So Yesterday

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 ru

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 I

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?"

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."