She brought it to him, offering a real bow. "Congratulations, Hiro."

""Hiro-sensei," he reminded her.

Aya just rolled her eyes. "You don't have to call your own brother 'sensei,' Hiro, no matter how big a face he is. So what was the story?"

"You wouldn't be interested. Apparently."

"Come on, Hiro! I watch all your stories…except for last night."

"It was about this bunch of crumblies." Ren lay back across the couch. "They're like surge-monkeys, except they don't care about beauty or weird body mods. Just life extension: liver refits every six months, new cloned hearts once a year."

"Life extension?" Aya said. "But stories about crumblies never go big."

"This one has a conspiracy angle," Ren said. "These crumblies have a theory that the doctors secretly know how to keep people living forever. They say the only reason anyone dies of old age is to keep the population steady. It's just like the bubblehead operation back in the Prettytime: The doctors are hiding the truth!"

"That's brain-kicking," Aya murmured, a shiver traveling down her spine. It was so easy to believe in conspiracies, after the government had made everyone brain-missing for centuries.

And living forever? Even littlies would pay attention to that.

"You forgot the best part, Ren," Hiro said. "These crumblies are planning to sue the city … for immortality.

Like it's a human right or something. People want an investigation! Check it out."

Hiro waved his hand. On the wallscreen his face rank disappeared, replaced by a web of meme-lines, a huge diagram showing how the story had kicked through the city interface all night. Vast spirals of debate, disagreement, and outright slamming had splintered from Hire's feed, over a quarter-million people joining the conversation.

Was immortality a bogus idea? Could your brain stay bubbly forever? And if nobody died, where on earth would you put everyone? Would the expansion wind up eating the whole planet?