He went out the first door he could find, striding quickly out onto one of Terminary’s wide campus lanes. Skirting the low, trimmed hedges of aluminum and stainless steel bushels painted to imitate shrubbery, he passed through another security gate and ended up at a different roundabout driveway than the one he’d been dropped off at.

After checking his location on the holo-map in his cyberware, he decided to send a net-message to his bodyguards Burt and Susan, who were no doubt still waiting at the east entrance. Soon, they would probably figure out from the new geo-tracking app his parents had given them that he had left Shetty Hall, but Aiden wanted to double-time his departure from campus.

I’m at the south entrance now for pick-up.

Immediately, Burt responded: Coming by now. ETA ten minutes due to traffic. Please stay inside the campus until we arrive.

Aiden closed out the message, kicking his heels idly against the sidewalk as he waited. He’d already passed through the campus gates and wasn’t about to go through security check two more times just to satisfy the stoic bodyguard’s overdeveloped attachment to security.

Your demeanor seems to indicate dissatisfaction, sir. I feel compelled to remind you that tonight was a partial success.

Partial? How do you figure?

You engaged briefly with both girls, for a time. You had a dance with one of them — quite sensuously, I might add.

Nothing good came out of it, Auxy. It was kind of a really big, fucking disaster.

Auxy said nothing at first, clearly computing his next response.

In truth, sir, I was aware of that. I was merely affecting ignorance in an attempt to lift your spirits.

Congratulations, you failed. Perhaps you need another reconfiguring of your personality matrix to compensate for your performance tonight.

I do not believe that is accurate, sir. I was given parameters of free agency to abide by.

Aiden was about to give a terse reply, but stopped himself…which was ridiculous, because Auxy didn’t have feelings.

Still, he said: You’re right, I’m sorry. You did everything you were programmed to do.

Thank you, sir. On a side-note, my self-analysis has determined that my threat assessment matrix has been vastly improved as a by-product of the socialization training you inputted to my neural net. I am much better equipped to identify premeditated harm in your visible vicinity.

Aiden said nothing. The embarrassment from Dorothy and Shelby’s Jell-O-smeared tussle had not subsided. Aiden was no stranger to attention. He didn’t mind it, even craved it sometimes, and two girls fighting over him was not something to be ashamed about. But yet he could only feel a sort of hollowness, a sense of having only worn one shoe before leaving the house, and only just now realizing that something vital to him was missing.

What had he been expecting? When Aiden thought about it, he found he truly didn’t know. He’d never really considered the outcomes of his plans tonight, only the theoretical promise of kisses, caresses, and hasty undressing in a secluded corner of Terminary that came with the premise of getting two dates at the Spring Extravanganza.

Was it the wanting that was the problem? Or the expectation that came with it? Though he would never admit it out loud, Aiden wanted to see his parents when he came back home from school. He wanted to be involved, in some form or another, in the family business and help ensure its legacy. He wanted to juggle two girls at once, one on each arm, smiling at him.

We got what we got, he’d told Tancy on the roof.

Then why did things lately seem to be going wrong? Forget ziv-ball, forget Devon’s comeuppance — why were all the things that really mattered to him not happening in his life?

There it was again, that feeling of stagnation, as if he was the only thing left stationary on a rapidly spinning Earth. Like he was being left behind, watching the cars crisscrossing the freeways and the rotocopters flying above the skyscrapers and the people walking on the streets drafting weekly reports to their bosses…and seeing the rest of his Terminary classmates advance, too — laughing at the pointlessness of their university applications (they’d get in, anyway); buying out the synth-buffet on graduation night; trying out new suits with friends for their matriculation ceremonies; spending dinners with family at Albertson’s Bistro or Synth-Sushi Deluxe; laughing in the private motorcade back home at, possibly, how the tube-squeezed salmon depressurized too quickly and shot out of the tube to smack into their father’s face — all of them living into the future.

The black SUV turned into the roundabout. Aiden slid in and shut the car door.

“I told you to wait inside,” said Burt. “Javison from the morning shift is still AWOL. There is a clear and present risk to being outside campus gates. Don’t you remember the ordinance fired at your school just a couple weeks ago? Never mind the riots.”

“Relax,” said Aiden irritably. “I was taking the metro to downtown before my parents enlisted you to babysit me. Take me back home.”

Burt turned in his seat and regarded him flatly. “Your parents enlisted McCourt to guarantee your security, and McCourt assigned me to your transportation detail. You are my principal and I don’t give orders lightly. But when I do, I expect them to be followed. Call it a relationship between a CPO and a principal if you’re not emotionally mature enough to recognize concern. You need to quit some of that attitude and do what I say. Do you understand?”

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

Aiden looked out the window and said nothing.

“Please answer me.”

“I get it,” said Aiden brusquely.

“Thank you.”

They pulled off, merging once again into streams of traffic. Aiden could tell Susan, who was chattier of the two, was struggling not to ask why he had left the dance so early.

“I like your suit,” she said finally, in an effort to break the tension.

“Thanks,” said Aiden dully. “And a fat lot of good it did me.”

“I’m sure your father would have liked it. Both of you share a similar taste in style. I think you picked up his fashion habits.”

Aiden took her compliment in stride. Then a thought struck him. “Susan, what exactly did my mother write in her note to Tancy before her track meet?”

“The note?” replied Susan, surprised. “Oh, you know, the usual things…how proud she was of Tancy, wishing her good luck —”

“No, what exactly did she say?”

“Do you…want to read the exact note?”

“Yeah, I do.”

Susan seemed to hesitate. Then she forwarded him the net-message. Aiden scanned the text briefly, then closed out the window.

“She didn’t write a Tancy a net-message, did she? You did.”

“I’m sorry?” said Susan.

“The sender username is off by a character. And my mother’s signature…she never signs off a message without including the family insignia of the Vermillion Bird. This net-message wasn’t sent from my mother’s personal account.”

Susan was quiet for a moment. “Wow, sometimes I forget how smart you kids are.”

“Why’d you do it?” said Aiden, nonplussed. “I’m sure Tancy noticed it wasn’t genuine right away.”

Susan bit her lip. “I don’t know. She seemed very down, and I thought…I thought she needed it.” She glanced defensively at Burt. “And don’t you go off again saying how I broke security-principal relationship protocol. It was just a net-message.”

“As long as you understand it was inappropriate,” said Burt impassively. “I won’t be reporting you to McCourt.”

Aiden pulled up the net-message again. At the bottom of the e-letter was his mother’s signature in graceful, loopy script. The words she’d never wrote glowed blue in his cyberware view.

All of a sudden, he felt stupid for being jealous at the notion of this fake letter, for wishing that he could feel the warmth of their support for once. He looked at the seat next to him, to where Tancy’s blue-capped mem-scent still lay.

Maybe it was time to wish for something more in reach.

“What time did Tancy’s track meet end again?” he said.

--

The Exsupero stadium parking lot was nearly full, so Burt loaded the SUV onto a lift that took them to a smaller backup area at the highest level of the illuminated, cylindrical parking structure. They walked down a short ramp to a personnel lift, and the clear, glassed tube hissed shut once they boarded.

Aiden looked out the tinted glass as they descended. The stadium was enormous even by professional standards, divided into multiple fields that hosted tournaments and track meets. Exsupero had the biggest sport department of all the preparatory academies in Neocopy. Its founder, Leonard Exsupero, had been an avid fan of laser polo, a dynamic game where players rode mini-cycles while directing a metatomic ball with directed energy pointers. He had also been very fond of synth-ketchup, and was known to drink it by the bottle like it was cream, though nobody talked much about that.

They sky was darkening fast. Inky-black clouds hung overhead, under-lit purple from the city lights. Aiden, Burt, and Susan emerged into the packed stadium of Stadium Sector 3, where sound-permeable membrane-benches of spectators cheered wildly at the runners on the track below. The anti-grav klieg lights blazed down, bright enough that if one didn’t look up, they would think it was the middle of the day.

Aiden had difficulty seeing the top row, just blurred outlines of the blue spectator bubbles.

“Let’s go to the front,” said Aiden. “Near the track.”

“It looks too crowded down there,” said Burt.

“I don’t care.”

They made their way down to the front row, Aiden sandwiched between Burt and Susan, and found a spot with enough room for the three of them between two adjoining membrane-benches. According to Auxy’s reading of the meet schedule, the 800-meter run was about to start. Tancy was in the second heat for junior varsity.

Aiden barely paid attention to the first race. The hollowness in his chest was slowly disappearing, replaced by something rich and full, as if he was being injected with warm, countryside air.

When Tancy’s heat came around, Aiden waved at her from the sidelines to get her attention, but she was too focused on jostling her way to a spot on the starting line, bending her knees in a ready stance. Tancy was not a midget, but she was not tall by any means, and next to the top runners in her heat she looked like a child.

Then the electric playback of the starting gun went off, and the race began. There were two laps around the track, two minutes and thirty seconds of runtime for the average female runner.

Tancy kept to the middle of the blob of runners for the first lap, trying to not get trampled underfoot by her fellow competitors. Whether by strategy or by the pure fact of not being noticed in a forest of legs, by the start of the second lap she was one of five in the lead pack. Aiden was dumbfounded. He was now just beginning to understand how much Tancy must have trained for this at school; she’d never shown her speed or talked about it at the house. There were a lot of things he didn’t know about her, he realized.

The stadium was roaring with cheers. Tancy was struggling now, her arms flopping more to the side as she moved from third to fourth in the pack. The fifth-place runner tried to cut around Tancy, and despite her exhaustion Tancy changed her pace slightly, hitching a step. The attempting cutter tripped herself, sprawled to the ground, and picked herself back up, but by then the race was really down to the final four runners.

Beside him, Burt and Susan had abandoned all semblance of bodyguard propriety; both of them had their hands cupped to their mouths, shouting themselves hoarse. Aiden loosened his flex-tie and screamed for Tancy to keep running.

And as the lead runners rounded the bend, she saw him, her face flushed with exertion. Aiden was afraid her surprise would slow her down, but then her eyes narrowed and her ears seemed to flatten along her head and she put her head down and ran, ran like her life depended on it, like she was racing a rotorcycle and didn’t care if she lost.

“Don’t stop!” Susan was yelling. “Don’t stop, you’re almost there!”

Via his cyberware, Aiden engaged one of the spectator dolly cameras situated by the track. He saw Tancy close the gap by ten meters, then five, and then she was neck-and-neck with the first-place runner — a long-limbed giant of a girl in the white jumpsuit, whose eyes bulged in shock at the little, determined girl next to her — churning her legs just to keep up.

The two of them jockeyed for a better position as they came down the final stretch, Tancy’s face screwed up in concentration as sweat poured down her face in the energized air of the stadium. The other girl was baring her teeth, visibly forcing her legs up and down with implacable, mechanized precision. They were getting closer to Aiden’s spot on the sidelines.

When they were at their closest point, Aiden switched out from the track-side camera, leaned out, and yelled at the top of his lungs: “BEAT HER NOW!”

He wasn’t sure if Tancy heard him. All he knew was that in the last twenty-five meters, Tancy summoned the last vestiges of her strength and sprinted forward, her legs blurring like the spokes on a wheel. As if being pulled by a tractor beam, she slowly dragged ahead of the taller girl, her lead becoming small but perceptible, until she crossed the finish line and fell to her knees in exhaustion, utterly spent.

On the giant, quad-screen, antigrav monitor in the center of the stadium, her eked-out lead was displayed on the playback feed. Her front foot highlighted in gold over the finish line, a full second ahead of the second-place girl.

And Aiden was cheering so loud that he thought his throat would burst.