CHAPTER SIX: Stars

The day was cool for early September and Amy sailed across the Brooklyn Bridge feeling high in spirits. Today was the day she'd realize the reward for her years of toiling. Even the exhaust kicked up by idling engines couldn't sway her mood. Even pedestrians ambling into the bike lane – the bane of the bicyclist's existence – couldn't bring her down. She had been working on the StarScape program since graduate school and ever since she'd sold it to CelesTech the year before, good things kept happening for her. In lieu of payment for the program, as CelesTech was a brand new company having just secured its initial funding, Amy accepted a thirty-percent share in the company. The program she had created was generating significant buzz in both the technology and aerospace fields and they had recently been offered eighteen million dollars to sell the company to a major international corporation called Galaxia. As far as Amy knew, Galaxia had its hand in many different industries, but the one that concerned her was its space exploration division.

When Amy rolled into lower Manhattan, she chained her bike to a street lamp and gazed up at the towering behemoth that was Miller-Conway Towers. She unclipped her helmet, slung it under her arm, and made her way through the lobby and up to the twenty-seventh floor where the CelesTech offices were.

"Morning!" said Amy, cheerfully greeting Rose, the receptionist.

"Oh good morning, Miss Anderson," said Rose. "Mr. Lawson is expecting you. He said you can go right into his office."

"Thanks so much, Rose," Amy called over her shoulder as she pushed through the heavy glass doors that led into the main offices. Amy traversed the office past cubes of young twenty-somethings working on complicated-looking projects on their computers. She ably located the corner office and waltzed right in.

"Amy!" cried Sam Lawson, leaping from his chair. At twenty-three he was the founder and executive officer of CelesTech and two years Amy's junior. He embraced her in a warm hug and gestured for her to have a seat.

"So what's this all about?"

"Amy, I'll just cut to the chase here. I just got off the phone with our banker, Darien Hunter. As you know, he's been working with the buy side bankers on this deal. Well apparently, after some extensive testing on the StarScape program, they found a bug. The deal is tabled until we fix it."

Amy was astonished. "A…bug?" she stammered. "But that's…that's impossible."

"Look, it isn't a big deal. We're just going to all have a little meeting later this afternoon and discuss it. They'll show you what they found, you fix it, we sell the company, we make millions, we live happily ever after, okay?"

Amy frowned. "All right," she conceded slowly. "Did they say what kind of bug?"

Sam shook his head. "No, not really. To be honest, I don't think they really knew what exactly the bug was or I'm sure they'd have fixed it themselves. They've got programmers over there who've been with the company since the seventies and I think it really bothers them that someone as young as you designed this program and someone as young as me owns it. All they said was that StarScape shows some kind of anomaly in Sector Twelve. Some kind of space distortion."

"Hm." Amy furrowed her brow and mulled for a while. She hated to be arrogant, but she knew there were no bugs in that program. She devoted so much of her life to it, she was sure she'd have noticed a long time ago if something were amiss.

"Come on. Let's go to lunch," Sam said pulling on his jacket.

Once outside, Sam tried to engage in small talk. "So how's life, Amy? Any big plans for when you're living on easy street?"

Amy chuckled. "Not really. I was thinking of maybe going back to school."

"School!" Sam exclaimed. "What the hell for? You're already probably the youngest person in history ever to attain double doctorate degrees in computer science and aerospace engineering. What do you need more school for?"

"I'm happiest when I'm learning," Amy admitted, running a hand through her spiky blue hair. Sam shook his head.

"I'll never understand that mentality. I couldn't get out of college fast enough."

"Harvard will do that to a person, I understand," Amy said smiling.

"Don't even get started on that Harvard-Yale crap," Sam warned. "Because I honestly do not care. I don't think I ever once went to that football game."

"Me either!" Amy cried. "I thought I was the only one! Anyway, I was thinking of going back and getting a medical degree."

Clouds had momentarily obscured the sun and Amy felt a little chilly. As she zipped up her denim jacket, she thought about buying a five-dollar scarf as she passed a vendor with a table set up on the sidewalk. Her eyes moved quickly over his wares, but she soon lost interest as she set her gaze upon the next vendor, an artist. Her paintings all depicted the same subject: a beautiful girl with flowing blond hair bedecked in a sailor suit. In some paintings the subject was alone and gazing off into the moonlight, in others she was engaged in what looked like a harrowing battle with some kind of hideous monster.

"Sam, just one sec," said Amy as she lingered to inspect the paintings. "She's an interesting subject," she remarked to the artist, a small girl with bright chestnut eyes and shoulder-length reddish-brown hair.

"I can't get her out of my head," the artist replied in a thick Brooklyn accent. "She's real, ya know."

Amy raised an eyebrow.

"I know," said the artist with a sigh. "It sounds crazy."

Usually Amy knew better than to engage strangers on the streets of New York, but something about the girl in the paintings struck something inside her. Amy was overcome with a feeling – something like familiarity, as if she knew this strange, sailor-suited heroine.

"How much for this one?" Amy said, pointing to a depiction of the figure standing in the foreground gazing up at the moon with the wind tousling her hair in an easterly direction. Sam snorted and rolled his eyes.

"Twenty," the artist replied eagerly. Amy stuck her hand into her pocket and fished out some bills. When the transaction was completed, the artist wrapped the work in a cloth and placed it in a plain brown shopping bag. "Oh," she added, dropping a small card into the bag, "here's my business card in case you want another. They make great gifts, too!"

Amy smiled and accepted the parcel. She thanked the artist and continued on her way with Sam.

"Sushi?" said Sam as they passed a restaurant called Ise. Inside the restaurant, the blue-haired girl looked quite out of place among the suits, but she wasn't bothered. She was quite used to being the strange one.

"Sam, Amy, so good to see you again," said Darien Hunter, greeting the two as they entered the office of Diamond Partners. "Please follow me to the conference room."

Sam and Amy did as they were told. Once in the conference room, Amy was disappointed to see that the representatives from Galaxia were already there. She was hoping she'd have a minute or two to pop by Ken's office and say hello. They had been dating pretty regularly since CelesTech first became clients of Diamond Partners and they'd first met. He was definitely not her usual type, very much all-business, but she could tell he had a kind heart.

Handshakes were exchanged all around and the programmer from Galaxia pulled out his laptop and immediately got down to business. "If you'll notice here when I pull up the Sector Twelve map, you see this mass of distortion. I've looked through all the algorithms and they appear correct so there must be a problem with the underlying code."

Amy narrowed her eyes and, without asking, pulled the laptop in front of her and looked at the screen. There it was, plain as day, a significant distortion in space. Amy sighed and began tapping away at the keys. She scanned the algorithms and as the Galaxia programmer had said, they all appeared accurate, but to be sure, she'd have to go through them one by one. Scanning the source code would be time-consuming and labor intensive so she wanted to avoid that at all costs.

"How much time do I have?" Amy asked.

The Galaxia executives glanced at each other and shorter, balder one replied: "Why don't we just circle back in a week and see where we are?"

Amy sighed again and nodded. It was going to be a late night. The teams said their goodbyes, exchanged handshakes again, and Amy slipped out of the conference room to find Ken. When she came to his office, she found him staring at charts and graphs in Excel as if in a trance. When he saw her, his face broke out into a grin. He stood to hug her and Amy smiled as she inhaled the almost-but-not-quite faded scent of his aftershave.

"How's it going?" he asked her. She shrugged.

"This problem with my program seems legit, even though I can't wrap my head around it."

"Well, between you and me, they want this program bad enough that I don't think a little bug is going to sour the deal. They might try to come down on price over it, but Darien's pretty good at being an asshole, so I wouldn't worry about it." Ken was doing his best to reassure her, but Amy wasn't moved. She was sure that her program had been perfect. Now it seemed as though she was just being arrogant.

"All right, I won't worry." Amy managed a smile. "Oh!" she said, suddenly remembering. "I want to show you something!" She had left her newly-purchased piece of art in the conference and headed back to get it. Darien was still in there cleaning up from the meeting. "Sorry," said Amy. "I just left my bag in here." Darien smiled and nodded. "Oh, is Sam still here?" she asked.

"No," Darien replied. "He said something about visiting his sister who works in the area or something."

"Ah," said Amy and she went around the table to where she'd been sitting and retrieved her bag. She shot Darien a quick smile and moved toward the doorway. She didn't see the telephone wire cutting across her path and when she tripped, her bag went flying and she tumbled to the ground.

"Oh man, are you all right?" said Darien, coming toward her. He extended a hand and picked her up. "Nothing broken?" Amy blushed and shook her head. How embarrassing, she thought.

Darien turned and bent down to retrieve her artwork which had fallen out of the bag and was now only partly covered by the protective cloth. When he picked it up, Amy noticed his face had suddenly turned ashen as he looked upon the image.

"Where did you get this?" he asked her, his voice quaking.

"Um," Amy began. "A girl was selling them on the street. Over by Ise."

At that, Darien pushed the painting back into Amy's arms and hurried out of the room. Amy peered out of the doorway and saw he was now in the elevator bank agitatedly jabbing at the Lobby button. I wonder what his hurry is?

"There you are," said Ken, coming around the corner. "What took you so long?"

"Oh, nothing," Amy replied. "I just had a little bit of inner ear trouble. Look!" She pushed the painting toward Ken and he gave it the once over.

"Very nice," he said. "So what are you doing later?"

"I guess I'm dissecting StarScape to see where I screwed up," Amy replied sullenly.

"Well, you shouldn't do that on an empty stomach. Come get drinks after work. Lita's coming down and I want you to meet her. And I want her to meet Andrew. I think they'd really hit it off."

"I thought you and Lita were in a fight?" Amy asked. She had heard about Lita since the day she and Ken started dating. At first she felt a little jealous, especially when she noticed the framed picture of the two of them adorning his desk, but on their third date he explained how they grew up together and how he thought of her as his little sister. He also told her the story about the time when Lita was eighteen and he was twenty-two when he tried to kiss her and she ended up giving him two black eyes. In any event, he'd said, you can't get too romantic about someone who can beat you up. So Amy was excited to meet Lita, if a little intimidated.

"Eh, she's over it. She can't stay mad at me too long, she doesn't have it in her. Anyway, I showed Andrew this picture of her and he's been bugging me for weeks to set it up. So can you do it?"

Amy smiled. "All right. But just one drink. Call me when you're ready to go, I'll be in the neighborhood." Amy gave Ken a quick kiss on the lips, gathered her things, and left the office. She planned to hole up in a Starbucks until happy hour and figure out what was going on with her program. Once outside, she turned the corner and proceeded down the street. She wasn't walking more than five minutes before she discovered a Starbucks. The girl manning the register looked tortured but greeted Amy with a smile when she noticed her.

"Hi there!" she said. "What can I make for you?"

Amy purchased a Venti iced chai latte and set up her laptop in a corner by the window and delved into her program.

"Let's see, let's see," she murmured. She began with the algorithms and checked over each one. After convincing herself they were perfect, she opened up the source code and scanned line after line for errors. She installed a macro that automated this task, but it still took hours. When all that was left in her cup was a few melted ice cubes, Amy was ready to give up when suddenly an idea struck her. What if, she thought, what if the program is perfect? She paused a moment to let the idea sink in. That would mean…that the distortion in space is real. Amy looked up from her computer excitedly. She looked around the shop, but it was empty, save for the doe-eyed blond at the register who was picking at a scratch wound on her forearm. It's real! The more she said it to herself, the more plausible it began to sound. But what in the world could be causing such massive distortion?

Amy wracked her brain for solutions when suddenly her phone vibrated to life. She had a message from Ken: We're ready to go. Meet Bobby Van's in 5. DH is coming. Wants to talk to you abt something. :X

Amy sighed and began to pack up her computer. Her breakthrough would have to wait.