The Takedown

by Corrie Wang

  “Ooh, friends from school?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Why not?”

  “Come in. Come in. He didn’t tell me friends were coming. I would have cleaned up.”

  From the small foyer, we stepped down into a living room that was not a whole lot larger than mine. I’d thought suburban homes were supposed to be huge. Granted, there was an identical space right across the hall. Like a second living room. With a whole other set of couches. The décor was a little bit country, but the tech was top-of-the-line. Each room had a home hub—each room—plus holo wall screens and a voice-tech system I didn’t think came out until next year.

  “Mira,” Mac said, and ran his hand through the Christmas tree in the corner.

  It was such a good holo, I’d thought it was real. And from what I could see, there were three of them, all with different light combinations. I was beginning to wonder if the furniture was even real when Mrs. Logan said, “I’ll tell Jonah you’re here.”

  All four of us traded glances. I don’t think any of us had expected to get this far. It felt so not like real life.

  Mrs. Logan went to the bottom of the stairs, started to holler, then slapped a hand over her mouth in an overexaggerated way and waddled back into our living room.

  “He gets so mad when I don’t use the gadgets. But I never remember how they work.”

  Next to the holoscreen in the living room, an old flat-screen HDTV blared an afternoon game show. Considering all the tech, Mrs. Logan could have watched the game show in interactive, life-sized 3-D. But hey, my dad still read paper books.

  With my back toward the mom, I whispered, “This is like totally—”

  “Redundant technology,” Rory and Sharma murmured at the same time, and not at all what I was going to say.

  As Mrs. Logan swiped through different screens on the Speak Panel, Rory and Sharma patrolled the perimeter. I caught only snippets of what they were saying.

  “…money they wasted installing three home hubs?”

  “…faster and easier interface.”

  “I hate—” Rory began.

  “Vanity tech,” Sharma finished.

  “The wonders of technology,” Mac murmured to me. “Bringing people together.”

  Suddenly, a boy appeared next to the very panel that Mrs. Logan was standing in front of. When she saw him, she let out a little scream. It was my hater. In the digital flesh. He was kind of what I expected any good Internet stalker to be. Doughy and pale, medium height, with bad posture and greasy hair hanging in his eyes. He clearly hadn’t washed it in weeks, though considering all his tech, until they created an app for cleanliness maybe he never would. Even in holo mode he couldn’t look his mother in the eyes.

  He had yet to notice us. I was holding my breath. I couldn’t wait to see his expression when he did.

  “If you’d watch the vid I linked you,” the hologram huffed, “you’d know how to work that.”

  “I did watch it, JoJo. But I can never remember if it’s a swipe or a tap, and when I’m supposed to say ‘speech activate.’”

  “Never! ‘Speech activate’ is only for when you install it. You swipe once, say ‘Jonah,’ and then talk. How less complicated can you get?”

  “Oh, well, much less complicated, actually. I could have called up the stairs to you. But now that you’re here, I was trying to tell you, JoJo, you have guests.”

  “Guests?” He flattened his hair with one hand, realized we could see him, and stopped. At first there was confusion on his face, like he was wondering who we were and why we were in his living room. Then his eyes quick regarded me and grew wide. “Oh SHT.”

  The image instantly evaporated. All four of us looked at each other. I wasn’t the only one holding my breath. Mac clearly wanted to run upstairs, but he settled for peeking out the living room windows, as if Jonah might jump from the second floor and make a quick getaway.

  I group txted:

  moi What do we do?

  rory (cb techie) Wait him out.

  sharm And if that doesn’t work?

  mac Drag that little p*ta down here by that oil slick he calls hair.

  “Yeah, playah,” Rory said as he and Mac bumped fists.

  “Drinks for anyone?” Mrs. Logan asked, worrying an LED bracelet that changed color every time she touched it. “You kids hungry?”

  I shook my head, unable to speak from the anxiety of anticipating what Jonah was up to.

  Mac, however, said, “Starving, and I would love a coffee. If you have any on. Please.”

  Mrs. Logan’s face lit up. “I’ll put on a fresh pot.”

  “Oh, and Mrs. Logan,” Sharma said, “may I borrow the home hub password? My Doc won’t sync to a signal. My mom’s trying to txt me.”

  No one would ever give out this information. Knowing the password to a home hub was like knowing someone’s Social Security number, bank account number, and password to said bank account all rolled into one. But Sharma asked for it like it was no big deal. Not syncing to a signal didn’t even make sense.

  “Sure, hon, are you ready? It’s pretty complex. Jonah made it up.”

  Mrs. Logan took a piece of paper out of a sideboard, put on glasses, and read aloud, “Capital A, one of those underslash things…”

  Meanwhile, Rory inspected the home hub like he was admiring its specs. Even though I was watching, I barely saw him insert the minuscule jump drive into one of its ports.

  “Lowercase a,” Mrs. Logan finished. “You want me to repeat that?”

  “Nope,” Sharma said with a bright smile. “Got it.”

  “Now about that coffee.”

  No sooner was Mrs. Logan out of the room than Sharma said, “G-A-S-P.”

  Hologram Jonah was back. Standing barely an inch away from me.

  “You have ten clicks to tell me what you want before I fry your operating systems.”

  I’m not sure what I was expecting. For the past week, I’d been daydreaming about how it would go down when I came face-to-face with my hater. Still under the impression AnyLies was a girl—namely Jessie—I’d imagined lots of tears and yelling. A smug hologram boy was not a scenario I would have dreamed up in a million years. It all felt…wrong.

  From what the holoimage captured, Jonah’s room was even more tricked out than the downstairs. It looked like he was at the helm of an alien fighter jet. All around him were holoscreens running with green code. I wondered how many girls’ lives that code was destroying.

  “So what do you want?”

  “I think you know what we want,” I said.

  “What, am I a mind reader now?”

  So he was going to play it like he didn’t know who I was.

  “I want to speak face-to-face,” I said.

  “And I’d like to get with Destiny Sparks.” Jonah blew air out his lips. “Sorry, sweetheart. No can do. You want the parental controls removed on your Internet? Leave me your operating system ID, the main password to your Internet hookup, and a hundred bucks on the coffee table. I can get it done by tomorrow afternoon. Now get out. I don’t do houseguests.”

  “Don’t make me pull you down here by your EarRing,” Mac growled.

  “Don’t bother,” Rory said.

  Sharma nodded. “We can do better.”

  They hadn’t stopped working their Docs since Mrs. Logan gave up the hub password. Via his hologram, we watched as Jonah stopped swiping. He peered more closely at one of his screens and then expanded it.

  “What the heck,” he murmured. “My CB was suspended?”

  Rory cracked his knuckles and grinned at Sharma, both eyebrows raised.

  Sharma tsked. “Too subtle.”

  Suddenly the screen in front of Jonah went black. The music shut off in Jonah’s room. All the lights went off as well. Other than the kitchen, where Jonah’s mother could be heard opening various cabinets, the whole house fell silent and dark. Mac whistled under his breath. Rory looked ready to cut his heart out and hand it to Sharma right there. The only thi
ng that stayed on was Jonah’s hologram and, on his end, the feed of us in the living room.

  “W-T-F, man?” Jonah pushed back in his roller chair and then fiddled with the connection on the hub under his desk.

  “It’s not your hub,” I said. “It’s us. Now how about you come downstairs.”

  It wasn’t a question.

  “Who the hell are you guys?” Jonah squinted at the transmitted images of us.

  We all looked to Rory.

  Swiveling his head to stare down the hologram, he said, “We’re the people who decide what the rest of your life looks like.”

  “Wait, this is my favorite part,” Jonah said. “You know how long I spent on that edit? I mean, it was fine after a half hour, but I really wanted to make it clean.”

  “A half hour?” I said. “Don’t you mean half a day?”

  Jonah snorted. “I would if I was a tool.”

  One minute and ten seconds ago, Sharma had cued up the Mr. E. video.

  “Oh,” Jonah said, “you’re that one. I couldn’t tell.”

  “Racist,” Sharma said.

  Jonah shrugged and then proceeded to provide an audio commentary track to the video the entire time it played. Now that we were coming to the end, I tuned him out. I’d never expected my hater to be so enthusiastic about his work. And I’d never expected my friends to be so absorbed by my hater. You’d think Sharma, Rory, and Jonah were at a hacker convention. Only Mac seemed to get how crazy this made me, patting my leg, kissing the side of my head, cracking up at the test video Jonah played where he put a lizard’s face where Mr. E.’s girlfriend’s should have been.

  “This part is amazing,” Rory said. On-screen I flicked my hair up. “The blend is perfect.”

  “I know, right? It’s the program—EffectsMaker. It literally melds the pixels of two different vids together. It’s the same software they use in special-effects studios, but way more user-friendly. It’s not even available anywhere yet. It’s all tied up in the courts because of security and identity concerns. Right now you need a Japanese birth certificate to even test a copy. Unless you know someone.” Jonah laughed—“Hehehe.” He sounded like the evil villain in an anime movie. “And in my case, I am that someone. Safe America got a deal when they booked me.”

  Rory and Sharma were silently, insanely jealous. Clearly, they both added EffectsMaker to their mental checklists of software that needed to be cracked.

  “Am I the only person who remembers why we’re here?” I asked. “What’s Safe America? I’ve heard that name before.”

  “It’s nothing,” Jonah said, and clamped his lips shut.

  “We don’t have time for this.” Mac stood up like he was going to beat it out of the kid.

  At the same time, Jonah’s mother staggered into the living room carrying a tray loaded with a crumb cake, full coffee mugs, and a veritable coffee shop array of creamers and sweeteners. A stack of paper plates was wedged beneath her arm. Mac and Rory jumped up to help her.

  “Aren’t you two sweet.”

  Mac set the tray on the coffee table.

  “Oof,” Mrs. Logan said as, knees cracking, she hovered over it and began doling out mugs of mocha nut. “Don’t mind me, kids.”

  Jonah sank into the couch with a satisfied grin.

  “Actually, Ma.” He smiled sweetly. “Stay. Have coffee with us.”

  “Oh, okay,” Jonah’s mom said brightly, though this could have been her intention all along as there were six cups of coffee on the tray. “It’s so nice to meet some of Jonah’s pals.”

  As Mrs. Logan spooned sugar into her coffee, the wall screen behind her flickered to life. Jonah’s main G-File page—his real one—was on view. His profile pic was a joker from a deck of cards. Douche. Otherwise there was scant information about him. He was tagged in a few family photos, but they looked blurry, like someone had taken a filter to the parts just over his face. Other than that, there were only a few banal memberships to various movie and comic streaming sites.

  “So,” he snorted.

  Sharma smiled but didn’t look up from her Doc. The list of memberships updated first. Every site that Jonah had joined under an alias was now attached to his G-File. There were sites for making weapons. Sites for looking at porn—whether it was girl-on-girl, guy-on-guy, teacher-on-student, the list was nearly unending.

  “Those are for work,” Jonah muttered.

  But already other memberships were edging the porn ones offscreen. Amidst the hundreds of sites that were suddenly scrolling along, I swore the B&P site flew by. Audra sure had reach. Jonah spilled his coffee on the floor as he stood up and quickly sat back down.

  “Whoops,” his mom said, and dabbed at the carpet with a napkin as, on-screen, avatars appeared for all of Jonah’s aliases, for his role-playing games, and for what I could only assume were hacker memberships.

  “Jonah was just about to tell us about this new club he joined,” I told his mother.

  “A club,” she said hopefully. “Like a school one?”

  “Extracurricular,” I said.

  Jonah pressed his lips together. “It’s nothing.”

  “Well, I’m sure it’s not nothing.” Mrs. Logan had finished with the spill and now turned her attention to the coffee cake. “Who wants cake? Sorry, kids. Jonah always gets the first piece.”

  Rory gazed at Sharma. “Be still my beating heart.” Then, cracking his knuckles, he said, “My turn.”

  Now on Jonah’s G-File, under the video section, small clips filled the screen. It was all the videos he’d authored. Mine and Mr. E.’s was first, as it had the most views, but the other girls’ came right after.

  “Wait,” Jonah said. “What are you doing?”

  “Is that too big a slice, hon?” Mrs. Logan stopped cutting cake; in an aside to me, she mock-whispered, “Jonah thinks he’s getting chubby.”

  As if his mother’s humiliation of him weren’t enough, on-screen there were now what appeared to be a bunch of old Batman movies that had Jonah’s head superimposed over Batman’s. Rory selected one. It whirled to life. It was immediately obvious, as Batman faced off against the Joker, that Jonah was playing all the parts.

  “Harsh,” he whispered, then louder: “Stop it.”

  “You don’t have to eat it all.”

  Beneath the video, all the pics that Jonah was Woofered in began to surface. Pics you could normally only see through ConnectBook could now be viewed by anyone. Rory and Sharma had just uncoded his life and privacy faster than it took Jonah’s mom to cut a slice of cake.

  “No!” Jonah shouted. “You can’t put all that…dessert…on my plate for everyone to see. This will ruin me.”

  Mrs. Logan blinked once, twice, then chuckled. “Jonah, it’s just cake. You love cake.”

  But then the sheer delight on four of the five faces around her finally caught her attention.

  “What’s everyone looking at?”

  She turned to face the wall screen.

  Jonah shouted, “Safe America. It’s called Awareness for a Safe America.”

  The wall screen flipped back to Jonah’s original, bare G-File.

  “Dear me,” his mother said. “That sounds like quite the dope club. What does it do, JoJo?”

  Jonah’s face was white. With shaking hands, he took the huge slice of cake his mother offered him.

  “I’ll tell you about it later, Mom.” Jonah set the cake on the coffee table and sat on his hands. “Do you mind if I hang with my friends now, alone?”

  Now that everyone was served, Mrs. Logan had just been about to sit. She covered the hurt over her revoked invite with a bright smile and patted Jonah on the head, then left. Sharma or Rory—who could tell which at this point?—was already bringing up the Encyclo screen for Safe America.

  “You won’t find much written there,” Jonah said, correctly.

  The definition stated that Awareness for a Safe America was a privately funded Internet-safety watchdog group. And that was about it.

&nb
sp; “They found me. Messaged me through a Kruel Killers board—”

  “Detective game where you hunt and kill serial killers,” Rory chimed in.

  “—things like: ‘Interested in being a Kruel detective in real life? Make money finding RL Kruels.’ I thought it was spam. Except a dude I’m connected with on the game said he worked for them. That they’re legit. Said the work was fun and all-caps DOLLAR SIGNS. Zipped-lips face what kind of work. Didn’t take me long to find out. I totes hacked my friend’s e-mail. ASA had him scooping up Woofer pics of congressmen with chicks who did not equal-sign their wives—I sent ASA my e-sumé stat.”

  Jonah couldn’t make eye contact worse than anyone I’d ever seen. It was like an invisible hand was pushing his head down and to the left. And it was horrible listening to him. He practically spoke in emotes. I was tempted to have Sharma give him subtitles. Wait. That was where I’d heard that name before.

  “Safe America brought down that shady senator, right?” I asked. “They’re behind the Dubai scandal exposé.”

  “Couldn’t say.” Jonah smirked. “The focus they assigned me was to stop-sign child molesters. It was all up to me to find the supporting vids and pics. It’s not hard. You find raunchy home vids, then use Woofer software, then write a diff program that cross-references against employment info, one that cross-references against age info. Found a doctor, a guitar instructor in Jersey—”

  “And then, let me guess, you stopped finding people so you started forging the videos instead? That wasn’t me with my teacher.”

  Jonah shrugged. “Well, it could have been. In the original vid the girl’s face was all blurred out, but the guy was clearly a teacher. That’s clearly sex in a classroom. I just connected A to B. I mean obv the guy’s got issues if he gets off on that kind of thing. Is that someone you want around impressionable sixteen-year-olds?”

  “But it’s fake. And he got fired. You’re ruining lives.”

  “I posted one vid on your school’s faculty message board after hours. It was taken down five minutes after it posted. Your life equaled ruined in five minutes? Please.”