Today, however, the CTC was empty and quiet around Natasha Mori, giving the auditorium a hollow, cavernous feel. She had come in to prepare her orientation spiel for the incoming group and also to put some distance between herself and her apartment. After Chacagua Island, no one was going to dun her if she took a few days off. But she didn’t want to stay home with her thoughts. She had more than filled her quota for that lately, thanks. With Bryan’s mom up in Maine taking care of him after his surgery, and her sorta-kinda roomie Duncan Ulysses apparently pulling one of his disappearing acts, she had felt cooped up and restless.

And so here she was being productive and pacing the auditorium in an augmented reality headset, one of multiple designs that Michaels, her former professor, had patented over the past five years. Lightweight and portable, it wasn’t the most full-featured of his designs. The holos lacked nuances of detail. But it did what it was supposed to do pretty well, offering her a convincing environment that was a composite of the computer-generated and the real.

For the moment Natasha was staying out of the center of the auditorium, wanting a view of the lecture area from its perimeters. She wore a faded denim jacket over a long loose purple tunic, black leggings and iridescent multicolor Converse high-tops. Her choppy white hair—tipped with black here and there, seemingly randomly, but not really—roostered out from under the headset’s elastic head straps.

Augmented reality.

Holographically projected into her retinas were rows of chairs arranged in a wide horseshoe, as well as the platform where she would stand facing the group between its branches. She had already tried out several alternative seating layouts—wide fan, three-quarter arena, end stage, a bunch more—leaving some in their boilerplate configurations, tinkering with others. She had used the headset’s interactive software to play with the holo’s lighting and ambience, raising and dimming the brightness of the room, adding and removing potential stage backdrops and displays. Forty-two seats, one for every person scheduled to attend the session.

After checking things out from various angles, she had pretty much settled on the horseshoe layout. It would bring her closest to the recruits and also provide excellent sightlines, which translated into eye contact, which would help her to connect with them and get group discussions going.