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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 bubbly 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 Hiro—he'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