She looked at her feet. "Look, there's a thing I've been meaning to tell you. I don't think I can keep on volunteering at the shop, okay? I've got stuff to do, assignments, and I'm taking some extra shifts at the store --" He held up a hand. "I'm grateful for all the work you've done, Natalie. You don't need to apologize." "Okay," she said. She looked indecisively around, then seemed to make up her mind and she hugged him hard. "Take care of yourself, okay?" It struck him as funny. "I can take care of myself just fine, don't worry about me for a second. You still looking for fashion work? I think Tropicál will be hiring for the summer. I could put in that phone-call." "No," she said. "No, that's okay." She looked over his shoulder and her eyes widened. He turned around and saw that Krishna and Link had spotted them, and that Krishna was whispering something in Link's ear that was making Link grin nastily. "I should go," she said. Krishna's hand was still down the little girl's top, and he jiggled her breast at Alan. # The reporter had two lip piercings, and a matt of close-cropped micro-dreads, and an attitude. "So here's what I don't get. You've got the Market wired --" "Unwired," Kurt said, breaking in for the tenth time in as many minutes. Alan shot him a dirty look. "Unwired, right." The kid made little inverted commas with his fingertips, miming, *Yes, that is a very cute jargon you've invented, dork.* "You've got the Market unwired and you're going to connect up your network with the big interchange down on Front Street." "Well, *eventually*," Alan said. The story was too complicated. Front Street, the Market, open networks...it had no focus, it wasn't a complete narrative with a beginning, middle, and end. He'd tried to explain it to Mimi that morning, over omelets in his kitchen, and she'd been totally lost. "Eventually?" The kid took on a look of intense, teenaged skepticism. He claimed to be 20, but he looked about 17 and had been the puck in an intense game of eyeball hockey among the cute little punk girls who'd been volunteering in the shopfront when he'd appeared. "That's the end-goal, a citywide network with all-we-can eat free connectivity, fully anonymized and hardened against malicious attackers and incidental environmental interference." Alan steepled his fingers and tried to look serious and committed. "Okay, that's the goal." "But it's not going to be all or nothing. We want to make the community a part of the network. Getting people energized about participating in the network is as important as providing the network itself -- hell, the network *is* people. So we've got this intermediate step, this way that everyone can pitch in." "And that is, what, renaming your network to ParasiteNet?" Kurt nodded vigorously. "Zactly." "And how will I find these ParasiteNet nodes? Will there be a map or something with all this information on it?"