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She watched the s flicker past - dreary rooms full of standard-requisition squalor No one fa extras wearing generic designs A few ego-kickers sat talking into their cae face rank here was six hundred thousand, despair- and pathetic

Obscurity in all its horror

Back in the Prettytiuely remembered, you just asked for awesome clothes or a new hoverboard and they popped out of the hole in the wall likedecent unless you were fa classes or doing chores - whatever the Good Citizen Committee commanded, basically

Moggie's lifters connected with theas she hit The wet grass squished beneath her like a sodden sponge, soft but shivery cold

She let go of Moggie and lay for aher heartbeat slon "You okay?"

Moggie flashed its night-lights again

"Okaythat's still blind-"

Ren had also al, but the new Moggie was e of circuitry and lifters Since Ren's tinkering, it had learned Aya's favorite angles, when to pan and zoom, and even how to track her eyes for cues

But for so

She kept her eyes closed, listening hard as she watched the spots across her vision fade No footsteps, no whir ofbut the muffled thump of music from the dorm

Aya rose to her feet and brushed herself off Not that anyone would notice the wet grass clinging to her; Reputation Bombers dressed to disappear The robe was hooded and shapeless, the perfect disguise for party-crashing

With a twist of a crash bracelet, a hoverboard rose frolittering lights of Prettyville

Funny how everyone still called it that, even if most of the residents weren't pretty anymore - not in the old sense, anyway Prettyville was full of pixel-skins and surge-e new fads and fashions You could choose a a million kinds of beauty or weirdness, or even keep your natural-born face your whole life These days "pretty" ot you noticed

But one thing about Prettyville was still the sao there Not at night, when all the good stuff happened

Especially if you were an extra, a loser, an unknown

Gazing at the city, she felt engulfed by her own invisibility Each of its sparkling lights stood for one of the million people who had never heard of Aya Fuse Who probably never would

She sighed, urging her hoverboard forward

The governone forever, freeing humanity from centuries of bubbleheadedness They clailies, pretties, and crumb lies had all been washed away That the last three years had unleashed a host of new technologies, setting the future in ain

But as far as Aya could see, the

It still prettyfifteen

TECH-HEADS

"Are you getting this?" she whispered

Moggie was already shooting, the shi from its lenses Hot-air balloons swayed over the ee jackets It looked like a party back in the old days: self-indulgent and eye-kickingly radiant

At least, that was how Aya's older brother always described the Prettyti operation on their sixteenth birthday It ed your personality, leaving you brain- and easily controlled

Hiro hadn't been a bubblehead very long; he'd turned sixteen only a few months before the mind-rain had arrived and cured the pretties He liked to clai shallow and vain was such a stretch for him But he never denied that the parties had been awesome

Not that Hiro would be here tonight; he ay too fae face rank inside was about twenty thousand Compared with her older brother, the people at this bash were total extras

Coh, they were legends

"Be careful, Moggie," she whispered "We're not wanted here"

Aya flipped up the hood of her robe, and stepped out of the shadows

Inside, the air was full of hovercale-size all the way down to paparazzi swarne cork

There was always plenty to see at tech-head parties, crazy people and kick new gadgets Maybe people weren't as beautiful as back during the Pretty tie-ers and s in a breeze; safety fireworks skittering along the floor, dodging feet and sizzling incense as they passed

Tech-heads lived for new technologies - they loved showing off their latest tricks, and kickers loved putting them on their feeds The endless cycle of invention and publicity bumped everyone's face rank, so everyone was happy

Everyone who got invited, anyway

A hovercah to peek in at Aya's face She lowered her head,her way toward a cluster of Reputation Bombers Here in public they all kept their hoods up, like a bunch of pre-Rusty Buddhistthe na to convince the city interface to bump his face rank

Aya bowed to the group and joined the blur of naly face covered

The whole point of boorithms: How many mentions of your name did it take to crack the top thousand? How quickly did you drop if everyone stopped talking about you? The clique was one big controlled experiment, which hy they all wore the same anonymous outfits

But Aya figured most Bombers didn't care about theto talk themselves famous It was like how they'd manufactured celebrities back in Rusty days, a handful of feeds hyping a few bubbleheads and ignoring everybody else

What was the point of the reputation econo you who to talk about?

But Aya chanted away like a good little Bo the view fro out faces one by one

The secret clique Aya had discovered had to be here somewhere Only tech-heads could pull off a trick like that

She'd spotted the-lev trains, traveling at insane speeds through the factory district - so fast that all the shots Moggie had taken were too grainy and blurry to use

Aya had to find the would be instantly famous

But Moggie was already distracted, watching a gaggle of NeoFoodies underneath a pink blob floating in the air They were drinking fro a spilled cup of tea

NeoFoodies were old news - Hiro had kicked a story about therown froen, and injected flavors into weird forel, dinner with the density of a soap bubble