It’s kind of amazing that after all this time we are still using passwords for anything,” Sophia exclaimed.

It was three hours later. She was sitting in a restaurant along Lake Union with the man she knew as Uncle C.

Corvallis Kawasaki was now in his late forties. Like a lot of men whose hairlines had simply gone wrong at a certain age, he had taken to shaving his head. As a result, he looked radically different from the mop-topped Asian-American kid visible in some of Richard’s old photographs from the Corporation 9592 days. He had also got in the habit of wearing suits. He had never quite resigned himself to neckties, though, and so he had his shirts tailored with stand-up collars meant to be worn unbuttoned. That, combined with his prominence in the tech world, had made him easily recognizable; when he’d walked into the restaurant, ten minutes late, the hostess had greeted him by name, and diners’ heads had turned, tracking his progress across the room to the private booth where Sophia had been waiting for him.

In this part of town, all lunches were business lunches, and all conversations over food and drink involved disclosures of sensitive IP. The restaurants had been designed accordingly; tables were widely spaced, sound barriers were inserted wherever possible, and when it got too quiet, randomized noise welled up from discreetly placed speakers and filled in awkward gaps. Private dining rooms of various sizes ringed the main floor. Some of these were mere booths, capable of seating two to four, with doors on them. In one of those, C-plus and Sophia had been able to get through the hugging and cheek-kissing part of the meeting without too many eyes on them. They had then enjoyed a light lunch together and spent a little while catching up. He was doing well. He and Maeve now had a brood of three kids, all indexing their way through school and soccer and robotics, exhaustively photo-documented in a way that had to be shared with Sophia.

It was only after the plates had been cleared away and coffee served that C-plus had buckled down to the serious business of making her a token holder—or, in the inevitable tech industry abbreviation, a toho—with access privileges to Dodge’s Brain.