Milton Dirth’s Ninth Maxim: Avoid publicity, except when you can wield it like a sledgehammer.

Anya was giggling at the picture of Laurence, in her throaty midwestern-girl voice. “God. Could they have made your chin look any bigger? It looks like the heel of someone’s foot, growing out of your face.”

“This picture looks like you got a bad chin implant!” shouted Tanaa from the pilot seat of the autocopter, where she was wearing big headphones over her afro, along with a pair of aviator goggles. She had her “operating delicate machinery” frown on her narrow mouth, even as she laughed.

“A chinplant!” Anya laughed, creating unaccustomed dimples in her normally dour face. “Actually, it looks like you’re overcompensating for being unable to grow a beard, by just adding more chin.”

“Shut up shut up!” Laurence said. “I’m a wunderkind, okay?” He took a moment to look at the two women, reflected on how lucky he was to have such clever weirdos working with him, and vowed yet again that he was not going to let this project fail. He wasn’t going to let Milton, or any of them, down. He was going to do better, somehow.

Then Laurence jumped out of the autocopter, trusting the steel-cord-and-pulley mechanism to lower him at a fast—but not too fast—clip. He wanted to land on his feet. For a moment, there was nothing but sky all around him, and then the Dogpatch was rising up, and the brand-new brutalist tower blocks grew in proportion to the ancient warehouses and docks around them. The air was searing hot, even with the wind.

Laurence’s face was on every computer screen in town right now—except the screens of the company whose roof deck Laurence was dropping onto right now, MatherTec. MatherTec’s computer screens were spewing gibberish, thanks to a clownware-injection attack that Laurence had unleashed on the company’s servers ten minutes earlier.