solutely sure it won't kill you dead where you stand. The
hospital counsel gave us all a very stern lecture on this very subject not a
month ago. I'll just make some notes in your medical history." He picked up his
comm and scribbled.

"Never woulda thought of that," I say. "I'm impressed."

"It's something I've been playing with for a while now. I think that psychiatric
care is a good thing, of course, but it could be better implemented. Taking away
prescription pads would be a good start."

"Or you could keep public stats on which doctors had prescribed how much of what
and how often. Put 'em on a chart in the ward where the patients' families could
see 'em."

"That's *nasty*!" he says. "I love it. We're supposed to be accountable, right?
What else?"

"Give the patients a good reason to wear their tracking bracelets: redesign them
so they gather stats on mobility and vitals and track them against your meds and
other therapies. Create a dating service that automatically links patients who
respond similarly to therapies so they can compare notes. Ooh, by comparing with
location data from other trackers, you could get stats on which therapies make
people more sociable, just by counting the frequency with which patients stop
and spend time in proximity to other patients. It'd give you empirical data with
which you track your own progress."

"This is great stuff. Damn! How do you do that?"

I feel a familiar swelling of pride. I like it when people understand how good I
am at my job. Working at V/DT was hard on my ego: after all, my job there was to
do a perfectly rotten job, to design the worst user experiences that
plausibility would allow. God, did I really do that for two whole goddamned
years?

"It's my job," I say, and give a modest shrug.

"What do you charge for work like that?"

"Why, are you in the market?"

"Who knows? Maybe after I figure out how to spring you, we can go into biz
together, redesigning nuthatches."

22.

Linda's first meeting with Art's Gran went off without a hitch. Gran met them at
Union Station with an obsolete red cap who was as ancient as she was, a vestige
of a more genteel era of train travel and bulky luggage. Just seeing him made
Art's brain whir with plans for conveyor systems, luggage escalators, cart
dispensers. They barely had enough luggage between the two of them to make it
worth the old man's time, but he dutifully marked their bags with a stub of
chalk and hauled