That last question made Aya dizzy again. She remembered that day at school when they'd showed satellite pictures from the Rusty era, back before population control. The sprawling cities had been huge enough to see from space: billions of extras crowding the planet, most of them living in total obscurity.

"Look at that!" Hiro cried. "Everyone's already going off the story My rank just dropped to nine hundred. People can be so shallow!"

"Maybe immortality's getting old," Ren said, grinning at Aya.

"Ha, ha," Hiro said. "I wonder who's stealing my eyeballs."

He flicked his hand again, and the wallscreen broke into a dozen panels. The familiar faces of the city's top twelve tech-kickers appeared. Aya noticed that Hiro had jumped to number four.

He was leaning forward in his chair, devouring the feeds to find out where his ratings had gone.

Aya sighed. Typical Hiro—he'd already forgotten that she'd come up here to talk to him. But she stayed quiet, curling next to Ren on the couch, trying not to crumple too many sad little paper birds. It probably wouldn't hurt, letting Hiro get his feed fix before admitting she'd left her hovercam at the bottom of a lake.

And Aya didn't mind a little feed-time. The familiar voices soothed her nerves, washing over her like a conversation with old friends.

People's faces were so different since the mind-rain, the new fads and cliques and inventions so unpredictable. It made the city sense-missing sometimes. Famous people were the cure for that randomness, like pre-Rusties gathering around their campfires every night, listening to the elders. Humans needed big faces around for comfort and familiarity, even an ego-kicker like Nana Love just talking about what she'd had for breakfast.

In the upper right corner, Gamma Matsui was kicking a new tech religion. Some history clique had applied averaging software to the world's great spiritual books, then programmed it to spit out godlike decrees.