A few sessions had been around for dozens of seconds; Bertie's remote was one of the two oldest. The other belonged Patsy Washington—at least it was tagged with her personal certificate. Identity hijacking was a major no-no at Fairmont, but if a parent was behind it there wasn't much the school could do. And Juan had met Patsy's father. Maybe it was just as well the Alcalde didn't have to talk to him in person. Patsy's image leaned clumsily through the chair in front of her. "In fact," she continued, "it's worse than naked. All their lives, these—we—have had civilization around us. We're damned good at using that civilization. Now you theory-minded intellectuals figure it would be nice to jerk it all away and put us at risk."

"We are putting no one at risk ... Miss Washington." Mr. Alcalde was still speaking in Spanish. In fact, Spanish was the only language their principal had ever been heard to speak; the Alcalde was kind of a bizarre guy. "We at Fairmont consider unaided skills to be the ultimate fallback protection. We're not Amish here, but we believe that every human being should be able to survive in reasonable environments—without networks, even without computers."

"Next you'll be teaching rock-chipping!" said Patsy.

The Alcalde ignored the interruption. "Our graduates must be capable of doing well in outages, even in disasters. If they can't, we have not properly educated them!" He paused, glared all around the room. "But this is no survivalist school. We're not dropping you into a jungle. Your unaided skills test will be at a safe location our faculty have chosen—perhaps an Amish town, perhaps an obsolete suburb. Either way, you'll be doing good, in a safe environment. You may be surprised at the insights you get with such complete, old-fashioned simplicity."

Patsy had crossed her arms and was glaring back at the Alcalde. "That's nonsense, but okay. There's still the question. Your school brochure brags modern skills, and these concurrent exams are supposed to demonstrate that you've delivered. So how can you call an exam concurrent, if part of the time your students are stripped of all technology? Huh?"