Originally published by No Media Kings and Four Walls Eight Windows in 2002, this e-book version came out in 2004. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/1.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 559 Nathan Abbott Way, Stanford, California 94305, USA.
	
If you haven't already, you should swing by www.nomediakings.org — more free e-books, ways to buy the paper editions, info about my other projects and resources for do-it-yourself publishing await you there. I also love letters, so feel free to feedback at jim@nomediakings.org. 

Everyone In Silico
by Jim Munroe

When Paul sat down on the bench, the young man moved over a bit without looking at him. His gaze was fixed on something in the sky. 
	Paul crossed his arms and looked down the tracks.
	The young man made a quiet noise. Paul looked at him, and then followed the young man’s eyes up. All Paul saw were the gleaming buildings of Frisco’s business district, several stretching higher than the eye could register.
	“Yeah, they’ve built them big here,” Paul said. “They’re not just scraping the sky — they go up forever.”
	The young man looked at him for the first time. Paul’s face was an indistinct blur of features, his suit fashionably cut. “Oh...” the young man said, looking up again. “No, I was watching the ad.” He pointed at the empty sky.
	Paul turned the dial on his watch, and the blue sky turned into a giant man running through a forest with a six-pack of Pepsi strapped to his head. The buildings obscured some of the ad. The man stopped, pulled off a can, and opened it. “Ah, yes,” Paul said. He noticed movement to his left — a giant panda with a fedora was parachuting to the ground. Paul recognized the panda as the mascot for an insurance company. He turned the knob on his watch and both waving panda and Pepsi ad disappeared. The young man was looking at him.
	“So you guys still wear the scramblefaces, even here,” the young man said.
	Paul shrugged. “You get used to it. Same as the ties.”
	The young man looked at his own tie. “Yeah. I never thought I’d get used to it,” he said, twisting it around like a noose. “But you do.”
	Paul laughed, looked down the tracks. Far off in the distance there was a trolley car almost too tiny to see.
	“If you don’t mind me asking,” the young man said.
	Paul looked back, his face a flurry of faces, a cipher.
	“Uh, it’s none of my business,” said the young man. “But...” he pointed to Paul’s watch. “If you’re platinum, why are you taking the trolley car?”
	“Oh,” Paul laughed. “I just enjoy it. Clears my head. Gives me time to think.”
	“I see,” the young man said, the blank look on his face clearly communicating that he didn’t.
	Paul started to look back at the approaching trolley car.
	“I’m actually silver,” blurted the young man.
	Paul looked back at the young man, who was smoothing his hair back.
	“Lot of people assume I’m bronze, because I take the trolley car. But it’s just that I can’t port. There’s a technical glitch.”
	“Really?” Paul said. “That’s too bad.” He got up. The young man jumped up too.
	“Yeah, check this out. I’m going to try to port home,” the young man said. “Watch.”
	The young man turned into a black silhouette of himself. Around the edges of the silhouette, light and image bent inwards. 
	“Wow,” said Paul, stepping away. “That looks bad.”
	The young man returned, his face agitated. “I know. It only happens when I try to port, though. Otherwise, I’m fine. They say it should clear up soon.”
	Paul nodded.
	The trolley car stopped, and the doors opened.


It was never good to work on an empty stomach, but Nicky had procrastinated to the point where there was no other choice.
	At least I’m just hungry, not hungry and wet, Nicky thought as she wandered down Commercial Drive, welcoming the sun on her face like a long-lost friend. The rainy season was over: Vancouver had finally shucked off winter’s grey cloak and the strip of stores and restaurants seemed cleaner, newer, reflecting Nicky’s small smile back at her. 
	“Nicholas!” said someone coming out of the Safeway.
	“Hey, JK,” Nicky said, turning. “Little shopping?”
	JK lifted his bulging bags as he backed away. “Lotta shopping. Gotta go. Like the new cut. Looks like an octopus is sitting on your head.”
	Nicky smiled and shook her thin ponytails. “Why thanks, Joseph Kindertoy.” She tried not to stare at his bags as she waved goodbye. 
	In the first Starbucks she saw she noticed some kids she knew, so she waved and kept on going. The Starbucks a block down looked clear, however, so she held her watch on the rusty plate until the door buzz-clicked.
	Breathing a silent relieved breath — she hadn’t been positive she had enough for a coffee — she threw her stuff at a table near the window and went up to the counter. As the machine filled her cup, she watched the people bustling by. Spring was all over their faces, as obvious and gleeful as strawberry jam. 
	Nicky put sugar and two Milkbuds into her coffee and watched the door. Mostly tourists, since the kids from the Drive favoured the outlet she had passed by. The steam from her cup curled around and coalesced briefly into the Starbucks logo, then dissipated.
	An older masked couple came in and tentatively looked around the café. Nicky rifled through her watch for something to read. She found an article on using EasyCut for amphibious splicing and got her watch to project it on the table instead of her retina. After a minute, she checked the couple out over the rim of her coffee cup. They were at the counter, waiting for a couple of boys to finish filling their soup-tureen mugs. They were as noisy as their clothes.
	The boys finally touched their watches to the payplate, bouncing them off it in a perfunctory way.
	“Next time, ask him where’s his body at!” the kid said on his way out the door, and his red-capped friend exploded in a honk-laugh that made the masked man step back briefly, place a hand to secure his mask, then square his shoulders and pretend he was rubbing his face. 
	Nicky strained to hear what the man was saying to the woman in his quiet voice, noticed that he touched his bare fingers to the payplate. Nicky smiled inside. Loaded. Only the utterly destitute and the fabulously wealthy did without watches.
	After casually pressing a black pellet onto the surface of the table next to her, Nicky leaned away from it and absorbed herself in her article. The woman stood for a second with the classic lattes, holding them well away from her white smock, and surveyed the room before nodding the man towards the table next to Nicky. Good, Nicky thought, tapping a protein DNA graphic in her article and pretending to watch it unravel.
	There was a movement from her backpack, and Nicky’s heart rate suddenly spiked. Moving her legs slowly, she placed one of her feet on the opening of the bag, then the other one. She could feel pushing against the side of her shoe. Settle down, you little shit, Nicky thought, you’re not the only one who’s hungry. She nervously glanced at the couple as they draped their coats over their chairs, but they seemed comfortable. The man even took off his mask despite the woman’s disapproving clucking. He had a square jaw and full lips, which he pressed against her ivory fingers. She had had her nails coated in mirror, and he pretended to stare at himself in them. She hit him and giggled.
	Nicky, not looking up, lifted her foot. For a second, nothing, and then, just as she was considering kicking the bag, a brown blur. It had crawled up the man’s leg and launched itself onto their table before the couple registered what was happening.
	Luckily the woman’s mask muffled her scream, because even then it bored into Nicky’s ears. Nicky snatched the brown animal to her chest and surreptitiously slipped a black pellet into its mouth. “I’m sorry, ma’am. I don’t know how it got out, my bag was closed...”
	The man’s mask was back on his face, and a halo was starting to generate around the two of them. Nicky stroked the head of the tiny pug-faced little bulldog with a single finger and murmured reassurances to it. The animal, however, was fully pacified by the pellet and stared at the couple with honey-liquid eyes.
	“Oh, what a beautiful little... creature,” the woman said, holding out her hand. “Turn off that silly thing, Alex,” she said. 
	The halo disappeared. “Sorry,” Alex said, to both Nicky and the woman. “It’s just...”
	Nicky looked down, kept petting the bulldog.
	“It’s just nothing. He’s paranoid,” the woman said, reluctantly taking her eyes off the bulldog to look at Nicky. “He’s been watching the news too much. I apologize for his rudeness.” She looked back at the bulldog. “Can I...”
	Nicky glanced at her. Go on, beg.
	“May I... hold him?” she said.
	“Her,” Nicky stated firmly, as if she cared.
	The woman leaned back, a little beaten. Nicky noticed the lines around her eyes and worried she’d pushed too hard. 
	“May I hold... her?” she said, finally. Nicky paused for effect, looked down at the little critter, and then slowly extended her hands.
	“Oh... oh, she’s a frisky... oh!” the woman said, her exclamations echoing in her mask. The little bulldog was trying to climb out of her hand and up her smock, its little paws gripping the red cross design printed there.
	“Heh heh, careful Simone,” said Alex, his eyes watching Simone’s rapturous face as much as the little dog. Nicky noted the emotions washing over his face and thought, not for the first time, that some couples might as well have childless stamped on their foreheads.
	The dog was gnawing on her finger, and Simone was delighted by this. “Oh, Alex, look. It thinks my finger is a bone.”
	“Heh heh,” Alex responded, looking at Nicky with an assessing eye. At this, Nicky held out her hand for the dog, and Simone reluctantly returned it. “So warm...”
	“Where’d you get it?” Alex said, trying to sound conversational, taking a sip of his coffee.
	“I made her,” Nicky said.
	“With what?” Alex said dubiously.
	“You know those do-it-yourself kits?” Nicky said.
	Simone nodded. “I had one of those when I was a kid. Mine didn’t work...”
	“They never did,” Alex said. “They always turned out wrong... messes.”
	“Yeah,” Nicky agreed. “She was my fourth try. I bonsaied her. It took the better part of a year. Even then, it was kind of a fluke. That’s her name, actually — Fluky.”
	“Fluky, oh, that’s cute,” Simone murmured. She looked at Alex.
	Nicky let the dog chew on her finger, trying not to lose her nerve. She thought about JK’s bulging grocery bags and forced herself to smile. “Yeah... I’ve seen a bonsaied tiger go for ten thousand, and it wasn’t nearly as unique. It just looked like a cat.”
	“Ten thousand dollars, huh?” Alex said, almost to himself. He glanced at Simone. “I couldn’t see paying more than five...”
	Nicky frowned outwardly, while a joyous melody of cash registers ca-ching!-ed in her head.


By the time she got back to her place, the sun was dropping behind the mountains. In the dim light, she could still make out that her front door had been flashed — Can You Afford Not To Upgrade? Go For Self! — but Nicky ignored the giant block letters and let herself in. She had to swipe her watch twice before it snicked open. Cheap piece of shit.
	She went into the kitchen and put away her groceries, stuffing the empty bags into a space between the counter and the wall, and remembered she had muted her watch when she went into Starbucks. She checked her messages. One was from her mom, inducing the familiar twinge of mom-guilt. The rest was spam that her filters didn’t catch, one of them advertising the next generation of spam filters.
	She stopped for a second and debated whether or not she should call her mom back now. She decided she didn’t want it hanging over her head when she was in the lab and knew that the longer she waited the greater the chance her mom would go snooping around. She’d know she was home. She’d know Nicky got the message. She kept meaning to disable her mom’s ability to track her watch’s position, but she knew that would mean a shitstorm of drama. If she needed to be untraceable, she could always take it off and leave it at home, as high school a manoeuvre as that was.
	She stood in her kitchen, paralyzed by indecision. She looked at the groceries, unappealing since she had eaten almost a whole packet of Sandwich Fixin’s on the way home. She watched a fly loop around and land on her garbage lid. She checked it — three-quarters full. Well, if it’s attracting flies I better get rid of it…
	She tied it up and lifted it out of the can, watching for a second to see if there were any drippings. As she left her house she realized that the depot closed in 15 minutes, so she picked up her pace, walking the plank to the sidewalk and step-swinging the bag. The setting sun stretched her shadow out, making her look like a lurching zombie coming out to feed.
	She admired a grand old house done up in canary yellow. It was similar to her own — at least a hundred years old, a walkway stretching out to the sidewalk to compensate for the fact that it was built on a slope. Nicky loved the style; it made her feel like she was living aboard a pirate ship. Too bad the False Creek flood hadn’t happened here, Nicky thought sacrilegiously, I’m sure these things are seaworthy. 
	She got to the depot and went right up to the scale and plopped the bag down on the belt. It came to $8.343, so she held her watch up to the payplate ’til it dinged and the belt started up.
	“Mmm, thanks!” The voice echoed in the empty depot as the stained belt moved the bag towards its black maw. She headed for the door, happy to leave the stinky and somehow creepy place. The recorded voice sounded hungrier than it had when there were even a few people lined up in there. She waited unconsciously for the “That was delicious!” recording to play as she pushed the door open.
	Instead she got, “Pee-yoo! Don’t you wish you could have just said, Empty Garbage?” followed Nicky out on to the street. The “Go for Self!” tagline was cut off by the closing door.
	She smelled her hands (fine) and glanced back at the green garbage can icon glowing in the half-light. As she headed home through the empty streets, she felt a little lonely. Since she had moved here, most of the kids her age who hadn’t left Vancouver had moved to apartments around Commercial Drive. But Nicky felt that moving to the Drive, still busy with people, would be kind of living in denial. Plus, there was no way she could afford as much space there.
	She heard squeaking when she got in and remembered she hadn’t fed the flukes. Nicky walked into her living room and looked in the fluke cage. Two of them were sleeping, but the other one was doing his best to wake them up.
	“How-are-you-my-little-meal-tickets?” Nicky said in her best imitation of Simone’s baby-voice, reaching into the bag of Critter Kibble. She fed the one that was running around, panting with his big eyes glazed over, and the other two blinked awake. “Oh yeah, now you’re awake. Where were you when I was taking in the groceries?” The flukes looked at her and started to whine.
	She chucked the other two pellets in the cage and rolled up the food bag. Checking the time, she decided to get something done before JK arrived, so she headed up to the third floor.
	She caught a glimpse of her new haircut in a mirror. Do I look like an idiot with this hair? she wondered. She had had a shoulder-length ragged cut for ages, and she needed a change — but she half suspected she’d done it to dramatically mark the end of her relationship. Kathy would have hated it, she thought giddily.
	On the top floor stairwell, she stepped up on the wooden chair, pushed open the hatch and pulled down the well-oiled ladder that led up to her laboratory.
	The lights came on gradually as she stamped down the hatch. She looked up with some regret at the covered skylight and window, even though it would have been pitch black outside by now. She remembered being excited by the skylight when she had first found the house, figuring it was perfect for a bedroom. But Kathy complained of having to climb down in the middle of the night to go to the washroom — it was a pain, but still, it would have been so cool to wake up to the sun — and so the lab ended up here instead. When Kathy ended up moving to Frisco, Nicky couldn’t be bothered moving all the lab equipment out. What had started out as a small operation with an EasyBake and a shaky table had expanded into quite a bit of stuff.
	Wedged against the slanted roof was a long silver counter with tons of beakers and vials and other antiques that Nicky had a soft spot for. Her computer setup was also outdated, but stable — like the rest of the equipment, she had scooped it up when the genetics department was phased out.
	She called up her active in silico experiments — two had been birthed alive. One was a three-headed fluke she had called Cerberus, and the other had a single eye in the middle of its forehead. She focused in on the Cyclops fluke first, noting with satisfaction that it was blinking normally — the last version had been birthed with a messed-up eyelid. She called up the Cerberus fluke. It wasn’t doing as well, only one of the three heads breathing normally.
	She zoomed in on the organs and got the computer to diagnose. The heart glowed red, 125% the normal rate. The lungs were within normal parameters this time, although still a little off. Nicky sighed. Maybe three heads aren’t better than one...
	She went back to the Cyclops and introduced different stimuli. The model fluke barked happily when it was introduced to food pellets, sexual partners, and petting. It looked good to Nicky, so she decompiled the dog into its spawning ingredients. To free up some memory, she went back to the sick puppy and deleted it. The computer, as it always did when deleting, made a tinny scream. It was just a morbid thing the EasyCut programmer put in, but it always reminded Nicky of the first time she heard it.
	It had been in the first week of classes, when they were all getting trained on the equipment. Her professor, a tiny outspoken Asian woman, was showing them how the in silico programs were used.
	“Now when I was a little girl, we were still dealing directly with the meat. None of this computer simulation crap. We’d use in vitro fertilization, being very very careful. But things still went wrong. And when it did, you’d have to take the sick little creature and terminate it.” She deleted the current experiment and the computer screamed. She smiled as the small crowd of students jolted back. “Newbies,” she mocked. As Cho pushed by them to the next piece of equipment, Nicky noticed her earlobes kicking.
	Nicky remembered being more surprised by Professor Cho’s highly modified earlobes than she was at the scream. She’d never seen club kickers in real life — the early body modification that pulsed with sound had been unfashionable for more than 20 years. After she got over the shock, Nicky decided it was gutsy — still later, she thought it hinted at why Cho stayed in genetics when it had ceased being scientifically relevant. She just didn’t care what people thought.
	At the end of Nicky’s second year her department was shut down, and Nicky had made an appointment to see Cho supposedly for direction on which stream to take now.
	Cho had been working on an in silico experiment of a tri-lunged horse when she came in. She had waved Nicky into a chair and made a few more adjustments before closing the horse. When it blinked out, Cho leaned back in her chair and tilted her head.
	“I’m kind of surprised to see you here,” Cho had said.
	Nicky just looked at the professor’s small smile, trying not to stare at her dancing earlobes.
	“You struck me more as someone who knew what she wanted to do,” Cho continued. “While the people who’ve been in this office lately are a mess. But this’s been coming for a long time. There haven’t been any jobs in genetics for a decade... except teaching jobs. We’re lucky the school is allowing students to transfer some of their credits. When the arts were phased out, they didn’t even get that.”
	Nicky wondered at the prof’s defensiveness. Was it because she’d been dealing with angry students all week, or was it the knee-jerk reaction of the professional know-it-all? She decided to cut to the chase. “What’s going to happen to the lab equipment?”
	Cho looked like she hadn’t considered it. “It’s too outdated to be of use to any other department,” she thought out loud. “They’ll junk it, I suppose.”
	Keeping her face neutral, Nicky said, “I’ve got a couple of experiments I’d like to finish, and I don’t have access to anything like that.”
	Cho nodded, her eyes suddenly hard. She touched the bridge of her nose. “Hmm. Yes, well... I’d be putting myself at risk if anything unorthodox was to happen to them...”
	Nicky was suddenly very glad that she hadn’t ever talked to Cho about personal matters. “I looked at the prices for them used, and they’re way too much. I’m going to have to move out of my place as it is.”
	“My situation isn’t very good either,” Cho said with discomfort. “Your parents?”
	“They’ve cut me off,” Nicky said, preferring not to elaborate.
	Something in Cho deflated. “Yeah, me too. There’re no jobs in a digital world for us dirty meat-workers,” she murmured. “Information Architecture, young lady, that’s what I suggest.”
	“Yeah,” Nicky said, trying to keep her voice respectful. “That’s what my mom said.”
	A few weeks later, Nicky had a fully functional lab in her attic. A little slow, but it was a stable system with Genome 2035 installed. The EasyBake oven was handy to have — no more having to send out her experiments to be compiled. And if the beakers and test tubes she had scored cluttered up the place a little, they at least gave her a sense of history.
	Not just ancient history, either. They reminded her of first year, working late late late to finish an experiment alongside other students. Someone would inevitably cook up something in one of them to break the tension — and there was a lot of that, with the stress of deadlines, the limited equipment, and the egos. At some point, for incentive, someone would come from the chemistry lab and set a steaming beaker of something yummy and narcotic within everyone’s sight.
	Thinking of those long nights and fucked-up mornings, Nicky felt a wave of nostalgia. To fight how suddenly alone she felt, she asked the computer for some fast and melodic music. She started a new Cerberus fluke and began to work on its organs, hiding everything except the problem lungs and heart. Maybe I could get a little more room by getting rid of the spleen...
	A few hours later her watch spoke. “Hey Nicky, I’m at the door.”
	“Oh, hey JK. Down in a second.”
	A ladder and three flights of stairs later, she could see his big frame silhouetted in the lace-curtained window beside the front door.
	“Sorry I’m late,” JK said as he stepped in. He looked around her place in his characteristic way, stooping and peering intently through his small spectacles.
	“No biggles, I’ve been chipping away in my lab.”
	“Man, you’ve got a hall. I wish I had a hall,” JK said, looking for a place to hang his bike. 
	Nicky took it from him and arched her eyebrow as she hung it on a coat rack, saying “Were you in a big hurry or something?”
	JK grinned. “Naw. I just felt like riding.”
	Nicky shook her head on their way upstairs. “You’re a reckless fool, JK.”
	He shrugged. “It’s not dangerous anymore. Who’s going to hit me now — man, you’ve got a living room. I want a living room,” JK said as they passed through it.
	Nicky couldn’t resist showing off the spaciousness by spinning, her arms extended. “Gotta move to Strathcona, son.”
	“Your hair looks great when you spin like that,” JK said, laughing.
	They climbed up into the attic and, as JK squeezed his shoulders through the hole, Nicky cleared out some dishes from the EasyBake. She got an empty one and handed it over to him.
	He set it down on the silver counter and pried it open. He took a small metal box from an inner pocket and removed some seeds from it, and while he was painstakingly placing them in the container’s compartments Nicky wondered why he didn’t just get rid of the muscles when he was constantly dealing with tiny things. And if he was going to spend money on body mods, why didn’t he correct his vision first? But watching him focus on the task, Nicky decided she didn’t want to ask. It was more interesting, in a way, not knowing.
	He clicked the box closed and passed it to her. She put it in the EasyBake and set it to organics only. “You don’t need the box copied too, do you?”
	JK shook his head. “Nope. I put ’em in there so they’re separated enough. Last time I did them loose, there were a bunch that fused together.”
	“A hundred of each enough?”
	JK licked his lips, looked pained. “That’d be great, but I don’t know how much extra you have...”
	Nicky cut him off with a raised hand. “S’okay, I got the machine pretty much fully loaded. And my projects are one-of-a-kind rather than mass produced, so I don’t need that much.” She set the machine to working. 
	“The job will take about eight minutes,” the EasyBake said. “And it will use under 1% of remaining toner.”
	“See?” Nicky said. “I’m going to get a cup of tea. Want one?”
	JK’s face lost its anxious look. “Ah!” he said, nodding and rummaging around in his bag. A few seconds later, he produced a jar full of dark leaves. “I brought tea!”
	Nicky, halfway down the ladder, looked at the jar and raised a quizzical eyebrow. JK just smiled and put the jar under his arm, followed her to the living room and through to the kitchen. Nicky was already reaching up for a tetrabox of Starbucks Earl Grey.
	“Oh, come on,” JK said, unscrewing the jar and taking out a leaf. “I just need a pot of boiling water, and then we’ll have tea.”
	“Sorry, no pot,” Nicky said with a smile, whacking the box against the counter and peeling it open. She set two mugs beside it and when a spiral of steam slid out of the opening, she poured one for herself. She looked to him to see if he wanted one, and he nodded with defeat, twisting the lid back on the jar. “Oh come on.” She handed him the balloon-festooned mug (“Lordy lordy look who’s forty!”) and slapped him on his shoulder. “You remember what happened that last time I had one of your herbal potions.”
	JK’s face cracked in a mischievous smile. “You said you wanted to get wasted,” he said. “If it hadn’t been after a keg of beer and a genderbender, it would’ve been fine.”
	Nicky let her silence be the response, although really she was pleased it got her out of trying whatever it was he had. She settled into the big quiltwork armchair and stretched her legs out. JK put the tea down on the coffee table and put a finger into the fluke cage.
	“So you still passing off these ratdogs as canine bonsai?” JK said.
	“Yep,” Nicky said, taking a sip of tea and resting the mug on her belly. “That’s where I was headed when I saw you on the Drive today, actually. Got enough to get me through next month.”
	“Sweet,” JK said, finger-wrestling with the little creature. “And they never catch on and come back?”
	Nicky shrugged. “Your average person doesn’t know the difference between a simple ratdog splice and a bonsai. Other than the life span and the jaw strength, there’s not much to tell them apart. Plus, I always sell to tourists, so I know they’ll be on a plane pretty soon, and it’ll get confiscated.”
	“Yeah, the Drive’s filthy with tourists these days. Lots of people doing a final tour before they upgrade. Easy pickings.”
	Nicky took another sip and looked up at the ornamental ceiling, water stained but still grand. “Yeah. I feel kind of bad about it, but there’s no real harm done. If they have the money to fly or upgrade then they can afford to support the local culture.”
	“Desperate times require desperate measures,” murmured JK. “Can I feed them a tea leaf?”
	“Don’t, you freak, they have a very strict diet.” Nicky looked away from the ceiling and straight at JK. “The thing is, though, I don’t feel like these are desperate times. I’ve been living off this scam for a half-year now. But...” She lolled her head again. “Just because I’m clever enough to find ways to live decently in this shitty world doesn’t mean the world isn’t shitty.”
	JK turned away from the cage and ran a hand through his shaggy hair. “Well,” he started, a tea leaf sticking out from a corner of his mouth. He sucked on it thoughtfully. “It’s not that things are getting worse. In some ways... they’re getting better. Easier, anyway. Less hassles. It’s just that the world is… losing relevance.” He pulled the leaf out from between his lips and dropped it into the mug.
	“I don’t want you tripping out on my living room floor,” Nicky warned. “This is a respectable place.”
	“It’s seriously just tea, Nicky,” JK said. “From India.”
	“How did you get a hold of raw organic stuff?” she challenged. “Not from your mail-order club?”
	“It’s not through the mail, anymore,” he said vaguely.
	“Your job is completed,” said Nicky’s watch. “Would you like to...”
	Nicky shut it up with a tap and set her tea down. “I’ll grab it, just stay here.”
	She made her way up to the attic, opened the EasyBake and carefully took out the sheaves of seeds. With minor spills, she was able to slide most of them into the original container (hoping that was what JK wanted) and seal the lid. Then she made her way down, telling the system to save and shut itself down, feeling her body complain as she climbed down from the lab. She was too tired to do any more work tonight. The tea had failed her.
	JK was back at the cage, looking at the flukes. 
	“Want one? Only ten grand!” Nicky cracked as she handed him the container.
	“Fantastic,” he said, looking inside.
	“Yeah, the machine doesn’t divide by colour,” Nicky said. “You’ll have to do that by hand.”
	“You wouldn’t believe how much stress this saves me, Nicky, you’re an angel.”
	“Not an octopus?” Nicky said, tugging on her pigtails.
	“Same difference,” JK laughed. “Seriously, last time I had to go to Kinko’s —”
	“They don’t have EasyBakes there,” she said.
	JK nodded. “I know, but they do organic duplication. But I was incredibly nervous the whole time, assuming they’d make me fill out an intent-of-use form —”
	“What are you doing with them, anyhow?” Nicky said, hoping to stop the waves of gratefulness before they built into a tsunami.
	“Another new growth party. Hopefully you’ll be able to go to this one.”
	“Well, hopefully you’ll tell me about this one,” Nicky said, poking his big chest.
	“I know, sorry about that.”
	“Mmm-hmm.”
	“But now you’re practically a patron. So I’ll send you the coordinates.”
	“Excellent,” Nicky said, stifling a yawn.
	JK grabbed his backpack from where he had laid it beside the couch and opened it up. He noticed something there and pulled it out. “Oh yes.” He took a little holocoin out and tossed it on the floor. A unicorn crawled out of it and pranced in a circle, stopped, seemed to notice Nicky and said in a whinny, “Come to see Mike Narc’s show!”
	JK was putting away the container. “I figured you’re working with similar themes...”
	Nicky gave a one-shoulder shrug. “Sorta.” The show invite was a floating, large-bosomed woman now, who was intoning the time and place. “I met him once, and he struck me...” She looked at JK. “Do you know Mike?” 
	JK made the finger gesture for a little.
	“I dunno. Maybe I’ll go,” Nicky said, picking up the coin projector.
	“He’s a bit arrogant,” JK said, putting on his backpack.
	“Yes.”
	They laughed at her vehemence.
	“It might be the fact that we’re working in similar territory, though,” Nicky admitted.
	JK shook his head. “It’s so different though, in terms of treatment.”
	Nicky squinched up her mouth, nodded. “I think so.”
	JK noticed the time. “Holy yikes, I gotta scram.” He reached for the door. “Seeya!”
	Nicky turned and walked into the living room, grabbed the jar of tea. “Not without this you’re not.”
	“Shit!” JK said, shouldering off and opening his backpack. “Can’t forget that. OK seeya for real this time,” JK opened the door and left.
	“Later,” Nicky said and shut the door. It wasn’t until she was coming back from the living room with the empty mugs that she noticed the bike, still hanging from the coat hook.


Doug flicked through the numbers again, his long fingers jerking spastically. Nope. No way to do it. He sighed and leaned his head against the palm of his hand, placing it there like a crystal ball on a silk pillow.
	And although it wasn’t giving him any answers, Doug’s head was somewhat crystal-ball-like: the bald top of his head gleamed softly, ringed by a well-kept monk’s fringe. His long face suited his current depressed state: thin-lipped misery accompanied by a thin moustache.
	Doug stood up, stretched, and gazed out his window. Through a tiny square patch — about one foot by one foot — he could see the mountains. Just the tips, but that was enough. He had no idea how the patch had peeled off, nor why it remained unfixed. He had considered telling someone, but it wasn’t like his bosses made money off of the billboards that covered the outside of the buildings. That was the building owner’s lookout.
	It was a bit creepy, however, that prime ad space would be left to waste. It was the clearest indication Doug had had that things were really changing, of the emigration, or whatever the pundits were calling it these days. He really should have known that, of course, but Doug had felt his concern for such matters diminish steadily over the years, a leak he felt incapable of fixing.
	He looked at his watch. Quarter to 12. Shit. He sat back down in his chair. Tapped the armrests, looked at his patch of sky. Stared at the finance sheet floating before him in his cubespace. Oh, fuck it. It’s close enough.
	He got up, waving off the spreadsheet, and elbowed his way into his black greatcoat. He headed out the door, checking his watch to see if he had enough for Pilar’s. Damn. Not enough for a decent meal and a tip.
	Striding past people in the hallway, he hid his disappointment.
	Fuck how I hate the day before payday — “Hi Gloria.” 
	“Early lunches for the execs.”
	Nosy — “Well. We don’t get to chit-chat on the phone all day, so we need a proper break.”
	“Ha ha.”
	What am I doing, sparring with the secretary —
	 “Doug! How goes it ol’ chum.”
	“Maintaining, Mike, you know how I do.” No! Don’t get on the elevator ah shit— “...So where you off to?”
	“Pilar’s. Can’t get enough of that kelp piñata stuff. You?”
	It’s paella, moron. “Oh, McDonald’s.”
	“McDonald’s?”
	Don’t act like you’ve never heard of it, you fat bastard — “Sure. I force myself once a week at least. Keeps my ear to the ground.”
	“Hmm.”
	“It’s all the same food, I mean — Pilar’s a McEatery.” God, that was desperate.
	“True, true. Well, watch those McNuggets, ha ha.”
	“Ha! Never touch ’em.” Can these doors open any slower? “Well, take care.”
	As the elevator whisked Mike away to the underground mall, Doug fished around in his pocket for a handkerchief. He pushed through the (barely) revolving doors into a fairly nice day, but Doug had his polka-dotted hanky firmly pressed to his mouth as he headed towards the golden arches.
	He caught a flash of his mountains between two massive buildings and almost knocked into an old man carrying a rather wet-looking garbage bag. “Fug you,” he said through swollen lips, and Doug nodded his agreement, getting away from the cloud of stench as quickly as possible.
	The McDonald’s sign loomed above, inaccurately stating 99 Billion Served. It had been frozen there for as long as Doug had been alive, and he had actually written an essay on it for a class in corporate history. “Obviously, there was the practical consideration of the costs involved in adding new slots for higher numbers,” he had written with the self-assurance native to cocky teens. “And there was also the zeitgeist of the ’90s and ’00s to consider — a last-gasp reaction against the unlimited growth model. So McDonald’s upper echelons sat tight, knowing that their point had already been made — that everybody loves their delicious flame-broiled burgers.”
	Standing in line, the greasy smell reminded him that they weren’t flame-broiled at all. He had lost marks for that, although he had gotten top marks for analysis — that’s what mattered, since he was sure (even then) that his future lay in coolhunting.
	Doug thumbed a burger and fries, having to press the worn fries icon twice before it registered. He pressed his watch against the payplate, held it there. It dinged its approval, and the relief Doug felt at this was quickly followed by self-loathing. Worried about the cost of lunch at Mickey Dee’s...
	The tray slid toward him. He picked it up and headed to an empty table surrounded by other empty tables, as far away from the cluster of youngsters as he could get. A younger Doug Patterson would have tried to get a little closer and eavesdrop on the conversation and make mental notes of the slang, but Doug Patterson at 37 unwrapped his burger and watched them with dull indifference fortified with caution.
	“But the two lanes were merging, right. So-so-so, I was like,” the kid took a toke, “Let’s go, shitarse. You wanted to race, so let’s race.” He had huge gaps between his teeth and the full attention of his crew. “Onetwenty-oneforty-onesixty… the motherfucker didn’t stop, I’ll give him that. Should have though. Ended up as the window display at Macy’s. Totalled.” He toked and blew a smoke stream at his gun finger, listened to his crew make impressed noises. “My Camaro had not a scratch.”
	One of the kids, a girl of about nine, screamed. Then, stopping entirely, pulling her knees up to her chest: “Oh see, so-so-so, that’s my bullshite alar-um.”
	“Verify. Fuck you little — go! Just go verify. Last night. Granville and 7th.” The kid crossed his arms, made cartoonishly big by his white puffy jacket, and jerked his chin. “Fuckin’ — go! Look stupid.”
	The little girl exaggeratedly spoke into her watch. “List fatalities —”
	“Did I say he died?! No, I didn’t…”
	“Cancel. Did a car accident occur yesterday at Granville and 7th?”
	The kid and the girl locked stares as they waited, eliciting hushed giggles from the others. Finally the watch verified an accident. The kid spread his hands out, a gap-toothed smile on his face. “An that’s —”
	“Cars involved with this crash?” the little girl continued, her face a curl-framed study in innocent curiosity.
	“Two cars, a Camaro Extremis and a Lightfoot, were towed from the site.”
	One kid covered his face in his hands, moaning, and the sounds of misery-induced hilarity beat down the gap-toothed braggart.
	“Stung,” pronounced the little girl, a small hint of a smile on her lips.
	“Who cares, I picked up that Camaro for like, a hundred fifty —” he started.
	Singsong: “Stung.” 
	“Ah, I’m makin’ money all the time,” the gap-toothed kid said, shoving himself upright, moving towards the counter.
	“How much of the tow charges have been paid off?” the little girl asked her watch as he moved away.
	“Zero dollars.” Hilarity. “Accruing 13% interest per annum.”
	One of the kids stood up and called, “Yo, Zero! Get me a burger motherfucker!” Then he seemed to notice Doug. “So-so-so, chicken hawk. You like this?” He motioned to the six-pack of abs on his prepubescent body, visible through a sheer t-shirt.
	Doug shook his head and looked away, finishing off his burger and starting on his fries. He emptied the packet on the tray and doused them liberally with ketchup, focusing on the motions, willing their attention away from him as an escaping convict wills away a searchlight on the yard. 
	Doug lifted large handfuls of fries to his mouth in an effort to inconspicuously eat more quickly. He could only swallow the potato derivative so fast, however, and he looked up to see the gap-toothed kid veering towards him on his way back from the counter.
	“So-so-so,” the kid said, getting out a pack of tokes and sliding in beside him. He sparked up and gave Doug the once-over, pausing at his expansive bald pate. Doug realized that what he’d thought were gaps were teeth tattooed black. “How you doin’, guy?”
	“I’m fine.” Doug raised his eyes to the kid’s, but the kid was already glancing over at his friends, who were talking amongst themselves. Only the little girl was really paying attention. Doug steadily mowed down his pile of fries.
	“You know, guy,” the kid said. “These Marlboros are really smooth. It’s a perfectly balanced mix between tobacco and marijuana that packs a punch while staying really flavourful.”
	“Really,” said Doug, happy that the kid was just pitching at him rather than something else. “Marlboros, you say,” he said in an interested voice, mopping up the last of the ketchup with the last of his fries.
	“Yes! Why not try one?”
	Doug took one of the tokes from the green and white pack and set it on his tray, “Thanks.”
	“Yes, Marlboros. Marlboros are...” the kid was checking his watch. 
	Hopeless, Doug thought, out of pitch ten seconds into it and checking his account in front of the mark. “Tasty?” he prompted. “With a high that lasts all day long?”
	“So-so-so, with-a-high-that-lasts-all-day-long,” the kid said, more to his watch than to Doug. A second later, “Fuck. Why didn’t I get anything for that?”
	Doug got up. “I said it first. You should have also offered me a light.”
	The kid went for his pocket.
	“I don’t smoke. But you get a few extra bucks for offering a light,” he dumped his tray into the garbage, the mat sticking for a second before obeying gravity.
	“Whattaya throwing the toke away for,” the kid said bitterly.
	“They’re not cool any more,” Doug said, walking away, taking his handkerchief out of his pocket and rubbing the grease off his fingers.
	“Whatta fuck you know about cool,” the kid muttered. “Bald-ass.”
	Doug pushed through the door, heard the kid yell “Money, alla time making money!” as he rejoined the group. Through the window, his glance caught a tableau: the kid in the white jacket showing someone the bank balance on his watch; the person being shown looking contemptuous; the little girl with the curls staring at the gap-toothed kid, her face as placid and as lazy as a viper a few seconds before striking. There was something about her face that reminded him of his own daughter, and Doug walked away quickly, trying to distance himself from that thought.
	After lifting the hanky to his nose, he decided to pocket it. Better unfiltered air than air filtered through french-fry grease. As he walked around the bums littering the sidewalks, he remembered an article he had read yesterday about Frisco — supposedly a few bums had been introduced in select locations “to ease the psychological transition.” Doug thought the whole article was probably cooked up by Self for marketing reasons, but still... he might have admired it, except that he was unable to think about Frisco without a ball of anxiety spinning to life in his gut.
	So naturally there was an ad in the elevator that made him think about it. The Self logo pulsated to life. “If you had upgraded already, you wouldn’t have to be wasting time in this stupid box. Hours of your life are spent shuttling your meat from location to location, representing thousands of lost —”
	Doug made an angry sound.
	The Self ad emorphed. “Trouble with aggressive impulses? We all have them, but wouldn’t it be nice if you could control your emotions and just mellow out? With the Self silver package —”
	A shuddering sigh from Doug emorphed the ad again. “Feeling blue? Are your sad days lowering your productivity? If —”
	“Shut up,” Doug said, as levelly as he could muster.
	The ad paused for a second, and Doug almost thought it had listened. But, no.
	“Sick of ads bombarding you every second of every day? Getting the Self gold package means that ads are optional!”
	The doors slid open, and the ad called cheerily after him “Go for Self!” The guitar lick reverbed until the doors mercifully closed.


Doug made his way through the hall back to his office, feeling more defeated than he had when he’d left. He’d barely sat down when a man with short white hair poked his head out of an office doorway. “Ready for our two o’clock, sport?” he asked Doug.
	“Will be at two o’clock, boyo!” Doug shot back in what he hoped was a hearty tone.
	He got up and shut his door behind him. His door. The one (and only one) upshot of the company’s expansion was that at least that idiot Stevens had been moved out two months ago.
	Stevens wasn’t so bad, Doug chastised himself as he got behind his desk. It was more that having to share with him sent a message — he was no longer worthy of his own office in the eyes of the management. No longer the young shark he had been in his prime, pulling in so much data they’d needed —
	Ah, it was dumb luck. The fact that he had been there at the beginning of the Ripper thing, that he had slid so easily into the community there — hell, that it had started in Vancouver. It was dumb luck. But it had been good for at least ten easy years at the company, years where his words were gathered like sacred fruits as they dropped from his lips.
	Doug checked his schedule to see what Lauden wanted to confer on. Consumer Trends — Tobacco. Lauden was a traditionalist, and wanted something good to feed Philip Morris, to keep them as a client even though they were having serious problems with the current transition. I know how you’re feeling, Phil ol’ pal, Doug thought as he scanned through the conversation he’d had with the kid at McDonald’s.
	There were only two or three snippets he could use, but he made the most of them. He worked on his analysis, happy to focus on something for a while, and pretty soon Lauden’s white spiky head poked in. Doug nodded, rose, and sucked the info back into his watch and followed Lauden down the hall.
	“So I’ve asked the new kid in on this,” Lauden said, his face blank.
	Doug felt something nasty shoot through him that he couldn’t quite identify. “Fuck. Could this day get any better?”
	“Oh, buck up, Patterson. You used to love a good fight!”
	Doug bit his tongue. “That was before home office started hiring scum off the street.” He glanced at Lauden’s doughy face, which revealed nothing. “I mean, at least with you and me there was some point to it.”
	“Ha ha,” Lauden said, holding the door open for him.
	Oh fuck. Not just the new kid, but the boss too.
	Doug rounded the board table and beamed at his boss. “Mr. Harris!”
	Mr. Harris stood up and stuck out his hand for a shake. Doug almost fell for it, but “Oh no you don’t you old bastard,” Doug said, stopping just short of falling for it, waving his finger at Harris. He had noticed something a little too symmetrical about his boss’s hair.
	“How’d you know?” Harris said, “Is it the resolution?”
	“God no,” Doug said, choosing a seat opposite his boss and two away from the kid, whose emanations of scorn he could already almost feel. “The resolution’s fan-tas-tic. Upgrading suits you, sir. No, it was just that I knew that you hadn’t entered the building.”
	“Looks really good on my end too. Right down to the wood grain,” Harris said, slapping the table.
	“Wow, the sound on this set-up’s pretty yum,” the kid said.
	God, not a minute into it and he’s already dropping slang, part of Doug’s brain raged. The kid was, as usual, dressed in the latest styles of the 12–17 set, his face so fresh it looked uncooked. “Well, it’s good to see you, sir,” he said. And it was true, partly. Harris was the only coolhunter that Doug could talk more than trends with, someone he could talk high-concept and theory with. But he also knew Harris was getting a little impatient.
	“OK, well...” Lauden started. “Whattaya got for us, Doug?”
	Doug started to pull up the files, silently thanking the gods for his poverty. “I collected a little data on the subject,” he said, looking over his notes. “I don’t know if we’re going in the right direction with our assumptions that smoking is a dying trend. We might be being hasty.”
	“Look, all the studies so far have shown it’s in final phase,” the kid started in a tone that sounded rehearsed to Doug. “There’s no danger-appeal, no vice-appeal — the smart money says it’s on its way out. Philip’s had a long run, but it’s time to close up shop.”
	“Our job isn’t to advise it on operations,” Lauden said. “We’re here to analyze its product’s current cool quotient and produce usable data for our client. CCQ is only one factor in their decision.”
	The patronizing tone Lauden was using on the kid soothed Doug. “A 12–17 year-old male pitched Marlboro’s Ganja Lites to me.” Doug played the audio clip from his watch, handed transcripts of the sessions around.
	“That’s one of the lamest pitches I’ve ever heard...” scoffed the kid.
	Doug pretended he hadn’t heard him, since he more or less agreed. “We know that the teen demographics are very-to-extremely reluctant to pitch products they don’t associate with strongly. And the subject was clearly the leader of his social group.” That last part was a lie — the little girl with the curls was alpha, putting him at beta at best — but there was no way they could tell that from the audio clip.
	It was like Lauden read his mind. “Was this recorded under controlled fieldwork conditions?” 
	Fucking T-crosser, Doug thought. Fucking I-dotter. “Well...”
	“I don’t think there’s any doubting the validity of Doug Patterson’s research,” Mr. Harris said with a little laugh. “Question is — what can we bring to the client from this?”
	Out of the corner of his eye, Doug caught the kid steepling his hands and nodding wisely. Doug gritted his teeth for a second, pretended to be scrolling through his notes. “The vice-appeal and danger-appeal aren’t going to work with upgraded consumers. But people also smoke to do something with their hands, to differentiate themselves from the crowd, to take an introspective break, to punctuate their angst with plumes of smoke —”
	“Whatareya, copywriting here?” the kid mumbled.
	“— and that won’t change when the market upgrades. Look at it this way — the fact that their product was lethal didn’t kill the industry. This transition isn’t a roadblock, it’s a speed bump.” This last bit was a favourite phrase of Mr. Harris’s, and he was rewarded by a soft grunt from his boss as he closed his notes.
	Lauden backed him up. “That’s relevant analysis.”
	Harris nodded, his eyes off in middlespace.
	The kid was smiling as he went through the transcript. Then he cleared his throat. “Subject A: ‘Whatta fuck you know about cool, bald-ass.’”
	Both Lauden and Harris laughed. On another day, Doug would have had more energy, but today he really had to struggle to even muster up a thin smile.
	“You’re a little piranha, aren’t you?” Mr. Harris said with a wry smile.
	“Very little,” Doug added, keeping his voice even.
	“Oh, untwist, would ya,” the kid said, with a lazy grin that said I’ve got you on the ropes. “These old guys. First thing to go is their sense of humour. Uh, well, second thing,” he said, indicating hair.
	More chuckling from Harris. Lauden was looking down at the table.
	“Let’s finish this up,” Harris said. “Doug, I’m definitely picking up what you’re putting down. But there’s the reputation of the agency to consider. We’d be putting ourselves in a very vulnerable position if we were the only dissenting voice. The feeling I get from Philip is that they’re definitely scaling back their tobacco operations until they can find something to attach their brand to that’s going to be viable in Frisco.”
	Doug nodded, a little stunned at how badly he had been beaten, and on how many fronts.
	“I’d like to do some research on that, sir,” the kid was saying, all mockery gone from his voice, all professional. “My own findings were more along those lines than Patterson’s.”
	Mr. Harris’s smile showed awareness of the kid’s ass-kissing, but he nodded his approval. “Why don’t you get started on that now. Get back to Lauden early next week... Tuesday latest.”
	Doug stood with the other two and moved towards the door. 
	“Doug...” Mr. Harris was standing now. “How are your preparations going? Ready to make the move soon? Things are heating up in Frisco...”
	Doug nodded wordlessly, forcing himself to walk no faster than the other two. 
	Harris’s brow furrowed.
	“Couple...” Doug started, actually gulped, and went on, “Couple of loose ends.” He was at the door. He reached for the doorknob, and slowly pulled it closed. “I’ll be there ASAP.”
	Harris gave the slightest of nods.
	Doug shut the door with a click. When he turned around, Lauden and the kid were striding down the hall, chatting. Lauden glanced back once, gave him a Hey, what can you do? look, and disappeared into an office.


The SkyTrain was still pretty crowded at rush hour. As it slid along on its monorail track, Doug peered out the window at an even older rail system — a train yard cluttered by cars that looked like cast-aside beer cans.
	Was that a tent? Doug thought, seeing a flash of olive green fabric in the yard. Probably some kind of garbage. It was hard to imagine someone living in the open, having to wear a mask all the time.
	He kept staring out the window, although there wasn’t much to see in the quickly dimming light. It was better than watching the advertisements, especially since most of them were for Self packages. Luckily they were broadband ads, unable to emorph with this many people.
	Doug closed his eyes and willed himself home, trying to imagine himself in the seat of his sedan, trying but failing... the babble of ads just slightly louder than the squeaking and clicking of the SkyTrain ruined the effect. Death and ads, he thought to himself in an effort to drown his irritation in philosophy, the two constants of our free market society. Maybe ads are more constant, if upgrading is all it’s cracked up to be…
	The SkyTrain hit a rough curve that jolted Doug, and he gripped the bar harder. He caught a child staring at him and he stared back, until he noticed that the adult with the child had been staring just as rudely. The adult, however, when confronted with Doug’s arched eyebrow, looked away. It’s not like you’ve never seen a balding man before, moron. The kid at least has an excuse.
	He looked away. He knew that most people considered his decision not to regen his hair as eccentric at best and lazy at worst, but until he sold his car, he hadn’t had to confront this on a daily basis. Now, with the little shit at work drawing attention to his lack of hair, Doug felt his credibility eroding away.
	Not that he had ever doubted that he had a timeless, indisputably cool look. Even when he had realized why he had chosen this style, it didn’t shake his faith — although the realization had been traumatic for other reasons.
	His father had been dying for the better part of a year, and he had gone to see him at the hospital after work. The sour-smelling room was big enough to house the life-support machines and a chair, upon which Doug had spent many an hour. Since the second stroke his father hadn’t been very communicative — well, he hadn’t spoken — and so Doug was left to his own thoughts, which often strayed to figuring out how much it was costing him per second to keep the decaying man alive.
	“...you leave...” his father had said. His eyes, rheumy slits, were locked on him.
	After a moment of complicated shock, Doug had licked his lips and replied. “...You want me to leave?”
	“Why did you leave Pop?” the old man wheezed.
	“I didn’t leave, Dad,” Doug had replied.
	“Pop why did you leave?”
	That had been the most coherent conversation they had had in months, but it wasn’t until they were going through his stuff after the funeral that Doug realized that his delirious father had mistaken him for his grandfather.
	“Honey,” Cheryl had said, coming into the basement. She had taken on the job of going through the mounds of decaying print photos for ones worth scanning. “Is this a relative?”
	He had looked up from the box he had been sorting through and taken the picture from Cheryl. His grandfather was in the middle of a sax solo, looking suave and dashing. His solid dome head with a well-kempt monk fringe had substance, dignity.
	“Yeah...” he had said. “I haven’t seen this in years.” When he had seen it as a boy, he hadn’t recognized the family features at first, assumed it was someone famous. When his father had told him who it was, the glamour of a relation had thrilled him. His father’s dismissive and abrupt descriptions had just deepened the mystery.
	The SkyTrain stopped at Main Street-Science World and a bunch of people got out, including the family of starers. Doug took a seat and ignored the little boy pointing at him through the window, although it naturally attracted the attention of those who’d just entered. 
	Brat. Doug felt his jaw clench and forced himself to unclench it. Apparently he ground his teeth in his sleep, according to his dentist, and he occasionally wondered if this indicated anxieties so deep that they only surfaced in dreams. He made a mental note to ask his dentist if this had increased, now that his anxieties skittered freely over his consciousness at all times of the day.
	Tired of watching lights flash to and fro outside the window, his eyes wandered cautiously to the other patrons. All but a few of them were watching media beamed from their watches. The middle-aged woman opposite him was particularly immersed, her mouth slightly agape. She blinked, and Doug caught an inverted flash of the guy-on-guy pornography that was being beamed onto her retinas. He quickly looked down at his own watch. That’ll teach you to be nosy, Doug ol’ pal.
	He didn’t select anything to watch, though, since he was pretty close to home and he had lost that apparently psychic ability that SkyTrain regulars had to prevent them missing their stop. When he was young, of course, he had had it, as well as an uncanny ability to predict where the next free seat would appear. He had lost a lot of instincts since then.
	Since settling into his first car at 17, a ride befitting the prodigy at the agency, and selling his car before the bottom totally dropped out of the market at thirty-seven, not much had happened. Twenty years had passed in a comfortable but not excitement-rich bubble. Oh, there had been moments — the birth of his daughter, the death of his father, hot accounts — and mostly, these little moments, coupled with security, had been enough stimulation for him and Cheryl. But now that his security was as low as his bank account, he wondered if he had been living life too conservatively…
	The doors slid open, startling him. Was this it? Yes! Out through the doors and, moving with the flow, through the turnstiles. A few went down the escalator here, fumbling for masks before entering the night, but Doug strode across an enclosed walkway. He loved the glass walkway, especially in the morning when it glinted with the sun, clouds looming above, safe from the torrent of traffic below. How, if you timed it right, you could see the SkyTrain gliding out of the hills and get there just in time for it to whisk you away. There was something Doug found intensely satisfying about that; it helped lighten the bitterness he felt over the loss of his car.
	Maybe I could buy a used one — that kid said he got a Camaro for $150. But Cheryl had been expecting to leave since August, when they sold the cars, and would take his buying another one as proof that they were staying. She’d want a car herself, then, for her and Olivia. Probably another one of those ridiculous 6x6 SUVs that kept growing each year. Doug could tell her that it was a pointless arms race, but the mother in her would look at Olivia’s fragile little body and opt for the reinforced titanium frame.
	Doug walked into the condo foyer and waited for the elevator. In the doors’ mirrored surface, he looked at his slightly rumpled suit with disapproval. Another lady, slightly familiar, joined him in his elevator vigil before he could smooth himself out.
	“Seems like I spend half my life in these things,” the lady said.
	“Mmm,” said Doug.
	The elevator arrived. On the way up, a Self ad started up with an exaggerated yawn.
	“Is there anything more boring than shuttling your meat from location to location?”
	“Nope!” the lady chirped, laughing at herself. Doug put on a polite smile and glanced at her, hoping she was simply talkative. He watched the floor indicator, waiting for his number to come up. The ad droned on.
	Finally, the elevator slowed. Just as the doors were opening, both the ad and the lady said, “Go for Self!” The bubbliness of her pitch and the fake-downbeat tone of the ad combined in a nauseating way, but Doug didn’t turn around. He knew exactly what he’d see: the half-apologetic, half-smug look. Although she was probably a freelancer, even the professional pitchmen had that look — it wasn’t actual shame then, but it was effective in defusing anger. But Doug wasn’t so much angry as stunned.
	Doug walked through the corridor, absorbing the experience, filtering it. Trying to ignore the cold sweat that had broken out on his brow, the metallic taste in his mouth. The fact that it had happened in his building was a bad sign. How did she get in? Could she actually be a tenant? Things were getting desperate.
	He stood in front of 1712, wondering if he should tell Cheryl. He held the doorknob, waited for the locks to tumble, one thought racing through his mind.
	We’ve gotta get out of here.


The little old woman stood beside the phone, stooped slightly, her ear to the receiver. The foyer was dim, with dust motes visible in the weak shafts of light. I should really vacuum that rug, Eileen thought vaguely. 
	She thought she heard a click, but no, it was still the hold jingle. She sighed and made her way around to the chintz-cushioned chair beside the phone. She lowered herself onto the chair, still listening carefully.
	The music stopped. “Hello?” said Eileen.
	The next song started up. Eileen sighed. She hated using the phone, always had Jeremy do those kinds of things. He always liked using the phone, accessing sites, connecting to things... even before he could talk he played with that toy phone. She smiled to think of him holding the receiver in his two chubby hands, drooling on the numbers. Of course, maybe that was what got him into this trouble in the first place...
	“Self Technical Service,” said a slightly bored voice. “Could I have your passport number please?”
	Eileen had to think for a moment what the man wanted. Self service passport? “Well hello, I’m not sure if you’re the right person to talk to...”
	“What’s your passport number, ma’am?”
	“My Canadian passport? I didn’t think they used those —”
	“The passport number issued with your Self purchase ma’am, not an official document, but a reference number which we use to serve you better.”
	“I haven’t made any purchase. I have a question about —”
	“No problem ma’am, I’ll redirect you to our FAQ system —”
	“I was just — hello?” Eileen heard the hold music again, followed by a cheery recording.
	“Welcome to our Frequently Asked Questions system. If you have a browser installed, launch it now. Otherwise, press one now.”
	Eileen leaned forward and pecked the worn button.
	“If you have an inquiry about our special offers on Self packages, press one. If you’re having problems upgrading, press two. If you have successfully upgraded and are having difficulties adjusting to your new reality, press three.”
	Eileen sighed, trying to remember what number it was that she had pressed before on her previous call. Was it three? She tried two.
	“If you’re having a lot of trouble, please come in person to our office in... Vancouver... at... 783 Robson Street.” The address was spoken by a different voice. “Press one to —”
	Eileen hung up the phone. 783 Robson. That was near enough, and she could use the walk anyway.
	It took her awhile to find her hat, even though she had stuck it in her sleeve as always. As she fumbled with her keys, she thought back to how Jeremy would always huff and fuss at the delay, saying she should get touch locks put in. She always told him it was too expensive, even though the real reason was a movie she had seen where the villain had cut off someone’s fingers to unlock a door. No thank you, I’ll stick with my little keys.
	It was always like that, with them: Jeremy pushing her towards the future. She didn’t mind, it was what young people did — assuming newer meant improved, seeing the flash but not the burn. But Eileen knew better.
	She started off down the road, taking a pull from her o-tube every now and then. The houses in this part of town were stately old ruins, not unlike their occupants. She came up to the gate and waved at the little guardhouse — the windows were opaque, but she knew Jack was in there. Or Helen, one of them anyway.
	She palmed out and pushed through the turnstile, ignoring the computer voice: “Goodbye, Eileen Ellis.” There were a few taxis outside the gate, as always, and she looked for one that wasn’t idling and got in. She gave the others dirty looks. What was the point of barring cars from the community when there were a dozen gas-guzzlers out there spewing fumes right outside the gate? She remembered, as she approached the humming cars, that there wasn’t any gas left to guzzle, and that they were rechargeables.
	Still a waste of energy, she tutted to herself as she got settled, setting her purse next to her. There was a hiss of static. “Where to?”
	Eileen blinked. Where — Robson Street. What was the number? “Uh...”
	Hiss, pop. “Sorry what was that?”
	She couldn’t remember the number. She stared at the speaker, not wanting to tell it that, yes, once again, one of the old biddies from Sunset Beach had forgotten where she was going. “The Self offices on Robson Street,” she blurted suddenly, hoping that he knew where they were.
	The taxi started to pull out. Eileen sighed, relieved. She decided that she was going to jot down some notes, while she was relaxed, to ask those Self people. She opened her grey, somewhat ratty purse (she knew she should get a new one but couldn’t be bothered — anyway, who was she trying to impress?) and pulled out a notebook.
	She turned it on and jotted down some notes:
	1. Where is my grandson!!!
	She stopped there. That was the question, and it wasn’t even a question — she more or less knew the answer. So she deleted it and started again.
	Why You Should Return My Grandson
	- he’s too young (12!)
	- he’s easily overstimulated
	- he’s my grandson
	That was about it, but Eileen thought her reasons were pretty convincing. The taxi pulled up to the curb, and she fished her card out of her purse. It was a new taxi, though, and it just had a payplate.
	“Driver?” she said, waving her card.
	The slot snicked open, and a young woman in her twenties handed her a card reader. “Oh!” said Eileen, sliding through her debit card. “I thought you were — you sounded like a man.”
	“Mmm,” said the girl. “Voice modulator. Less robberies that way.”
	“Oh,” said Eileen, handing her back the reader. “Sorry for the trouble. I’m always telling my grandson: the only thing I want my watch to know is the time!”
	The driver smiled, shoved the reader under the seat, and adjusted the elastic on her ponytail.
	“You watch yourself, young lady,” said Eileen as she slid out of the car. “I could have slit your throat easy as pie, just there.” She smiled in at her and slammed the door.
	Oh, do I have my — oh yes, it’s right here, she thought, patting her purse. The taxi pulled away, leaving her in front of a storefront. The facade was a tasteful white and blue, with Self Technologies set in small, assured type. She took a breath and entered the building.
	Inside was a plushly carpeted room with large desks. At one of the desks, a young man leaned back in a round swivel chair as he spoke to an attractive young couple. An older man was just finishing up at another desk, nearly colliding with Eileen as he waved his goodbye on the way to the door.
	“Oh —” said Eileen.
	“Pardon me!” the old man said. When he looked at Eileen, a twinkle came to his eye. “Just in time for folks like us, hey?”
	“Well,” said Eileen, but the man was past her.
	“See you over there,” he said with a laugh Eileen didn’t like.
	The woman who had been tending to the old man walked up to Eileen. Her hair was swept into a stylish bun and pinned in place, her face was fresh and inquisitive.
	“Can I help you, ma’am?” she said.
	What a lovely girl, thought Eileen. She looks a little like Mary, when she was younger. “Well yes,” she began. “Maybe we should sit down,” Eileen said, indicating the desk. The chair for visitors wasn’t as plush, but it still looked awfully comfortable. The woman nodded and slid around to her seat, and they both sat down.
	“Now. What can I help you with?” the woman said with serious eyes.
	Eileen was glad it was a woman. The men could be very dismissive, especially of someone her age. “My grandson...” She stopped herself before it all came spilling out. She remembered the notes she made and started to root around in her purse for them. “My grandson is missing. Ah!” She pulled out the notebook.
	The young woman looked at the notebook and then back at Eileen. “Well, that’s terrible... has it been for long?”
	“No, just a few days. But I received a bill from your office. I’ve tried to get in touch with him using the address you gave me, but there’s been no answer. He had mentioned something about it being free...”
	The young lady leaned back a little and nodded. “I see. Well, we do have a no-strings-attached test drive offer, but the person must go back of his or her own accord.” She stopped and let that sink in. “You see? If they don’t, they’re charged for the time.”
	Eileen shook her head. “That’s not like Jeremy.”
	“I’m sure it’s not... could you slide your hand on the desk, ma’am? We need a skin sample for DNA matching.” Eileen obeyed.
	The young lady paused for a second, her eyes moving up and down. “Ma’am, I’m not getting any descendants of yours on the system.”
	Eileen smiled uneasily. “He’s not my grandson, really, I suppose.”
	“Ma’am, of course you know we can’t —”
	“Can you do a search for clones?”
	The young lady’s eyes widened.
	Eileen tilted her chin. “I call him my grandson because it’s easier than explaining.” And dealing with reactions like yours. Wonder what you’d do, though, with millions of dollars and no uterus?
	The young lady blinked suddenly. “Here we are. Jeremy Ellis.”
	Eileen nodded, relieved. “Did you give me the wrong contact address on the bill, perhaps?”
	Slow shake of the head. “No... that’s correct. It says that he arrived six days ago... transferred immediately to Gamerz Heaven... and then nothing. No transfers, no data requests, no hits of any kind.”
	“Oh yes! I’ve heard of the Game Players Heaven, he wanted so badly...” Eileen stopped when she saw how puzzled the young lady looked.
	“I’ve never seen... ma’am, could you hold on a moment? I should ask my manager about this.” She touched her ear nervously and disappeared.
	Eileen realized that she had been speaking to a hologram. She tutted and felt stupid that she hadn’t noticed, of course a place like this wouldn’t have meat help. This manager better know —
	The young lady came back, her face composed, and a thin man even younger than the woman stood behind her. “Here you go ma’am, he’ll help you.” Then she blinked out.
	The thin man slid carefully into the chair, and Eileen noticed how natural it looked. They must practice that, she thought.
	“I’m Gerald, and you are...?”
	“Eileen. Eileen Ellis. My... boy...”
	“I’ve been filled in on your situation, Ms. Ellis.” He rubbed his chin. “I wish I could say it was unique.”
	“A little boy disappearing isn’t unique?” Eileen said, leaning forward.
	“Well, first of all, Ms. Ellis,” the thin man said, pursing his lips. “Jeremy isn’t a little boy. He’s entitled to all the consumer products aimed at the 12–17 demographic.” He fixed her with water-blue eyes. “And he agreed to the contract.”
	“No one reads those things,” Eileen snapped. “They just click on the I Agree button.”
	“Nevertheless, Jeremy agreed to the trial hour of the bronze package, and when he didn’t logoff after that, he was automatically registered as an active user and charged accordingly.”
	“Well. I want him back.” Eileen felt the skin around her cheekbones tighten.
	The thin man sighed. “Ms. Ellis... we get a lot of missing people complaints, or allegedly missing people, here. Usually it’s husbands and wives. And we say, if it isn’t charged to a joint account, that there’s really nothing we can do. In your case, if you like we can stop the payments, but they’re really extraordinarily reasonable. It’s practically free.”
	That was strange. “Why... is it so cheap?”
	The thin man smiled, and began a practiced spiel. “The bronze package is subsidized by a number of corporate patrons in exchange for it being a delivery system for stimulus-rich promotion.”
	Eileen worked her way through that, unravelling it. “You mean... it has advertising.”
	“Well, yes. It’s a lot more dynamic than traditional —”
	Eileen felt a sweat breaking out, under her arms. “He can’t have... he can’t have advertising.”
	The couple in the desk next to them got up, looking happy. The dark-haired man looked over at Eileen, his smile failing a bit as he noticed her agitation. He followed his blond boyfriend out.
	The thin man watched her, plainly debating if the time for decorum had passed.
	Eileen took a big breath and tried to calm herself down. “Because of a problem when he was... born... Jeremy has an extreme sensitivity to stimulus. He even has to wear special glasses when he plays games.”
	The thin man nodded. “The contract he agreed to clearly states that anyone with a medical condition —”
	“He’s slipped into a coma before,” Eileen said. “What if he’s in a coma — in there?”
	“The contract —”
	Eileen just looked at him.
	He stopped. “Ma’am, I’ve got to ask you to leave. There’s nothing I can do about this. When your grandson wants to get in touch, he will.”
	She looked at him, laid the words out as carefully as she could: “Where is his body.”
	“You know that for security reasons, the location of our clients’ bodies is a matter of the most confidential —”
	“Where.”
	The thin man whispered something and then lifted his hands in supplication. “Ma’am, I’m afraid I’m going to have to contact a security team if you do not vacate the premises immediately. I am truly sorry about the problems between you and your... your —”
	“My grandson!” Eileen screamed.
	The thin man took a step back and disappeared.
	Eileen looked at the other desk, and saw that it was empty too. She was alone. She looked at the notebook that she still clutched in her hand and slowly put it in her purse.
	She got up and moved through the empty office and pushed out the door, feeling like every cell in her body was dragging her down. Outside, it was a grey-yellow twilight, and she hailed a cab. Across the street, a cube van burst open, and security men in riot gear piled out. They charged into the Self office just as she got into a taxi. She watched them mill around, her purse feeling too heavy in her lap.
	Jeremy.


The next morning, Eileen got up and felt her way to the bathroom — go to bed when it’s too bright, get up when it’s not bright enough. She was halfway through relieving herself when she remembered about Jeremy, and it hit her hard, a flashfreeze. It was a few seconds before her pee started again. She sat there, feeling the cold tiles even through her calloused soles. It made her remember about how Jeremy thought she was inhuman because he couldn’t tickle her feet no matter how hard he tried, while he screamed and howled at the lightest of brushes.
	It was the memory of his laugh that finally drew it out of her. She bent her head and let the tears drip on her legs, a painful sound coming from her lips. She squeezed her eyes tighter, tighter... then wiped, got up. “Stoopid,” she said, her sinuses having filled instantly. She splashed some cold water in her face and stared at herself in the mirror. “Don’t be stupid, Eileen.”
	She tottered downstairs and got herself a cup of tea. She forgot to shake it first so it was pretty weak, and she wondered for the thousandth time what was wrong with teabags? Why did they have to meddle, these companies, in things that were better left alone? They pretended like they knew better, so you went along with it... even with her old job it had been like that. There were a few missions that she had had that were obviously poorly thought out, disastrous, enough so that she stopped reading the papers. The missions were supposed to help those people in the long run, help them adapt to the world market by eliminating key bad apples, but more often than not, the violence raged on like a forest fire. If you believed what you read.
	By the time the caffeine really kicked in, Eileen had worked up a heart-pumping anger. And then it struck her. Of course. She forced herself to finish off her tea before she got up and made her way to the phone.
	Her co-worker’s number jumped to mind immediately, and it wasn’t re-routed to some fancy new address, two good omens. Eileen was still shocked by the voice at the other end. 
	“Who is it?”
	“It’s… Eileen. Eileen Ellis.”
	“Eileen!” Mary squealed. “Oh my god! It’s been years — decades! How... how are you?” Her initial excitement had curved down into caution.
	“I’m fine. But... Well, it’s a long story. Maybe we could meet. But I need to ask you something right away. Mary...” Eileen’s eyes were squeezed closed, as much from the dust as from the tension. “Do you still have your suit?”


Eileen dabbed her cookie into what was left of her tea and took a nibble, listening intently to the glamorous woman in blue seated across from her.
	“...And even if he did come back, I wouldn’t want him. I’d show him the door so fast his head would spin.” Mary said.
	Eileen shook her head, dabbed. The waitress came around to offer tea, and Mary took some, smiling brilliantly at the waitress. She still has her looks, Eileen thought, amazed that the years had hardly withered her, barely streaked her hair white. Eileen’s hair had gone completely white over ten years ago. The waitress moved towards her cup, but Eileen put a hand over it to stop her, and she glided away.
	“Oh, you’re better off without that... jerk,” Eileen said. She chose her words carefully, since Mary was one to take offence rather easily. She would be telling horror stories about a man one day and then come back at you for agreeing with her the next, once he was back in her good books.
	“So...” Mary said. “You ever meet a fella...” She lost her mischievous smile when she saw Eileen’s face. “Better off without them. It’s like they said in the company, XYbother?” She laughed at her own joke, and Eileen smiled, if just to see her old friend in good form.
	“I never knew why you wanted a boy. When I heard, I said ‘What? Did something go wrong?’” She was laughing again, and Eileen’s answering smile was much weaker. She thought about the cloning rep advising her, in a bored tone, that the gender alteration would increase the chances of flaws. They didn’t call them defects. She wondered if that could be connected to the stimulus seizures.
	“I figured he would have more advantages as a man,” Eileen said.
	“Well, how is he?” Eileen said.
	“Fine, good,” Eileen said guiltily, taking the last cookie and changing the subject. “This is really a beautiful hotel.”
	“Yes, isn’t it grand?” Mary said, looking around at the nearly empty dining room, the round ground floor of a coliseum-shaped building. “You can just smell the history. Used to be a library or some such. Terribly expensive, but I get over to Vancouver so rarely... you should come to visit! The island’s so cosmopolitan now… it’s no Frisco, but we try!”
	“Maybe when I get my affairs sorted out,” Eileen said.
	“I brought what you asked me for, by the way,” Mary said.
	Eileen had seen the small bag immediately, but she smiled gratefully. “Thank you.” 
	The waitress buzzed past, and Mary dropped her voice. “I’ll just leave it here when I go...”
	“Great.” Eileen paused. “How did you keep it after —”
	Mary smirked. “Well. That’s a story. Remember how they were withholding my bonus? Because my facemask was ‘damaged’?”
	Eileen remembered it. While most of the operatives had put on any decorations with removable flash prints, she had drawn on hers with, among other things, lipstick.
	“So. I was so mad. I needed that bonus! So I hid it, and told them I destroyed it. They were mad, but I’d already been paid up, so they couldn’t dock me. And they were being dissolved by their parent corporations, so they were too busy trying to save their jobs to bother following up with me.”
	Eileen felt a little queasy thinking of the risk Mary had run. She tried to cover it up by sipping her tea, but noticed her hand was shaking a bit.
	“I had planned to sell it — get the bonus money they screwed me for. But…” Mary shrugged expansively. “I guess once I had settled back into normal life I didn’t want to, you know, get back into… that. It was going good with Larry at the time… so I just packed it away. Oh!” She covered her mouth. “Listen to this. Larry, about a year after I put it away, finds it in the bottom of a box somewhere. He takes it out and says I’m keeping secrets from him. He confronts me with it. He says, ‘I can’t believe you never told me you were … a scuba diver!’”
	Eileen giggled. 
	“A scuba diver! It was a riot. I just about killed myself trying not to laugh. I was so scared I’d have to tell him the whole thing…”
	“Oh, there’s no point in that,” Eileen said, sipping her tea. “No point at all.”
	“Exactly.” Mary looked at Eileen, smiling sadly. “It’s so good to talk to you, Eileen. I’m sorry if I’m talking your ear off.”
	“You’re not. You’re just being Mary.”
	Mary smiled, and her eyes landed on the bag with the suit. “Please be careful, Eileen. I’d feel so guilty if anything were to happen. Oh! And don’t uplink, whatever you do. I’m sure that would set all sorts of alarms off.” Her hands fluttered in demonstration. “Will you get in touch with me when you finished with whatever you’re doing? So I know you’re OK?”
	Eileen nodded. She’d want to return the suit, anyway. “You’ll be at the same number?”
	“Well, if it’s — if not, there’ll be a forwarding service.” Mary’s eyes dropped, moved over the linen.
	“You’re going?” Eileen said dully.
	“Well... of course. For the next few weeks, there’s a seniors’ special. You’re not seriously considering... staying.”
	Eileen hadn’t, although since this business with Jeremy the idea of trusting Self certainly wasn’t appealing. She hadn’t really expected to stay — she’d just assumed that they’d go when the time was right.
	She hadn’t considered staying, but all these presumptions about what she would want, how she would act, were making her want to dig her heels in.
	“I suppose I’m not really thinking about anything beyond getting my affairs in order,” she said to simplify things.
	Mary nodded and smiled at her. “So you’re really not telling me what you need it for?”
	Eileen shifted in her seat uncomfortably, took a sip of tea that wasn’t there.
	“Tell me this, oh mysterious one,” Mary said, her eyebrow arching. “Is it a man?”
	Eileen thought, decided that it was factually true, and nodded.
	Mary looked over her shoulder. “Well,” she said conspiratorially, nodding at the package. “It wouldn’t be the first time that suit’s come out of retirement to deal with some cheating little shit.”


That night in her bathroom, Eileen used a small silver mirror to look at her back, wishing that the mirror’s makers had been more concerned with surface area than ornate detailing. But a few angles later, and crouching slightly, she was able to see it.
	Although the skin around it was blotchy and greyish, the small black hole hadn’t changed at all. The knob of spine that it was drilled through was different, less symmetrical. She was worried that it might have grown over, sealed up like her belly-ring hole had. But no, it looked solid. But was the rest of her solid enough to withstand the connection?
	She opened up the Nordstrom’s bag that the suit was packed in. Mary had also wrapped it in brown paper and tied the whole thing up, so it took Eileen a few seconds to free the blacksuit. She rolled it out on the bed.
	Uniform was what they had been trained to call it — there weren’t any logos or anything — and the technical name was some military mumbo jumbo that had sounded impressive but that Eileen had immediately forgotten. 
	Forgot what a trial it was to get this thing on, Eileen thought, stepping into the jet-black neoprene bodysuit, pulling it up past her bare, blue-veined legs. She stuffed her bare arms in, and, holding her white hair in place, pulled the head mask over and waited in the pitch darkness.
	The sealing sequence started immediately, and Eileen felt the zipper slowly crawl up her back. She felt her sagging breasts barely bumping the bodysuit’s surface and thought that she — ow! 
	The zipper had caught some loose skin. Feeling blindly, Eileen found and yanked the zipper down, holding her back straighter this time. The zipper resumed its crawl. Eileen hoped that Jeremy would see the note she had left for him in the unlikely chance he made it back on his own. He’ll open that fridge sooner rather than later, was her thought as the suit plugged into her central nervous system.
	The familiar triumphant chime. The sudden rush of electrically induced adrenalpro. The brightening of surroundings, first in low rez blocky shapes and then high, higher, perfect rez. “System speed,” Eileen mouthed, and her heart rate showed normal.
	She walked around the room, trying the eyes in the back of her head, moving her body in some limbering exercises she hadn’t thought about in years. Her body sent sharp little reminders of this fact to her joints, and it took a lot just not to cry out.
	“Pain Mute on.”
	The numbness settled over her like gauze, and she was able to stand up straight, even arch her back. Her sharper vision noticing it, she wiped the dust off the full-length mirror, leaving a grey streak on the edge of her matte black hand.
	Glove, Eileen corrected, knowing that it was futile to resist thinking about her suit as part of her. She let out a bark of a laugh as she focused on her face — mask, I mean.
	Mary, you silly girl. She had forgotten the outrageous face Mary had drawn on: large red lips, blue almond eyes, a cartoon femme fatale painted on her mask. Eileen had preferred the unadorned black, had felt that the smiley faces and such were a bit inappropriate — not to mention a good target — but she herself couldn’t help tittering a little as she looked at how the vamp face contrasted with her bony pelvis and bulging knees.
	“Set system speed to 500%,” she mouthed. Nothing happened. Was it working? She reached forward and flicked the mirror. Nothing.
	She looked around at her room. Well, it had been years —
	The mirror, where she had flicked it, had an indent. Then, as if someone was sketching them, crack marks leisurely spidered out from the indent.
	Eileen felt relief. She left her room and went into Jeremy’s. His cubespace was on — as it always was — and the Self contract was floating there, a sinister writ. Beside it was another subcube, something else he was working on. She stared at the strings of numbers and letters. He was so clever. As she focused on it, her suit said, “Decrypting document Deep Inside Lois Lane…10% decrypted…”
	“Cancel job,” Eileen said, feeling an odd flutter in her chest. That wouldn’t help me find him, she told herself. What I need is to be uplinked! I could get his current coordinates from his watch…She opened a file.
	“New target file opened. Data?” the suit whispered in her ear.
	“Name: Jeremy Ellis. Primary occupant of room.” Eileen leaned over his desk and sniffed. The suit needed more, so she took another, deeper sniff, her facemask almost touching the desk.
	“Cloned 2025. Hair black, eyes —”
	Eileen stopped the flow of data the DNA sample had provided. “Evidence of other occupants?”
	There weren’t any. Self hadn’t sent out agents to take Jeremy away — or at least, not organic agents. That would have been too easy.
	Gently closing the door with its Gamerz Only! sign on it, she thought about the time that he had explained to her, so seriously, that she was an honorary gamer and thus was admitted past the threshold. 
	The suit asked, “Would you like to uplink? Yes or No.”
	“No,” she said, jogging down the stairs.
	“Not uplinking means that you might be depriving yourself of critical information regarding your target. Are you sure? Yes or No.”
	“Yes,” she snapped.
	She opened the door and stepped out into the chilly night air. The suit automatically adjusted. “Track Jeremy,” she said. Blue blotches appeared here and there, solidifying into a trail going down their garden path and stopping at the sewer.
	As she shut the door behind her, she realized that she’d left her keys upstairs, and even if she went back for them she had no pockets to keep them in. She walked away from her house with one last anxious glance at its unlocked state. Don’t be stupid. If someone breaks in, you can track them down and — she stopped it, the voice. It was the voice that always accompanied the suit, as much a part of it as the nagging whisper. But it was her, this voice — a harder, stronger, colder her.
	She reached the street. Jeremy’s traces stopped at the sewer. They may have dissipated naturally, or the Self agent may have… she lifted the sewer grate set into the middle of the road, as if it were a pot lid, and climbed down. Reaching up, she snagged it with a few fingers and slid it back into place. The clank it made, slowed down, stretched over a few seconds.
	The tunnel glowed with grey-green infrared. There were no traces of Jeremy, but she knew where she was heading. The walls were thick with the filth of centuries, the few inches of water equally fetid. She imagined a spider sentry with Jeremy in tow, scuttling down the tunnel. They dragged my boy through —
	She put the adrenaline that the rage fed her to work, jogging down the tunnel. By the time the shattered glass had finished dropping from her bedroom mirror, a crystalline snowfall, she was several city blocks away.


The two men stood together on the little knoll, hands in pockets. The taller man wore blue knee-length shorts and an unbuttoned golf shirt, while the shorter man was overdressed, holding his blazer in the crook of his arm as he made his case. It was hard to say for sure, because both men had scrambled blurs where their faces should be, but by his body language the taller man seemed more interested in watching the children play.
	“Now you see, this is what I’m talking about,” the tall man said, pointing a beefy finger at the blur-faced children. “This is the second time that kid has fallen down in that exact place. This picnic doesn’t even have a decent loop rate.”
	“Paul, c’mon, you know we have a budget limit on these things —”
	“But you’re not even trying. Your heart ain’t in it. It’s all work work work with you guys. Look at you, Al — with your tie on. Come on!”
	“It’s just... I’ve got a meeting after,” Al mumbled, deleting his tie and loosening his collar. “Better?”
	“Pathetic,” Paul said, turning around and looking at the adults swarming around the barbeque. “I mean, we’re in the culture industry, the ones the ordinary joes look to to spice up their lives, and this is the best recreation you come up with?” 
	Al lifted his hand to the sky. “Whattaya talking about? It’s a beautiful day. Look at those clouds! Those are high-quality clouds, Paul. Not a chance of rain.”
	“My point exactly!” Paul said, taking his hand out to point at the shorter man. “No chance of anything. Where are the ants, Al?” He shook his head. “Now the Branders picnic, that was something. They had some terrorists come in and shoot the place up. Pitchmen screaming, people running everywhere.” He laughed.
	Al made a sour noise. “Aw, that’s in poor taste. Especially in light of the Exxon Massacre...”
	“Creative. That’s what it was. Everyone shitting their pants, even though they knew they couldn’t be killed. All it took was a few holo’s getting their heads perforated to accessed that fear. It’s hardwired into us, even if we are just software.”
	“Well, I remember a time when we didn’t have to wear scramblefaces,” Al said. “That dates me, but it’s true.”
	“Well, the cutting edge sometimes cuts back,” Paul said with an easy laugh.
	Al shook his head and chuckled. “That’s what I admire about you, Paul — you can turn anything on its head. Make crazed terrorists seem like they’re keeping us sharp. Our firm, on the other hand, has been the bedrock of the industry for longer than you’ve been alive. And that’s why I think we’d make a great team to go for the Self account.”
	“Oh, good lord! Not you, too, Al!” Paul said, making a gesture of pulling his hair out that was obscured by his scrambleface. “Don’t tell me you’re going on this wild goose chase, too!”
	Al turned away, seemed on the verge of giving up. Then he turned back. “It’s not a wild goose chase. It’s the biggest single account in the history of business.”
	“I don’t even believe that Self’s operations are generated by an artificial intelligence, Al. It’s all a scam to convince the end users that it’s all top secret and totally secure. But even if that wasn’t a scam, don’t you realize that it’s the same old story? In the old days they’d dare kids to hack their code, and kids would spend man-years finding ways to get in — which the company would then patch.”
	Al laughed. “I think it’s a little different than that, Paul. Our profession consists of the finest cultural analysts and data miners on Earth.”
	“Self gets us to exhaust our resources to simply give them information about their operations that they already know and are promising an undisclosed exclusive deal in return… If you can’t see the connection,” Paul said. “Then I guess you can’t.”
	A phone floated by in mid-air, between them, but Al didn’t notice and started to say something. Paul held up a hand. “I’ve got a call.”
	He turned away slightly, holding his hand in a phone shape to his ear. The connection was made immediately.
	The voice was warbly from the strain of several filters. “There’s something going on at the Robson Street Self office. Do you want me to check it out?”
	“Definitely, Honey, eight sounds good.”
	“OK, contact me when you’re alone. I’ll have more info then.” Click.
	“You were right to give this picnic a miss, Hun,” Paul continued, looking over at Al’s slumped form. “These fellows don’t know how to loosen up.” A laugh.
	Al raised a timid hand goodbye and went back to the barbeque. “All right sweetheart,” Paul said to no one. “Yes, I’ll remember.”
	Alone on the knoll, he held his hands behind his back and watched the children. As one of them tripped and skinned her knee for the third time, he disappeared, leaving the little girl to her eternal fate.


Nicky got to the launch about an hour after the invite said it started, entering the brightly lit Molson’s Gallery to be immediately caught in the staring crossfire. Trying not to scurry, Nicky moved towards the art. She held JK’s folded bike in front of her where it was less obvious in an attempt to minimize her oddness level, feeling the tiny feet of her little creature crawling over the back of her jean jacket. Maybe the gecko was a bit much.
	She looked at the boxed holo. It was a cavern, an underground mine, judging by the little railcars.
	“Well you know what they’re like. You’re lucky you got out of it with your scalp intact,” said someone behind Nicky.
	Someone else replied in a tone too low to hear. Nicky leaned forward to examine the box, picking out tiny figures hacking away at the cavern walls. Dwarves?
	“I think you’re right,” said the first voice, which was quiet but distinct. “He’s just the type. Too young to be that intense, but he’s staring at your stuff pretty hard.”
	Nicky glanced back. The guy with the distinct voice had a large grey afro in which he had stuck mirrored sunglasses. The mumbler was the artist — Mike something — who looked uncharacteristically nervous. Nicky moved away before Mike recognized her, even though it was unlikely with her new hairdo.
	There was a cash bar with a kind of cute bartender. She looked at the price list — $10 for a Coke, $15 for a Molson Ex, $17 for Evian, $20 for a Tropicana — and she almost considered treating herself to an OJ, seeing as she just got paid. I can get a whole box for the same price at Safeway, she thought. I’ll get some on my way home.
	She walked away, returning the bartender’s smile nervously, wondering what kind of clothes he wore when he wasn’t in his tux t-shirt uniform. She imagined herself asking him that, and a thrill of terror passed through her. 
	She stationed herself in front of another box. This was the one that had been on the invite — the unicorn trotting around the distressed woman with the heaving bosom. Nicky noticed that the artist had spent more time on the princess’ erect nipples than on the unicorn’s whole head, but that was typical. He had done a not-bad job on the field, though...
	“Who do you identify with more?” said a familiar voice.
	Nicky turned to see a middle-aged man who she’d never seen before. She inwardly sighed as she looked at the guy’s blank stare, his almost empty Molson. JK, where the fuck are you? “Uh... neither.” She looked back, and, sensing he wasn’t going away, challenged: “What about you?”
	“Probably the unicorn,” he said with a smile that loosened up the severity that his short grey hair gave his features. “I feel more... fancy-free than stressed out these days.”
	“You think unicorns are free?” said Nicky, not meaning to be challenging, just genuinely surprised.
	“Well, look at that one,” he said. “Trotting around all over the place.”
	“He’s anxious. Constantly on the move. He’s hunted,” Nicky said, plucking the gecko from the cuff of her jacket just as it was on the verge of slipping up her sleeve. “Doomed,” she said as she placed the gecko back on her shoulder. “And she’s probably in on it, with her exaggerated damsel-in-distress routine. She’s probably the bait.”
	The man laughed. “Huh,” he said. “I’m going to get another drink,” he said with a waggle of his empty bottle. “Want one?”
	“Sure,” Nicky said, figuring that since he didn’t make the obvious virgin-unicorn crack he’d do until JK arrived. She scanned the room, which had filled up a bit with the usual suspects since she had arrived. She caught the eye of a tall blond girl across the room and waved.
	“No thank you,” Mike said, his voice suddenly crisp and carrying all over the room. He leaned forward and shoved a business card back into a young man’s blazer pocket. The young man — the one that had been spotted earlier, Nicky supposed — smiled ruefully and left the gallery. Mike, his sneer not entirely covering up a grin, turned back to his friends. His crony with the afro squeezed his shoulder, nodded approvingly.
	The buzz in the gallery increased noticeably, and Nicky tried not to get angry. She moved to the next box and stared at it, not absorbing anything.
	“What was that?” said the short-haired man, who had returned with a beer for her.
	“Thanks,” Nicky said, taking a sharp pull on the cold bottle without even looking at it. “That was the first step in the dance known as Artistic Success.”
	“Wha — who was the stiffy?” the short-haired man asked.
	“Recruiter. Probably freelance. Offered to rep Mike as a creative.”
	“And he turned him down?” said the man incredulously, his ample eyebrows raised. “Wow.”
	“No. Yes,” Nicky said, taking another pull at her bottle, tasting it this time. “Ahhhh... it’s so fake and stupid.”
	They looked at the box for a moment. It featured a man lying on a slab.
	“How is it success if he —”
	Nicky sighed. “It’s just the first move. If an artist doesn’t reject the first offer vehemently enough, then he’s not the real thing. The coolhunter loses interest.”
	“Ah,” said the short-haired man. “Hard-to-get.”
	They watched as an astral projection struggled out of the man on the slab and flew off. The short-haired man leaned back and read out the title of the piece. “Goeth for Self.” He laughed.
	Nicky rolled her eyes.
	He noticed her reaction. “Oh come on, it’s funny!”
	“It’s easy,” frowned Nicky.
	“Well,” he said, pointing his bottle at it, “Not everything has to be difficult. It’s like… commentary. On how we’ve attained the ability to do something we’ve dreamed about for centuries.”
	“So they keep telling us,” Nicky said, something about black magic bouncing around in her head but not getting out. “But... I mean, why be an artist if all you’re going to do is echo?”
	“Whoa!” said the short-haired man. “I’m just a code monkey, ma’am. What do I know about that? Let’s ask this guy,” he said, nodding at the door.
	JK had just walked in, a big smile on his face as he greeted a few people. He waved and made his way towards them.
	Nicky looked at the short-haired guy through slitted eyes. “Hey! You know JK?”
	He shrugged innocently.
	JK was briefly chatting with Mike, then plucked the mirrored sunglasses from the guy with the afro and put them on. Their owner checked him out and approved with an a-ok finger circle. JK finally made it to them.
	“Chase! Nicky!” he said. “You found each other!”
	Nicky watched her scowl melt in the giant mirrors on JK’s face.
	“Well, there weren’t too many octopus-haired gals carrying bicycles...” said Chase.
	Nicky snickered. “Those sunglasses...”
	“Are they working for me?” he said, his smile cranking up even higher.
	“And how,” Nicky said, feeling her mood pull out of the dark concentric spiral.
	“I wish I could see something in them,” he said, looking around the room. He took them off and returned his normal specs to his face, poking himself in the eye with the handle as he did so. 
	Chase arched an eyebrow. “What are you on, man?”
	“Do you guys wanna go... somewhere?” JK said, waving at someone.
	“Uh huh!” Nicky said. Yay JK!
	Chase shrugged. “OK. Where?”
	JK gave them the thumbs-up, and started heading towards the exit.
	They followed JK as he cut a cheery swath through the room, now dense with humanity. Nicky gave Chase an encouraging smile, sensing he seemed a bit irked by JK’s choppy conversation, and answered for him. 
	“Somewhere interesting, probably.”


By the time they got there, it was pretty late.
	“This is perfect,” said JK, indicating the expanse of asphalt. “Let’s hang out here for a while.”
	They were in the shadow of Science World. It was a giant sphere lodged on the brink of the inlet, its mirrored structure divided into triangles by a metal frame. Nicky remembered the first time she’d entered it, how disappointed she’d been by the regular box shapes of the buildings it housed. But the wonderful exhibits soon distracted her. 
	JK was unrolling his bike, the tires hissing and the joints clicking into place.
	“Do you guys remember coming here as a kid?” she said.
	“Uh huh!” said JK. “I remember one time I was here on a class trip.” He got on the bike and started riding around. “They had this thing where you could experience what it was like to be a seed. Like the growth cycle. You got into this jelly box…”
	Chase, sitting on the soft asphalt, leaned back on his palms and grinned. “Jelly? Oh, you mean that biomass stuff?”
	Nicky was watching JK weaving back and forth in circles that seemed on the verge of collapsing. “You sure you’re OK on that thing?”
	JK ignored her. “Yeah, biomass jelly. Tricked your body into thinking it was something else. It was kind of messy, but we loved the stuff.”
	Nicky gave up and sat on the ground, crossed her legs. She remembered something really impressing her at Science World, but couldn’t put her finger on it. A colour wheel? No, a prism. A giant prism hanging from the rafters, refracting. All colours coming from white. Black being the absence of colour. 
	“Something similar in Toronto,” Chase said. “Science Centre, I think it was called. Real original.”
	They laughed at that for a while. “Well, it beats Science World II I guess.”
	“Science World II: Back to the Lab,” Nicky said. JK snickered at this, and Nicky felt her annoyance at being ignored lighten. “You from Toronto?” she asked Chase.
	JK rode away towards the edge of the water.
	Chase shook his head. “Nope. About an hour outside it. Closer to Montreal, really.” He was making finger imprints in the asphalt. He looked up at her. “Where are you from?”
	“New West,” she said, trying not to look at JK as he climbed up on the frame of his bike. “Oh man!”
	Chase turned to see what she was gaping at. JK was standing on his frame as the bike rolled briskly along the edge of the waterfront, his broad shoulders making an absurd silhouette. Chase smiled and shrugged.
	“He’s not even on the asphalt anymore, it’s just concrete along the water…” Nicky said. And what if he fell in the water? “Those things make me nervous.” She focused on her gecko, which was leaning off her jacket to tongue the ground.
	“Ah, they’re not as dangerous as all that. I’m an old guy, so I remember when you could still ride them around,” he with a smirk. “Kids fell off them all the time… it was only in the ads that they fell under the wheels of passing convoy trucks.”
	Nicky felt queasy, remembering an ad of that kind where a woman was riding her bike with a baby seat into traffic. It was in slow motion — you fully expected her to be broad-sided and her and her baby to be brutally mangled. Instead, a car swerving to avoid her causes a three-car pile-up, and she rides off unscathed. It ends with a close up on the window of one of the wrecks where someone’s scrabbling to get out just before it explodes.
	Chase saw the look on her face. “I mean, people rode them for a hundred years before those ads came on,” he said.
	People did a lot of stupid things, Nicky thought. She wished he’d change the subject. That ad had given her nightmares for years.
	“Bikes are good fun,” Chase continued. “Right JK?”
	JK came up, riding on one wheel. He balanced there for a second, and then, with a quick move with his heel, hit the lever that disassembled it. He landed squarely on his feet in what Nicky had to admit was a pretty neat move.
	“Where’d you learn how to do that?” she said.
	“Where’d I learn how to do anything?” JK said with a smile.
	“Everyone used to know how to ride a bike,” Chase said. “But traffic got so bad people were always getting in accidents or collapsing from smog and then getting hit… it was either change the automotive industry or make a bunch of scary public service announcements…”
	Nicky shrugged. She’d heard conspiracy stories all her life — she’d been a fan of the genre, when she was, like, 12. The whole air thing seemed exaggerated as well. Her eyes started to sting after a few hours outside, it was true, but she had allergies.
	As it hissed and clicked closed, Chase asked, “There’s no smart parts in there at all? Not even in the rollup mech?”
	JK shook his head. “Nope. The Czechs are geniuses at simple machinery. Wanna give it a try?”
	Chase declined.
	“Nicky?” JK asked.
	Nicky was on the verge of refusing when she heard Chase’s bark of a laugh. A potent mix of contrariness and annoyance forced her to her feet.
	“Yeah, OK.”
	JK smiled with delight, unrolled the bike with a flick of his wrist. He adjusted it to her height. After placing the gecko into her pocket — it was nearly still, seeming to know something was happening — she lifted her leg over the frame. Grabbing a handful of JK’s shirt for balance, she stood up on the pedals and sat on the seat.
	Then, gritting her teeth and bracing for a fatal accident, she pushed off.
	Wobble wobble wobble straight straight straight! Nicky felt victory rise from her belly as real as the night air on her face. She kept on away from them, smiling as she heard their cheers, and headed around the Science World structure.
	The lights across the inlet, the commercial district, were bright enough to easily navigate by, but as she rounded the sphere it got decidedly darker. She looked up at the mostly residential hillside and tried to figure out if there were less lights now than a year ago…
	Shit is that a pole? Nicky swerved a little too tightly, and the bike fell over on top of her. “Fuck...” she said, struggling to extricate herself from the stupid thing. She got up quickly — she had fallen hip first, but the asphalt had cushioned her fall — and glanced backwards to see if she was within sight of the guys. They were hidden by the curve. Good.
	She started walking the bike the same direction she had been riding. Her hip was fine, probably wouldn’t even bruise. Her face was still burning, though, and she remembered an incident in the second grade, after a classmate had pushed her down. The playground security guard just lectured her about the playground being hard as stone when he was a kid — obviously having long forgotten the sting of humiliation that the new bouncy substance was powerless to reduce.
	It was a long way round, so Nicky decided to get back on the horse. A little more tentative than she had with her annoyance-fuelled first try, she nonetheless was able to pedal herself to a straight line. She kept her eyes in front of her this time.
	By the time Chase and JK were in sight, her eyes had adjusted to the darkness, and the relative brightness strained her eyes. She rolled up and swung off the bike.
	“There she is,” said JK. “Thought you found a way to ride on water.”
	Chase was lying down now, head propped up on one hand. “So you have ridden bikes before.”
	Nicky was trying to kick the same place where JK had. “Nope. First time.” She hit the lever just as JK was about to help, and it rolled up. She handed it to him, a little relieved and a little reluctant to be giving it up.
	“So is it the same kind of exhibits?” JK asked Chase.
	“Uh... kinda,” Chase said. “They have a Science World thing in Frisco,” he explained to Nicky.
	Nicky sat down and hugged her knees. “A Science World? That doesn’t make any sense!”
	“There’s no science there,” added JK.
	“I know, it’s kind of... they call it the Science and Technology Pavilion. They have these pavilions that they suggest you go to on your free hour. It’s a similar set-up though... you know the ball that when you touch it and your hair stands on end?”
	Nicky nodded. “To demonstrate static electricity, yeah, but there’s no —”
	“Don’t ask me,” Chase protested, “I know. Anyway, they have the same thing except that when it sticks out it starts to grow. So I did it, and everyone’s laughing, and when they turn off the ball my hair’s, like, super long.”
	JK laughed. “You with long hair. Ha! How long?”
	“Like, down to my butt. And I could swish it around and feel it on my back and stuff —”
	“But what does it have to do with science? It’s all a software demo,” Nicky said.
	“It’s a theme, I guess. Showing people familiar things. They had a zoo, too, and a shopping mall, that was really the most impressive —”
	“A zoo, huh?” Nicky said, staring at her little creation. “Any geckos at this zoo?”
	“No,” he said. “A giant lizard of some sort though.”
	“All cute or impressive, though, right?” she said. The gecko was flicking its tongue at her nose. She had given it a double-forked one, and it fanned her nose.
	“I guess so. I don’t remember any ugly and unimpressive animals, but I probably wouldn’t.” He laughed. “There was a unicorn there, I remember that.”
	Nicky hissed in response, and the gecko scuttled to the far side of her hand. “Unicorns suck. Why would it have to be a zoo? If they can do anything there, why not have the animals mixing with the humans? Why does it have to be the same old shit?”
	“It’s true, it’s pretty uncreative at the moment. It’s improved a lot, though,” Chase said. “I used to live there.”
	“Chase was in Frisco before it was Frisco,” JK said.
	“Oh yeah?” Nicky said, surprised. “Were you coding there?”
	“I think so…” Chase said, squinting his eyes in a pantomime of remembering.
	They all laughed.
	“Yeah. It was still a relief effort for those crippled by the Quake, and they were looking for anyone who could code… back in those days you actually had to go down to San Francisco — what was left of it — to uplink.”
	“Huh!” Nicky said. The brother of a friend in high school had gone as well, and she had thought he was brave. “How long were you there?”
	“For most of 2031, I guess. Ten or eleven months. Of course, it was just a blink of an eye to me — if I hadn’t been flashbacked in a different room from where I’d been processed for uplinking I wouldn’t have even noticed anything had happened.”
	“Wow,” Nicky said. She’d heard about the revert-to-saved transition but she’d never met anyone who’d been through it. It seemed so unfair.
	“It’s not so bad, now,” Chase said. “They make a full recording of your time in Frisco — although past a certain point…”
	“Who wants to sit through eleven months of life?” JK said. 
	“Exactly,” said Chase. “You’re invested in Frisco, once you stay a certain length of time.”
	“I guess you could fast-forward past the embarrassing or boring parts,” Nicky said, poking the gecko awake.
	“Your little guy wishes he could fast-forward this part,” JK said. “’Let’s go home, Nicky, I’m hungry!’ he’s thinking.” JK did the gecko in a soprano voice that made the little creature look at him.
	“One of my plans was to set up a service to edit people’s lifecordings for them,” Chase said. “But…”
	“No one comes back, practically,” Nicky finished. “You’re the first one I’ve met.”
	“Yeah,” JK said. “You freak of nature. What’s wrong with you? Everyone else’s having a great time over in Frisco!”
	Chase just shrugged. 
	“Tell her what you do now,” JK told Chase. When the older man rolled his eyes, JK said, “He does the menus for all the Ristwatch products.” JK mumbled into his watch.
	“Please hold your Ristwatch up to your eyes for retinal positioning,” Chase’s calm voice said from JK’s watch.
	“Please hold your Ristwatch up to your ass for rectal positioning,” the real Chase mimicked.
	They laughed, and the sudden noise startled the gecko. 
	“I knew your voice sounded familiar!” Nicky said.


She had plotted her walk home for maximum pleasure and minimum danger. Although the air would be cleaner with a little more rain, Nicky was happy to have a stretch of rainless days after the wet winter, taking shallow breaths and wondering for the thousandth time about getting a mask. Too damn geeky, she concluded for the thousandth-and-first time.
	She was walking along the edge of the Pleasant Acres neighbourhood, the leafy trees poking out from the bars of the 20-foot high fence. A few blocks in she could smell the green — imagined the oxygen sliding into her bloodstream. Better than an o-tube, she thought, but then stolen oxygen always tastes better.
	She passed the guardhouse at the entry gates, curiously looking in. She saw the outline of a KrazyCar in a driveway, its fins giving it a distinct silhouette. The first time she’d seen the tiny car advertised — it showed a dozen or so clowns bouncing out of it, although it was clearly only big enough for one — she had figured it’d be dead in the water, regardless of getting eighty miles to the charge. Guess that’s why I’m not a coolhunter…
	A block or so beyond the guardhouse she saw a person beside the gate, a big pile of something on the ground beside him. There was the familiar krac! and the pile, which was a person covered in blankets, jerked with the flow of electricity.
	Oh shit, thought Nicky, stopping in her tracks. The guard was putting his taser gun back into its holster and lazily heading back to the guardhouse. He noticed her and kept his hand on the laser.
	Nicky looked at the person-pile, who glowed and jerked. “They, you know, they’re just here because the air’s better. Two people died last year from oh-two deprivation, you know,” she said, repeating herself in her nervousness.
	The guard stopped in front of her, the brim of his hat shadowing his eyes. “She’s not allowed to camp on the property, miss.” He walked away.
	Nicky continued, numb. Then she whipped around. “As if electrocuting her is going to help!” she yelled, feeling lame.
	Her words had no noticeable effect on the guard’s lanky strides.
	As Nicky passed the twitching body, she could hear a whimpering, but she kept walking. At least she’s not dead...
	Pleasant Acres was ending, and it was separated from Joy Enclave by a freeway. She decided to walk along the side of the freeway, since otherwise she’d have to pass under it through a creepy and stinky underground tunnel.
	Fucking security. Torturing an old woman to protect a bunch of empty houses.
	She followed the little path for a couple of nervous minutes beside a flow of whizzing metal until it dipped down and under the freeway. She told her watch to turn on her halo field, and for a second she thought she had used up her minutes… but then it glowed bright enough to see. She was glad she had it, for the light as well as the protection — there were usually a few people sleeping there. No one tonight, though.
	As usual, Nicky was glad to get out from the shadow of the freeway bridge, even though the train yard wasn’t the safest place either. But she could keep to the wide open spaces out here, where there weren’t that many places for hypothetical attackers to lunge from. She figured she’d be able to turn on the protective field in time if someone came running across the field, so she turned off her halo.
	It’s not even that dark, Nicky said scornfully to her scared half. In fact, it seemed brighter than normal. She could see the individual rocks blackened to coal in between the long dead tracks, the strands of a weed that looked like wheat
	Ahead, she saw a boxcar that had a faint aura around it. She walked up to the boxcar and stopped, listening. She couldn’t hear anything, so she decided to proceed fieldless to save her minutes.
	She rounded the rotting artifact and discovered a spotlight trained on it, lighting up a strange design. The design looked new: a colourful image of a fat man sitting on a basketball, smoking a huge joint. Give it up, fatty, give up the fatty, give it up for the b-boyz and b-girlz were some of the words that Nicky read uncomprehendingly.
	What it meant was a puzzle; who had put it there was a bigger one. She couldn’t recognize any brands. Maybe Nike, with the basketball... maybe Marlboro, but they always spelled it “phatty” (something about the negative connotations of obesity, she remembered from class). And the image was so rough, the paint wasn’t solid in places...
	Fear pulled her out of her reverie when she remembered where she was. She turned around quickly, the solid wall of the boxcar at her back, and looked around as best she could with the spotlight in her face. A bit to her right, she noticed another spotlit boxcar and what looked like two figures facing it.
	Were they the people behind these things? she thought, apprehensive but curious. “Protective field,” she said, and as the halo surrounded her, she headed towards them. What were they doing?
	They looked like they were working on a picture similar to the other one. As she got closer, she could hear a hissing sound starting and stopping, and the murmur of their voices. The bearded one stopped and shook something that made a clicking sound, noticing her as he did so.
	“Good evening,” he said with a mock formality.
	“Hi,” said Nicky, stepping into the light pool.
	The other one looked at her, his angular black face showing nothing.
	The first one, who had his hair in thick brown ropes, asked “So you enjoying the show?”
	A show? She noticed that they weren’t painting from scratch, but instead tracing over a design. “Why are you doing this?” she asked, feeling stupid but asking anyway.
	“We’re restorin’ some of Vancouver’s finest art,” the bald black man said, his face serious. “These pieces date back to the early nineties.”
	“They’re paintings,” Nicky said, understanding. She was glad she hadn’t asked if they were ads. The painting of interlocking shapes they were working on took up the entire surface, except for a small patch where it wound around the letters CN. But then Nicky realized that they weren’t interlocking shapes after all — they were letters.
	“Virus,” she read aloud. “Virus CN?”
	“Canadian National is the brand of the boxcar,” the bald man said. “Virus is the tag.” He tossed the can he was holding and walked away.
	“Graffiti artists had codenames, or tags, that they used to sign their work,” said the man with the beard. “Get me another orange, willya Andre?”
	Andre was unzipping a small green tent beside the boxcar. “If we have one.”
	“These paints are really hard to find. Krylon stopped making them when flashing got big,” the bearded man said. He yawned and pulled at his ropes of hair as if to keep himself alert.
	“Why don’t you just flash these things?” Nicky said. “You could just scan it in and adjust the colour levels.”
	The bearded man laughed, a glimpse of tattooed teeth. Andre came back and handed a can to him, popped the cap off his own. “Hey Andre, she wants to know why we don’t just flash these things.”
	Andre snorted through his nose. Nicky felt her face begin to burn.
	The bearded man held his hands up, as if he detected her growing annoyance. “OK, so there were these graffiti artists. In the eighties, nineties. They used the city as a canvas. Made these murals, sometimes with permission of the wall owners, sometimes without.”
	“Usually without,” Andre interjected between his can’s hissing.
	“Yeah well, some of them decided that it wasn’t fair to keep all this talent and art in the city — so they snuck into the train yards at night.” He thumbed back to the painting. “And did up some freight trains.”
	Nicky waited for the point. “Uh huh.”
	“Well, I mean, they did up ones that were active. And the people who drove the trains didn’t have the time to paint over them — they couldn’t just flash them blank like nowadays. So imagine this. You’re on your way to, I don’t know, your grain silo, you’re in your truck in the middle of Saskatchewan. You come to the train tracks and you stop cause there’s a train coming.”
	“And these boxcars are on it?” Nicky guessed.
	“Exactly!” the bearded guy said, slapping his hands together. “So this guy’s sitting there, getting a surprise art show. So these graffiti artists basically exported urban culture to the countryside.”
	Andre looked at him, his even white teeth showing in a slight smile. “Exporting urban culture. Exporting ego, more like.”
	Nicky laughed.
	“I’m serious!” the bearded guy said. With his eyes bright like that, Nicky saw that he wasn’t as old as he had seemed at first. She wasn’t used to seeing young guys with beards. “I know it was ego too, and they didn’t think of it like that, exactly — but that’s the beautiful thing about it. It was all accidental, kinda. And to get to your question, the traditional graf scene died out with the flashing technology. ’Cause it was super hard to get paint, and even if you did get a piece up it’d be flashed off in a second. There were a few writers who got into flash pieces—”
	Andre shook his head. “Not the same. Not the same.”
	“Yeah,” the bearded guy shrugged with one shoulder. “It was pretty much over.”
	“So it would be kind of sacrilegious to flash them,” Nicky guessed.
	“Exactly. Exactly!” the bearded man said. He held his hand flat to his chest. “My name’s Simon,” he said. “This’s Andre.”
	“Nicky.” She waved, not ready to turn off her field to shake hands.
	“Well Nicky,” Simon said. “I’m glad you came across our art show. Where are you coming from?”
	Nicky smiled as she realized it for the first time. “An art show.”
	They laughed at that. “You must be an artist,” Andre said, not turning around.
	“Kinda,” Nicky said. “Not like this, really. Not painting. I make little animals.” She would have shown them the gecko but it always hid when her field was activated. Not really representative of my style, anyway. She felt a need to impress this strange pair, but ended up tongue-tied. As usual.
	“Oh yeah,” Simon continued, when it was clear she wasn’t going to elaborate. “Splicing, cloning, that kind of thing?” His eyes seemed interested.
	“Yeah. I’ve got this series of ratdog splices that has a kind of mythic theme,” she said, trying not to wince. God, that sounded pretentious.
	“Sounds yum,” he said appreciatively. “Are you showing somewhere?”
	“No no,” Nicky said, already wishing she hadn’t said anything. “I’m just fooling around. I haven’t got a chance at sponsorship. No one’ll touch biologicals.”
	“Good for you,” said Andre. “That means you’re the real thing.”
	Nicky was afraid he was mocking her, even though Simon was nodding at her, and she didn’t have the energy to sort out what the hell they were talking about. “I gotta go,” she said suddenly with a lame smile. “Bye.”
	She walked away, out of their weird circle of light and towards home.


As soon as Doug shut the door behind him, he felt something hit his lower body. Something soft. He pried her off and lifted her up. “Olivia,” he said, looking into her green eyes. “Trying to kill me?”
	“Hi Dad,” she said with a calm smile that belied her projectile state just moments before. She lunged forward and planted a kiss. “Whatja get me?”
	He dropped her.
	“JJ Dad, JJ,” she said, hugging his leg. Just Joking or not, it was not what he wanted to hear with McDonald’s gas still roiling in his belly. Should have picked her up one of those toys there.
	He walked into the living room, pretending like Olivia wasn’t clinging to his leg. His wife was watching some comedy show. “Hey Sweetie,” she said, glancing at him briefly.
	“Looks like I picked up a parasite somewhere, Cheryl,” he said in a serious voice. Olivia quietly giggled.
	He had Cheryl’s full attention now. Her face, slack from watching her show, now cycled through amusement and feigned worry.
	“Down here on my leg,” Doug said, putting his hands on his hips. 
	Cheryl leaned over on the couch arm and saw Olivia. “Uh oh,” she said with a smile. “That looks really bad, Doug. Why, it almost looks... it almost looks like a little girl.”
	“I am a little girl!” said Olivia. “Not a parachute.” 
	“Yes,” Doug said. “I believe it’s the littlegirlus parasite again. I’m going to have to operate.” He wiggled his long piano-player fingers and descended on Olivia. He tickled her methodically and mercilessly.
	“Daaaaaaaaad!” she screamed.
	“My, the parasite certainly makes a lot of noise,” said Cheryl with a grin.
	“It’s probably just gas being released,” explained Doug, stopping for a second. Olivia took the moment to hold on tighter. “Hmm. This is a tough one. Would you give me a hand with the operation?”
	“Certainly!”
	Seeing her mother rise from the couch, Olivia ceded defeat and let go.
	“The growth has apparently dropped off on its own,” noted Doug.
	“The growth,” Cheryl snorted, heading for the kitchen.
	Doug immediately went to the television and turned down the zoom — Cheryl would always fill the room given her own choice, but Doug liked it small. The stand-up comic shrunk down to about a foot. He strutted around on the table as the unseen audience roared. When it died down, he said, “...And that’s why I always date locally.” The audience exploded, and Doug turned the volume down a bit.
	Olivia had flumped down on the couch. Doug sat on the other side. Her tiny body stretched out to take up as much room as possible. It wasn’t very much.
	“Well?” he said. “What happened today?”
	“Stupid stuff,” she said. “Nothing.” With her white-blond curls framing her face and her arms at her sides, she looked like a doll.
	Doug waited.
	“Just like... we went to school. There was a new kid today, a girl with ugly shoes.”
	That was strange. Middle of the term. “Did her school close down too?”
	“Maybe. I don’t know. This new school is so stupid. They don’t even have any games at recess, the kids have to make their own.”
	“That’s too bad,” Doug said lamely. He remembered reading in the parents’ letter they had gotten that after the move to Frisco, the school would be expanding their recess game options. The move will allow us to engage your children, both at work and at play, in a manner heretofore unimaginable! Doug had told himself it was just ad copy (and overly wordy ad copy at that), but he still felt guilty.
	There was a new stand-up comedian on, a really old guy with a slight hunched. “What is up with Self?” he was saying, holding out his palm. Doug realized, more from the voice and the body language, that it was Jerry Seinfeld.
	“So you sign up for this plan, and you’re instantly transported to this place... this place that looks like San Francisco, sounds like San Francisco, but is actually just a box in some room somewhere. I got that part. It’s like e-mailing your brain.” The audience roared at Jerry’s old-man shtick, and he held up a hand to quiet them down. 
	Doug sighed.
	“But what happens to your body? Supposedly, they take your body away to some secret location... and do something to it. I’m sorry, but doesn’t that sound like something they should be paying you to do? Back in my day, you’d get dinner and a couple of drinks outta it at least!”
	Doug laughed, despite himself. Olivia looked at him, stone faced.
	“He’s funny, hey?” Doug said.
	“Funny looking,” Olivia said, echoing one of Doug’s favourite lines.
	They cracked up. “Delivery,” Doug’s watch said.
	Doug got up, wondering what it was. He asked his watch to show him what was out there, and he got a still of a young Chinese boy with a box beamed to his eye.
	He opened the door and, for a horrified moment, realized he couldn’t pay him. He nearly shut the door but instead stood frozen as the boy handed him the box and left.
	Cheryl paid for it already. Thank god. He shut and locked the door behind him. He took off his shoes, numbly, mechanically. As he walked with the box to the kitchen he started to get mad at Cheryl. Why was she ordering out for di