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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 rediscovered—family 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 Banana—the 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 meant—even 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 clique—Radical 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 eye—spinning. "Frizz designed this new brain surge. Like back in the Prettytime, except instead of making you a bubblehead, they change your