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She needn’t have worried As she approached the guarded gate to the outside world, the security system queried her terminal, which assured it of her VIP status A cauard post scanned her face, compared it to the picture on file, and verified her identity while she was still twenty uard snapped her a sharp salute and asked if she’d need a ride

“No, just going for a walk,” she said

The guard s down the street leading away from the UN complex, then turned around to see two ar her at a discreet distance She shrugged and walked on Soot lost or hurt

Once Bobbie was outside the UN cos rose around her like walls of steel and glass, er saw it Sh-pitched whine and the scent of ozone

And people were everywhere

Bobbie had gone to a couple of ga Stadium on Mars, to watch the Red Devils play The stadium had seats for twenty thousand fans Because the Devils were usually at the bottoenerally held less than half that That relatively reatest number of humans Bobbie had ever seen in one place at one time There were billions of people on Mars, but there weren’t a lot of open spaces for the doo streets that seemed to stretch into infinity, Bobbie was sure she saw aine how o-inducing heights in every direction around her, and couldn’t Millions of people, probably in just the buildings and streets she could see

And if Martian propaganda was right, ht now didn’t have jobs She tried to i any particular place you had to be on any given day

What the Earthers had discovered is that when people have nothing else to do, they have babies For a brief period in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the population had looked like it row As her education, and frorew se ended that

Or, again, that hat she’d been taught in school Only here on Earth, where food grew on its ohere air was just a by-product of randoround, could a person actually choose not to do anything at all There was enough extra created by those who felt the need to work that the surplus could feed the rest A world no longer of the haves and the have-nots, but of the engaged and the apathetic

Bobbie found herself standing next to a street-level coffee shop and took a seat

“Can I get you anything?” a shtly dyed blue hair asked

“What’s good?”

“We make the best soy-milk tea, if you like that”

“Sure,” Bobbie said, not sure what soy-h to take a chance

The blue-haired girl bustled away and chatted with an equally young man behind the bar while hethat everyone she saorking was about the sae

When the tea arrived, she said, “Hey, do you ed, her se?”