“Away for ten hours,” he told the room. Silently, it calibrated a delicate climactic balance to conserve energy in his absence. In a few seconds he would actually join the physical commute, what his brother Len called the Fleshbound Parade. He took a deep breath and wondered if his life would look different out of ever-sleepless eyes, then turned and palmed open the door.

Time to go to work.

* * *

UniCorp headquarters occupied the top twenty-five floors of the UniCorp Building, a 375-story atmoscraper. It was one of the first buildings to be fitted with a red plasteel/brick polymer to make the entire mile-high facade look like a hundred pre-Unison firehouses stacked on top of one another. Around the time of Ambrose’s birth, UniCorp had occupied the entire building. Unison Version 2.0 went live soon after, and then every month more empty office space was converted to luxury apartments as thousands of Associates fled office life for the comforts of working entirely within Unison.

For security reasons the UniCorp building had street-level parking only. Mr. Danielson, an elderly Associate who had known the Truax family forever and served as Ambrose’s driver and escort, descended smoothly beneath the elevated traffic stream and parked in his designated space. Ambrose glanced up at the bluish-white ion lift patterns traced in the sky by the undersides of tightly packed cars flowing past in perfect harmony. Danielson palmed open the car door for him and smiled. “You ready for the big day, sir?”

Ambrose shrugged. He’d already been through so many preliminary tests and scans over the past year that it was hard to imagine today as an ending point. But it was also hard to deny the fact that today’s procedure carried a new kind of weight. All the testing had been performed in Unison. Now they’d actually be invading his physical, fleshbound self and permanently altering the hypothalamus part of his brain, where the sleep impulse lived.

He stepped out into the morning air, warm even in the deep shade of the UniCorp atmoscraper.

“I guess I was born ready,” he said in his half-serious businessman voice. Danielson’s smile froze for a moment before he slapped Ambrose gently on the shoulder.

“That’s the spirit. Reminds me … you know, I played football when I was your age—and I don’t mean the old American kind. I’m not that ancient, despite what your father tells you.”

“He says you’re old enough to be his father.”

Danielson extended a hand and flipped it palm side up. His homepage—UniCorp Admin login—sprang from his palm and displayed in the air between them. It was translucent and looked backlit from both sides. Danielson navigated by poking the floating site with his finger and sliding it out of view, the hardcoded browser following his instructions. He landed on a wiki-site called Notable Eastern Seaboard City Births.

“Okay, Mr. D, I believe you,” Ambrose said.

Danielson flipped his palm again and the site vapored away. “These are exciting times, sir.”