The Unidentified (11 page)

“My mom would be pissed,” I said, looking in the mirror again.

“Put it on your Game card,” she said, like a command.

I laughed and turned to face her.

“Buy it,” she said seriously.

I rolled my eyes and started to take it off. Ari stepped forward, close, entering my space. “Come on, you have to get it,” she said, her face close to mine. Her face melted into her charming smile. “It looks so prize on you,” she said sweetly. And stepped back into her corner to finish trying on her things.

I felt a little sick handing over my Game card to the lady, and refused to even look at the printout of how much I’d just charged. Thanks to added peer-pressure purchasing, I walked out of there with silver-and-black-striped leggings and red slip-on flats to go with the dress. When Tesla dropped me off, I ran in to hide the shopping bag in my room before Mom got home.

“Kid!” I heard her call through my bedroom door a few minutes later.

“Yeah?”

“Did you feed Lump?”

“Yeah,” I said, even though I hadn’t. I felt bad about lying to my mom, but I didn’t want her to know I’d gone downtown. I felt worse about the hungry dog in the other room and vowed to slip him his food when my mom left the room.

“Look what I got you,” she said, opening my door. “I saw a show the other night that said how popular these are right now. On sale!”

I cringed, waiting to see what it was. She held up a pink plaid sundress that Eva Bloom would wear if that look hadn’t gone out of style seven weeks ago.

“Isn’t it cute? I’m going to have to take a few more shifts at Aunt Gillie’s to pay it off, but I want you to have the best.”

“Yeah. Thanks, Mom,” I mumbled. I wanted to feel grateful, I knew she tried. But she should realize I was not going to get any popularity points from something she got on discount. “I just need to finish up some schoolwork.”

“OK, Kiddie. Play hard.” She kissed the top of my head, then left my room, closing the door behind her.

I scanned the tag with my intouch(r). The pink thing cost a pathetic fraction of what I’d just spent at Trendsetters.

I opened my notebook(r) to check Trendsetters’ return policies, but I got distracted by the little spying eyeball icon in the corner of my Network page. It was the tracker app I had installed in the Illegal Arts Workshop earlier today. I clicked it and scrolled through to see who had been viewing my page.

My privacy settings were friends-only, so I wasn’t surprised to see Mikey and Ari topping the list. My heart started bumping hummingbird style when I saw that Swift had checked me out a few times in the past couple days. I couldn’t wait to tell Ari.

I scrolled through to Recent Views and was surprised to see that apparently sponsors were an exception to the friends-only privacy setting. Protecht Securities and Trendsetter clothing had recently viewed my page. The Trendsetter sponsors probably had a policy to look at a page after a Game purchase was made in their stores. But why would Protecht Securities be interested in my content?

Then, as I was logged on and watching, a new address popped up into the viewing field.
Zeronet.
I’d never heard of them, but they must’ve had sponsor status because they definitely weren’t on my friends list.

As the eyeball icon pulsed slowly, I got a little spooked that someone I didn’t know was looking at my page at the same time as I was. It almost made me feel like they could see into my bedroom, right now.

My notebook(r) pinged as a new private message appeared in my inbox.

They’ve got their eyes on you now. And so do I.
by

anonymous The words jolted me deep like a static shock. I logged out quickly and closed my notebook(r). I was too creeped out to know how to reply. I didn’t think it was even possible to create an anonymous account on Network.

Then I remembered the Illegal Arts Workshop.

Obviously there were ways to get around the Network security systems. Anonymous proxies to hide the identities of the viewer. But I’d seen who had been looking at my page.

Zeronet.

“Why aren’t you wearing your new clothes?” Ari asked when I met her for breakfast in Culture Shock the next day. Our mornings there were kind of a tradition. Or they had been, until she got cliqued.

“I don’t know,” I said, taking a seat beside her. “It felt a little too dressy for school.”

“It wasn’t. It was totally the look you need right now to get noticed.”

I had been thinking about that anonymous private message all night, and I was pretty confident that I would prefer not to be noticed, thank you very much.

“Did you get me my cream cheese steamed bun?” I asked.

“No. I was there with you in that dressing room, and what kind of friend would I be if I fed you fat-filled steamed buns?”

“An
amazing
friend?” I pleaded. “I’m craving one so bad right now.”

She just shook her head. “Eat this. Much more healthy.” She pushed a plate with a green-tinged pastry over to me.

The World Languages Department required students to order foreign food in the native language. It was supposed to provide us with the “experience of travel,” hich apparently meant being really confused and reduced to universal hand-gestures to express what you needed.

to universal hand-gestures to express what you needed.

Lucky for the Culture Shock program, the food was reeeally good, like worth-making-a-fool-of-yourself good. If you couldn’t learn the language, the alternative was making friends with someone who could order, that was another one of the “rainbow diversity” goals of the World Languages Department.

I could squeak out enough Italian to order gelato, but Ari learned Japanese so she could order sushi and video chat with an e-pal in Kyoto so she should be like the poster child of the Culture Shock program. Mikey knew a brand of East LA Spanish slang he picked up from watching too many Hollywood gang flicks. They were pretty much my only friends, so I survived on sushi, pizza, burritos, and hamburgers. I wondered if it was also the aim of the World Languages Department that the socially maladjusted go hungry.

I bit into the Japanese pastry Ari ordered for me. It was good but it wasn’t amazing.

All Ari wanted to do during our “together time” was talk about strategies on how to get branded. I scrolled through my intouch(r) messages, but there were only some sponsor messages and a call-to-arms from Tesla. She’d found out who lobbied for the ban on her product.

toy321:
re: flipstream. message swarm PEDIAFIX.

tell them goggles are for recreational use only. go! go!

go!

I thumbed in a protest message to PediaFix(r), and half-listened to Ari tell me about what Rocket had told her about the VIP Lounge.

“She makes it sound like the whole place is coated with pixie dust,” I said, sipping my tea.

“Yes, pixie dust and power.” She sighed dreamily. I couldn’t tell if she was joking. “I wish my tracker was still working,” she said, flicking her notebook(r) screen as if that would help. “I don’t know if Aerwear has been back to my page. I posted images of my punk ballet slippers and everything—”

“Your tracker’s not working?”

“Yeah, I think admin found out about it and blocked it.”

I opened my notebook(r) to check, even though I swore to myself that I wouldn’t. The eyeball icon was gone.

“It worked last night,” I said more to myself than to Ari.

“Do you think someone who was at the IAW yesterday told?”

“Who would tell ?” Ari said, tearing off a piece of her pastry and popping it in her mouth.

Yeah. I didn’t know. I thought about the Illegal Arts Workshop, about the voice telling us how to subvert Network security.

“Have you ever heard of Zeronet?” I asked Ari.

“Nuh-uh,” she said, shaking her head and trying to lick powdered sugar off her lips and fingertips.

“They visited my page last night.”

“Huh,” she said, obviously not interested.

“You know who else visited my page?” I dangled the scrap of gossip out to get her attention. “Jeremy Swift.”

“No way,” she said, frowning. “Let me see.”

“I can’t. The tracker’s down.”

Then her tone got sharp. “Well, that’s convenient.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Ari laughed a fake and tinkly kind of laugh. “Seriously, Kid. If you want to start rumors about Jeremy being interested in you, there has to be at least
some
possibility of it being true.”

I looked at Ari. Looked at her glittery violet eyes, so different from the hazel ones I had looked into when we used to tell each other secrets and confessed our crushes.

They weren’t the same eyes that cried for me when I was having problems at home. Not the same eyes that winked at me when we were pulling pranks on Mikey.

“I’m just trying to look out for you,” she said.

“Right,” I said quietly.

My intouch(r) hummed in my hand.

cwinterson:
please come to my office for an important announcement @KID “Anyway, I have to go.” I picked up my bag, getting ready to leave.

“What? Where are you going? We never get to hang out anymore,” she complained. I looked at her to see if she was serious.
She
was the one who kept blowing off band practice with me and Mikey to hang out with Rocket and the Craft-sters.

“Winterson wants to see me.” I quickly slammed back the last of my tea.

She looked irritated. “Fine, then. Next time you can order your own
matcha manju
.”

My eyes were watering. The tea had been way too hot.

I headed over to Winterson’s office, humiliated. I was pissed at Ari, mostly because she was probably right. Who was I trying to fool? Swift was just interested in my excess online hours, it was stupid to think it was anything else.

I slumped down in the chair across from Winterson and waited for the “big announcement.”

She stared at me quietly for a moment. “Katey,” she began, “earlier this week you asked me about suicide…”

“I’m not depressed, if that’s what you think,” I said quickly.

“No, no. After our talk I asked around a little in headquarters to see what was going on. The sponsors weren’t responsible for that stunt last week, in case you were still wondering.”

Nope. I wasn’t still wondering. That was stale news.

“But because of our conversation,” Winterson said, biting her pinky nail, “the sponsors got interested and began their own investigation to find more information.”

“No one was interested,” I said. “No one cared.”

“Well, that’s actually what I’m trying to tell you.
You
were interested in it.” Winterson rubbed her temples. “Let me back up. I just wanted you to know that it wasn’t my intention to bring more attention to this suicide phenomenon…or you.”

I wished she would get to the point already.

“They want to brand you, Katey.”

“What?”

“It’s in your record now that you are a trendspotter. The sponsors will be keeping a closer eye on you from now on.”

“What? I was just logged in to my record. I didn’t see anything in my record about being a trendspotter.”

“It won’t be made public user-side until you accept their terms and conditions. But it’s in there, Katey.”

I didn’t like the idea of information about me being in my record that I couldn’t see or edit. And I didn’t have anything to do with that suicide stunt. I was just an innocent bystander or something.

“But there were tons of kids in the Pit who saw it happen, how could I get credit for ‘spotting’ it?”

Winterson sighed heavily. “You were the first one to talk about it. To show interest. To search for it. The flow of interest is what the sponsors follow. They already had your notebook(r) registered as the first video view.”

I thought about the anonymous private message:

They’ve got their eyes on you now
.

“We’ve contacted your mom,” Winterson began. “You’ll be meeting with the administrators and interested sponsors’ brand representatives today after closing time.”

“Kid?”

I turned to see Jeremy waiting outside Winterson’s office.

“Hey, what are you doing here?”

“What are you doing right now?” he said.

“I don’t know.” I was supposed to meet Mikey in the DIY Depot. He was going to battle in the Robot Combat Arena today.

“Oh. I thought maybe you’d want to do that thing we talked about yesterday. In Chez Chess.”

I didn’t know what he meant.

“Favors for favors?” he said smiling. “I thought we could do an hours trade. I saw that you’ve been stuck in Math Attack. You want to play?”

I’ll admit I was flattered that Swift wanted to spend time with me, but I wished he’d chosen a mission a little more romantic than math.

“Yeah, OK,” I said pulling out my intouch(r). I left Mikey a message that I was delayed, but I’d be there before Cripple entered the ring.

We swiped in to the Math Attack prep room, where kids were reviewing for their next level—doing meditation exercises and straight-up hyperventilating. I took a deep breath and walked with him to a free table.

breath and walked with him to a free table.

“I got some Study Aides(r) off of Archive. Can I see your notebook(r)?”

Yes, the date had gotten off to a truly romantic start. Ari was so right. I took a seat beside him and slid my notebook(r) over to him.

I peeked nervously into the Math Attack area while he installed the Study Aides(r). It was a bit like the Arcade up on fifth—where the SimKids plan cities, raise families and destroy military targets—but down here there was a lot more anxiety. Kids stared into video monitors, typing in their calculations, cringing when they pressed Send, like a bomb was about to go off.

The install finished and Jeremy looked away from the screen and at me.

“Do you want something?” He said, leaning in closer.

I kind of wanted his lips on my neck, but I didn’t tell him that. Instead I said, “What?”

He nodded toward the wall display of Liquid Crack(r) and Focus(r) drug samples.

“No, thanks. I’m OK.”