Genrenauts: Season One

by Michael R. Underwood

  Maybe that would come in handy this time.

  Hossan looked back at the PopBar, drew himself to his full height, and walked back at the door, hands still shaking. Leah followed at a discreet distance, talking under her breath to Mallery.

  “I’ve got Repentant Loverboy headed back in to make the Big Reconciliation.”

  Mallery responded over the earpiece. “I heard. Brilliantly done. You’re a natural.”

  “Helps that I’ve had some experience with romantic misadventure.”

  “I could tell. Meet me at the bar and we’ll watch this play out.”

  * * *

  Mallery greeted Leah by holding out Leah’s mostly full amaretto sour, her other hand wrapped around a glass of red wine.

  The speed dating crowd had broken out into a mingling period, couples reconnecting and expanding on their conversations. Sarah stood in a corner, shields up with crossed arms and face buried in her phone.

  “It’s super-intrusive, but is there any way we can hear what they say?”

  “We’d have to drop an omnidirectional mic with a power source somewhere nearby. Also, ten bucks says they make up.”

  “This is my story fix. Why would I bet against myself?”

  “If you’re right, I pay for the next round of drinks.”

  Leah chuckled. “You’re already paying for drinks.”

  “Work is paying for drinks. You pull this off, and I slap down my own hard-earned cash to celebrate. It’s a gesture; please take it in the manner it’s intended.”

  “Sorry, of course.” Leah just hoped it wasn’t also some other kind of gesture. Workplace romance drama was exactly what she didn’t need in this new amazing job. There was too much going on in her day-to-day to get distracted by hot coworkers, bombshell dress or no.

  Leah focused on the couple in the corner.

  Hossan’s hands were shaking, but he kept solid eye contact with Sarah. He wasn’t boxing her in, either. She had room to get out but wasn’t even eyeing an escape, looking for help. They were really talking, and so far, there was no more spilling or klutzy ridiculousness.

  Sarah set her drink down and took Hossan’s trembling hand. Tension bled out of him and the couple closed in to kiss.

  “Yes!” Leah said more than a little too loud for the bar’s average volume. Apparently, everyone’s attention was on the couple in the corner, and she got away with it.

  Mallery turned to the bar. “Can you please send a bottle of champagne to the couple in the corner, and another round for us, please?”

  “So, is that it?” Leah asked, heart racing.

  “I hope so. We’ll have to wait an hour or so and take readings again. There might be multiple breaches, or this might have been a story that was supposed to end badly, and maybe we’ve made things worse. Rom-Com can be a tricky region if you don’t peg the breach right away—it’s not like Crime World, where a breach means that the wrong people are dead. But the impact back home is just as bad. A while back, we—” Mallery stopped, interrupting herself. “Not literally we, but the organization we bungled a mission here by getting the wrong people together, it led to that insidious ‘fifty percent of marriages end in divorce’ meme back on our world.”

  Leah shuddered. She’d heard that statistic from more than one would-be significant other when they blew off her attempts to start a define-the-relationship talk. “How can we make things worse by making a happy ending?”

  “Not all romantic comedies end in a happily-ever-after.”

  “Yeah, but like one percent, right?” Leah said. “I can think of about two in the last fifteen years.”

  “It’s very rare, which is why I had you go for it. Let’s hope this was the breach. Missions don’t tend to go this easy. Especially not this year. More breaches and worse. It’s like El Niño for making our job a pain in the ass.”

  Leah peeked at the couple. Awkwardly adorable, they were perched half-on a wide bar stool, totally wrapped up in one another. She flashed back to her own relationships, to foolishly patterning her life off of Rom-Coms for a semester, and the montage of heartbreak that had led to. She was probably too young to be jaded about relationships, but she was well on her way. But that didn’t stop her from enjoying every second they spent in this world so focused on people finding love.

  “Yeah, King and folks read me in about the storms and the breach rate. Any idea of why things have gotten harder?”

  Mallery finished off her drink and picked up her backup, sliding Leah’s new round over to her. “That’s the question that’s making the High Council twitchy and is driving Ops up the wall. Leading theories at the top are that this is the interdimensional equivalent of El Niño or a meteor shower, some kind of convergence or confluence of forces that we can’t adequately read, accumulating in a way that increases dimensional instability.”

  “So, basically, ‘We don’t know; maybe weather?’”

  Mallery shrugged. “That’s for Ops and the Council to figure out. We’re just the story plumbers.”

  “That makes it way less glamorous than our current fancy-outfit-wearing, cocktail-sipping existence would indicate.”

  “Oh, it gets far worse than this. Romance World tends to be the best, since the chances of gross bodily harm are pretty low. Though there was that brief crossover with Fantasyland where there were as many spells cast and dragons fought as there were long walks through gardens.”

  “Crossover?” Leah asked. “There’s nothing in the documentation that talks about crossovers.”

  “Council regulations. They say crossovers are so infrequent as to be not worth putting into the official material. I’d have thought that King would have told you about those by now.” The Genrenauts High Council was the founders and directors of the organization, which had bases all around the world. Of their team, only King ever talked to the Council, which suited Leah just fine. They sounded like a bunch of jerks, to be honest.

  Leah took a sip of her drink. “They might have. My brain has gotten so full it spilled at least three times so far.”

  “Do I ever know that feeling.” Mallery peeked at the couple in the corner. “Our work here is done. I’ll leave behind a sensor to collect the readings. Do you want to hit the third bar to relax out the night, or turn in for an early day tomorrow, should your marvelous story fix turn out to not be the patch we needed?”

  “This better be my last drink, if I’m going to be at all useful tomorrow.”

  Mallery made a comically mopey face, still impressing with her almost cartoonishly elastic actress skills. She dropped the look, tossing it aside as the joke it was. “Okay. Then skip the drink and just take in the city. I did mention it’s a rooftop bar, right?”

  “You didn’t. Rooftop, eh?”

  Leah imagined a shoulder angel and a shoulder devil. Her shoulder angel was dressed in professional slacks and a collared shirt in the manner of her style idol, Janelle Monáe. The shoulder devil was Mallery, wearing an even-more-exaggerated version of the woman’s dress.

  “Drink lots of water and get enough sleep! This is a job!” shoulder angel said.

  “Rooftop bar! Cute coworker! New York!” said the shoulder devil.

  I really hope I don’t regret this, Leah thought, banishing the shoulder angel and devil.

  “Let’s do it.”

  Mallery lit up like a kid on Christmas. “Fantastic.”

  The senior Genrenaut turned to the bartender and called, “Check, please!”

  Chapter Four: Did You Get the Number of that Martini?

  Leah woke up with a head full of mothballs, light piercing her eyes like lances.

  For a moment, she didn’t know where she was, but the residual smell of patchouli opened the window of memory, and reality came streaming in.

  She was still dressed in her fancy club gear, which meant she hadn’t bothered to undress after getting back from the bar.

  The previous night came back to her in fits and starts. The sights, the sounds of pounding techno, and
another round of drinks.

  An imaginary Better Judgement shoulder angel appeared, shaking her head, dressed in the elaborate dresses her mother made her wear as a kid for Chinese cultural festivals.

  “Told you so,” the angel said in Mandarin. It had always been a know-it-all. And yet she never seemed to listen.

  Her mission phone read 8:17, which was only fairly late. There was a glass of water on the bedside table. She glugged the water, then grabbed her towels and made a break for the shower.

  One bracingly cold shower later, she wandered into the office/living room, wearing her gym clothes. She skipped makeup for the morning.

  Walking into the room with the team assembled, she saw Mallery in trendy clothes and a full face of makeup.

  “Good morning. Nice of you to join us,” King said, tut-tutting heavy in his tone.

  You’re doing great today! she taunted herself as she slunk around the couches and took a seat.

  The whiteboard was back, with a fresh message in two columns.

  The first read:

  Story Breach Leads

  1) Techie couple reunited by Leah

  Leah reports

  2) Online dating pool

  Roman reports

  3) Gossip pool

  Shirin reports

  And in the second:

  Today’s Agenda

  1) Follow-ups based on leads

  2) Regular haunts

  Mallery set her coffee down and tapped on the board with her marker. “Okay, let’s get started. Word from HQ says that the story Leah patched last night was not our breach. We’re going to hear from Leah first, since even though it wasn’t the breach, patching a story is still a very exciting achievement, especially since she did it all by herself.” Mallery tapped the other numbered points on the board. “Next, we’ll get status reports and leads from Roman and Shirin, and then I’ll assign today’s tasks.”

  Mallery said, “You’re up, newbie.”

  Leah wished for caffeine, wobbling to her feet to address the team at Mallery’s prompting. She ran through the night’s adventures, focusing on identifying Hossan and Sarah, inserting herself to give advice, and the PDA-tastic reconciliation between the pair.

  “Nicely done,” King said. “Next time, you can plant a mic on the subject so your team can listen and intervene if things are heading off base. When we ID the prime suspect couple, remember what you did here. Chances are, what we have to do will just be a bigger version of your story patch, though experience tells us that it usually takes more than a five-minute pep talk for a breach as far-reaching as this one.”

  “How far-reaching?” Leah asked.

  “Filings for divorce in the USA and Canada have increased nine percent over the last month, and dating websites have seen a twenty percent increase in membership cancellations due to frustration.”

  Shirin piped in, “For context, the last time there was a breach in Romance, those numbers were three percent and twelve percent, respectively.”

  “Holy schnikes.”

  Mallery shook her head. “I’m sorry, dear, but I won’t stand by and accept that as field profanity. We’ve got some latitude in our PG-13 rating; give it a proper crap or hot damn.”

  “Well, crap.”

  “There you go. Don’t let a little hangover keep you from speaking with gusto.” Mallery tapped the whiteboard again. “Now, to Roman, with some findings from the online dating site mines.”

  Roman was dressed in gym clothes, warm-up pants and a grey hoodie over white tank top. “We’ve sorted out a half-dozen candidates using Mallery’s algorithms, and cross-referenced their hobbies and locations to find some likely places to run into them over the next couple of days.”

  Leah raised her hand. “Wait, how? Isn’t that, like, ridiculously invasive?”

  Roman looked to Mallery, then King. He shrugged. “This is what we do. If we fix their stories, we’re helping them. The natural state in this world is Happily Ever After. In this world, people are actually incomplete until they’ve found their match. If they aren’t in story breaches, our making contact will be a momentary blip on their lives. No one gets hurt.”

  Leah looked around to the group. “And this doesn’t bother anyone else?”

  “It’s this or rely entirely on serendipity to do our legwork for us,” King said. “With the ripple effects we’re seeing on Earth, these approaches have been sanctioned by the High Council and are entirely appropriate.”

  “Is it possible to log my displeasure without being insubordinate? Can I, like, fill out a form or something?”

  “So noted,” King said. “Roman…”

  “As I was saying.” Roman wrote out the six names on the whiteboard, beside the “Online dating pool” section.

  “I’ve got likely haunts and plans for making contact in today’s briefing email, along with relevant details for each candidate.”

  Mallery kept going. “Shirin, you’re up with word from the wide world of gossip. Please, spare no detail. I do love these little morsels of story, even the red herrings. They are the relationship hors d’oeuvres before the main course of romantic reconciliation.”

  Shirin took the presenter position, spinning the whiteboard around to the clean back. Leah’s stomach grumbled, which elicited a smile from the older Genrenaut. “Someone hasn’t had breakfast yet.”

  Leah shrugged. “Meetings take priority.”

  “Some of us were up at six and got in a run and a breakfast before the meeting,” Shirin said.

  “And some of us had to shepherd home an inebriated probie at one AM,” Mallery riposted before stepping back to let Shirin go.

  There was no venom in the women’s words, just the bantering barbs of long acquaintance.

  “Shaking the gossip branches yielded a few choice bits.” Shirin started writing on the whiteboard, breaking down their leads for possible plot threads. They’d covered this in her orientation—it was standard approach when a breach wasn’t immediately evident—look for events and trends that stood out, then narrow down until you find your breach. If possible, use one plot to resolve another.

  “Newspaper sources indicate Mercy Hospital admitted three people who were hit by cars after getting engaged. Two have been discharged; one is still recovering.”

  On the board: Engagement Rings In Hospital

  “The Off-Broadway Achievement Awards are in five days.”

  Off-Broadway Awards

  “And a physical therapy company embedded in a gym that caters to the trendy urban professionals is advertising for two new PTs.”

  PT Posts Open

  “And lastly, millionaire actor Kyle Randal is hosting a gala tomorrow night. Randal is well known for being a lecherous skeeve, so there’s a very good chance, given where we are, of women put into compromising situations which would then make for a creepy but in-genre meet-cute with innocuous guys.”

  Skeeve Party

  “Thanks, Shirin.” Mallery tapped the board over the listed plot threads. “King and Roman, you go ahead and grab those PT jobs. The gym association gives us a good field base for a wide range of possible stories. Shirin, I want you on the algorithms today; see if we can cross-reference some of these findings and come up with intersections to narrow our search.”

  “Leah and I will hit the haunts. Two of them jog in the mornings in Central Park, so we’ll start there. Updates by five PM for the evening meet-up, then we make plans for the evening.”

  Mallery paused as the team shuffled on the couches and seats, ready to move.

  “Any questions?”

  Leah, as usual, had many questions, but they could wait until she was talking to Mallery.

  Starting the day in Central Park, served both of Mallery’s agendas: reconnaissance and working through Leah’s hangover.

  Mallery trotted along merrily, gloves and yoga pants and a light fleece, hair held back in an exercise-standard ponytail.

  Leah, meanwhile, huffed as she tried to keep pace.

&n
bsp; “How are you in better shape than I am and you’ve just been in traction?”

  “Because I was in marathon-running shape before my last mission, and you haven’t been around long enough for Roman’s fitness regimen to deform your life like a black hole. Also, it looks like your liver also needs some more training.”

  Leah huffed and puffed, pushing herself to catch up to Mallery. “I was stretching it. Next time I say, ‘I shouldn’t have another drink,’ please don’t pressure me like it’s no big deal, even if it makes me out to be a spoilsport.”

  Mallery’s face darkened. “You’re right. I was just so happy to be back on my feet, I got a bit carried away. And then I had to carry you away!”

  “Sorry about that. I hope I didn’t inadvertently kick off any romance plots with random passers-by at the bar.”

  Mallery picked up the pace again. “No, nothing like that. You were very easy to take care of. Once we got back, I just left you with the glass of water and went on my way.”

  A moment passed. “Priority One is spotting the candidates from Roman’s notes who frequent this park – Anna Grace and Jasper Montes, but also be on the lookout for other broken stories. So, what we’re looking for,” Mallery said, gesturing to the other runners on the trails, “is groups of friends, probably three of them, talking about relationships. They’ll be running just a bit slower than everyone else, but they’ll be talking a lot.”

  “Like we are,” Leah said.

  “Exactly! If I were a group of Genrenauts watching the scene, I’d definitely peg us as candidates. You’d be the romantic lead, and I’d be the wise, free-spirited friend, offering you advice about how you need to put yourself out there more.”

  “Got it,” Leah said, pushing past the wall and finding something resembling a stride.

  Focusing on the other joggers helped distract her from how not-in-shape she was. She saw solo runners in their own worlds, pairs jogging silently, love-birds in matching outfits jogging and stealing long glances at one another.