Lost in Geeklandia Read online

  Afraid to pick up her water bottle in case her hands betrayed her again with their stupid trembling, she clutched the hem of her T-shirt. Feisty. What a joke. When he’d turned his back on her, she’d discovered feisty was impossible to maintain as a solo act. The teenage power base was like a full-contact team sport. What you could do didn’t matter as much as how you looked. Who you knew. And whether your team could score better if they threw you under a convenient bus.

  She stumbled to the sink, turned on the water to mask the sound of Lindsay making polite conversation, and washed her hands over and over.

  Lord help her, she’d been so distracted lately that Daniel Shawn, Angel of Digital Death, had infiltrated Portland without her noticing. But a Daniel at large in the city was a far cry from a Daniel parked in her kitchen. This was worse than the last time he’d ambushed her—the very last time they’d spoken—in the spring of her junior year in high school, when he’d stepped into her path as she’d rushed from AP history to calculus.

  “Hey.” He’d had a man’s jaw by then, square and determined, different from the rounder chin of their shared childhood. But the shape of his blue eyes was the same, his hair still hugged his head in crisp, dark waves, and the hurt she thought she’d buried over the previous five years had bloomed fresh enough to close her throat.

  Her braces were gone. She’d finally learned to French-braid her hair so it wasn’t the total fright it had been. Random rusty corkscrews still stuck out around her face, though, bouncing when she snapped her head around to see if he was speaking to someone behind her. No one there. She turned back cautiously and blinked at him, hugging her calculus text and waiting for the boom to lower.

  “Charlie, I…uh…wanted to ask you something.”

  “Me?” she croaked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Oh. Oh!” Of course. The rumors. He’d gotten shut out of all the good colleges because his grade point average looked like it was expressed in binary. Did he want her to tutor him? It was about four years of slacking too late for that. And as far as her doing him a favor? It was even later.

  He hadn’t wanted a tutor. He’d had a completely ingenious method of torture for her, the big jerk.

  But digging around online after yesterday’s Daniel-sighting, she’d discovered he’d served his own time on Team Humiliation.

  It didn’t give her the satisfaction she’d expected.

  “So. Charlie.” Daniel’s voice startled her out of soaping her hands for the fourth time. “Any plans for tonight?”

  She dried her pruned-up fingers on the kitchen towel and peeked at Daniel out of the corner of her eye. He blocked the exit from the kitchen, standing next to the breakfast bar with his hands in his pockets. He’d dialed down his earlier shit-eating grin. On anyone other than Daniel, who’d never betrayed lack of confidence in his life, she’d have tagged his current smile as tentative.

  “Um…”

  “We could grab some dinner. Talk over old times.” He gestured at her T-shirt. “I need ideas to pitch to my editor. You always had a line on the best tech gossip. You could help me out.”

  Despite being tangled in the towel, her hands turned icy.

  He knows. About the field study. About Argonne.

  Or if he didn’t, she’d no doubt give herself away. Blurt out the truth in a moment of excess gawkitude.

  “I just remembered. I’ve got a…a thing. A project deadline. Tomorrow.”

  Something flickered in the dark blue of his eyes, and his smile faltered before he stretched it even wider.

  “Some other time then? My schedule’s pretty flexible.”

  “I don’t think that would be—” She took a breath. “Thanks, but no.”

  “Oh.” He blinked as if she’d landed a roundhouse kick to his head, and an unexpected pang of remorse shot through her. “No problem. I’ll just…go.” He paused before he disappeared behind the entryway wall. Was that regret in his expression? “It was…ah…great seeing you again.”

  “Thank you for dropping Philip’s phone by, Daniel. It was lovely of you.” Lindsay half turned and aimed a very un-Lindsay-like glare at Charlie. “I’ll walk you out.”

  Charlie didn’t breathe again until she heard the downstairs door slam and Lindsay’s light tread returning up the stairs. She crept to the window in time to see Daniel trudge down the sidewalk. He stared down at the keys in his hand, then glanced up at the house.

  Charlie jerked back, even though he probably couldn’t see her in the dimness behind the sheer curtains. His shoulders rose and fell once, then he shook his head and climbed into his car.

  When he pulled into the street and drove out of sight, she was surprised to discover that she’d pressed one hand over her heart and another to the base of her throat.

  At the click of the door, she turned and found herself facing an uncharacteristically somber Lindsay.

  “Charlie, I know you and Daniel had some…some trouble in the past, but don’t you think you were a little…well…unkind to him just now?”

  A tiny thread of guilt wormed its way into Charlie’s belly. “I…”

  “I mean, he seems very nice. He went out of his way to do a favor for Philip today. I think…” She sat on the sofa, hugging a needlepoint throw pillow to her chest. “I think he might be a little lonely.”

  Charlie perched on the arm of the sofa opposite Lindsay as the guilt-worm burrowed deeper. “You know what he did to me.”

  “That was a long time ago. Don’t you think he could have changed? You have.”

  But she hadn’t. Not really. She was still the same awkward girl who couldn’t face the jeers of her schoolmates, who retreated from their unkindness into the safety of her increasingly elaborate techno-sanctuary.

  But today…just now. Lord. She’d acted exactly like the bullies. To Daniel.

  “I really was mean to him.” She toppled sideways onto the sofa cushions. “I’m pond scum. I’m lower than pond scum. I’m the scum on the bacteria of a pond scum virus.”

  Lindsay chuckled. “You’re not that bad, but don’t you see? This is your chance. A chance for closure, something I never had.”

  “Closure isn’t the real issue, Lin. Neither is the stuff that went down when we were teenagers.” Charlie picked at the piping on the sofa cushion. “He’s an investigative reporter. The Angel of Digital Death. He’s killed more tech careers than the dot-com crash.” Thanks to her GPPS, she knew about every one of them, too. “It’s what he does.” But she’d wanted more details than her GPPS provided. “After we saw him on the street yesterday, I added him to the matrix.”

  “To the Love Program?”

  “It’s not the Love Program. It’s Studies in—“

  “Predictive Mating Behaviors Predicated on Social Media and Online Interaction. I know. But why did you add him? You said you were shutting the study down.”

  “I am, but since the code is already in place to harvest the men’s online data, it was the fastest way for me to track his digital footprints. Besides, it’s not like I’ll ever use the database again.”

  “Okay. I guess,” Lindsay said, uncertainty lacing her tone. “So?”

  “So…about a year ago, he went after this guy, Franklin Argonne. Argonne wasn’t a programmer or the owner of a tech start-up. I doubt he’d be able to tell COBOL from HTML. But he looked great on webcasts.”

  “But…” Lindsay’s brow wrinkled. “If he wasn’t a tech person, why did Daniel go after him?”

  “Because he claimed to have cracked network theory. He said that he could find any man’s soul mate by the trail he left in cyberspace.”

  Lindsay’s eyes widened. “But that’s…”

  “My dissertation project. Yeah. That’s where I got the idea.” Charlie pushed herself upright and sat tailor-fashion, facing Lindsay. “See, Daniel made this huge stink in his column. He w
as merciless, mocking any man who’d believe in an impossibility—that some pie-in-the-sky techno-magic could deliver the perfect woman to his arms with no effort on his part.”

  “But it’s not impossible. You did it.”

  “Yes, but the only reason I even tried was because Daniel claimed it couldn’t be done.” She always had. It was one of the reasons they’d made such good science fair partners. He always challenged her assumptions. Made her look at the problem from all angles. “Then all my bandwidth got consumed by the dissertation and the field study, and I lost track of the story.”

  When she’d gotten the first results from her theoretical model, she’d wanted to track down Daniel and post a great big Ha! in the comments under his last rant about the unlikelihood of Argonne’s claims. But when she’d gone looking for the article, it had been taken down.

  “Last night, I found out what happened. He got pwned.”

  “‘Poned’?”

  “Sorry. P-w-n-e-d. It’s a gamer term. But it means owned. Totally dominated and…well…anyway, it took me hours last night, but I found this.” Charlie pulled her laptop off the coffee table and angled it so Lindsay could see the screen. She clicked the link.

  From the awkward angle and poor quality, the grainy video had obviously been filmed with a cell phone. It panned a room full of people around a conference table, a huge monitor on the wall, a cluster of champagne bottles in a bucket of ice, and Daniel manning the keyboard and mouse.

  Someone whispered, “Can they hear us?”

  “No,” Daniel said. “We’re muted. Webcam’s off.”

  The monitor flickered to life, displaying the face of a blond woman nearly as beautiful as Lindsay. The people around the table shifted uneasily, glancing at one another, but Daniel froze, his knuckles white on the mouse.

  “Hello, Dan. Expecting someone else?”

  Charlie killed the web page before she could see that awful scene again.

  “What was that?” Lindsay whispered.

  “That was supposed to be the final reveal. Daniel thought he had a link to a web meeting between Argonne and his gang, where he’d get the final evidence he needed to turn them over to the authorities. Instead, he found out he’d been conned just like the other victims. That woman,” Charlie closed her laptop, “was supposed to be his girlfriend.”

  Lindsay’s eyes filled with tears. “Oh no. Poor Daniel. But isn’t that a reason to reach out to him now? He would probably be grateful for a friend or two.”

  “Don’t you get it?” Charlie hugged her knees to her chest. “If he hated Argonne before because of what he did to other men, imagine how he feels now. If he knew I built a working model based on Argonne’s concepts…”

  She shuddered at the image in her mind. Her face, with her overwide mouth and circus of a hairdo, plastered on websites from here to Mumbai, accompanied by the same vitriol he’d flung at Argonne. Her reputation would never recover.

  And if she gave him another chance to expose her to public humiliation, neither would her heart.

  Chapter Four

  Geekronym: OMIK

  Translation: Open mouth, insert keyboard

  Definition: The computer equivalent of “open mouth, insert foot”; a faux pas committed with or because of computer technology.

  On Monday morning, Daniel nodded to his boss, Nelson, on the way to his dingy cubicle in the corner of HTW’s bullpen and tried to muster up some enthusiasm for his job.

  If he stuck to the boring assignments Nelson doled out to him, he’d never get back in the game. Today, damn it. He’d find a lead today. Sure, he’d promised he wouldn’t publish any story that bordered on the sensational. Didn’t mean he couldn’t look. Just for his own information.

  Just for your own obsession.

  He doodled notes on a legal pad as he waited for his dinosaur of a desktop computer to boot up. While the other two reporters brought their personal laptops to work, Daniel refused on principle. In his opinion, if Nelson wanted respect in the high-tech community, he needed to run a high-tech ship without floating it on the backs of his staff.

  By the time his login screen flashed on the monitor, he’d decorated his pad with half a page of chevrons surrounding two names.

  Franklin Argonne and Charlie Forrester.

  What the hell? Argonne he could understand. The bastard was still out there somewhere, and Daniel owed him and his cronies major payback.

  The other name was a shock.

  Charlie.

  At one time, she’d been the most important person in his life, more important even than his parents, who were stiff-lipped, barely civil, and careening toward a messy divorce. He’d lost track of her somewhere around middle school, when his father fell for that idiotic internet scam and lost everything. At first, Daniel had avoided his friends because he’d been mortified at his family’s change in status. But then his dad had sent his soon-to-be-repossessed red Corvette through the guardrail on Highway 101, and shame was the least of his worries.

  Overwhelmed by grief and responsibility—hell, he’d been twelve—he’d built a fortress around his feelings. Oddly, his emotionless facade had gotten interpreted as cool, first by his teenage peers and later by his professional colleagues. He’d allowed his chilly outer shell to seep all the way to his bones, untouched until Trisha cracked it wide open.

  He wasn’t so fossilized, however, that Charlie’s brush-off last night hadn’t cut deeper than he wanted to admit.

  When they were kids, she’d mapped out a whole plan for her life. Where she’d go to college. Who she wanted to work for. What difference she wanted to make in the world. She’d had enough fierce determination back then that he could believe she’d done all that and more.

  What would his life have been like if he hadn’t lost touch with her? If they’d stayed friends through high school? She’d damn well never have let him torpedo his GPA the way he had. She’d have dragged him onto the honor roll by his ears, and he could have spent more years racking up journalism credits before print newspapers became an endangered species.

  What the hell. He pulled up a search engine and keyed in her name, but although he got a ton of hits, they were all about her, not by her.

  Christ, she had a PhD. And two fricking master’s degrees, just like she’d always planned. No wonder she didn’t want to waste her time with a dumb-ass like him, who’d nearly flunked out of high school and then sent his hard-won career down in spectacular flames.

  But if he wanted to reconnect with her, this wasn’t the kind of information he needed. He craved the personal, not the academic.

  Fortunately, since his latest thrilling assignment would take him two hours, max, he had time to dig a little deeper into the Charlie Forrester story. While he waited for his next brilliant idea to bite him on the ass, he’d discover exactly what his childhood friend had been doing with her life while he’d sent his own down the crapper.

  …

  IT Staffing West had barely unlocked its doors for the day on Tuesday when Charlie burst through them, her hair still damp from her shower. Meredith, one of the women in the user group, always breathless and with an unfortunate tendency to match her drinks to her clothing, sat behind the reception desk.

  A smile split her round face. “Oh, Charlie. I’m so glad you came in today. Please, please, pleeeeeease don’t shut down the Love Program. Please?”

  “It’s not— Never mind.” Focus on the task. “You’ll be fine, Meredith. Really. You have no trouble meeting men.”

  “But the Love Program makes it so much easier.” She took a dainty sip of her Kiwi Strawberry Snapple, the same shade of pink as her dress. “Can’t you keep it open for a little bit longer? Two weeks?” she wheedled, but Charlie shook her head. “One?” Meredith sighed at Charlie’s continued refusal. “Darn it.”

  “Look, something’s wrong with the job listing
application.” Charlie off-loaded the messenger bag packed with her toolkit and laptop, and rubbed the spot where the strap had cut into her shoulder. “Audrey asked me to fix it the last time it happened, so can you buzz me into the server room? I’ll run a diagnostic and get you back online in no time.”

  Meredith’s widening eyes clued Charlie in to approaching danger. She peeked over her shoulder.

  Eeep.

  “Dr. Forrester, isn’t it?” In a blood-red linen suit and matching stilettos, Shanna advanced across the lobby, her pale blue eyes colder than the Furtwängler Glacier. “What makes you think something’s wrong with our system?”

  “Well…” When she’d rushed out of the apartment, Charlie’s only goal had been to get to the ITS West offices and fix whatever glitch had removed AGS from her list of available jobs. She hadn’t given a thought to her clothes—not that she ever did. But faced with aggressively well-groomed Shanna, Charlie realized she should have opted for something less casual than ratty jeans and her Data Driven Since 011111000101 T-shirt.

  “Yes? Your reasons?”

  “On Saturday, the analytics job with Anthony Global Solutions appeared in my job opportunities listing, but this morning, it was gone.”

  “What makes you think that’s an error?”

  “Because…because Audrey flagged my file specifically for this job.”

  “Yes. She did. I unflagged it.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Shanna sighed heavily. “Audrey and I have been business partners for more than ten years. She’s shrewd and nearly as unsentimental as I am. Consequently, I can’t fathom why she’s completely abandoned common sense where you’re concerned.”

  “I—”

  “Please. Let’s continue this conversation inside.” She swept past the reception desk. “Meredith, bring me a skinny soy latte.” She paused in her office doorway. “Beverage, Dr. Forrester?”

  Charlie’s brain hadn’t caught up with Shanna’s announcement. “No. I’m fine.” She slunk into the office and sat in one of the visitor’s chairs in front of the desk.