Girl Gone Viral Read online

  “We miss you in HSM,” I say.

  “Whatever. Dr. Travers is lame.” Shane’s bouncing on his feet, grinning widely. “I have something you’ll like.”

  A stranger might raise a brow at Shane’s lack of hygiene and his spastic energy, but I’ve known him for too long to worry. He traces a long stroke over the tablet he brought with him, finishing with a flick, and my walls suddenly fill with endless lines of data. When I process the glowing text, my jaw drops. This code is more beautiful, more detailed than Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel—and more revealing than his David.

  “Shane.” I gawk. “How did you . . .”

  “Don’t ask questions,” he says, pinching my lips closed. I haven’t seen Shane so drunk with pleasure since we actually went drinking off-campus last year. “Consider it a gift.”

  “There’s no way you got all this data—” I lower my voice. “Legally.”

  “And there’s no reason anyone should find out,” Shane says, grinning slyly. That smile combined with his giddy drunkenness takes me back to our awkward kiss freshman year, and how I probably shouldn’t let him pinch my lips in the future. I raise a brow, and Shane rolls his eyes. “Come on, Opal. After that showdown with Kara last weekend, I thought you could use some ammunition. I mean, screw Kara—you understand WAVE better than any of us. Now you have the numbers to prove it.”

  “Even if this wasn’t impressively sketchy, I don’t know how we’re going to analyze all this data in one weekend.”

  “We can’t, but you can. My parents are dragging me with them on one of those ‘device-free’ retreats in Monterey this weekend. Which reminds me—I should probably go and, like, shower and hug my laptop goodbye.”

  Before I can open my mouth to object, Shane shoots off one last grin and leaves.

  I stare at the writing on the wall. Snippets of numbers, letters, and symbols ripple before my eyes, and slowly, Hailey Carter’s wounded voice becomes an afterthought. I’m comforted by code. After my dad disappeared, I didn’t touch a command line for an entire year—but the first time my fingers plucked out the words hello, world again, it was like a rope pulling me out of my pit of depression. Sometimes I wonder if I followed in my dad’s footsteps as a coder because I had something to prove. But I’ve always loved numbers. They were my way of making sense of the world before he left, and I’ve only needed them more since.

  But what Shane’s given me—these aren’t just numbers. They’re people’s lives.

  Imagine someone watching you when you think you’re alone. Imagine them recording your face’s every move: every time you laugh or cry, every flinch, every blink. That’s what WAVE started doing last week in an effort to “provide users with the best, customized experience.” The idea is that the data is for internal use only, and for XPs that explicitly ask for permission.

  Unless you’re Shane. Because somehow, my friend has hacked into millions of headsets and stolen that data. And that data has found its way to my walls. I stare the way you can’t help but stare at the hot neighbor through the window taking his shirt off.

  Then I get to work. I would never release people’s private data, but it doesn’t mean I can’t study it. For the next forty-eight hours, I’m plugged in. Headphones. Liquid meals. Allergic to sleep and showers and other bodily needs. I’m swatting bugs in my code, getting loopy off if loops and for loops and, Jesus Christ, it’s like a roller coaster.

  But toward the end of this blurry trip, I discover a secret in the numbers. It’s the kind of discovery that would get all the internet trolls talking—that could win us the attention we need to win Make-A-Splash.

  I discover that everyone is lying.

  Chapter

  Three

  By Sunday night, I want nothing more than to reunite with my pillow—but instead, I put on my headset one last time.

  The cold goggles push lightly into my skin, and headphones come out the sides and hug my ears. The plexiglass visors lock into place over my tired eyes, making a powerful thunk, like a heavy vault door being closed. Sometimes I imagine Howie Mendelsohn, WAVE’s reclusive inventor, swallowing the key himself and trapping me inside his virtual universe, a devilish grin smeared across his face. I met him once seven years ago, when he and my dad were up late working on their stealth-mode start-up at the marble island in our kitchen—and that’s all I remember. His smile. Like he knew exactly how my life was about to change.

  If we win this contest, I’ll meet him again.

  WAVE makes a high-pitched ding when my friends accept my chat request, and within seconds, we’re standing inside our favorite chat room, Pete’s Arcade. My eyes skate over the coin-operated machines like Star Trek and Wheel of Fortune glaring their tacky blues and reds, and land on my two best friends.

  “Seriously, Opal? It’s one a.m. I’m exhausted,” Shane groans. He drops his gaze below the snakeskin joggers and designer sneakers his mom almost certainly bought for his avatar.

  I gesture at the brand-new clothes. “I see Mrs. Franklin really took the device-free weekend to heart.”

  Shane snorts. “She barely lasted five minutes in the car ride home before another shopping spree.”

  “Greetings, night owls!” Moyo bellows as his avatar materializes. He dishes me a side-eye. “A text would have done the job, I’m sure. But that wouldn’t have been your style. All hail Queen Opal Hopper! Interrupter of late-night activities, demander of attention!”

  “Don’t pretend you weren’t already up,” I chide. Neither of them goes to bed before three a.m., ever.

  “Well, I was engaged in very important business,” Moyo says.

  Doodles. I’d bet my new haptic gloves Moyo was drawing at his makeshift studio. Curfew in the senior dorms is midnight, which happens to be when Moyo’s fingers start itching for pencils over stylus pens. His parents wouldn’t buy him art supplies this year—they wanted him to focus on digital design, for his college applications—so Moyo built himself a drawing board out of scrap cardboard.

  “Sure you were, Picasso,” I say. “And what’s your excuse, Shane? Some late-night Rubik’s Cube action?”

  Shane jerks his head up, but his arms stay at his side—which means he’s turned off limb control.

  “Oh my God, you really are solving a Rubik’s Cube.”

  “How exactly does one solve a Rubik’s Cube with goggles on?” Moyo asks, his playful eyes meeting mine.

  “He can feel the colors,” I say, smirking. Moyo and I share a special language, and making fun of Shane is our favorite dialect. “Naturally. It’s like synesthesia in your fingertips. Though I don’t understand why you can’t just buy haptic gloves off WAVEmart. We get that sweet PAAST discount, and you’d still feel the synesthetic”—I flutter my fingers in front of his face—“tingles.”

  Shane looks peeved, but he doesn’t swat my hand away. I bet he’s still twisting little squares. “Wait,” he says, and his jaw clinches the way it always does when he’s snapped the last square into place. “You’re calling about the contest, aren’t you? What ever happened with that data?”

  His eyes brighten. Shane wants to win Make-A-Splash just as much as I do, though for him, it’s kind of a shotgun effort. He realized over the summer that the extracurricular box on his MIT application was about as empty as a quantum vacuum, and even for a double-legacy applicant, that’s not a good look. I convinced Shane that he could use a quick, shiny résumé padder like Make-A-Splash.

  “That’s exactly why I’m calling,” I say, smiling.

  Moyo’s expression slumps. He got roped into all this—the three of us have been a unit since sophomore year, and Moyo wasn’t about to go breaking the rule of three. Or any rule, for that matter.

  “Have you guys seen the latest Hailey Carter meltdown?” I ask.

  “I saw the holos,” Moyo says. “Someone photoshopped her into a snake suffocating Timmy. His fans went nuts. They think she’s the devil.”

  “You know she was born on leap day,” Shane says.

  “What does that have to do with it?” Moyo asks.

  “It means she won’t ever grow up. Remember that XP you showed me last year, Opal, where she threw a hissy fit in an ice cream shop?”

  I’ll admit, I had always accepted the “Hailey Carter is a train wreck” narrative. She’s an internet martyr—a fixture on Zapp and Livvit boards, an easy target for holographic memes.

  “I’ll never understand all the online hate for her,” Moyo says.

  I grin widely. “Oh, yes you will.”

  I walk over to the Pac-Man leaderboard in the back of the arcade and erase the top scores so that I essentially have a blank slate. A whiteboard.

  “What if people don’t actually hate Hailey Carter the way you think they do?” I ask. “What if we could stir up our own drama on the internet and prove that we’re all rooting for her?”

  “Rooting for her?” Moyo repeats. I can almost feel his curiosity hanging in the air. That’s what I love most about Moyo—he’s the open-minded, artsy, philosopher type, without any of the usual douchebaggery. I wave my hand over the screen, and it fills with a line graph.

  “The comments on Hailey Carter’s latest meltdown were overwhelmingly negative. From start to finish. That’s this red line. But the thing is, that dialogue was dominated by Timmy’s fans. Anytime someone tried showing an ounce of support for Hailey, they got shut down.” I tap at the board, and a cutout of Timmy’s face appears every time the red line dips. I tap it again, and a green line appears. This one doesn’t dip but rather rises gradually, shooting up near the end. “The first line was everyone’s public reactions. This second line is how they reacted privately.”

  Moyo doesn’t notice the giant difference between what people write in the comments and how they actually feel about Hailey Carter.

  He doesn’t notice the jump in sympathetic gestures after Timmy runs off and you’re left alone with Hailey. More winces, more whimpers, more hands clasped over mouths. How the vast majority of viewers—even Timmy’s biggest fans—actually feel for this girl in pain.

  He doesn’t notice that people aren’t as cruel as you’d think from the comment section.

  Or maybe he does. But instead of acknowledging my breakthrough, he homes in on one specific word: “Privately?”

  The data. Right. That’s how I came to these conclusions, isn’t it. Meekly, I turn to Shane, who’s drifted to the corner of the arcade.

  “Shane, over here—” I linger as I read the terror in Moyo’s eyes. “He may have stumbled upon some helpful data.”

  “And you struck gold,” Shane says, his eyes leaping. “Imagine Kara calling out one of those trolls on her channel tomorrow. Like, ‘NOPE, even you have a heart, troll. In your face!’ Literally! It would be huge.”

  “She’d look like a mind reader,” I say. “It takes ‘behind the scenes’ to another level.”

  Moyo draws a deep breath. His avatar’s arms swing steadily by his side, but I don’t need WAVE to tell me where his real arms are. I know from his silence that he has one hand cupped under his chin, conflicted about what to say next. I shift my attention from his face to his shirt, an oversized Nigerian button-up that he designed himself. I examine the patterns carefully, searching the blotches of red and green, focusing on the bright shade of yellow he copied straight from the sun.

  Having access to the private emotions of every person on WAVE makes nerds like Shane and me giddy with possibility. It’s a rare patch of spring flowers in Antarctica, or Moyo’s colorful shirt against the retro arcade background. But Moyo’s different. He sees the weeds that grow underneath the flowers: difficult to pull out, maybe even poisonous. He sees his Nigerian mother clucking her tongue, disappointed in her son’s loosened morals, his disregard for privacy.

  When Moyo doesn’t respond, I finally say, “It’s just facial expression data. The new tracking feature they added last week.”

  “I didn’t even know they were letting XPs track that,” Moyo sputters, somewhat angrily.

  “You gave WAVE permission,” Shane says. “You checked a box.”

  “I check a lot of boxes!” Moyo huffs. “Besides, no one checked a box letting us look at it.”

  “Moyo, it’s not a big deal—”

  “What if they start letting XPs track more than your face?” Moyo says incredulously. “Would you want strangers looking at that?”

  “Like what, when I’m in the shower? When I’m naked in bed stuffing my face with potato chips?” I say with a laugh.

  “This isn’t a joke,” Moyo says.

  I’m getting exasperated, but I should have expected as much. Arguing with Moyo is like refracting sunlight to make a fire: it’s all about finding the right angle.

  Shane stares at Moyo from over in the pinball corner. “You do understand that no one would find out about the hack,” he says, his eyes bulging. “It just lets us know how people will react. It’s like a cheat sheet.”

  “What do you mean?” Moyo asks.

  “We’ll be collecting our viewers’ data during the show, and we’ll use that as our evidence. Which we’re completely allowed to have. This collection of data just shows us what we’re going to find there.”

  “Doesn’t make it right,” Moyo replies.

  “Look at it this way,” I say. “You had no idea you were giving XPs permission to track your face until I told you, right? If we spread the word with our channel, we’d be doing a public service for all the Moyos out there.”

  “We’d be taking advantage of them!” he barks back.

  “All right, Moyo, then look at it this way: Shane’s already hacked the data. We want to win this contest. Not a single one of Kara’s XPs has broken ten thousand views, and if we don’t hit it big with this next one, we’re done. So there’s really no point in arguing with me right now,” I fume. Screw refraction—I’m lighting a match. “If you want to go and turn off facial recognition on top of limb control, be my guest. You can be one of those static blobs floating pointlessly through WAVE. But the rest of us are on board with all this benign tracking if it means we get a better experience. And speaking of, did you even consider what this discovery could mean for Hailey Carter? Doesn’t she deserve to know there are people out there, millions of people, who actually care about her?”

  Moyo goes quiet, and I assume I’ve either broken him or gotten through to him. All of a sudden his shoulders wake up with life, and then his arms and legs; he’s turned on limb control. His whole body seems tense at first, but then he relaxes.

  “Fine,” Moyo sighs. “As long as no one finds out about the data hacking.” His muddy brown eyes are distant and defeated.

  I fill up with warmth. “Of course.”

  “But do you think—”

  “Dude! Just chill,” Shane bursts out from his corner.

  I raise a brow at Shane. Chill. Every once in a while, Shane actually lives up to his jockish looks. He might have decently toned arms from the pushups he performs every morning and wear the fitted shirts his mom buys him, but in reality, he’s neither jock nor prep nor apathetic bro. He’s the nerdiest of our nerdtastic unit, an honor we liken to being the tallest giraffe.

  Moyo gives Shane a look. “I was just going to ask about Kara,” he says. “She wanted to preview her Halloween costume options tomorrow. I don’t see how we’re going to convince her to air a Hailey Carter PSA . . .”

  We decide our best chance at getting through to Kara is with Peter Isaacson, her drama department confidant, who’s been feeding her scripts for Behind the Scenes. I used to help him with his calculus homework, so he owes me. I agree to meet with him in the morning, and we say good night and exit the chat room. I don’t take off my headset, though. I bury my face in the folds of my bedsheets and twist my head, high-def 3D icons whirling before my eyes like a carousel floating in outer space. Each one invites me inside for a ride. This time of night, I always pick the same pony.

  I extend my hand to seize a green scribbled-tree icon, and in a quick flash, I’m dropped into an old Jeep rumbling down a bumpy dirt path. The Tahoe basin glimmers a perfect blue. Yellow leaves dance over the road. The California sun sinks behind pine trees of every variety, and the familiarity of this simulation puts me at ease. Campfire is a simple XP with many paths, but they all lead to the same place.

  I know with razor precision when he’ll appear at the clearing on the left, and I always savor the moment in slow motion. The Jeep crawls down the road, inch by inch, and I turn my head, rubbernecking without shame. There he is. My dad, waiting for me by our campsite. His green eyes twinkle just for me, and I smile, irresistibly soaking it all in: Abba’s gawkish frame, his salt-and-pepper hair, the way he waves his hand like an overeager kindergartener. A fire crackles behind him. I used to get out of the car and join him, back when I first created Campfire, but I can’t do that anymore. Now I keep driving, thinking about how I used to hold that soft hand the entire drive home.

  That was just before things got “complicated.” Before Howie Mendelsohn convinced my dad to leave Stanford, before Abba grew cold and distant and spent all his time with Howie, before he left that note and never came back.

  I take off my headset. “Lights out,” I instruct, and my dorm fades to black. “Alarm set for six fifty-five a.m.,” purrs M4rc, my voice assistant.

  Then the wall facing my bed illuminates, and the sound of audience laughter fills every corner of the room. M4rc’s gotten to know me well over the years—he’s like my secretary, nanny, and parent all wrapped in one. He reminds me to take my vitamins. He listens in on my conversations. He plays soothing music when I’m studying for exams. And on nights like this, when I’ve got a lot on my mind, he knows I can’t fall asleep without the lullaby of some late-night talk show host.