In lieu of a purse, Sophia carried Daisy: a sort of disembodied pocket whose purpose was to atone for the sins of the women’s clothing industry. It was a flat wallet that she slung over her shoulder on a thin strap. It was big enough to carry ID, tampons, pens, a miniature multitool, a spare house key, and an improvised rosary of electronic fobs and dongles and mini-flashlights. Every so often it grew bulky enough that she could feel it thudding against her hip, and then she would go through and clean out all the little scraps of paper she’d stuffed into it. When prepping for a day at work or a night out, she could put it into a larger bag. At ACTANSS 5, it carried a key token to her room and one of the pocket notebooks that the organizers handed out as swag. On one side it had an outer sleeve consisting of a rectangle of tough clear plastic, closed by a zipper. Some while ago, while pawing through a drawer in search of her passport, she had come across the peel-and-stick op-art shower daisy that she had purloined from the Forthrast family farmhouse. On the spur of the moment, she had slipped it into the transparent sleeve so that she could see it more often. Since then, it had become a visual hook, like a distinctive piece of jewelry or a dyed streak in the hair, that friends associated with her and strangers used as a conversation starter. Her more stylish girlfriends had begun rolling their eyes at the increasingly frayed and dingy wallet, and begun addressing it as Daisy.

After a long day of sitting still in conference sessions, it was her habit to wind down by going to the spa, where she would walk on a treadmill for half an hour or so, just to wake up the muscles and get the blood moving. The machine had a shelf intended to hold reading material. It was no longer all that useful since wearables tended to be easier to read from when you were bobbing along at full stride. She put Daisy on that and cranked the treadmill up to a brisk pace. Then she pulled her wearable down from the top of her head and settled it on the bridge of her nose and began wading through all of the message traffic that had piled up during the day. Her editor, assisted by various bots, had done her best to sort that into different buckets. One large bucket was devoted to quarantining all notifications relating to the complex of lawsuits recently generated by Sinjin Kerr and his minions at the behest of Elmo Shepherd. Those were a strange blend of very boring and very stressful. Sophia had an understanding with the Forthrast attorneys that she could ignore all of them and they would notify her when her attention was really needed.