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spex if you want more …” Stuart paused portentously. “Discretion.”
    “Do you charge more for discretion, Mr. Stuart? I’m rather interested in discretion.”
    “I charge just to enter my building,” Stuart said. “That’s sufficiently outrageous for most folks.” Someone yelled a long question at him from the new machines at the western end of the building—something about “naming trees” and “defuzzification.” Stuart whipped his leathery neck around like an owl. “Read the manual!” heshouted. He turned to Mia again. “Kids … Where were we, ma’am?”
    “Mia.”
    “What?”
    “There
is
no manual!” the boy screamed in reply.
    “Mia, M-I-A,” Mia said patiently.
    “Oh,” Stuart said, tapping one hearing aid. “Nice to have you in the shop, Maya. Don’t mind the kids here, they get a little rowdy sometimes.”
    “I’ll try the curtain unit and the slate, please.”
    “I’ll check you in,” said Stuart.
    Discretion was the sole advantage of obsolete hardware. Obsolete hardware was so bafflingly out-of-date as to be basically unpoliceable. Modern virtuality standards were far tidier, sturdier, and more sensible than the primitive, frazzled, often dangerous junk from the rest of the century. Modern data archives were astonishingly free, accessible, and open. But there were hundreds of obsolescent formats, and vast backwaters of obsolescent data, that were accessible only on machines no longer manufactured or supported. Machines of this sort could only be used by hobbyist fanatics—or by people so old that they had learned to use these machines decades ago and had never abandoned them.
    Stuart gave Mia a battered touchslate and a virtuality jewel case. Mia retired to the netsite’s bathroom, with its pedestal sinks and mirrors. She washed her hands.
    Mia clicked open the jewelry case, took its two featherlight earring phones, and cuffed them deftly onto her ears. She dabbed the little beauty-mark microphone to the corner of her upper lip. She carefully glued the false lashes to her eyelids. Each lash would monitor the shape of her eyeball, and therefore the direction of her gaze.
    Mia opened the hinged lid of a glove font and dipped both her hands, up to the wrists, into a thick bath of hot adhesive plastic. She pulled her hands out, and waved them to cool and congeal.
    The gloves crackled on her fingers as they cured and set. Mia worked her finger joints, then clenched her fists, methodically. The plastic surface of the gloves split like drying mud into hundreds of tiny platelets. She then dipped her gloves into a second tank, then pulled free. Thin, conductive veins of wetly glittering organic circuitry dried swiftly among the cracks.
    When her gloves were nicely done, Mia pulled a wrist-fan from a slot below the basin. She cracked the fan against her forearm to activate it, then opened it around her left wrist and buttoned it shut. The rainbow-tinted fabric stiffened nicely. When she had opened and buttoned her second wrist-fan, she had two large visual membranes the size of dinner plates radiating from the ends of her arms.
    The plastic gloves came alive as their circuitry met and meshed with the undersides of the wrist-fans. Mia worked her fingers again. The wrist-fans swiftly mapped out the shape of the gloves, making themselves thoroughly familiar with the size, shape, and movements of her hands.
    The fans went opaque. Her hands vanished from sight. Then the image of her hands reappeared, cleverly mapped and simulated onto the outer surfaces of the wrist-fans. Reality vanished at the rim of the fans, and Mia saw virtual images of both her hands extended into twin circles of blue void.
    Tucking the touchslate under one arm, Mia left the bathroom and walked to her chosen curtain unit. She stepped inside and shut and sealed the curtain behind her. The fabric stiffened with a sudden top-to-bottom shudder, and the machine woke itself around her. The stiff curtain fabric turned a