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managed to stay open every day, so Conn didn’t lack anything while she was snowbound. She spent a couple days with a neighbor who was a 2L in Illinois Tech’s law school down the street. It was obvious, including when he said so, that he was interested in a closer relationship with Conn. He was so close to regaining his humanity after giving it up as a 1L—but Conn wasn’t looking for someone. She realized anybody would come up short in comparison to Grant: boy wonder, astronaut, adventurer, happy, confident, cute...the revelation almost troubled her. Was she with Grant until someone better came along? And if so, did that mean she was with Grant forever?
    By February tenth, things were halfway back to normal. Conn and Grant both returned to classes and to their work for Peo. Her first day back to work, Conn was interested to see a v-mail from Gale Jennings.
    In the v-mail, his hair was messy, his face sheened with sweat. He wore a gorgeous, slate-colored silk suit jacket that was badly rumpled. Today, he had glasses, unlike the other times Conn had seen him.
    The message was brief: “I have something for your alternate e-mail. Urgent.” That would be Peo’s double-encrypted account using a sophisticated technology called Wawigdin, which had never, to anybody’s knowledge, been successfully hacked. Conn had never been given access to it, and Peo never talked about what she sent and received from there.
    Conn brought the message to Peo’s attention immediately. Peo tapped away on her tablet, accessing her Wawigdin e-mail, Conn presumed. Conn left her alone.
    Peo seemed distracted and troubled for the rest of the day, and the next.
    “Is everything OK?” Conn asked over the next day’s lunch in the office.
    “Depends on how you look at it,” Peo said. She dunked another Chick-fil-A waffle fry in ketchup and ate it. “I can show you, if you like.” She sounded conspiratorial. Conn’s curiosity was piqued.

# # #
    Peo shut the office door, and snow began to flurry outside the window. She pulled the blinds and motioned Conn to her side behind the desk.
    “That NDA you signed”—the nondisclosure agreement that forbade Conn from revealing any sensitive Dyna-Tech information outside of work—“it’s still in force.” Conn wasn’t sure if it was a statement or a question. She nodded.
    Peo swiped a few instructions into the Wear on her arm. “Wait.” She rooted around for her tablet. She found a cable as well, and Conn’s heart thumped. This was sensitive enough that Peo didn’t want to cast the screen onto the tablet wirelessly.
    On the tablet screen, an animation began. A large sphere in the center of the display, and a smaller sphere out near the border, foreshortened to show its smaller scale. The larger sphere was the orange-brown color of burnished wood, the smaller a dull gray, with almost a metallic sheen.
    The smaller sphere began to spin, and to orbit the larger. A planet around a star.
    The planet orbited twice. Then the animation froze, and the perspective shifted to a bird’s eye view, directly above the spheres. The planet began another orbit and then halted a little more than halfway around the star.
    Zoom in on the planet. As it grew in size on the screen, a second, much smaller, silver-white sphere appeared to the side of it. The picture focused on the new sphere and continued to zoom in. When the new body filled three-quarters of the screen, an arc drew itself across the sphere, and one side of the arc went dark. The result looked like a gibbous moon.
    Conn was transfixed.
    “FALCON” appeared on the screen, so large that it was wider than the moon. Then the screen went blank.
    Peo’s face was inscrutable.
    “OK. What was that?” Conn asked.
    Peo sighed. “If you figure it out, please let me and Gale Jennings know,” she said.

FIVE
Headway
    February, 2032
     
    The only context Gale was able to provide was that the source of the animation was the Chinese government, who were not