“Right. I thought you turned around a little too quickly after what I told Philip about you that night. But anything to prove the data, right?”
“That’s not how it happened.” She stretched a tentative hand toward him, but he smacked his palm against the table and ice rattled in the glasses. Charlie cringed.
“Tell me, then, Charlie. Tell me how it happened. Because I got blindsided by it. I thought you were sincere.”
Daniel seemed so far away, as if she viewed him through the wrong end of a telescope. His voice was muffled, distant, although the clink of silver on china from surrounding tables nearly deafened her. “I am,” she whispered. “Was. Am.”
“Would you have made any effort at all if not for the bet? Would you have called me to get together the way I asked?”
She shook her head. “Does it matter what the reason is? It was real, Daniel. Last night—”
“Do not bring up last night. Did you sleep with me for the statistics? Is that all it was to you? Another way to demonstrate that Doctor Charlie Forrester’s data can do anything?”
Charlie wished she didn’t feel so disheveled in yesterday’s clothes, the clothes that Daniel had removed last night. Only half an hour ago, those same clothes had given her a heady feeling, remembering the almost reverent look in his eyes as he revealed each inch of her skin. Now she just felt grubby, and from Daniel’s furious gaze, he wasn’t thinking about her skin anymore, unless it was to determine the most excruciating way to remove it.
“I thought this meant something to you,” he said. “That we meant something. But I was falling in love and you were just beta-testing.”
“L-l-love?”
“Isn’t your program supposed to match both sides of the couple? Both people in the same emotional space? Why am I the only one trashed here? Did you falsify your results? Skew your data so you could stay untouched?”
“Do you think, if I were to force my own data, that I’d pick you?”
Daniel made a sound like he’d been punched in the gut.
Charlie sucked in a breath and covered her mouth with her hand. “That’s not what it sounds like. I mean, I would never have imagined I would succeed with you.”
“Is this payback?” His voice wobbled on the last word, and he cleared his throat. “Christ, I was a stupid douchebag of a teenager. Can’t you let that go?”
Daniel pulled out his wallet, tossed enough cash onto the table to cover their check, and stood up. “Do you need streetcar fare to get home?”
“No.” Her lips felt stiff, paralyzed. “I’m okay.”
He laughed, a broken, edgy bark. “Really? I’m not.”
He turned and strode off.
An audible sniff and a muttered “finally” from the table to her right tore her attention from Daniel’s back. She glanced around wildly. All the surrounding diners and waitstaff stared at her as if she were the latest celebrity viral meltdown video.
She pushed herself away from the table and stumbled out of the restaurant before she added to the spectacle and allowed them to see her cry.
Chapter Nineteen
Geekronym: PUM
Translation: Potentially unwanted modification
Definition: An unwanted change made to a computer’s settings, which may occur without the user’s express knowledge or consent.
After he left Charlie at the Brunch Spot, Daniel didn’t bother to go home. He took the Mustang all the way to the coast, but once he parked at the beach, he stared at the ocean without bothering to get out.
Christ, he’d never escape this emotional black hole driving a Ford. He doubted the Enterprise or the Millennium Falcon would be up to the job.
He pulled out his phone, half hoping for a message from Charlie, but the only thing he’d gotten all morning was that document from rosserx.
He re-read the email, and with Charlie’s betrayal fresh in his mind, the dry academic words took on a different meaning.
…social media data sets…predictive algorithm…probable success rate…
Christ. Could it be? He didn’t want to look. Didn’t want evidence that Charlie was no better than Argonne or Trisha.
Man up, Shawn. You’re a fucking reporter.
He took a deep breath and opened the attachment.
Studies in Predictive Mating Behaviors Predicated on Social Media and Online Interaction by Charlice Forrester.
Her doctoral dissertation.
This was the cause of the rumor. Not any fresh incursion by Argonne, but Charlie’s field study.
He chucked his phone onto the floor, refusing to read the damn paper. She’d confessed, hadn’t she? He didn’t need further proof that she could be so uncaring. More concerned with data validation than with the feelings of the men he’d accused her of victimizing.
He headed back to Portland, straight to the HTW office, and pounded out a vitriolic article as an attempt at catharsis, drawing more on his history with Argonne’s tactics than with any knowledge of Charlie’s program.
When he finished pouring his rage onto the page, he still felt like shit warmed over. Be honest, Shawn. You’re not outraged on behalf of the alleged victims. You’re pissed because she didn’t want you for yourself.
Damn it. Catharsis wasn’t what it was cracked up to be.
He eyed his phone. Could he call himself a journalist if he didn’t consider all the facts?
“Fuck.” He barricaded himself behind his battered desk, tilted his chair back, and read the damn attachment. Forced himself to look at it objectively, as a reporter, and not as a heartbroken chump whose theme song was “Won’t Get Fooled Again.”
When he finished, he stared at his monitor for a full hour, then forced himself to write a second story, one based on Charlie’s results rather than his Argonne-fueled biases. He spent the rest of the day tracking down the participants in her field study.
Surprisingly, it wasn’t that hard once he had a starting point with Meredith and Philip. Hell, the women all used the same damn hashtag, #LPGrrlz.
As he finished the second article, he smelled the telltale aroma of burned coffee, a sure sign that Nelson was in the office. He blinked bleary eyes at the computer screen. Christ. Eight o’clock. It was Monday morning. He was still in the clothes he’d worn on Saturday and hadn’t yet come to any firm conclusions or resolved his bruised feelings.
Who owned social media data anyway? Once you released your personal crap into the internet wilds, you had to take your chances. But Twitter tweets and Facebook posts were different from browser history and clickstream activity.
Weren’t they?
Shit, HTW’s revenues were based on click-throughs, on selling those prospects to their advertisers and sponsors. How was that different than Charlie’s use of the data stream? It was all Big Data, the latest hot commodity for sales and marketing. Was it so horrible for her to use it to facilitate romance?
Daniel let his chair creak forward and clicked his mouse, displaying his alternative stories side by side on his monitor, comparing them paragraph by paragraph, the knot in his belly drawing tighter with each word.
Charlie’s program wasn’t the problem. None of the other guys were complaining. They were all like Philip, more or less. Happy to let the program do the work for them. None of them were outraged or appalled over the lack of consent. One of them had put it succinctly:
“Shit. It’s like those software license agreements. Nobody ever says they don’t agree to the terms, so why bother to ask the fucking question?”
For all his ranting at Charlie about the unethical manipulation of unsuspecting men, the real issue was the bone-deep hurt that crippled him when he’d realized he was nothing more than a data point.
And he wanted to be more, damn it. He wanted to be special, the outlier, the one she chose despite statistics.
The one she loved,
God help him.
Daniel swore and pushed away from his desk. He passed Nelson on his way across the empty bullpen. “I’m going out for some decent coffee.”
“I need your story, Shawn. This issue goes live at midnight.”
“Yeah. I know. You’ll have it by noon. I just need to embed the images.”
He ran down the stairs and out onto the sidewalk. Neither the sun baking down on his head nor the heat of the pavement striking up through his shoes was enough to chase the chill out of his soul.
…
After twenty-four hours holed up in her room like an agoraphobic mole, running test after test, Charlie still couldn’t figure out how she’d made such a huge error. Daniel shouldn’t have been so invested in the relationship, not to the extent of falling in love.
And I shouldn’t feel like a Rancor monster scooped out my heart and replaced it with a shard of bone.
Don’t cry. Don’t cry.
She could say it was all for the job, that her feelings, Daniel’s feelings, any individual’s feelings, didn’t matter compared to the good she could do in the world as part of the AGS team. But was it even true?
Maybe—heresy of heresies—Spock was wrong after all. Maybe the needs of the many didn’t justify being a total jerk to the one.
Especially when Charlie suspected Daniel might be The One for her.
“And not just for two to six months,” she murmured as she scrolled through her query results for the nth time. But the statistical probability of him ever speaking to her again was less than nil.
The bot she’d set up to troll for AGS messages popped up on her screen, and she opened her email with a halfhearted click of her mouse.
Dear Dr. Forrester.
We have scheduled an interview for you with our search committee tomorrow, July 7th, at 10:00am. Please arrive by 9:30 to complete the preliminary paperwork.
Thank you.
Floyd Bolton
Human Resources Director
Anthony Global Solutions
There it was. The long-awaited AGS interview. The reason for the whole charade. Shouldn’t she feel elated? Keyed up and ready to rock?
Instead, she felt disassociated, as if the Charlie who cared, who’d be thrilled that her dream was on the verge of coming true, was in suspended animation, waiting on a cure for shattered love, while an automated utility Charlie mechanically composed the response.
But if she let seventeen years of lead-up implode now, she’d have hurt Daniel and destroyed her own peace of mind for nothing. She took a giant breath and opened her AGS dashboard to outline her presentation.
A red timestamp flashed in the corner of the screen. She squinted at it in disbelief, ice forming in her belly.
Oh lord. The data hadn’t refreshed since last Tuesday.
Her fingers trembled on her mouse as she checked her scheduled jobs. None of them had run since last week, either. Her error logs held six different messages about connection failures, and she hadn’t noticed them.
She’d been so focused on Daniel that she’d ignored her basic protocols. Her data was over a week out of date.
Stomach plummeting, she re-enabled all the jobs, hit execute, and paced her bedroom, rubbing her damp palms on her jeans.
Gideon pushed open her door. “Knock knock.”
She didn’t stop patrolling the room. “You’re supposed to knock before you open the door.”
“What can I say? I’ve always had difficulty with the whole cause-and-effect continuum.”
He stepped into the room, holding a glass of iced tea and a plate of Milano cookies, which meant Lindsay must be in on this, too.
“If the two of you are trying to cheer me up, it won’t work.”
“Recognize it for what it is, Charles,” he said, plunking the plate onto her desk and thrusting the glass into her path. “An intervention. Did Shanna blackball you from the AGS job?”
“No. In fact, I’ve got an interview tomorrow.”
“Then for pity’s sake, what’s the matter with you?”
“It’s Daniel. He found out about the bet. He…” She took the glass and set it on her desk because the tea would never make it past the lump in her throat. “He did not take it well.”
Gideon’s eyebrows disappeared behind his glasses. “What is the matter with that man? I’d adore being the subject of a relationship bet. All the responsibility for success would land on the bettor and bettee, with nothing but fun and games for moi.”
“He didn’t see it quite that way.”
“Stupid He-Man pride, eh? Well, I shall have a few words for Mr. Shawn. Let me—”
She stopped him with a hand on his chest. “It’s not his fault, okay? It’s mine. I never should have made the stupid bet. So for heaven’s sake, don’t say anything to Daniel and don’t try to cheer me up.”
He leaned forward and kissed her cheek. “Anything for you, my darling.” He turned and walked into the hallway, pausing before he shut the door behind him. “But remember. If you need anyone’s ass kicked, I have a brand new pair of Prada boots that are more than up for the job.”
She forced a pathetic excuse for a smile. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
He shut the door softly as the end-of-process alarm pinged. She lunged for her keyboard.
Forget the AGS presentation. That was inconsequential. Less than nothing. She opened up the Love Program and re-ran the test queries for Daniel’s profile.
The results made her leap out of her chair and back up until her legs hit the side of her bed.
He wasn’t a Stage Two, hardly even a Three. He was teetering on the brink of Stage Four.
Charlie dropped onto her bed, faced with a data wonk’s worst nightmare. Operator error. Stale data. Garbage in, garbage out.
Daniel hadn’t been looking for a casual mid-term relationship. He was ready for forever, and she was so lousy at pretending to be a Stage Two that she’d projected the wrong signals entirely.
But a Stage Four and a Stage Two, even a fake one, shouldn’t mesh. The signs would have been there, subtle but off-putting, and Daniel would have moved on.
Better for him.
But would it have been better for her? Would she have traded the last few days to go back to believing in Dickhead Daniel?
No. She wouldn’t. Even if that old hurt was easier to bear than this…this hollow ache, that’s not who he was. Not now. Not ever, really. She’d been wrong about him for years. Wrong about everything.
Tears tracked down her cheeks. She dashed them away with the back of her hand. Oh lord. What if she hadn’t been pretending at all, not for any of it? Could her data know her better than she knew herself?
After all, memories lied. Appearances lied. She’d lied. Only data told the truth.
She fell backward onto the bed.
“Damn it. Data sucks.”
Chapter Twenty
Geekronym: CLM
Translation: Career-limiting move
Definition: An action or event that could result in an individual’s loss of employment or employment opportunities.
When she pulled out her interview outfit the next morning, Charlie convinced herself she was glad she didn’t have to wear the seduction clothes anymore. With every button of the crisp white oxford shirt, the zip of the knee-length charcoal gray skirt, and the set of the single-breasted jacket on her shoulders, the pieces of her normal life reassembled. She slipped on her sensible black flats and tucked an extra half dozen copies of her resume into her black leather briefcase.
She caught a glimpse of her monochrome reflection in the mirror. Lord, this suit was ugly. Maybe an accessory?
Her gaze snagged on the jewel-toned scarf she’d worn at the Blues Festival, and she remembered Daniel dragging the silk against her throat, across her chest.
No.
She pushed the memory away. This was her real life, and real-life Charlie didn’t do color. Real-life Charlie didn’t deserve color. She folded the scarf and returned it to Lindsay’s room on her way out of the apartment.
Halfway down the stairs, her cell phone pinged with an incoming text and hyperlink from Toshiko.
You must read this before your interview.
Frowning, Charlie touched the link and a lurid red headline splashed across her screen.
Cyber Pimp
Charlie’s knees buckled, and she sat on the step with a teeth-jarring bump, her briefcase sliding from numb fingers. She read the headline three times, hoping she wasn’t reading it correctly, that Daniel’s name didn’t scream at her from the byline.
She scanned the article, her hand clutching the collar of her shirt. All of Daniel’s arguments about privacy and manipulation and Big Data ethics were there, laced with ill-concealed rage masquerading as righteous indignation.
No wonder Tosh had wanted Charlie to read this before she left. Forget the petty humiliations of school corridors and bar meet-ups. This was global annihilation, just as she’d feared. While Toshiko could no doubt quote half a dozen studies on how animals lashed out when they were hurt, Charlie couldn’t blame Daniel.
It’s your own fault. You struck the first blow with your stupid program and stupid bet and stupid lies. You deserve this and more.
She’d probably get it, too. With AGS’s stringent requirement that all employees maintain an impeccable public profile, she’d be disqualified before she ever walked in the door. Would Shanna pull her from the candidate pool? Maybe AGS would simply bar her from the premises, or worse, let her limp through the meeting before politely telling her she didn’t suit.
She stood on shaky legs, retrieved her briefcase, and headed to the streetcar stop, feeling off-balance, as if she were missing the heel of one shoe.
As she walked into the lobby of the building housing the AGS offices, her cell phone rang, sending a buzz up her spine as if she were wired to it. Could it be Daniel, calling to apologize? To explain? To extend his rant into her personal space?
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