Fifteen different ways to fasten a shoe and she was sitting on the porch steps of a refurbished brownstone, watching a boy barely old enough to shave tie knots in an ancient pair of Air Jordans. Steffie pushed her hair out of her face, opened her palmtop and used the tiny lens in the corner to shoot the boy's hands. They were long, slender, unlined, with wide knuckles and trimmed nails. A person couldn't do what he was doing with short stubby fingers or InstaGrow™ nails that curved like talons.
He took all six multi-colored laces, wrapped them around three fingers, and created bows of differing sizes. Then he tied them at the tongue, and created a flower that blossomed from the ancient shoe like a rose in the middle of rubble.
When he was done, she flipped him a plastic. He caught it between his thumb and forefinger, glanced at it, and raised his eyebrows.
"Mega," he said.
She was glad he thought so. She only paid him half the going rate for a style that would be all over the streets in the next two hours, then all over the stores in the next two weeks.
"Thanks," she said, and slipped her palmtop back in her pocket.
Then she grabbed one of his extra laces, tied her brown hair back, and headed down the gum-covered sidewalk toward the park.
Shoelaces. Who'd have thought? When shoes could zip, velcro, and seal themselves, who'd've thought the arbiters of cool would go back to the lace?
Hers was not to ask why. Hers was to record, market, and change.
Coolhunting was still a strange profession, but thirty years after the first coolhunters hit the streets, it had worked its way into a mini science.
A science only a person with an eye for beauty and a sense of people could spot.
She resisted the urge to open her palmtop and check her own credit account. She'd sent the vid to seven laces companies, two shoe manufacturers, and one hundred resale outlets. Each of them should have sent a fee into her current account. It should have doubled with the laces bit. If she hit her quota today, she'd have enough for a two-week flop.
Lord knew she needed it. Her own boots were worn thin from all the walking. Twenty-one successful hunts in seven days, not to mention eight busts, and one illegal.
She still held the record for the most shifts in one day. Steffie Storm-Warning, they called her, because in her wake was turmoil and destruction. Entire companies folded on the basis of her vids. Entire companies replaced them. And credits flowed back and forth like a river covered in Mediterranean sludge.
No one knew who she was. She had forty different legal identities, and more than enough credits stashed in various accounts to live expensively for the rest of her life. But she liked coolhunting. It was purposely anonymous -- if people knew who she was, they would chase her, try to convince her they were cool -- and it carried no responsibility. She didn't answer to a boss, she didn't answer to a company, she didn't even answer to the people she sold her vids to. She was as independent as independent got, a loner in every sense of the word.
And she liked it like that.
On the corner a hot dog vender floated his cart over a hot air grate. The dogs weren't like the ones she'd had as a kid. These were all meat, registered and certified lean cuts from prime portions of pig. The taste was similar but not the same.
A taste gone from her life.
Everything changed.
Nothing remained the same.
Life on the street had taught her that.
Coolhunting had reinforced it.
She took an unmarked plastic from her pocket, checked the credit level, and decided to launder it through the vendor. She stopped, ordered two dogs slathered in mustard, sweet catsup, and pickle relish, and handed the man the plastic.
He was skinny, unshaven, with an apron that had grime on it as old as she was. Vendors had always looked like that. Even in the ancient black 'n white vids available for free download on any TV set, the vendors looked like that.
A hundred years hadn't changed them. Just their carts and their product.
He took her plastic, ran it through his machine, then frowned. "That's a lot of change," he said.
"Just run it through the machine." She took one dogs off his countertop, and took a bite. A little too juicy, a little too ham-flavored, but enough to still an appetite that had been building for the good part of a day.
"Don't do that any more," he said. Anyone caught recharging too much plastic, running too many credits, was brought in.
"Sure you do, for an extra five," she said around the dog.
He grunted, then slammed the plastic into his machine. No one said no to an extra five, and she could afford it. She could afford anything if she were willing to spend credits instead of accumulate them.
Somehow, knowing how fast tastes changed, made her unwilling to commit to her own.
She ate the rest of the dog, nearly swallowing the last piece whole. Maybe it had been two days since she'd eaten. Maybe only a few hours. She couldn't remember. She'd been hunting.
It always took all of her energy.
As she picked up the second dog, he handed the plastic back to her.
"I won't do it again," he said.
"Your loss." She sprayed a bit of bun at him, and automatically covered her mouth with her left hand. "Sorry."
He shrugged, turned away. A lot of basically honest people did that when she asked them to violate their own rules. Made her ashamed sometimes. Made her realize how different her world was from theirs.
She had the luxury of eating the second dog more slowly, then cleaning her mustard-covered hands and face in the stand's laser wipe. She grabbed a napkin and wiped for good measure: public cleaners always left her feeling a bit gritty.
"Good dogs?"
She hadn't seen the guy approach. She glanced up as he spoke, registered him as someone she'd seen before, and a shudder ran down her back. He wasn't young like most of her subjects, but then her early subjects weren't young any more either. Still, his clear gray eyes slanting in a coffee-colored Slavic-feature face looked familiar.
The wrong kind of familiar.
She shrugged, kept it light. "Dogs are as good as any these days."
"You ever had the old ones?" He brushed a hand over his silver suit. Three weeks old, worn Detroit style, with a red cummerbund instead of a tie and pierce chain. "The ones they made of sawdust and pig's feet?"
"That's not how they made 'em," she said and stepped away from him.
For a minute, she thought he'd keep up, but he didn't. He stayed at the stand, bought himself a dog, and watched her walk away.
Maybe that was how her subjects felt when she watched them. As if they were suddenly on public display, as if their entire selves were being exposed to the world.
Watchers shouldn't be watched.
She rounded a corner, then slipped into the park.
The air was fresher here, the trees budding. Tulips bloomed in special garden circles maintained by a crew of city employees who were determined to make Central Park look as cultivated as possible. She liked to spend spring here. It made her feel alive.
It also allowed her to watch the cools bloom.
She went to her bench. It was newly painted -- green this time -- to give the illusion of newness despite its great age. Around her, couples threw balls for their dogs, and kids went by in groups, deep in conversation.
She watched:
Clothes.
Shoes.
Jewelry.
Always alert for a new combination, a new look. But it wasn't as easy as all that. The look was a sense, a third eye, a way of seeing that most people didn't have.
She wasn't looking so much for the new trend as she was for the person who would set that trend.
Back when coolhunting started in hype-filled '90s, the coolhunter's goal was to find the cool kid, the one who would be the innovator, the one all the other kids wanted to copy. But what the early coolhunters never realized was that cool itself was a transient state: a cool kid one week would be passé the next.
Cool was easy to spot.
Pre-cool was hard.
And she had the hardest job of all. She was in New York, not Phoenix or Dallas or Santa Fe, those hotbeds of the newest trends. Here she had to work harder because everyone knew that fashion moved north and east. It started in the southwest and traveled, slowly through the south, up the middle, then over to the eastern seaboard.
Coolhunting in New York was like deep-sea diving in Arctic: Not recommended.
Which made it all the more challenging.
Which meant it was for her.
She settled onto the iron bench. It was still a bit cold to be sitting still, but she had two dogs to settle and that encounter to put in place. Strangers rarely spoke to her. She put up an invisible barrier: if she was noticed it was in passing. If she wasn't, even better.
Casual people didn't speak to her on the street.
This guy knew her.
And if he knew her, he'd be here, sometime soon.
Copyright © 1998 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
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She was a coolhunter with forty different legal identities. Her job: to drive fads; to find the "next cool thing" five to ten times per week. She was one of the best. Entire corporations rose and fell under her influence. But then some really uncool things start to happen…
