Adrian's agent found the bootleg again just as he reached the waiting room at Innis College. The French one had passed it on before deleting it, to another girl in Kansas. Sighing with relief, he queued the download just as his father arrived.

Adrian's father was apparent 22, hardly older-seeming than Adrian himself, though his real age was closer to 122. All Adrian's life, his father had kept himself at an apparent age that was just a few years older than Adrian's own, following a bit of child-rearing wisdom that had been trendy 50 years before, just as the Bitchun Society started to mete out Whuffie-punishments for those people selfish enough to contribute to the overcrowding by reproducing. The logic ran that having a father of playmate-size would reduce the loneliness of the children of the diminished generation of the day.

At 22, Adrian's father was heavyset and acne-pocked, his meaty pelt bulging whenever it came into contact with the light cotton djellaba he wore around town.

He gave Adrian a curt nod when he arrived, his eyes fixed on a space in the middle-distance where his omnipresent HUD shone for him alone. He took a seat next to Adrian and rang his cochlea.

Adrian rolled his eyes and answered subvocally. Why his father couldn't have an unmediated conversation was beyond him. "Hi, Dad," he said.

"Hi there. Had a good morning?"

"Good enough," Adrian answered. "How's Mom?"

His father subvocalized a chuckle, the sound in Adrian's cochlea blending weirdly with the swallowing sounds from his father's throat. "She's pretty angry. Don't worry about it -- we'll do a dog 'n' pony for Bosco and she'll forget all about it."

Bosco opened the office door and greeted them. Adrian's father answered audibly, his voice rusty from disuse.

In Bosco's leatherbound academic cave of an office, the two adults chattered boringly and lengthily. Adrian knew the drill, knew that it could be a long time before anyone could have anything to say to him.

Sneaking a glance at his father and Bosco, he rolled up the revolutionary's backup and flash-baked it.

The life unrolled over his mind, the early days of the Bitchun Society, the physical battles and the ego clashes; first adulthood lived as a nomad, trekking around the globe; a second and third adulthood, a fourth, moving toward that moment at which the backup was taken, when eternity unrolled, and

snip

It cut off.

Adrian's eyes popped open. Damn. Truncat! The file had been chopped short during transmission between the nodes. Half the revolutionary's life vanished into a random scattering of bits and aether.

Bosco was looking expectantly at him, heavy-lidded, wavy hair and thick eyebrows and crinkles at the corners of his eyes from long hours of thinking. He had said something. Hurriedly, Adrian zipped through his short-term AV capture on a HUD, played back to Bosco saying, "Well, Adrian, this is a very well-prepared entrance paper. Can you tell me what it is about mathematics that interests you?"

Now Bosco and Adrian's father were both staring, and Adrian mimed concentration, as though he were genuinely considering his answer. In truth, he was paging through his files for the canned response his mother had provided him with, but there was no sense in admitting it.

"I've always loved math," he recited, struggling to remember the phrasing. "I just can't help seeing the mathematical relationships in everyday life. It just makes sense to me."

Bosco nodded, the ritual response satisfying him. Adrian's father gave him an appraising look and went back to wrangling with Bosco. It all came down to Whuffie, anyway -- did Adrian's parents have enough reputation capital that their gratitude to Bosco outweighed the upset the teaching staff would feel when they were saddled with a lowly undergrad?

- - - - - - - - - - - -

The meeting was hardly over before his mother was conferencing Adrian and his father in. As it turned out, Adrian's father had been dumping a real-time video stream to her all through the meeting; she'd seen it all. "Adrian," she said, sharply, "What's the matter with you? You were completely out of it during that whole thing."

"I was just thinking, Mom. I got distracted. I think it went well, anyway, right, Dad?"

"Sure, sure," his father subvocalized, patting him on the shoulder. "I think you're all set for next term."

But Adrian's mother was not to be mollified. "Adrian, I'm sick of all this flakiness. I know exactly what you were thinking about --" Adrian's heart sank: how could she know about the bootleg? "All that adolescent hand-wringing about your generation is distracting you from your real priorities, and it's time you smartened up. Grant me private access, I want a look at what you've been up to."

Oh, shit. Hurriedly, Adrian flushed the bootlegs. His mother hadn't gone picking though his files in years, so it took him a moment to remember the mnemonic that erased the bootlegs and all records of their existence from his personal storage. In his cochlea, his mother made impatient noises, and that sure didn't help.

Once the data was flushed, he granted her access. He watched dismally as his system log scrolled by, every file in his storage piping through his mother's keyword filter.

"'The parents of the Million are understandably resentful of their offspring,'" she read, in a dangerous voice. It was the paper he and Mohan had been collaborating on, and he knew she wasn't going to like it. "'For whatever reason, they chose to bring a generation into being at a time when the world wanted nothing but. The sacrifices they've endured since are immense, Whuffie penalties that mount daily as their peers make their disapproval felt. Our parents are stuck in the closest thing the Bitchun Society has to poverty, and it's our fault.'"

She paused and drew breath. "All right, Mom, all right, that's enough," Adrian said. "I'll get rid of it."

She snorted. "You're damned right, you will. Just adolescent nonsense --"

"I know," Adrian said. "I'm sorry." Mohan had a copy, anyway -- he could recover it later.

"Don't switch off my access, either," she said, to Adrian's dismay. "I'll be checking in regularly from now on -- you've got to concentrate on your studies, not this, this --"

Words failed her.

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