Rainbows End

The Mysterious Stranger

Even after three weeks, Robert and Juan still did most of their studying in person, right after classes let out. They would walk out to the bleachers and one ignoramus would endeavor to teach the other.

Occasionally Fred and Jerry Radner would tag along, unofficial third and fourth ignoramuses. The twins had teamed with each other in Chumlig's composition class, but they seemed to take innocent pleasure in following Robert's progress, offering advice that was more colorful than Juan's, but rarely as useful.

Then there was the fifth ignoramus. Xiu Xiang had chickened out of Creative Composition, but she was still taking her other courses at Fairmont. And like Robert, she was learning to wear; nowadays she wore a frilly, beaded blouse — another kind of Epiphany beginner's outfit. She was there the afternoon when Robert and Juan ran into the Chileans. This was out on the track that circled the athletics field. No one else seemed to be around; the varsity teams wouldn't be here for a while yet.

Miri — > Juan: Hey! Wake up, Orozco. Flag down .

Juan — > Miri: Sorry, I didn't see them.

Miri — > Juan: You missed them yesterday, too. Flag them before they shift to the Radners. I told you these guys would make good practice.

Juan — > Miri: Okay, okay!

"Hey," Juan said abruptly, "Dr. Gu, Xiu. Look!" He shipped an enum capability to Robert's Epiphany. It was just like the targets they'd been working with the last few days. The kid claimed that if you practiced, this kind of interaction was as natural as looking at where another person was pointing. It wasn't that easy for Robert Gu. He stopped and squinted at the icon. By default that should force access. Nothing. He tapped on his phantom keypad. He noticed Xiang, a few feet away, doing the same.

… And then suddenly there were a half-dozen students in evidence, all jabbering in Spanish.

Miri — > Juan, Lena, Xiu: Okay, I think Robert sees them.

Lena — > Juan, Miri, Xiu: I see them! Can you, Xiu?

Xiu — > Juan, Lena, Miri: no yet i must —

Miri — > Juan, Lena, Xiu: Don't try to message back, Dr. Xiang. You're not fast enough yet; Robert will get suspicious. Just talk out loud, as if to him and Juan.

Xiang was silent for a moment, her fingers still tapping. She was even worse at wearing than he was. But then she said, "Yes, I do see them!" She glanced at Juan Orozco. "Who are they?"

"Friends of Fred and Jerry, from way south. Chile."

Miri — > Juan: Tell them to play synch monster.

Juan — > Miri: Okay.

Juan rattled Spanish at the visitors, almost too fast for Robert to understand. Something about helping beginners with a monster.

The others' Spanish was even less intelligible. But maybe that didn't matter. The visitors stepped back, and the space was filled with a shambling purple something .

Xiang laughed. "I see that too. But the creature… it's not even pretending to be real."

Robert leaned close to the lopsided vision. "It's pretending to be a stuffed animal," with crudely stitched seams and tufts of stuffing peeking from between the joints. But the vision was almost seven feet tall, and when Robert approached, it shambled back from him.

Robert laughed, "I've read about these things."

Lena — > Juan, Miri, Xiu: I looked it up, Xiu. You move, it moves. But each of you can only control a part of it.

"Oh." Xiu Xiang stepped forward, blocking the creature's retreat. Its rear legs stopped but the front kept pushing, and it almost tipped over.

Miri — > Juan: Say the goal is to make it do a graceful dance.

Juan said, "The goal is we all cooperate to make it move. Dance around it, Xiu."

She did. Music followed her motion. The creature's rear legs reengaged, and its butt end seemed to track her march. The children from Chile thought that was hilarious.

When Robert cocked his wrist and wiggled a beat, the music came up.

Juan began clapping, and the beast's shoulders twitched to the music. The children from the Far South watched silently for a moment. They looked as solid as the real Juan and Xiu Xiang, but they were no more expert than most San Diego users. Their shadows went the wrong way, and their feet had only a casual acquaintance with the surface of the lawn. But after an instant, the Chileans seemed to hear the music and began clapping too. And now the critter's tail — their domain in this game? — began pumping up and down.

Robert expanded on his gestures, grabbing control of the creature's floppy claws. For a moment, the monster danced in synch with the music, each gesture consistent. But the network delay was about half a second, and worse, it varied randomly from a tiny fraction of a second to well over a second. The dance got wilder as errors were corrected and overcorrected, until the tail was whacking at the heel claws. The creature rotated onto its back and its legs flailed in random directions.

Lena — > Juan, Miri, Xiu: That was fun!

"Damn!" said Robert.

But everybody was laughing, and not at any particular victim. One by one, the faraway children disappeared, till only the real people were left, Robert and Juan and Xiu Xiang.

"We could have done better, Juan!"

Lena — > Xiu: See? He's always complaining. Give him another minute and he'll be making sly claims that you are to blame for everything that went wrong.

Juan was still laughing. "I know, I know. But the network link was basura más odiosa . There are game companies who give you cheapnet for free, because it makes everyone so mad they upgrade to paying status."

"Well then why did we try?"

"Hey, to practice. For fun."

Robert remembered the inept international choir down at UCSD. "We should have used a metronome. Can you bring these kids back?"

"Nah, we were just… like waving to each other. You know, in passing."

In passing. "I didn't see them at all until you showed them to me. How busy is the aether?" Robert slashed the air with his hand. How many realities burbled immanent?

"Out here in public, it's lots too busy to view all at once. There's probably three or four hundred nodes in line of sight of your Epiphany. Each of those could manage dozens of overlays. In a crowd there'd be hundreds of active realities, and bazillions potentially — "

Miri — > Juan: Don't go there. My grandfather is smart enough to add up teeny clues and guess at us invisibles.

Juan — > Miri: Yeah? Well you're making one clue yourself. Showing Mrs. Gu visible to Xiu just confuses her. Look how she avoids where you have Lena standing.

The boy seemed to lose his train of thought. "Of course, when there are just two or three people around, the laser traffic is mostly just a potential."

They walked farther along the track, the boy demonstrating how to surf through the public views. Robert and Xiu Xiang practiced at his direction, sometimes achieving a consensus view. Xiang seemed more relaxed than at the beginning of the walk; at least she was walking a bit closer to Juan and Robert.

But Xiu didn't respond when Robert joked, "I'd say we're getting to be truly awful."

Lena — > Xiu: See!

Robert wondered at what a weird duck this Xiang woman was.

Xiu Xiang was weird in other ways. Though she had dropped the composition class because she was too shy to perform in front of others, she loved the shop class. Every day she seemed to be playing with something new from the class inventory. That was the only time she was clearly happy, smiling and humming to herself. Some of her projects were obvious to the new Robert, some he could make good guesses about. She was happy to explain them. "Maybe there aren't any 'user-serviceable parts' inside," she said, "but what I've built, I understand!" She was doing the equivalent of a student semester project every day, and enjoying every minute of it.

Xiu wasn't entirely crazy; normally she didn't show up when Robert Gu was teaching Juan. Robert had never taught children, and he didn't like incompetents. For all Juan's good intentions, he was both. And now Robert was pretending to teach him to write.

"It's easy, Juan," Robert heard himself say. Lies on top of pretense ! Well, maybe not: writing crap was easy. Twenty years of teaching graduate poetry seminars had shown him that. Writing well was a different thing. Writing beauty that sings was something that no amount of schooling could teach. The geniuses must take care of themselves. Juan Orozco was distinctly less able than the students of Robert's experience. By twentieth-century standards he was subliterate… except where he needed words to access data or understand results. Okay, perhaps he was not subliterate. Maybe there was some other word for these crippled children. Paraliterate? And I bet I can teach him to write crap, too .

So they sat high in the bleachers, pounding words across the sky, Juan Orozco oblivious of the runners below and the games far away. There came a time when he didn't play with his fonts anymore.

There came a day when he wrote something that had affect and image. It was not utter crap. It was almost up to the standards of muddled cliche. The boy stared into the sky for half a minute, his jaw slack. "That is so… bitchin'. The words, they make me see things." His gaze flickered sideways, to Robert. A smile spread across his face. "You with wearing, me with writing. We're getting really good!"

"Perhaps equally so." But Robert couldn't help smiling back.

A week passed. Most evenings, Robert had interviews with Zulfi Sharif. After school and sometimes on weekends, he and Juan worked together. Much of that was remote now. They were still flailing around for a semester project. More and more, Robert was intrigued with the problem of far coordination. Games, music, sports, it all got jittery beyond a few thousand miles and a couple dozen routers. The boy had bizarre plans for how they might put everything together. "We could do something with music, manual music. That's lots easier than game synchronization." Robert went for hours at a time without thinking about his demented, maimed condition.

These school projects were more interesting to the new Robert Gu than Sharif's admiring interviews — and far more interesting than his occasional visits to UCSD. The library shredding had been temporarily suspended, apparently due to the demonstration and his own unintendedly dramatic appearance there. But without the demonstrators, the library was a dead place. Modern students didn't have much use for it. There was just Winnie's "Elder Cabal" up on the sixth floor, rebels whose cause was suddenly on hold.

Robert and Xiu Xiang had mastered most of the Epiphany defaults. Now when he looked at a real object in "just that way," explanations would pop up. With the proper squint or stare at attendant icons, he got the added detail he wanted. Look at the object a different way, and he often could see through and beyond it! Xiu wasn't as good as Robert with the visuals. On the other hand, if she didn't get flustered, she was better at audio searches: when you heard a word you didn't know, if you could tag it, then search results would appear automatically. That explained the marvelous vocabulary — and equally marvelous screwups — he noticed in the children's language.

Miri — > Juan: You should tell him that the nondefaults are a lot harder.

Juan — > Miri: Okay.

"You know, Dr. Gu, you and Xiu are, um, really good with the defaults. But we should work on the nondefaults, too."

Xiang nodded. She was remote today, too, though not as realistically as Juan Orozco. Her image was perfectly solid, but her feet were melted into the bleacher bench in front of her, and occasionally he got glimpses of — background? Her apartment? He kidded her about that, but as usual when he made a joke, it just made her even more quiet.

Lena –> Juan, Miri, Xiu: What! What did he see?

Miri — > Juan, Lena, Xiu: Not to worry. Xiu has a good background filter. Besides, you're in the kitchen and she's sitting in the living room.

Robert turned back to Juan. "So what are the most useful nondefaults?"

"Well, there's silent messaging. The bit rate is so low, it works when nothing else does."

"Yes! I've read about sming. It's like the old instant messaging, except no one can see you're communicating."

Juan nodded. "That's how most people format it."

Lena — > Juan, Miri, Xiu: No! Let the SOB learn sming on his own!

Miri — > Juan, Lena, Xiu: Please, Lena!

Juan –> Lena, Miri, Xiu: It's something everyone uses, ma'am.

Lena — > Juan, Miri, Xiu: I said no! He's already sneaky enough.

The boy hesitated."… but it takes a lot of practice to do it smoothly. It can be more trouble than it's worth when you get caught." Maybe he was remembering run-ins with his teachers?

Xiang sat forward on the bench. She was leaning on some invisible piece of furniture. "Well, what are some other things?"

"Ah! Lots of stuff. If you override the defaults you can see in any direction you want. You can qualify default requests — like to make a query about something in an overlay. You can blend video from multiple viewpoints so you can 'be' where there is no physical viewpoint. That's called ghosting. If you're really slick, you can run simulations in real time and use the results as physical advice. That's how the Radners do so well in baseball. And then there's the problem of faking results if you hit a network soft spot, or if you want a sender to look more realistic — " The boy rattled on, but now Robert was able enough to record the words; he would have to come back to this.

Lena — > Juan, Miri, Xiu: The monster's eyes are glazing over. I think you've distracted him, Juan.

Xiu said, "Okay, let's start with the easiest, Juan."

"That would be moving attention from face front." The boy talked them through some simple exercises. Robert had no idea how this looked to Xiu Xiang. After all, she was already remote. For himself, looking directly backwards was easy, especially if he took the view off his own shirt. But Juan didn't want him to use mirror orientation; he said that would just be confusing once he moved on to other angles.

Without the defaults, things got very tedious. "I'll spend my whole life just tapping in commands, Juan."

"Maybe if we use the eye menus," Xiang said. Robert gave her an irritated look. "I am, I am!"

Lena — > Xiu: Never criticize him. He'll get back at you when it hurts the most.

Xiang's gaze dropped from his. He looked at Juan. "I never see you tapping your fingers."

"I'm a kid; I grew up with ensemble coding. Hey, even my mom mostly uses phantom typing."

"Well, Xiu and I are retreads, Juan. We have learning plasticity and all that. Teach us the command gestures or eyeblinks or whatever."

"Okay! But this is not like the standard gestures you've already learned. For the good stuff, everything is custom between you and your wearable. The skin sensors pick muscle twinges that other people can't even see. You teach your Epiphany and it teaches you."

Robert had read about this. It turned out to be just as weird as it sounded, a cross between learning to juggle and teaching some dumb animal to help you juggle! He and Xiu Xiang had about twenty minutes to make fools of themselves before the soccer teams came out to play. But that was long enough that now Robert could look all around himself with just a subtle shrug.

Juan was smiling. "You guys are really good, for — "

" — for oldfolks?" said Xiu.

Juan's smile broadened. "Yeah." He looked at Robert. "If you can do this maybe I can learn to put words together… Look, I gotta go help my ma. She's running a tour this afternoon. See you all tomorrow, okay?"

"Okay," said Xiang. "I should leave too. How is that most gracefully accomplished?"

"Ha! Most graceful takes practice — but I want it to look cool to anyone watching." He pointed at the teams rowdying about on the soccer field. "For them, I mean. So how about if I iconify-and-guide you, Dr. Xiang?"

"Very good."

Xiang's image collapsed into a ruby point of light.

The boy stood and grinned at Robert. "I think I have the geometry good enough that no one has to cooperate on the receiving side." His image climbed down the bleachers. His shadow matching was much better than Sharif normally managed. Xiang's icon tagged along right above his shoulder. He reached the grass and walked away along the edge of the bleachers, his figure shortening in perspective.

And then abruptly, golden letters hung across Robert's vision.

Xiang — > Gu: See you tomorrow!

Huh. So that's what silent messaging looked like. Robert watched the two till they were out of sight.

Lena — > Miri, Xiu: Wow! I can't tell Juan's image from the real people. That boy is clever.

Miri — > Lena, Xiu: He did okay.

Robert had no more classes. He could go home now, too. There were plenty of rides available; the cars flocked to the traffic circle when the children were going home. But just now, Robert wasn't keen on getting back to Fallbrook. He saw that Miri would be arriving home in a few minutes. Bob was on watch duty tonight — whatever that meant. Any run-in with Miri would bring Alice Gu into action. Robert was amazed that he'd ever thought his daughter-in-law was smooth and diplomatic. In a subtle way, she was scary. Or maybe it was simply that Robert realized that if Alice ever became determined, he would be exiled to "Rainbows End." (He'd never been able to decide if that spelling was the work of an everyday illiterate or someone who really understood the place.)

Okay, so hang around school and watch. There were dynamics here that were unchanged since his childhood, perhaps unchanged since the beginning of human history. He would rebuild his sense of superiority. He climbed to the south corner of the bleachers, far above the kids forming up soccer teams, and even clear of the secretive children who sat at the other end making barely veiled jokes about everyone else.

Miri — > Lena, Xiu: He should be going home now.

Lena — > Miri, Xiu: Not my monster. See the far look in his eyes? He's thinking about everything that's happened, figuring out just how to cause Xiu grief.

Xiu — > Lena, Miri: He has seemed pretty normal since he went crazy in shop class.

Xiu — > Lena, Miri: No, Lena, please use silent messaging. I know I just sat down by you at the kitchen table. But I want to get some practice.

Lena — > Miri: Sigh. Xiu's a dear, but she can be so obsessive.

Xiu — > Lena: Yoo-hoo, Lena! What are you typing to Miri?

The sun was lowering behind him, and the shadow of the bleachers extended partway onto the field. He had a naked-eye view of most of the campus. In fact, the buildings looked like junk, the sort of thing you used to buy mail-order if you needed some extra storage in your backyard. But it wasn't all new junk. The school's main auditorium was wood, rebuilt here and there with plastic. According to the labels he called up on overlay, it had originally been a pavilion for showing horses!

Xiu — > Lena, Miri: I think he's just training his Epiphany.

Focus on the soccer field. That looked like something from Bobby's school years — if you didn't mind the fact that there were no line marks or goals. Robert brought up the sports view, and now he could see the usual field layout. The soccer kids moved out onto the field. They wore crash equipment, real helmets, quite unlike what he remembered. The kids' high-pitched voices wafted direct to him without any magic of modern electronics. They circled around midfield, seemed to be listening to someone.

With a whoop, the teams rushed toward each other, chasing — what?

An unseen ball? Robert searched frantically through his options, saw a flickering parade of possible overlays. Aha ! Now the teams had spectacular uniforms, and there were umpires. In the bleachers, there was a scattering of adults — teachers? parents? — what you'd expect for a contest that was more a class event than varsity sport.

Xiu — > Lena, Miri: What is that game?

Miri — > Lena, Xiu: Egan soccer.

Xiu — > Lena, Miri: He's just watching the game, Lena.

Lena — > Miri, Xiu: Maybe.

Xiu — > Lena, Miri: I think Juan is right about him, Lena. Let me talk to him. You'd still be covered.

Xiu — > Lena: Don't be that way.

Robert still couldn't see the soccer ball. Instead, the field was now covered by a golden fog. In places it came almost to the players' waists. Tiny numbers floated within the mist, changing with the thickness and brightness of the glow. When the players of opposing teams rushed into close contact, the glow flared brightly, and the children would angle around each other as if trying to line up a kick. And then the light would erupt like an arc of wildfire across the field.

Xiu — > Lena, Miri: What about Sharif, Miri? You use him to talk to Robert, right?

Miri — > Lena, Xiu: Yes. I thought Sharif would be a perfect cat's-paw. He has the right academic background to talk to Robert. And he has terrible personal hygiene! It was easy to take him over. Trouble is, so did somebody else. Mostly we're getting in each other's way. Hey!

Xiu — > Lena, Miri: I've lost all the close-up views on your grandfather.

Miri — > Lena, Xiu: We've lost local audio, too. That was seamless. I didn't know Robert was that swift.

Lena — > Miri, Xiu: I warned you.

One child broke away from the others and raced along the golden fire, somehow guessing just where and when it would flare up. The girl gave an odd, flailing kick — and landed on her rear. For an instant there was a light in the nearest goal, so sharp and intense it was as if all the fog had suddenly coalesced into the fuzzy image of a soccer ball. Everybody was shouting, even the phantom adults in the bleachers.

Robert made a grumpy noise. Even something as simple as a schoolyard game didn't make sense. He pulled at his cuff, trying to get a clearer view.

"It's not your fault, my man. You're seeing properly." The voice seemed to be coming from right beside him. Robert glanced over, but there was no body to keep the voice company. He stared into the empty space, and after a moment, the voice continued. "Just look at the scoreboard. Everything is fuzzy about this game, even the score." On the big scoreboard facing the bleachers, the goal was recorded as 0.97. "I do think that should be rounded to one. That was an excellent, near-certain goal the girl kicked." On the field, the teams had retreated to their sides. Another phantom kickoff was in progress.

Robert kept his eyes on the action below. He didn't reply to the helpful voice. "You don't recognize the game, do you, Professor? It's Egan soccer. See — " A reference floated across his vision, everything anyone could want to know about Egan soccer. Out on the field, three kids had fallen over, and two had collided. "Of course," the voice continued, "it's really just an approximation to the ideal."

"I'll bet," said Robert, and he almost smiled. The stranger's tone was confiding, the speech affected — and almost every sentence was a mild put-down. It was a pleasure to run into a type he understood so well. He turned and looked into the empty space. "Run along, kid. You're a long way from being able to play head games with me."

"I don't play games, my man." The reply started out angry, segued back to patronizing good humor. "You are an interesting case, Robert Gu. I'm used to manipulating people, but usually through intermediaries. I'm much too busy to chat with bottom dwellers directly. But you intrigue me."

Robert pretended to watch the game, but the voice continued, "I know what's eating you up inside. I know how much it bothers you that you can't make poetry anymore."

Robert couldn't suppress a start of surprise. The invisible stranger gave a little chuckle; somehow he had distinguished the movement from Robert's natural twitchiness. "No need to be coy. You can't disguise your reactions here. The medical sensing on school grounds is so good that you might as well be hooked up to a lie detector."

I should just walk away . Instead he watched the "soccer" match for a few moments. When he was sure he had proper control of his voice, he said, "You are admitting to a crime, then."

Another chuckle. "Of sorts, though it's the crime of superior network skills. You can think of me as something of a higher being, empowered by all the tools with which mortal men have chosen to smarten the landscape."

This must be a kid . Or maybe not. Maybe the visitor was invisible because even his virtual presence on school grounds was a violation of law. Robert shrugged. "I'd be happy to report your 'superior network skills' to interested parties."

"You won't do that. Primus, because the police could never identify me. Secundus, because I can return to you what you have lost. I can give you back your poetical voice."

This time, Robert was in control and managed a creditable chuckle of his own.

"Ah," said the other, "such suspicion. But also the beginning of belief! You should read the news, or just loosen up your ad filters. In olden times, you had athletes on steroids and students on amphetamines. Those drugs were largely false promises. Nowadays, we have things that really work."

A drug dealer, by God ! Robert almost laughed for real. But then he considered himself, his smooth skin, his ability to run and jump and scarcely feel out of breath. What's already happened would be magic by the standards of my past life . Yes, this might be a drug dealer, but so what? "Where's the profit in drugs for recovering world-class poesy?" Robert spoke the words with proper flippancy, then realized how much he was revealing. Maybe that didn't matter.

"You are so old-fashioned, Professor." The stranger paused. "See those hills to the south of you?" Hills covered with endless housing. "A few miles beyond them is one of the few places on Earth where physical location is still important."

"UCSD?"

"Close. I mean the biotech labs that surround the campus. What goes on in those labs is nothing like twentieth-century medical research. Modern cures are awesome things, but often they are unique to the individual patient."

"You can't finance research that way."

"Don't get me wrong. Broad-spectrum cures are still the big moneymakers. But even those use custom analysis to guard against side effects. Yes, you are a singleton case. The Alzheimer cures are sometimes incomplete, but the failures are idiosyncratic. There is no other great poet who's had your problem. As of today , there is no cure." This clown knew how to mix the brutal putdowns with flattery. "But we live in an age of enhancement drugs, Professor, and many of them are singleton hits. There is a chance, a very good chance, that the labs can be caused to find you a cure."

Magic. But what if he can do it? This is The Future. And I am alive again, and maybe — Robert felt the hope growing within him. He couldn't help it. This SOB has me. I know it's manipulation, but that doesn't matter .

"So who am I dealing with, O Mysterious Stranger?" It was a losing question, but it just slipped out.

"Mysterious Stranger? Um — " There was a pause, no doubt as this para-literate looked up the reference. "Why yes, you got my name on the very first try! Mysterious Stranger. That is good."

Robert gritted his teeth. "And I take it that getting your help involves something dangerous or illegal."

"Definitely illegal, Professor. And somewhat dangerous — for you, that is. Whatever might cure you would be pushing into unknown medical territory. But at the same time, very much worth it, don't you think?"

Yes ! "Maybe." Robert kept the tension out of his voice, and glanced mildly at the empty space beside him. "What's the price? What do you want from me?"

The stranger laughed. "Oh, don't worry. I simply want cooperation with a project you're already involved in. Keep seeing your pals at the UCSD library. Go along with their plans."

"And keep you up-to-date on them?"

"Ah, no need for that, my man. I am an all-encompassing cloud of knowingness. No, what I need is your hands. Think of yourself as a droid who was once a poet. So, Professor, do we have a deal?"

"I'll think about it."

"Once you do, I'm sure you'll sign."

"In blood, I suppose?"

"Oh, you're so old-fashioned, Professor. No blood. Not yet."

Lieutenant Colonel Robert Gu, Jr., had brought work home from the office. That's how he thought of it anyway, when he worked in the time that both he and Alice thought should be theirs and Miri's. But Miri had her own studying to do tonight, and Alice… well, her latest assignment was the worst yet. She wandered about, stony-faced and terse. Anyone else in her position would be dead by now, or a raving lunatic. Somehow she hung on, often simulating something like her natural self, and successfully managing the prep for her latest assignment. That's why the Corps keeps driving her harder and harder .

Bob pushed the thought away. There was a reason for such sacrifice. Chicago was more than a decade past. There hadn't been a successful nuclear attack on the U.S. or any of the treaty organization countries in more than five years. But the threat was always there. He still had nightmares about the launchers at that orphanage in Asuncion, and what he had almost done to shut them down. And as always, the web oozed with rumors of new technologies that would make the classical weapons obsolete. Despite ubiquitous security, despite the efforts of America, China, and the Indo-Europeans, the risks kept growing. There would still be places that would come to glow in the dark.

Bob sifted through the latest threat assessments. Something was in the wind, and it might be closer than Paraguay. The really bad news was two paragraphs further on: An analyst pool at CIA thought the Indo-Europeans might be somehow collaborating with bad guys. Christ! If the Great Powers can't stand together, how can humanity make it through this century ?

There was motion behind him. It was his father, standing in the doorway.

"Dad," he acknowledged politely.

His old man stared for a second. Bob made the general form of his paperwork visible.

"Oops. Sorry, Son. You're working?" He squinted at Bob's desk.

"Yeah, some stuff from the office. Don't worry if it looks blurry; it's not on the house menu."

"Ah. I, I was wondering if I could ask you some questions."

Bob hoped he didn't look too surprised; this diffident approach was a first. He waved for his father to take a seat. "Sure."

"At school today, I was talking to someone. Voice only. The caller could have been on the other side of the world, right?"

"Yes," said Bob. "If it was from far away, you might notice."

"Right. Jitter and latency."

Is he just parroting jargon ? Before he lost his mind, Dad had been a technical ignoramus. Bob remembered once in the days of very-dumb-phones when Dad insisted that his new cordless handset was a cheap substitute for a cellphone. Mother had proven him wrong by having Bob take the cordless down the street and try to call her home-business number.

She'd rarely made mistakes like that; the old man had been hell on her for weeks afterward.

Dad was nodding to himself. "I suppose timing analysis could reveal a lot."

"Yes. Your average high-school student is good at both sides of that game." If you hadn't ruined things, you could learn all this from Miri .

His old man looked away, introspective. Worried?

"Is someone hassling you at school, Dad?" The thought was boggling.

Robert gave one of his old malevolent chuckles. "Someone is trying to hassle me."

"Um. Maybe you should talk to your teachers about this. You could show them your Epiphany log of the incident. This is a standard sort of problem they have to deal with."

There was no return fire; the elder Gu just nodded seriously. "I know, I should. I will . But it's hard, you know. And given your job, well, you've spent years working on life-and-death versions of these problems, right? You'd have the most expert possible answers."

It was the first time in Bob's life that his old man had said anything nice about his career. This must be a setup !

There was silence for a moment as the father waited with apparent patience, and the son tried to think what to say next. Finally, Bob gave a laugh. "Okay, but the military answers would be overkill, Dad. Not because we're that much smarter than a billion teenagers, but because we have the Secure Hardware Environment. Down at the bottom we control all the hardware." Leaving aside the moonshine fabs and the hardware abusers .

"The fellow I was talking to this afternoon styled himself 'an all-encompassing cloud of knowingness.' Is that bull? How much can he know about me?"

"If this jerk is willing to break some laws, he can find out a lot about you. That probably includes your medical history, maybe even what you've said to Reed Weber. As for spying on you moment to moment: He can usually watch you in public places, though that depends on your defaults and the density of local coverage. If he has confederates or zombies, he can learn what you do even in deadzones, though that information wouldn't come to him in real time."

"Zombies?"

"Corrupted systems. Remember what things were like when I was a kid? Almost any nastiness we had on home computers, we have on wearables now. The situation would be absolutely intolerable without the SHE." Dad looked blank, or maybe he was Googling. "Don't worry about it, Dad. Your Epiphany gear is about as secure as you'd be comfortable wearing. Just remember that other folks may not be so trustable."

Robert seemed to be digesting what his son had said. "But aren't there other possibilities? Maybe little gadgets the, ah, kids can stick on you?"

"Yes! The little dufuses are no different than I was, but they have more opportunities for mischief." Last semester it had been the crawling-up-your-skirt spidercams. For a while, the gadgets had been a god-damned mechanical infestation. Miri had raged about the invasion for days, and then dropped the issue so abruptly that Bob suspected she'd wrought some terrible revenge. "That's why you should always come into the house through the front hall. We have a good commercial bug trap there. Just you and I talking here is as private as your Epiphany can be… So what exactly is this fellow hitting you up for? You're from so far outside the school scene, I can't imagine you being successfully hassled."

By God, Dad actually looks shifty ! "I'm not really sure. I think it's just the hazing a new kid gets" — he gave a little smile — "even when the new kid happens to be an old fart. Thanks for the advice, Son."

"Sure thing."

The old man sidled out of the room. Bob's gaze followed him into the hall and up the stairs to the privacy of his room. Dad was definitely a man with things on his mind. Bob stared at the closed bedroom door for a moment, wondering at life's inversions and wishing he and Alice were like some folks, the ones who snooped on their own miscellaneous dependents.

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