So Yesterday (6 page)

We slipped into the apartment, and Lexa closed the door
immediately behind us to fend off any dust swirling in our wake.

I handed her the cup of coffee we'd brought as an
offering. She always said her brain was nothing but a machine for turning
coffee into special effects.

Jen took in the high-tech
splendor, her eyes widening as they ; adjusted to the darkness. Hardly any
sunlight leaked in through the \ heavy curtains (like dust, sunlight was a Bad
Thing), but the apartment glowed around us. All of Lexa's furniture was made
out of the stainless steel used in restaurant kitchens. The metal glittered
with the scattered red and green eyes of gadgets recharging: a couple of cell
phones, an MP3 player, three laptops, an electric toothbrush by the kitchen
sink. (Despite all the coffee, Lexa's teeth were as clean as her apartment.)
And of course there were several computers running screen savers, coiling blobs
of light that reflected throughout the room. Jen's Wi-Fi bracelet
  
o joined in the sparkling, excited by the
heavy wireless traffic. Lexa noticed
  
^
the bracelet and gave it the Nod, and I felt obscurely pleased by this sign of
approval.

Steel shelves lined the walls, filled with memory
chips and disk drives and cables, all of these spare parts coded with colored
stickers. The top shelves were lined with about a dozen of those electric
fireplaces with fake glowing embers, so that the ceiling pulsed with a rosy
light.

Sometimes there is a very fine line between being cool
and being a crank. Whether you're one or the other depends on the overall
effect. Lexa's apartment always filled me with a sense of calm, a room full of
candles but without the fire hazard. It was like being inside a huge meditating
head. Maybe it was a Zen thing after all.

Making good money also helps with not being a crank.
Lexa was famous for her special-effects work for a certain previously mentioned
movie franchise, the one involving frozen kung
fu
and lots of ammunition. With plenty of income, Lexa
cool-hunted as a hobby, as a calling, even. Her goal in life was to influence
the manufacturers of MP3 players, cell phones, and handhelds to follow the
principles of good design— clean lines, ergonomic buttons, and softly pulsing
lights.

"You haven't been over in a while, Hunter."
She glanced at Jen, wondering if I'd been busy.

"Yeah, you know. Summer."

"Did you get my e-mail about joining SHIFT?"

"Uh, yeah."

One more word about cranks: An Innovator friend of
Lexa's had this theory that uppercase was coming back in. That all the Webby
kids who'd never hit the shift key in their lives (except to type an @ sign)
were about to start putting capitals at the beginning of their sentences, maybe
even
the first letter of their names and other proper
nouns. Lexa didn't really believe this seismic shift was imminent, but she
desperately wanted it to be. Typographical laziness was slowly destroying our
culture, according to
j
Lexa and her pals.
Inexactitude was death.

I wasn't clear on the details of the theory. But the
concept behind SHIFT was that if enough Trendsetters started using capital
letters in their e-mails and posts, maybe the herd would follow.

"You haven't joined up, have you?"

I cleared my throat. "I'm sort of agnostic on the
whole SHIFT agenda."

"Agnostic? You mean you aren't sure if capital
letters exist?" Lexa could be literal minded at times.

"No, I believe in them. I've actually seen a few.
But as far as the need for a
movement
goes—"

"What are you guys
talking about?"
      
i

Lexa turned to Jen, eyes alight with the prospect of a
conversion. "You know how no one uses capitals anymore? Just dribbles
along in lowercase, like they don't know where the sentence starts?"

"Yeah, I hate that."

Lexa's well-brushed smile was blinding in the rosy
gloom. "Oh, you've got to get into SHIFT, then. What's your e-mail?"

"Um, Lexa, can I interrupt?"

She stopped, her handheld already unclipped from her
belt, ready to take Jen's contact information.

"We came here about something important."

"Sure, Hunter." She reluctantly returned the
tiny computer to her belt. "What's up?"

"Mandy's disappeared."

Lexa crossed her arms. "Disappeared?
Define."

"She was supposed to meet us in Chinatown this
morning," I said. "She didn't show."

"You tried calling her?"

"We did, which is how we found this." I held
up Mandy's phone.

"It's hers," Jen said. "It was in an
abandoned building near where we were supposed to meet her."

"That's a little creepy," Lexa admitted.

"More than a little," Jen said.
"There's a picture on the phone. It's blurry but kind of scary. Like maybe
something happened to her."

Lexa held out her hand. "May I?"

"We were hoping you would."

************************************

Using Lexa's cinematographic hardware to look at a
postage-stamp digital photo was like using the space shuttle to get to the end
of the street. But the results were equally earthshaking.

On Lexa's giant flat screen Mandy's last picture
looked a hundred times more ominous. The gash of white that cut across one
corner made sense now. It was the gap between the boards of the abandoned
building, sunlight pouring through. The photo had evidently been taken from
inside, only a few steps from where we'd found the phone.

"It looks like it's been unlocked," Jen
said, standing. Her fingers traced a dark snake in the bright patch, a chain
swinging free between the boards, the blurred shape of an open padlock hanging
at one end. The gap seemed wide enough for a person to squeeze through.

"So Mandy had a key," I said. "She said
she was going to show us something."

Jen pointed. "But when she opened it, somebody
else was in there."

I squinted at the blotchy
shape in the darkest corner of the picture.
 
Blown up this big, it seemed less like a face, the gradients of gray
more
jagged, like a mob informer
with his identity concealed by computer.

 
"What do you think, Lexa?
Is that a face?"

She was also squinting.
"Yeah, maybe."

"Can you do anything to clear it up?" Jen
asked.

Lexa crossed her arras.
"Clear it up? Define."
  

"Well, make it look more like a face. Like on cop
shows when the FBI guys do that computer stuff to pictures?"

Lexa sighed. "Let me explain something, guys:
Those scenes are rigged. You can't really make a blurry picture clearer; the
information's already gone. Besides, when it comes to faces, your brains are
better than any computer."

"Couldn't you give our brains a hand?" I
asked.

"Look, I've created ocean waves, crashing cars,
whirling asteroids. I've erased boils from movie stars' hands, made it snow and
rain, even added smoke to an actress's breath after she refused to put a lit
cigarette in her mouth. But you know what the hardest thing to animate
is?"

Jen dared a guess. "A human face?"

"Exactly."

"Because it's so mobile?"

Lexa shook her head. "Humans aren't especially
expressive. Monkeys' faces are more muscular, dogs have much bigger eyes, and
cats have very emotive whiskers. Our crappy ears don't even move. What makes
humans ; so tough to do is the audience.
We're
human, and we spend our whole
lives learning to read each other's faces. We can detect a glimmer of ! anger
on another person's face from a hundred yards through a fog bank. Our brains
are machines for turning coffee into facial analysis. Take a drink and look for
yourself.''

I swallowed the cold dregs
from my paper cup and stared at the picture. It
was
a face, I decided, and it was
starting to look familiar.
   

"Although frankly, this might help." Lexa
stood but didn't reach for ^ the mouse. She went to the kitchen drawer and
pulled out a long, thin box. With a swish and a tearing sound, she extracted a
large sheet of wax paper, the kind you wrap sandwiches in. She held the translucent
paper over the screen.

"Don't ever tell anyone I said this, but
sometimes blurry is better than clear."

Jen and I gasped. Through the haze of the paper
something recognizable had resolved.

It was the face of the man who'd come after us in the
darkness. The bald head was obvious now, the heavy brow and childish lips all
somehow cohering in the blur. And Lexa was right: we could read the expression
perfectly, right through the wax paper and pixelization and darkness. The guy
was eager, determined, totally in control.

He was coming to get Mandy, like he'd tried to get us.

We sat there for a moment in silence, paralyzed, as if
he'd stepped through the screen into the room. Then a bouncy Swedish tune
started to play.

Take a chance on
me....

Mandy's phone had come to
life, its lights blinking away. Lexa took a step, lifted it to look at its
little screen.

"That's funny."

"Who's calling?" I
asked.

Lexa lifted an eyebrow.

"You are, Hunter."

Chapter
9

LEXA HANDED
ME THE PHONE. THE SWEDISH TUNE KEPT PLAYING,
insistent and diabolical.

The readout glowed in the
darkness.
Incoming
call: Hunter.

 
"It really is me," I said to Jen. "It's
my phone calling."

"Maybe you should
answer."

"Oh, yeah." I
swallowed and lifted the phone to my ear. "Hello?"

"Hi, uh, I'm just calling
because I found this phone. And I wanted to return it to the owner."

"Really?" My foolish
heart lifted.

"Yeah, and this number was in the incoming call
memory, so I figured the phone must belong to a friend of yours. Maybe you
could give me the guy's name. Or his address?"

"Yeah, actually that's
..."

My voice trailed off as I came to my senses: why did
this person assume the phone's owner was a he?

"Uh, actually
..."
I looked up at the face on the screen, at arm
's
length now. The voice on the
phone was male and sounded like a big guy

Maybe
that
guy.

I cleared my throat.
"Actually, I don't recognize this number."

"Are you sure? You just
called it an hour ago. Like four times in a
row."

"Uh, yeah, that was a wrong number," I said,
trying to keep the tremor out of my voice. "I have no idea whose number
this is."

"Oh, okay. Well, sorry to bother you
...
Shoe Girl."

The phone went dead.

Shoe Girl, he'd said. That was the name in my phone
for Mandy:
shugrrl,
her instant-message handle. He knew I'd been lying.

"It was him, wasn't it?" Jen said.

I nodded, looking at the grim face on the screen.
"He's calling the numbers in my memory, saying he wants to return a lost
phone. He's trying to find someone who'll give him my address."

"Oh, crap," said Jen. "But no one would
do that, would they?"

"I've got about a hundred numbers in that phone.
Eventually someone will give him what he wants. Probably my aunt Macy in
Minnesota."

"You could call your aunt," Jen said,
"and all your close friends, the ones who know your address, and tell them
what's going on."

"That might work if I
could
call them." I shook my
head. "I don't actually keep anyone's number in my head. Without that
phone, I'm toast."

"You don't back up?" asked Lexa,
scandalized.

"Sure, at home." I tried to remember the
last time I'd actually backed up the phone onto my computer. A boring day
during Christmas vacation? "But by the time I get there and call everyone
..."

"Okay, guys, I was just trying to help with this
and not be too nosy. But this is getting weird." Lexa pointed at the
screen. "How did
that
guy get your phone? And why does he care what your
address is?"

"Well, after Mandy didn't show up, he did. You
see, we were in this old building, and there were these
...
shoes."

"Shoes." Lexa sighed. "Why is it always
shoes with you guys?"

"They were amazing," Jen said softly.