Beth walked into the anteroom of the Central Station on Vallejo and tapped on the glass. Mikey was sitting behind his desk, head down, hands in his pompadour- styled after Newsom no doubt. He saw her and came over to open the door.
“What’s wrong?” Beth asked.
Mikey walked back to his desk. “I’m never going to get a promotion. I get this big break, and it turns into a total clusterfuck. I can’t find any connection between these guys just that they ‘look alike.’ I’m so fucking screwed.”
“Don’t worry. I found a connection.” She swung her shoulder bag around and plopped it on his desk. THen she dragged out a few manila folders and her laptop. “OK, I cross checked a few sites and came up with this site, and turns out it’s the only thing all of our vics had in common. So then I grabbed their first degree connections, and made this list.” She waved a piece of paper in front of his face. “But this is just first degree. There are hundreds of second and third degree relations. I think we should focus on this list, and maybe the second degree too.”
“What are you talking about?”
She sat down and popped open her sleeping laptop which made a quick hiss and chirp awake. She clicked around until she got the right window in Firefox. “See, all of these guys were in the usual social networks- you know, like MySpace and Facebook. I kept running across the same kind of profiles, and then realized, they’re all kind of un techie guys. But the comments their friends left kept on mentioning this other site. So I finally went there, and then I hit it. They were all going to the same events that they found out about on that other site. And the site isn’t just another social network, it’s the mother of all social networks. It’s the aggregator. That’s what I was missing for days. I thought I knew all the major social networks. But it’s not a network, it’s a kind of grand central station of all of those sites.”
“So they all met up on this thing?”
“No, it’s… it’s nothing in and of itself. It sucks all of the profiles, the contents, everything from other sites and publishes it on one. So it’s like, hyper/uber-MySpace.”
“And these guys were on it?”
“Yeah, but I haven’t found out if they’re all truly connected to each other. It’s like they all seen the same set of band photos. Like they’re all reading the same bulletin board, but I haven’t found out what band they all like.”
“Ugh. If you can barely explain it to me, how am I going to explain it to Sosa, and to the captain.”
“Yeah. That’s why I wasn’t even going to stop by here. I was on my way to work. I think there may be a person in common, not a band or show or event or something.”
“You go to work?”
“I got a little office in Asia Mall.”
“That is so weird.”
“Hey, the food is good.”
Next –> Stairs & Flakes