Adventures in Space-Time

Raquel flipped through the record bin and pulled out a beat up copy of Appetite for Destruction, scrutinizing the cover and the scratched disc inside. It looked like it had been played hundreds of times, and she wondered why someone who had loved this record so much would have given it up. It was a quiet afternoon in downtown Inglewood, and she was the only one in the shop. Next door, an abandoned movie theater still advertised the matinee showing of Zombieland on its marquee, as it had for the past 9 years. An old man stepped out from the back room and stood behind the counter. “Can I help you?” Raquel looked up and responded, “Naw, I’m not looking for anything in particular.” Dust lined the bookshelves around her, and handwritten notecards in fading ink beckoned to highly specific subgenres of books, movies, records, and cassette tapes.

Raquel spotted an old sci-fi novel and pulled it off the top shelf. It had soft, yellowed pages, and an illustration that looked like it had been drawn at a time when Tron and the first Blade Runner had been the blockbuster movies of the summer. A boy stood on a neon grid that faded into the background, triumphantly holding something that looked like a light saber. The title was written in 1980s computer font, like the sort that would print on that paper with the perforated holes on the side: Adventures in Space-Time. She looked at the inside cover: Copyright 1981. There was something vaguely familiar about the book and its title. It reminded her of the many hours she had spent in her elementary school library as a small child, picking out donated fantasy and sci-fi novels and reading them cover to cover. Those novels had that same smell, that same yellow hue, and the same neon grids and tropes about robots and young boys nobly fighting bad guys in digital arenas. She always wondered why little girls like her weren’t the ones saving the world from the computer-generated forces of evil.

An epiphany about her innermost motivations started to form: maybe that’s why she had decided to specialize in cyber security. You know, to show that little girls could fight the digital bad guys, albeit without lightsabers or robot sidekicks. Raquel sat down on the worn carpet and began to read.