Z-Boy breaks the connection, drops the phone into his pocket, and leaves Brady’s room. He heads back past the duty desk and Nurse Rainier, who is still absorbed in her computer. He leaves the cart in the snack alcove and crosses the skyway. He walks with a spring in his step, like a much younger man.

In an hour or two, Rainier or one of the other nurses will find Brady Hartsfield either slumped in his chair or sprawled on the floor on top of his Zappit. There won’t be much concern; he has slipped into total unconsciousness many times before, and always comes out of it.

Dr. Babineau says it’s part of the re-booting process, that each time Hartsfield returns, he’s slightly improved. Our boy is getting well, Babineau says. You might not believe it to look at him, but our boy is really getting well.

You don’t know the half of it, thinks the mind now occupying Library Al’s body. You don’t know the fucking half of it. But you’re starting to, Dr. B. Aren’t you?

Better late than never.

24

“That man who yelled at me on the street was wrong,” Barbara says. “I believed him because the voice told me to believe him, but he was wrong.”

Holly wants to know about the voice from the game, but Barbara may not be ready to talk about that yet. So she asks who the man was, and what he yelled.

“He called me blackish, like on that TV show. The show is funny, but on the street it’s a put-down. It’s—”

“I know the show, and I know how some people use it.”

“But I’m not blackish. Nobody with a dark skin is, not really. Not even if they live in a nice house on a nice street like Teaberry Lane. We’re all black, all the time. Don’t you think I know how I get looked at and talked about at school?”

“Of course you do,” says Holly, who has been looked at and talked about plenty in her own time; her high school nickname was Jibba-Jibba.

“The teachers talk about gender equality, and racial equality. They have a zero tolerance policy, and they mean it—at least most of them do, I guess—but anyone can walk through the halls when the classes are changing and pick out the black kids and the Chinese transfer students and the Muslim girl, because there’s only two dozen of us and we’re like a few grains of pepper that somehow got into the salt shaker.”

She’s picking up steam now, her voice outraged and indignant but also weary.