So Yesterday - By Scott Westerfeld Page 0,45

like, Yeah, I kissed you last night.

The coffees came, and I carried them back.

When Jen had heard about my call from Cassandra, we agreed it had given us exactly zero new information. All it meant was that the anti-client had somehow convinced Mandy to cover their tracks and that the cops weren't going to be helping us anytime soon.

"So, I've got a theory," Jen said.

"Another vision?"

She shook her head, playing with her Wi-Fi bracelet, which was twinkling in the heavy wireless traffic in the coffee shop as all around us people deleted spam, downloaded music, and asked the world's most powerful communication system to find them pictures of blond tennis players.

"Just normal brain activity, I'm happy to say. And some tinkering: this morning I took my Poo-Sham camera apart. I was right. When you take a picture, it sends a copy of the image to the nearest Wi-Fi hub."

"But why?"

She leaned closer, as if the couch were bugged. (The electronic kind, not the biting kind. Bugs in your hair. Bugs in your chair.)

"Well, these people went to a lot of trouble to set up last night, right? Spent lots of cash."

"Yeah. They had to create a brand of shampoo, shoot an advertisement for it, cough up money to cosponsor the party. Those things can cost a million, easy."

"And most insanely, they gave away about five hundred Wi-Fi-capable digital cameras. All this just to collect a bunch of pictures of rich people behaving badly."

I nodded, remembering flashes coming from every direction as the chaos had increased. The more the cameras unleashed paka-paka, the worse the behavior had gotten, resulting in more pictures being taken, and so on.

"Yeah, I guess they'd have a ton of those this morning."

"Which sounds like blackmail as a motive," she said.

"I'm not so sure about that." I leaned back into the musty embrace of the couch. "Granted, everyone got plastered and acted like idiots. But that's hardly illegal. I mean, who would pay hush money to cover up a twenty-year-old being drunk and stupid at a party?"

"A politician? Maybe someone important's son or daughter was there."

I shook my head. "That's too small a target. The anti-client thinks big. Frankly, I don't believe they're in this to make money."

"Didn't Lexa say that there's lots of money in cool?"

"There is. But that doesn't mean the anti-client thinks it's cool to have money."

Jen untangled that for a second, then leaned back and sighed. "So what do you think, Hunter?"

I could still see the woman mouthing the words Call me. I would have to sooner or later, but not until I knew more.

"I think we need to find out who she is."

"The woman on roller skates?" Jen reached into her back pocket and pulled out four printouts - pictures of NASCAR Man, the bald guy, Future Woman, and the missing black woman, all wearing sunglasses to protect themselves from the Poo-Sham flashes. "In all that chaos, it was pretty easy getting these."

"I'm glad you did." Even in the blurry photograph I could see it. "She's the one we need to find."

"Why her?"

"It's my job to spot where cool comes from, Jen. I can see who's leading and who's following, where the trend starts and how it spreads. The first time I saw you, I knew you'd innovated those laces yourself."

Jen looked down at her shoes and shrugged, admitting it was true.

I looked at the picture again. This woman was an actual resident of the client's fantasy world, a place where shoes could fly, where motion was magnetism, and where she was pure charisma on roller skates.

"Trust me," I said. "This isn't a lone, crazed cool hunter we're looking out for; it's a movement. And she's the Innovator."
Chapter 23~24
Chapter 23

IT'S A SMALL WORLD. SCIENTISTS HAVE PROVEN THIS.

In 1967 a researcher named Stanley Milgram asked a few hundred people in Kansas to try to get packages to a small number of "targets," random strangers in Boston. The Kansans could send the package to anyone they knew personally, who could then pass it on to anyone they knew personally, until a chain of friends between Kansas and Boston was uncovered.

The packages arrived on target much quicker than anyone expected. The average number of links between searcher and target was 5.6, immortalized as "six degrees of separation." (Or six degrees of my mom's favorite actor.) In our small world (small country, really) you're only about six handshakes away from the perfect lover you haven't met, the celebrity you most despise, and the person who innovated