Digital Divide (Rachel Peng) by K.B. Spangler Page A

of the gas-and-go, which was just miles away but was worlds apart. 
    The sun had set, leaving the front wall of the coffee shop a bright bank of windows in the night. Inside, Judge Edwards was standing and addressing a few dozen people. Reporters with handheld cameras made up a third of the group.
    “Oh! Oh! Oh!” Rachel, delighted, opened the door and jumped out. Santino yelled something about waiting for him to stop the car first, but he was barely crawling forward and she had never been at one of Edwards’ press conferences before. She was sure no Agent had ever attended one in person, and she didn’t want to miss the opportunity.
    The door to the coffee shop was propped open by a carved wooden owl. Rachel bent down and patted it on its head before she stepped inside. The store was one of those old places formed entirely from dovetailed aesthetics. A small room made tiny by the number of people jammed inside, Rachel moved her sixth sense past them to look at the old brass hardware and hand-cut mosaic tiles of what must have once been the local apothecary. A glass mirror gone smoky with time was stationed behind shelf after shelf of canisters holding exotic teas, and a heavy stone countertop polished by a century of elbows displayed working antique Gaggia brewing equipment worth slightly less than her house. The very air pulsed with the scent of chocolate and freshly ground beans. Rachel had never wanted a cappuccino more in her life.
    An eclectic assortment of furniture had been pushed to the side to clear a stage for Edwards. It was not a good location for a press conference, but in Rachel’s recent experience, press conferences didn’t happen the way they did on television. The crash of reporters clamoring for quotes was great drama but made for a terrible working environment. Large conferences were calm and civilized. The best analogy Rachel had come up with was that of a classroom where the teacher’s pet was chosen first, and if they didn’t ask the right question then the second-favorite was called, and so on down the pecking order. Geeks, nerds, and hanger-ons rarely made the cut and were forced to compete for interesting sound bites dangled over their heads by the popular networks.
    Smaller press conferences were not nearly as friendly. Since the only ones who bothered to show up were the bottom feeders, the rules of the false society did not apply. Most of these conferences were about backpatting and grandstanding instead of news. If something of interest did take place, the networks had found it more cost-effective to purchase clips from their lesser affiliates rather than pay to send the trucks out. Reporters at these lesser conferences knew the only reason they were there was because they weren’t important enough to be somewhere else, and they behaved accordingly.
    Rachel was sure this particular conference would be of the backpatting-and-grandstanding variety. Edwards was a would-be politician who lacked political strategy. It was a savagely dangerous combination; he knew he had to get his face out there but wasn’t quite sure how. Judges were nominated by a commission in the D.C. circuit judiciary and Edwards had earned his nomination from his record as a trial lawyer, but his fledgling platform was nothing more than a mix of his own views and items culled from the headlines.
    (She had read his colors several times and wasn’t sure if the judge was as vehemently against OACET as he claimed, or if he had accidentally tripped over a topic he could use to distinguish himself as a candidate. She had never caught him lying when he ranted against them, but she still thought it might be the latter since Edwards was awfully comfortable with blending technology with the law when it suited his purpose. The man was a trainwreck, she had told Mulcahy, and her boss had agreed but said the problem with trainwrecks was that people got hurt.)
    She entered the store and Edwards’ eyes slipped over and past her.