Adrian thought his mother would be mollified when Bosco called her later that day to say that he was to be admitted for the summer term in the Department of Applied Mathematics at the University of Toronto. But she couldn't let go of her suspicion that he was up to no good.

Mohan's theory was that she was worked up over the possibility that she was nearly shut of the stigma of mothering one of the Million, and that she feared that he would do something that would rain down fresh shame on her.

So, the random audits of his files continued, daily at different times. Adrian hardly flash-baked at all in the next week, and he fell into a grimy, hyperreal mood, bereft of access to others' consciousnesses. It wasn't that the Bitchun Society had anything to complain about: food, shelter, entertainment, travel, communications -- all of it freely available. No disease that couldn't be cured with rejuve, or, failing that, refreshing from backup into a clone. But three months remained until his term started, three long months of not being able to swap polemics with Mohan, of not being able to roll up the lovely consciousnesses that he scored through Mohan and jam them into his brain.

After a week of it, he was positively buggy, ready to have himself frozen until classes started. During the scarce hours when he and Mohan were awake and online at the same moment, he was able to work remotely off of Mohan's systems, but the lag through the kludged-up channel made it so painful he could hardly bear it.

His salvation came 10 days after the acceptance.

He was en route to his private spot when it happened. Thawing out on the curb outside of Union Station, chewing thoughtfully at his routing tag, he was approached by a stranger. The woman was apparent 17, and a quick back-check of her public I.D. verified that she was actually 17, another member of the Million, a needle in the demographic haystack. She snuck up on him while he was ruefully paging through the public directories where he'd put his bootlegs the last time his mother had gone tiptoeing through his consciousness, salvaging what he could from the tatters of his beloved collection. She was wearing a cowl like his, and had odd, vaguely Asian features, round-faced and flat-nosed, but with a fair cast to her skin that was almost paper-white. She tapped his shoulder and spoke aloud, a clear, young voice ringing out in the mumbling white-noise of the subvocalizing crowd.

"Hi there!" she said. A few people turned to stare, their eyes flicking up to HUDs where they examined the pair's Whuffie and designation.

"Hello," Adrian said.

"My name's Tina," she said. Her speech had long, spacey vowels in it, the speech of a jaunter somewhere in the dark nothings of interstellar space, crackling through adventure dramas on the net.

"Adrian," he said, and put his hand out.

She chuckled. "Wow, you really do that, huh?"

"What?"

"Shake hands! I've seen it in historicals, but never in real life." She shook his hand, harder than was necessary. "I'm pleased to meet you, Adrian. What do you do?"

"What?" he said again.

"You know, what's your role? I used to help out with the hydroponics, before we came here. Now my folks say I've got to find something new to do. What do you do?"

"Uh," Adrian said. She was a jaunter, freshly back from space, probably landed at Aristide Interplanetary just north of the city. He didn't know much about jaunters, but he did know that their version of the Bitchun Society was a little nonstandard. "I'm a student," he said.

"Wow!" she said. "Full-time? What do you study?"

"I'm doing applied maths at U of T. Will be, anyway," he corrected himself. "This summer."

Her face clouded for a moment as she chewed this over. "How long are you going to be doing that for?"

"It's a four-year degree."

"Four years?" she said, shocked.

"Yes."

"That's a long time! Who's going to take your job when you go?"

"What job?" Adrian asked. He wasn't sure how he'd been drawn into this conversation, but he was enjoying it, in a disorienting way.

"The job you do now," she said, as though explaining something to an idiot.

He fished for words, then watched as comprehension dawned on her. "You don't do anything now, do you?"

He grinned. "Not really, no."

She clapped her hands. "You people are really freaky, you know that? What do you do all day, if you're not working?"

Adrian opened his mouth and she looked at him with such guilelessness that he made a rash and wonderful decision.

"I'll show you," he said, and struck off to the ferry docks.

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

It was tough squeezing two people into the buoy, but they managed to clamber in, with much blushing and inadvertent placement of hands and elbows. Adrian's sexual experiences to date had been entirely teledildonic, and the reality of his close proximity to someone of the opposite sex had his ears glowing pink.

Tina took it all in stride, remarking that she'd been in much closer quarters aboard the ship she'd grown up on, bending time and space on a long voyage out to what turned out to be a hunk of dead, airless rock. "It's pretty cool for Earth, though," she allowed.

Adrian covered his embarrassment by furiously combing the network for some decent bootlegs. Though not officially one of the Million, Tina was a generational comrade, and entitled to try out flash-baking under the terms of the agreement that Mohan had insisted the Million subscribe to if they wanted access to his booty. Adrian's researches located a real plum, the revolutionary's backup, trunced to a mere nubbin of its former glory, but still a good choice for Tina's first experience. He downloaded it from a boy in Vancouver and pushed it into Tina's public directory. She cast her eyes up and they tracked over her HUD.

"What's this?" she asked.

"It's what I do," Adrian said, and sent her the flash-baking app. "We'll run it together."

Together, they executed the app, rolling the bootleg and baking it. Adrian suppressed a groan of disappointment. The file was so foreshortened that it barely registered for him, just a distant hurrah of triumph and then it was gone.

Tina, though, was taken completely aback, her breathing heavy, her jaw hanging limp. Slowly, her almond eyes fluttered open, and she rolled her head from side to side langorously.

"That was really fine," she said. "Really. How do you know Nestor?"

"Who?"

"The guy in the backup -- Nestor. He was on the ship with us."

Adrian's heart slammed in his chest. "You know him?"

"Yeah!" she said. "Of course! I grew up with him."

Adrian reeled. She knew the revolutionary! He could meet him, get another copy of the bootleg --

"Wait, you don't know Nestor?" she said.

He shook his head, his mind racing. He would meet him, go with him to see Mohan, tell him their theories about the Million --

"How did you get this if you don't know Nestor?" she asked.

His thoughts screeched to a halt. "It's a bootleg," he said. "An illicit copy."

She gave him a hard look and he realized what was weird about her eyes, her skin. She'd been tin-plated, iron-lunged and steely-eyed all her life, until she made Earth. She'd only had naked eyes for a few days. Now, they looked steely, distant and considering.

"You're saying that you got this without Nestor's permission?" she asked.

So he explained about the bootlegs, about Mohan's discovery of a back door that let him designate his personal storage with the generic I.D. used for the system's discard bin, how Mohan had distributed the backups over the handshaking channel. He was warming up to a discussion of generational politics when she interrupted him.

"That's awful!" she said. "These are private -- how can you just trade them around?"

He hadn't actually given it any thought in years. "It's not like we're spying on our friends," he said, hastily. "These people are strangers. We'll never know who they are -- but it's the only way we can learn about --"

"Nestor's not a stranger," she said, flatly. "He ran the engine room on my ship. He won't like this very much, either."

"Wait!" Adrian said, alarmed. "You're not going to tell him, are you? We could get into a lot of trouble."

"You mean you could get into a lot of trouble," she said.

"Fine," he said, hotly. "Go ahead. That's what I get for making friends with a stranger."

That stopped her. "We're friends?" she said.

"Sure," he said. "You're the only person I've ever brought here. That's friendship, isn't it?"

"But you just met me!" she said. "How can you be my friend?" She seemed genuinely distressed.

"Well, I just liked you is all," he said. "You asked me good questions. I thought I could ask you some. I showed you this place, let you flash-bake one of my bootlegs --"

"And that makes us friends?" She shook her head. "On the ship, we treated everyone like that. Friends were really ..." she dug for the word. "It wasn't so casual. Friends were a big deal."

"You see?" Adrian said, glad to be off the subject of the bootlegs. "That's just the kind of thing that makes us great friends -- you don't know your way around Earth and I don't know much about space, so we've got lots to talk about. What were friends like on the ship?"

And off they went, and at first, Adrian was just relieved, but she had wonderful stories, stories of bravery and devotion, of friends scattered to the stars, seas and Earth when the ship returned to Earth, of the hollow longing she felt for them now. Before he knew it, it was nightfall, and he'd located another bootleg, fresh from Mohan, and they flash-baked it and agreed that having the whole file was better than just some little stub of a truncat, but that being said, her friend Nestor had a much more interesting life than the 80-year-old painter they'd just run.

When they parted for the night, Adrian took her hand and told her what a wonderful time he'd had with her. "Could you do me a favor, do you think?"

"Sure!" she said, brightly.

"Could you hold onto some files for me?"

If she'd hesitated, even for an instant, he would have taken it back, told her not to bother. He wasn't a bastard -- she was really cool, the first person his age he'd been in company with in years, just wonderful to hang with. She didn't hesitate, not even for an instant.

"Sure," she said, and he moved all the bootlegs he'd picked up that afternoon to her storage.

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