And wouldn’t you know, a beer-oiled gang of Rousseau’s ‘young lads,’ the enforcer crowd, had hijacked the news screen, hooting and hollering and spraying foam at each other. Sometimes, when it got plain lethal outside, Rousseau cleared the main hall and staged unruly basketball tournaments to let ‘the lads’ run off steam, instead of harassing us girls. The den’s first line of defense, maybe, but in a group, they could be mean, and I meant to stay clear of them. The net’s weather feed would have to do me.

I was too night-blind to see till I was right on top of my favorite computer—already taken. Damn! Could take longer if I had to jigger a new machine!

Slipping past, I saw it was Ellie Mae had my spot, otherwise known as Crazy Ellie. A real old-timer, she claimed to have been a scientist before, a PhD in Astrophysics. Rubio went on about what that meant, but ran out of details pretty quick. The gossip was that Ellie Mae had come to Unca Joe spouting a lot of grim views about the future of the planet and the impossibility of a short-term climate fix, even though everyone (but Rubio) would tell you the whole world’s resources were focused on finding one. After a chat with Rousseau, she toned down her act. The boss didn’t hold with wild ideas or daunting pessimism.

So now, if you sat next to Ellie Mae in the Mess, she smiled and asked after your night’s picking, like any other nice elderkin. Meanwhile, there she was, slamming away at my keypad, so intent she didn’t see me go by, keeping her unpopular obsessions to herself.

Three machines along, I found an old keyboard model that could limp up tomorrow’s stats. Weather was Topic Numero Uno, after all. No one bothered to lie about it. If something big was coming, you might find an actual human reporting it, from some safely inland site. But that morning, only the robo-crawl below a slide show of nature porn from before. Today would be unseasonably warm, possible t-storms, periods of heavy rain. What else is new? But I’d been right about the river creeping up the avenues.

“Sea level still rising,” I muttered. When were they gonna get things under control?

“S’up, kiddo?”

“Hah?”

“Wow! Jumpy, aren’t we?” A chair scraped. My friend Jenn plopped down beside me, mug in hand. Was it a nudge from fate that kept putting bunk delays in my way?

I made my shoulders relax. “Hair-trigger Glim, they call me.”

“Sorry! Whacha lookin’ at?”

“The usual. S’up wit you? You gave up on the brew riot?”

She offered the mug. “Swill. That crowd could get drunk on air.”

I sipped, handed it back. “Watering it again. A shame to poison good beer.”

“Or even not so good.” Jenn shrugged and took a long pull. “When in Rome . . .”