by Corrie Wang
Coming in and out of the building were people walking their dogs, toting their bikes and skateboards, and otherwise enjoying this sunny, brisk late-December day. It felt more like a college campus than the headquarters of one of the most influential companies in the world.
“This isn’t David versus Goliath,” I muttered. “It’s David versus all the geek gods inside one giant Cronus.”
“Geek gods. Good one.” Mac stared up at the building in awe. “Don’t forget. David won.”
We didn’t get past reception.
There were two receptionists—one male and one female—who sat in plush chairs behind an empty glass table. I nudged Mac toward the male receptionist because he gave us a bright smile when we entered while the female receptionist kept staring straight ahead, her eyeballs moving in minute flicks. Every few clicks, she said, “Hello, ConnectBook. How may I connect you? One moment.” Even though we heard no ringing.
“Hi there,” the male receptionist said when we approached. “Welcome to ConnectBook. How may I help you?”
“Hi there,” I said. “Someone’s posted malicious content about me. I was hoping I could talk to a tech.”
“All right, I see you’re having a malicious content problem. If you go to your ConnectBook account and click Flag Post, ConnectBook security will investigate the complaint.”
If I’d had my Doc, I’d have txted Creepy to Mac. Instead I tried to convey the emotion with my eyes and mouth. Mac raised an eyebrow, like, huh? Behind us, the front doors slid open. A kid in a slate-colored hoodie, not much taller than Audra, wandered in and waited for an elevator. Did they have day care here, too?
“Oh, it’s not one post, it’s like hundreds of thousands, but the thing I need help with is—”
“I understand. If you go to your account and click Flag Links, ConnectBook security will investigate the complaint. But what I am hearing you say, ma’am, is that there are many links you’d like removed, and I should remind you that as a ConnectBook user, you have signed a terms-of-service agreement that allows all ConnectBook information to be public. You can find this information right online under your My Account Info.”
My eyes flicked to Mac, and under my breath I said, “Txt Mac: Bot?”
Mac’s mouth was slightly agape, his eyes glued to the receptionist. “Not sure.”
I glanced longingly at the bank of elevators behind us. I imagined grabbing that kid—who’d put his hood up and was clearly eavesdropping—as a hostage, making a mad dash for any upwards locale and cornering the first tech person we saw.
“But we’re here and I don’t want to wait for”—I didn’t mean to mimic a robot when I said it, but I did—“ConnectBook security to launch an investigation. I don’t want you guys to remove any links. I was hoping to speak with someone about accessing closed user accounts so I could remove the links myself.”
The smile didn’t leave the receptionist’s lips, but it tightened. Thank goodness. He was human.
“Yeah,” Mac said.
“Please,” I added, to make up for using the robot voice.
The female receptionist tapped a tiny square piece of metal next to her eye, then spoke directly to me. Mac and I jumped.
“What I am hearing you say is that you would like to access another user’s private account information. At ConnectBook we take the privacy of our users very seriously. Account tampering is a serious offense. May I have your username, please?”
“But he just said all ConnectBook information was public—”
“Posts are public and protected by freedom of speech. Identities are private and protected by CB. May I have your username, please?”
The smile now genuinely widened on the male receptionist’s boyish features.
“No. Why do you need my username? I’m not trying to account tamper. I’m not even online right now. But I’m pretty sure someone has accessed ConnectBook Woofer footage of me and other girls my age and then turned that footage into fake and highly damaging videos of us doing stuff with our teachers. If a user is allowed to do that within CB’s guidelines, I should be able to find out who that user is.”
The female receptionist tapped the metal square again and resumed staring at her retina screen. “Hello, ConnectBook,” she said. “How may I connect you? One moment.”
I didn’t want to sound like Mom or anything, but cutting-edge tech was getting weird. The kid in the slate hoodie now stood a few feet behind us. He was even leaning in to hear us better.
“This is garbage,” Mac said.
“If you have a complaint about the service you received today”—this now from the smiling male receptionist—“you can put it in writing and mail it to our customer service division. You can find the address online under our contact information. Is there anything else I can help you with?”
“But you haven’t helped me. You’re telling me—ConnectBook is telling me—to write a letter?”
“That’s correct. Thank you for contacting ConnectBook. Have a connected New Year.”
It wasn’t supposed to go this way. I wasn’t supposed to be stopped at the gates by a tooth-model clone with an unhelpful script. Next to me I could feel Mac tense, like he was ready to coil up and spring on the guy. Grabbing the crook of his arm, I pulled him toward the exit. The doors didn’t automatically slide apart. I jammed my finger against the manual door-open button. When that didn’t work, Mac pressed the button again and again.
“I think those are supposed to work on a push-once basis.”
The kid in the hoodie was hovering behind us, except he wasn’t a kid. He was just short. And extremely pale. He looked like he’d been kept in a closet his whole life.
“Doors used to work that way too,” Mac said.
The glass panels parted and let us out. Sunlight. Air. I took a deep breath and glanced back. The building didn’t look like an oasis now; it looked like a madhouse. And it didn’t help that the shrimpy guy in the sweatshirt was following annoyingly close on our heels.
I whispered. “Txt Mac: We’ve got company.”
“Txt Kyla: I know,” Mac said. “Also, I’m right here.”
Mac abruptly stopped walking. The little guy plowed into him.
“Dude,” Mac said. “What is your deal?”
“I’m Rory, senior ConnectBook programmer.”
“And?” I asked.
“And? I’m the guy who’s gonna help you get your life back.” He grinned and pumped a fist in the air. “Man, I’ve always wanted to say something like that.”
Five minutes later, the three of us were sitting at a café right around the corner from Headquarters, as Rory called it. Hood up, Rory sat with his back to the café and spoke so softly, Mac and I had to lean halfway across the table to hear him whisper, “I heard your dilemma.”
“Shhh,” the woman at the table next to us said.
Was there ever a time when coffee shops weren’t dens of silence? This café didn’t even play music.
Even softer, Rory continued, “What it sounds like is some hater has made a series of nasty DRMs using footage they swiped from CB’s Woofer and you’re trying to find links between all the subjects hoping they connect back to the maker B-U-T you need someone on the inside’s access because half the accounts are closed re nasty DRMs.”
“You got all of that from my conversation with the receptionists?”
“I filled in some blanks. So now what I need to kick the SHT out of the person doing this to you are the names of the other victims. Then it’s just a simple logarithm that scans multiple accounts and connected lists along with any other related overlaps, i.e., if all those bad teachers were in some dirty CB closed group together.”
I reached for my Doc but only patted empty pockets. Mac jokingly mirrored my stressed-out expression back at me.
“I don’t have the names with me, but off the top of my head I remember Trina Davis. And another of the girl’s names was…Natalie Wong. And, well, Mr. E.—Eric Ehrenreich, though I think he deleted
his account, so you might need, like, special access.”
“Darlin’, I am special access.”
As Rory spoke, he swiped at his Doc and murmured commands. Pushing his blue-framed glasses up on his forehead, he took out a wired pair from an inside pocket of his hoodie. With all the nodding, swiping, and twitching it was like someone had his head on a puppet string. I missed my Doc even more.
“Txt Mac: It’s like he’s possessed,” I murmured.
I’d only ever seen one person this adept at their gadgetry.
“Txt Kyla: Stop weirdly trying to audio txt me, you addict,” Mac whispered back, and then, reading my mind, said, “And, no, it’s like he’s Sharma.”
“I can hear you,” Rory said. “People in cafés down the block can hear you. Where are your Docs, B-T-W?”
“We left them in Brooklyn,” I said.
“You left them in Brooklyn?” Rory shuddered.
Being called out on what a terrible idea it was made my stomach feel even queasier. Before I could protest that we were trying to avoid being WhereYouAt-ed, which I already knew Rory would not accept as an excuse, Mac said, “Why don’t you just wear those NanoContacts? You wouldn’t need all this gear.”
“They give me a headache. And call me old-fashioned: I like the gear.”
Nobody would ever call Rory old-fashioned. All the gadgetry he was flicking and switching between could buy a family of four a luxury sedan. The woman at the table next to us got up with a loud tsk and moved farther away. I didn’t see what it mattered when both her ears were plugged with buds. I mean, if you want to work without distractions, maybe stay in your office.
“How long you been working for the evil empire?” Mac asked.
“Evil empire? I don’t have to pay a wired bill ever. Why sit in coach if you can fly first class? I’ve been with CB ever since I flunked out of college.”
“No mames.” Mac laughed. “Kid genius flunked out of college?”
“I only enrolled to get scouted. I never intended to graduate.”
“Why not just send CB your résumé?” I asked.
“Flunking out sounds cooler.” Rory’s eyes flicked to Mac.
The boys shared a smile, like they were members of the same rabble-rousers’ club.
“Let me ask you,” Mac said, after they’d knocked fists. “You get all the perks, how come I bought your coffee?”
“Because I’m the guy who’s going to fix your girlfriend’s life.”
Both Mac’s eyebrows went up. Girlfriend. I took a huge slug of coffee so Mac wouldn’t see me smile. I wasn’t about to correct Rory that we were only friends. Let him think what he wanted.
“We’re just friends,” Mac said.
Rolling my eyes, I said, “If I get you the students’ and teachers’ names by tonight, how long do you think this will take?”
“What do you mean how long will it take?” Rory sat back and cracked his knuckles. “All I had to do was a quick search of suspended or terminated accounts—which, I mean, are a pretty rare thing—taking into account age and date of account suspensions. Throw a little profession filter on it. Then a quick survey of flagged posts—everyone always flags the posts—bada bing, bada boom, and voilà. We have the teachers.
“Then it gets a little more complicated. I won’t bore you with the details—gender filter, school-type filter, recently clenched up on privacy settings, blah blah blah—and voilà! The students. I mean, it’s not called waiting with my thumb up my A-S-S. It’s called hacking. And it’s done.”
“That’s what I’m talking about,” Mac whooped, reaching across the table to knuckle Rory’s head.
The barista held a finger to his lips and loudly shushed us. Rory tried, but failed, to act offended by Mac’s affection and barely suppressed a grin when Mac said, “This little dude is killer. So dímelo, Killer, what’d you find?”
“To begin with, there are eighty-two matches between all twelve of your accounts.”
He hit a switch on his Doc. The white café table was now illuminated with the eighty-two matching connections he’d found between mine and the other eleven harassed teachers and students’ accounts.
“You can rule the famous connections out right off the bat. That takes away thirty. Good-bye, Madam President. Also, these users.”
With a swipe of his fingers, the pics on the table diminished by ten.
“Why?” I asked.
“Elderly Asians and Indians? No offense, but your criminal is not going to be Abhay Kapur. Dr. Abhay’s got better things to do.”
“No, that’s not racist at all, Rory.”
“Hey, my people died in the Holocaust. I’m allowed to make whatever ethnic jokes I want.”
“What if those were fake profiles?” Mac asked.
“Nah, I checked. They were all too detailed and went too far back in time. Same goes for these six—they’re all over sixty and their profiles are mainly pics of kids and grandkids; they probably can’t sync their home hub to their Doc, let alone scroll Woofer for hacking purposes.”
That left just under forty. An assortment of real men and women aged sixteen to forty-two. Thanks to his CB access, out of thousands of people Rory had narrowed down my potential hater to a handful of choices in thirty minutes flat. Sharma would be all-caps PISSED.
“But I don’t recognize any of these people,” I said.
Some of them used actual photos for their CB profile pic, others used more vague personal images like sunsets or a pic of their dog. About half used an avatar re-creation of themselves. It was one of the ways that people tried to get around being woofered. It also didn’t really work. Sooner or later, someone snapped a pic and tagged you. Then it equaled total loss of anonymity from there on out.
“Has the person who made the video contacted you?”
“Lots.”
“Then chances are just because you don’t recognize them doesn’t mean you might not know them. Even so, what we’re looking for is a dummy account. Nobody would make all these illicit videos using their actual profiles.”
Rory swiped away one of the girls.
“Why’d you get rid of her?” Mac asked.
“First, it’s a real profile. Second, she lives in South Africa. Third, I mean, that’s some precision work. Your video probably took ten solid hours of edits and airbrushing. Girls are lethal, but I can’t see them staring at footage of a couple having sex for as long as it would take for someone to make that vid.”
“You must not know a very wide variety of girls, then.” If only Audra could hear me. She’d be so proud. “And what if she got her hands on something new? I hear there’s this new tech out of Asia—”
Rory snorted. “That’s a myth, though your video is unbelievably realistic.”
“Wait. You’ve watched my video? Like before I went into Headquarters? You recognized me?”
“Of course I did. You’re famous. You have almost five million views, and after that piece they ran this morning on EToday about wayward teens, it’ll only go up. Oh, don’t worry—they didn’t use your name—but it’ll still spike views. Why did you think I was helping you? I’ve never met someone who’s trending and wants to take their video down. Antifame? I mean, coolest project ever.”
Mac ran a hand across his throat in a universal symbol of Dude, panic attack happening here. I put my head in my hands. Both boys were quiet. When I looked up again, they tensed.
“Okay, so let’s find out which of my friends isn’t.”
The boys traded a silent look. Rory covered his mouth with his fist. Mac patted my arm in a there, there kind of way.
“Apologies my one-liners aren’t as freakishly good as Rory’s. Can we get on with this already?”
Mac and I spent the rest of the day with Rory in the café, going through the names one by one. Around noon, we went to a different coffee shop for lunch, but kept at it because deciding which profiles were fake was way more difficult than it first seemed. But it equaled the longest amount of time Mac
and I had spent together in like a week. And is it bad to admit that, sitting next to each other, shoulders nearly touching, joking with Rory, that I had fun? I mean, despite the college kid who came up and asked to take his pic with me, then snapped one anyway when I said no. Despite him, too soon it was over. Once we were back in Brooklyn, we went to my house to pick up our Docs.
“Wanna hang and then stay for dinner?” I asked. “I still don’t know what I’m going to tell Graff. And I’m sure your mama is not happy she received a Not In Attendance txt from Prep today.”
I sat on the stoop. Mac stayed over by our tree, tapping his fingers against his stomach.
“Nah, I can’t.” Mac cleared his throat. “I have this thing with Victor tonight.”
“A soccer thing?”
More than anything I wanted to reach out, grab his jacket, and rest my head against his belly. I wanted to run my fingers from the tip of his fingers, tracing the muscles up his arms until they stopped in the hollows of his collarbone. Before the Mr. E. video, I’d kind of figured Mac and I would eventually hook up. Audra had tried to rush me into it. But there’s something to be said for going slow. Letting tension build. Daydreaming about all the things thumbs can do.
But Mac had promised he wouldn’t ever ask me out again. We were at last on the same, sensible just-friends page—truly—and all I wanted to do was kiss the boy, like, now.
“No,” Mac said. “I guess it’s kind of like a double-date thing.”
Keep it together, Kyla.
“Oh. Wow. Okay. Is it someone I know?”
“Como? No, I’d never do that to you. It’s just some girl. It’s a favor to Victor more than anything else. He’s been trying to get with this girl’s sister for, like, ever.”
“Okay, well, thanks for letting me know.” I had no right to be upset. Yet my traitorous eyes filled with stupid tears. “I’ll get your Doc for you.”