
mikes: wanna pop next door, audio/viz? @SWIFT
It was a while before he answered again. I was following the conversation on my intouch®.
swiftx: what is it? i’m about to get promoted @MIKEY
“He’s playing Buy, Sell & Destroy,” Mikey said, as if I weren’t already totally lurking through the entire exchange.
kidzero: please? @SWIFT
I wrote, buttoning in on their conversation again.
swiftx: kid with you? @MIKEY
I was mortified.
mikes: yes. @SWIFT
kidzero: hi. @SWIFT
We looked at each other while we waited for his reply. Mikey mouthed, You’re so rude.
I knew he was just teasing me, but I felt my face get hot. I usually wasn’t that bothered when I made a fool of myself, but this was different. This was Jeremy Swift.
swiftx: let me save my game. @MIKEY, @KID
I smiled at my intouch®. It was such a kick when Jeremy @ed me. I got the same roller-coaster drop in my stomach as I did when he looked at me yesterday.
“Oh, stop,” Mikey said, irritated.
“What?”
“‘What?’” he mocked.
I punched him on the shoulder, mostly to hide my embarrassment that I apparently wasn’t fooling anybody.
Jeremy slouched in through the Audio/Viz doors, hands in his pockets, squinting at everyone from behind his shaggy bangs like the slacker rockstar that he was. He saw Mikey and me and nodded his head in our direction.
We went to meet him.
“What’s going on?” Swift said, brushing his hair out of his eyes.
I swallowed. Mikey nudged me.
“Is there any way we could see the Audio/Viz login records? We need to see who used the editing stations between like…I don’t know, the dummy dropped a little after nine,” I said.
“Whoa, players don’t have access to log-in records,” he said. “Why’re you asking me?”
“Because you’re a Crackhead,” Mikey said, emphasizing the “rrr” in Crackhead. “So, come on. Show us the score.”
“For yesterday morning. Between, like, nine to eleven a.m.,” I added.
“Does this have anything to do with that video you were watching the other day?” Swift said to me.
“Um, yeah,” I said, kind of surprised he put it together so quickly. “We’re trying to find out who pulled that anti-PR prank yesterday morning. Some group calling themselves the Unidentified.”
“Never heard of them,” Swift said, shrugging. “Look, log-in records are purged daily after closing time to protect player privacy.”
Mikey poked Swift in the chest. “You make a really lousy Crackhead.”
Swift slapped Mikey’s hand away. “Fawk off.”
“So what’s our next move?” Mikey asked, turning to me.
I glanced at Jeremy. He was playing around with his intouch®, reading streams. But I caught him peeking over at us. I tried to smile naturally even though I felt like his gaze was pinning my butterfly heart. Seemed like he was interested to know what our next move was too, trying to listen in. Or maybe I was just hoping he was interested.
“I don’t know,” I admitted.
Jeremy smiled wide. “Hey, have either of you heard anything about an Illegal Arts Workshop today?” he asked.
I shrugged. I didn’t know why, but I didn’t feel entirely comfortable telling Mikey and Jeremy about my run-in with the
mysterious man in the bushes. Okay, the mysterious man and his ex-Fashion Fascist girlfriend. I guess the truth didn’t sound as scandalous.
“I’ve heard rumors,” Jeremy said.
“You want to check it out?” Mikey asked me hopefully. “I’ve got time.”
“But we were supposed to meet up with Ari at the Studio.”
Mikey rolled his eyes. “How many times this week has Ari blown off band practice? Please express the probability of her being there today in the form of a ratio.”
“What, you don’t think she’s going to come?”
Mikey just shook his head.
I took out my intouch® to let Ari know to meet us in Prime Real Estate instead. I knew she didn’t have the greatest track record of making it to practice lately, but I wasn’t going to give up on her.
Besides, she’d be upset if we went to an Illegal Arts Workshop without telling her. I passed the word on.
kidzero: change of plans. IAW! tick tock 02, PRE @ARI
“Let’s go,” I said, feeling kind of guilty that the excitement I felt was more for the idea of hanging out with Swift than learning some forbidden skill.
10 ILLEGAL ARTS WORKSHOP
Illegal Arts Workshops were held in Prime Real Estate, the row of empty storefronts that had been reserved for players to use, to encourage young entrepreneurs to get involved in the joys of retail and business. The kids who got their proposals approved to set up shop in Prime Real Estate sometimes loaned out their space to friends who wanted to share skills that the administrators would never OK. These clandestine activities always got a good turnout. Forbidden knowledge had its allure.
Jeremy walked with us across the hall to the Prime Real Estate wing.