I’m not sure what I was expecting. For the past week, I’d been daydreaming about how it would go down when I came face-to-face with my hater. Still under the impression AnyLies was a girl—namely Jessie—I’d imagined lots of tears and yelling. A smug hologram boy was not a scenario I would have dreamed up in a million years. It all felt…wrong.
From what the holoimage captured, Jonah’s room was even more tricked out than the downstairs. It looked like he was at the helm of an alien fighter jet. All around him were holoscreens running with green code. I wondered how many girls’ lives that code was destroying.
“So what do you want?”
“I think you know what we want,” I said.
“What, am I a mind reader now?”
So he was going to play it like he didn’t know who I was.
“I want to speak face-to-face,” I said.
“And I’d like to get with Destiny Sparks.” Jonah blew air out his lips. “Sorry, sweetheart. No can do. You want the parental controls removed on your Internet? Leave me your operating system ID, the main password to your Internet hookup, and a hundred bucks on the coffee table. I can get it done by tomorrow afternoon. Now get out. I don’t do houseguests.”
“Don’t make me pull you down here by your EarRing,” Mac growled.
“Don’t bother,” Rory said.
Sharma nodded. “We can do better.”
They hadn’t stopped working their Docs since Mrs. Logan gave up the hub password. Via his hologram, we watched as Jonah stopped swiping. He peered more closely at one of his screens and then expanded it.
“What the heck,” he murmured. “My CB was suspended?”
Rory cracked his knuckles and grinned at Sharma, both eyebrows raised.
Sharma tsked. “Too subtle.”
Suddenly the screen in front of Jonah went black. The music shut off in Jonah’s room. All the lights went off as well. Other than the kitchen, where Jonah’s mother could be heard opening various cabinets, the whole house fell silent and dark. Mac whistled under his breath. Rory looked ready to cut his heart out and hand it to Sharma right there. The only thing that stayed on was Jonah’s hologram and, on his end, the feed of us in the living room.
“W-T-F, man?” Jonah pushed back in his roller chair and then fiddled with the connection on the hub under his desk.
“It’s not your hub,” I said. “It’s us. Now how about you come downstairs.”
It wasn’t a question.
“Who the hell are you guys?” Jonah squinted at the transmitted images of us.
We all looked to Rory.
Swiveling his head to stare down the hologram, he said, “We’re the people who decide what the rest of your life looks like.”
“Wait, this is my favorite part,” Jonah said. “You know how long I spent on that edit? I mean, it was fine after a half hour, but I really wanted to make it clean.”
“A half hour?” I said. “Don’t you mean half a day?”
Jonah snorted. “I would if I was a tool.”
One minute and ten seconds ago, Sharma had cued up the Mr. E. video.
“Oh,” Jonah said, “you’re that one. I couldn’t tell.”
“Racist,” Sharma said.
Jonah shrugged and then proceeded to provide an audio commentary track to the video the entire time it played. Now that we were coming to the end, I tuned him out. I’d never expected my hater to be so enthusiastic about his work. And I’d never expected my friends to be so absorbed by my hater. You’d think Sharma, Rory, and Jonah were at a hacker convention. Only Mac seemed to get how crazy this made me, patting my leg, kissing the side of my head, cracking up at the test video Jonah played where he put a lizard’s face where Mr. E.’s girlfriend’s should have been.
“This part is amazing,” Rory said. On-screen I flicked my hair up. “The blend is perfect.”
“I know, right? It’s the program—EffectsMaker. It literally melds the pixels of two different vids together. It’s the same software they use in special-effects studios, but way more user-friendly. It’s not even available anywhere yet. It’s all tied up in the courts because of security and identity concerns. Right now you need a Japanese birth certificate to even test a copy. Unless you know someone.” Jonah laughed—“Hehehe.” He sounded like the evil villain in an anime movie. “And in my case, I am that someone. Safe America got a deal when they booked me.”
Rory and Sharma were silently, insanely jealous. Clearly, they both added EffectsMaker to their mental checklists of software that needed to be cracked.
“Am I the only person who remembers why we’re here?” I asked. “What’s Safe America? I’ve heard that name before.”
“It’s nothing,” Jonah said, and clamped his lips shut.
“We don’t have time for this.” Mac stood up like he was going to beat it out of the kid.
At the same time, Jonah’s mother staggered into the living room carrying a tray loaded with a crumb cake, full coffee mugs, and a veritable coffee shop array of creamers and sweeteners. A stack of paper plates was wedged beneath her arm. Mac and Rory jumped up to help her.
“Aren’t you two sweet.”
Mac set the tray on the coffee table.
“Oof,” Mrs. Logan said as, knees cracking, she hovered over it and began doling out mugs of mocha nut. “Don’t mind me, kids.”
Jonah sank into the couch with a satisfied grin.
“Actually, Ma.” He smiled sweetly. “Stay. Have coffee with us.”
“Oh, okay,” Jonah’s mom said brightly, though this could have been her intention all along as there were six cups of coffee on the tray. “It’s so nice to meet some of Jonah’s pals.”
As Mrs. Logan spooned sugar into her coffee, the wall screen behind her flickered to life. Jonah’s main G-File page—his real one—was on view. His profile pic was a joker from a deck of cards. Douche. Otherwise there was scant information about him. He was tagged in a few family photos, but they looked blurry, like someone had taken a filter to the parts just over his face. Other than that, there were only a few banal memberships to various movie and comic streaming sites.
“So,” he snorted.
Sharma smiled but didn’t look up from her Doc. The list of memberships updated first. Every site that Jonah had joined under an alias was now attached to his G-File. There were sites for making weapons. Sites for looking at porn—whether it was girl-on-girl, guy-on-guy, teacher-on-student, the list was nearly unending.
“Those are for work,” Jonah muttered.
But already other memberships were edging the porn ones offscreen. Amidst the hundreds of sites that were suddenly scrolling along, I swore the B&P site flew by. Audra sure had reach. Jonah spilled his coffee on the floor as he stood up and quickly sat back down.