As Aya's hoverboard approached the mansion steps, she remembered what her brother had been like in those months during the Prettytime: beautiful, contented, respectful. Sure, he'd gone to all the bashes, but he'd come home for every holiday, always bringing Aya and the crumblies presents.
The mind-rain had changed all thatexcept for his pretty face.
For the first year after being cured, Hiro had jumped from clique to clique: Extreme Surge, the city hoverball team, even a tour in the wild as a Ranger trainee. He hadn't stuck with anything, shifting aimlessly, unable to make sense of freedom.
Of course, in that logic-missing first year a lot of people were confused. Some actually decided to reverse the mind-rainnot just old crumblies, but new pretties, too. Even Hiro had talked about turning back into a bubblehead.
Then two years ago came the news that the economy was in trouble. Back in the Prettytime, bubbleheads could ask for anything they wanted: Their toys and party clothes popped out of the hole in the wall, no questions asked. But creative, free-minded human beings were more ravenous than bubbleheads, it turned out. Too many resources were going to random hobbies, new buildings, and major projects like the mag-lev trains. And nobody was volunteering for the hard jobs anymore.
Some people wanted to go back to Rusty "money," complete with rents and taxes and starving if you couldn't pay for food. But the City Council didn't go that crazy; they voted for the reputation economy instead. From now on, merits and face ranks would decide who got the best mansions, the most carbon emissions, the biggest wall allowances. Merits were for doctors, teachers, wardens, all they way down to littlies doing schoolwork and their choreseveryone who kept the city going, as determined by the Good Citizen Committee. Face ranks were for the rest of culture, from artists to sports stars to scientists. You could use all the resources you wanted, as long as you captured the city's collective imagination.
And to keep the face ranks fair, every citizen over the age of littlie was given their own feeda million scattered threads of story to help make sense of the mind-rain.
The word "kicker" hadn't even been invented yet, but somehow Hiro had understood it all instinctively: how to make a clique huge overnight, how to convince everyone to requisition some new gadget, and most of all how to make himself legendary in the process.
As Aya landed outside the mansion's elevator door, she sighed quietly. Hiro had been so smart since they'd fixed his brain If only all that fame hadn't turned him into such a self-centered snob.
"What do you want, Aya-chan?"
"I need to talk to you."
"Way too early."
Aya groaned. Without Moggle to float her back up to her window, she'd had to wait till dawn to get back into her dorm. And Hiro thought he was tired?
He couldn't have had a worse night than she'd had. She kept imagining Moggle at the bottom of the underground lake, lying cold and lifeless.
"Please, Hiro? I just spent a bunch of merits to switch my morning classes, so I could come see you."
A grumbling noise. "Come back in an hour."
Aya glared at the elevator door. She couldn't even go up and pound on his window; the mansions in the famous part of town didn't let you fly close to them.
"Well, can you at least tell me where Ren is? His locator's off."
"Ren?" A chuckle came from the door. "He's on my couch."
Aya breathed a sigh of relief. Hiro was a million times easier to deal with when his best friend was around. "Can I talk to him, then please?"
The door went silent for so long that Aya wondered if Hiro had gone back to sleep. But finally Ren's voice came on.
"Hey, Aya-chan. Come on in!"
The door opened, and Aya stepped inside.
Hiro's rooms were garlanded with a million cranes.
It was an old custom from pre-Rusty days, one of the few that had survived the Prettytime: When a girl turned thirteen, she made a string of a thousand origami birds with her own two hands. It took weeks of folding little squares of paper into wings and beaks and tails, then stringing them together with an old-fashioned needle and thread.
After the mind-rain, a few girls had started a new trend: sending their finished strings to reputation-crushes, new-pretty boys with big face ranks. Boys like Hiro, in other words.
Just seeing them made Aya's fingers ache from the memory of her own thousand cranes. The chains of paper birds were draped everywhere in the apartment, except for Hiro's sacred feed-watching chair.
He was slumped there, wearing a hoverball sweatshirt and rubbing his eyes. Green tea was swirling from the spigots of the hole in the wall, filling the air with the scents of cut grass and caffeine.
"Could you get those?" he asked.
"Good morning to you, too." She gave him a sarcastic bow and went to fetch the tea. Two cups, of coursefor him and Ren, not her. Aya couldn't stand green tea, but still.
"Morning, Aya-chan," Ren called groggily from the couch. He sat up, a flock of squashed cranes unpeeling from his back. Empty bottles were strewn everywhere, and a cleaning drone was vacuuming up the remains of food and spilled bubbly.
She handed Ren his tea. "Were you guys celebrating something, or just reliving bubblehead days?"
"You don't know?" Ren laughed. "Well, you better congratulate Hiro-sensei."
"Hiro-sensei? What?"
"That's right." Ren nodded. "Your brother finally cracked the top thousand."
"The top thousand?" Aya blinked. "Are you kidding?"
"Eight hundred and ninety-six, at the moment," Hiro said, staring at the wallscreen. Aya saw the number on it now: 896 in meter-high numerals. "Of course, my own sister ignores me. Where's my tea?"
"But I didn't " Aya's exhaustion turned dizzy-making for a moment. This morning was the first in ages that she hadn't checked Hiro's face rank. And he'd hit the top thousand!
If he could stay there, he'd be invited to Nana Love's Thousand Faces Party next month.
Hiro, like most boys, had a major crush on Nana Love.
"I'm sorry last night was really busy. But that's fantastic!"
He lazily stretched out a finger, pointing at the teacup in her hand.
She brought it to him, offering a real bow. "Congratulations, Hiro."
""Hiro-sensei," he reminded her.
Aya just rolled her eyes. "You don't have to call your own brother 'sensei,' Hiro, no matter how big a face he is. So what was the story?"
"You wouldn't be interested. Apparently."
"Come on, Hiro! I watch all your stories except for last night."
"It was about this bunch of crumblies." Ren lay back across the couch. "They're like surge-monkeys, except they don't care about beauty or weird body mods. Just life extension: liver refits every six months, new cloned hearts once a year."
"Life extension?" Aya said. "But stories about crumblies never go big."
"This one has a conspiracy angle," Ren said. "These crumblies have a theory that the doctors secretly know how to keep people living forever. They say the only reason anyone dies of old age is to keep the population steady. It's just like the bubblehead operation back in the Prettytime: The doctors are hiding the truth!"
"That's brain-kicking," Aya murmured, a shiver traveling down her spine. It was so easy to believe in conspiracies, after the government had made everyone brain-missing for centuries.
And living forever? Even littlies would pay attention to that.
"You forgot the best part, Ren," Hiro said. "These crumblies are planning to sue the city for immortality.
Like it's a human right or something. People want an investigation! Check it out."
Hiro waved his hand. On the wallscreen his face rank disappeared, replaced by a web of meme-lines, a huge diagram showing how the story had kicked through the city interface all night. Vast spirals of debate, disagreement, and outright slamming had splintered from Hire's feed, over a quarter-million people joining the conversation.
Was immortality a bogus idea? Could your brain stay bub
bly forever? And if nobody died, where on earth would you put everyone? Would the expansion wind up eating the whole planet?
That last question made Aya dizzy again. She remembered that day at school when they'd showed satellite pictures from the Rusty era, back before population control. The sprawling cities had been huge enough to see from space: billions of extras crowding the planet, most of them living in total obscurity.
"Look at that!" Hiro cried. "Everyone's already going off the story My rank just dropped to nine hundred. People can be so shallow!"
"Maybe immortality's getting old," Ren said, grinning at Aya.
"Ha, ha," Hiro said. "I wonder who's stealing my eyeballs."
He flicked his hand again, and the wallscreen broke into a dozen panels. The familiar faces of the city's top twelve tech-kickers appeared. Aya noticed that Hiro had jumped to number four.
He was leaning forward in his chair, devouring the feeds to find out where his ratings had gone.
Aya sighed. Typical Hirohe'd already forgotten that she'd come up here to talk to him. But she stayed quiet, curling next to Ren on the couch, trying not to crumple too many sad little paper birds. It probably wouldn't hurt, letting Hiro get his feed fix before admitting she'd left her hovercam at the bottom of a lake.
And Aya didn't mind a little feed-time. The familiar voices soothed her nerves, washing over her like a conversation with old friends.
People's faces were so different since the mind-rain, the new fads and cliques and inventions so unpredictable. It made the city sense-missing sometimes. Famous people were the cure for that randomness, like pre-Rusties gathering around their campfires every night, listening to the elders. Humans needed big faces around for comfort and familiarity, even an ego-kicker like Nana Love just talking about what she'd had for breakfast.
In the upper right corner, Gamma Matsui was kicking a new tech religion. Some history clique had applied averaging software to the world's great spiritual books, then programmed it to spit out godlike decrees.
For some reason, the software had told them not to eat pigs.
"Who would do that in the first place?" Aya asked.
"Aren't pigs extinct?" Ren giggled. "They seriously need to update that code."
"Gods are so last year," Hiro said, and Aya smiled.
Resurrecting old religions had been kick right after the mind-rain, when everyone was still trying to figure out what all the new freedoms meant.
But these days so many other things had been rediscoveredfamily reunions and crime and manga and the cherry blossom festival. Except for a few Youngblood cults, most people were too busy for divine superheroes.
"What's the Nameless One up to?" Hiro said, switching the sound to another feed.
The Nameless One was what the two of them called Toshi Bananathe most brain-missing big face in the city. He was more of a slammer than a real tech-kicker, always attacking some new clique or fashion, stirring up hatred for anything unfamiliar. He thought the mind-rain had been a disaster, just because everyone's new hobbies and obsessions could be unsettling and downright weird.
Ren and Hiro never said his name, and changed his nickname every few weeks, before the city interface could figure out who they meanteven mocking people helped their face stats. In the reputation economy, the only real way to hurt anyone was to ignore them completely. And it was pretty hard to ignore someone who made your blood boil. The Nameless One was hated or loved by almost everybody in the city, which kept his face rank floating around a hundred.
This morning he was slamming the new trend of pet owners and their ghastly breeding experiments. The feed showed a dog, dyed pink and sprouting heart-shaped tufts of fur. Aya thought it was kind of cute.
"It's just a poodle, you truth-slanting bubblehead!" Ren shouted, tossing a cushion at the wallscreen.
Aya giggled. Giving dogs funny hairdos wasn't exactly Rusty, like making fur coats or eating pigs.
"He's a waste of gravity," Ren said. "Blank him!"
"Replace with next highest," Hiro told the room, and the Nameless One's angry face disappeared.
Aya's eyes drifted across the screens. Nothing looked remotely as kick as surfing a mag-lev train. The Sly Girls had to be more famous-making than poodles, pig eating, and rumors of immortality.
Aya just had to make sure that she was the first kicker to put them on her feed.
Then she saw who had supplanted the Nameless One in the top left of the wallscreen, and her eyes widened.
"Hey," she murmured. "Who's that guy?"
But she already knew the gorgeous, manga-eyed boy's name It was Frizz Mizuno.
Frizz
"That bubblehead's the thirteenth-most-popular tech-kicker now?" Hiro groaned. "That was fast."
"Turn his sound on," Aya said.
"No way!" Hiro said. "He's so gag-making."
He waved his hand, and Frizz's face was replaced by yet another feed.
"Hiro!"
Ren leaned closer to her on the couch. "He's the founder of this new cliqueRadical Honesty.
Hiro's just mad because Frizz decided to kick the clique himself, instead of letting one of us help out."
She frowned. "Radical what?"
"Honesty." Ren pointed at his temple, his eyescreens like a true tech-head, he had one in each eyespinning. "Frizz designed this new brain surge. Like back in the Prettytime, except instead of making you a bubblehead, they change your mind so you can't lie."
"Yeah, it's supposed to be the brave new horizon of human interaction," Hiro muttered from his chair. "But they just babble about their feelings all day."
"Friend of mine tried it for a week," Ren said. "He said it's very boredom-killing. Turns out if you never lie, there's always someone mad at you."
Hiro and Ren laughed, and the two of them went back to analyzing the other feeds, watching the kickers' ranks rise and fall. The software religion was a flopGamma-sensei had lost face all morning.
But the poodle was working, as funny-looking animals usually did, sending the Nameless One all the way up to sixty-three, one notch above the mayor.
Aya kept silent, staring at the corner of the screen Frizz had briefly occupied. She was trying to remember every word he'd said to herthat he'd liked her randomly generated nose, thought she was mysterious, and wanted to know her full name.
And he hadn't been lying about any of it.
Of course, when he found out that she didn't have such great taste in randomly generated nosesthat she'd just been born with it, because she was an ugly and a party-crashing extrawhat would he say then? He wouldn't even be polite about it. The honesty surge would make him show his disappointment about their difference in ambition Unless she wasn't an extra by then.
"Hey, Ren," she asked quietly. "Have you ever snuck footage of anyone?"
"You mean like fashion-slammers? No way. That's totally unkick."
"No, I don't mean shots of famous people. More like going undercover for a story."
"I'm not sure," Ren said, looking uncomfortable. He was a tech-kicker; his feed was filled with more hardware designs and interface mods than people stories. "The City Council keeps changing their minds about it. They don't want to get all Rusty, with people owning information and stuff. But nobody likes all those feeds that just show people cheating on their partners. Or fashion-slammers making fun of clothes and surge."
"Yeah, everyone hates those feeds. Except the zillions of people who watch them."
"Hmm. You should probably ask Hiro. He keeps up with that stuff."
Aya glanced at her brother, who was deep in a feed-trance, absorbing all twelve screens at once, no doubt plotting his big follow-up to immortality. Not the right moment to mention her new story, especially since that would mean bringing up a certain missing hovercam.
"Maybe not right now," she said. "So what are you working on?"
"Nothing huge," he said. "This middle-pretty science clique asked me for a kick. They've got some merits but no face. They
're trying to recreate all those species the Rusties erased, you know? From old scraps of DNA and junk genes."
"Really?" Aya said. "That sounds totally kickable!"
"Yeah, till it turned out they're starting with worms and slugs and insects. I was like, 'Worms? Let me know when you get to tigers!'" He laughed. "I saw your underground graffiti story, by the way. Good work."
"Really?" Aya felt herself blush. "You thought those guys were interesting?"
"They will be," Hiro murmured from his chair, "in about a thousand years, when their work gets unburied."
Ren smiled, whispering, "See? Hiro watches your feed too."
"Not that she returns the favor," Hiro said, his eyes never leaving the wallscreen.
"So what are you kicking next, Aya-chan?" Ren asked.
"Well, it's kind of a secret right now."
"A secret?" Hiro said. "Ooh, mysterious."
Aya sighed. She'd come here to ask for Hiro's help, but he obviously wasn't in a help-giving mood. He was going to be insufferable now that he'd reached the top thousand.
Maybe it was pointless anyway. She wasn't even sure that the Sly Girls would keep their promise and contact her, or how to find them again if they didn't.
"Don't worry, Aya-chan," Ren said. "We won't tell anybody."
"Well okay. Have you guys ever heard of the Sly Girls?"
Ren glanced at Hiro, who turned slowly in his chair to face her. A strange expression had appeared on both their faces.
"I've heard of them," Hiro said. "But they're not real."
Aya laughed. "Not real? Like, they're robots or something?"
"More like a rumor," he said. "The Sly Girls don't exist."
"What do you know about them?" she asked.
"Nothing. There's nothing to know about them, because they aren't real!"
"Come on, Hiro," she said. "Unicorns aren't real, and I know stuff about them. Like they have horns on their foreheads. And they can fly!"
Hiro groaned. "No, that's Pegasus that flies. Unicorns just have a horn, which makes them a lot more real than the Sly Girls, who I can't tell you anything about. It's just a random phrase kickers use.
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