Sleep was far away now. His mind was working again, and required numbing. Alex slid out of the bed onto his hands and knees and searched around on the thick, plush, ugly carpet. His head swam and pounded with the effort. Alex persisted, being used to this.

The TV's remote control, with the foxlike cunning of all important inanimate objects, had gone to earth in a collapsing heap of Mexican true-crime fotonovelas. Alex noted that his bed's iron springs, after three weeks of constant humidity, were gently but thoroughly going to rust.

Alex rose to his knees, clutching his prize, and slid with arthritic languor beneath the sheets again. He caught his breath, blew his nose, neatly placed two cold drops of medicated saline against the surface of each eyeball, then began combing the clinic's cable service with minimal twitches of his thumb. Weepy Mexican melodramas. A word-game show. Kids chasing robot dinosaurs in some massive underground mall. The ever-present Thai pop music.

And some English-language happytalk news. Spanish happytalk news. Japanese happytalk news. Alex, born in 20 10, had watched the news grow steadily more and cheerful for all of his twenty-one years. As a m~ he'd witnessed hundreds of hours of raw footage: plagues, mass death, desperate riot, unsanitary wreckage, all against a panicky backdrop of ominous and unrelenting environmental decline. All that stuff was still out there, just as every aspect of modern reality had its mirrored shadow in the Net somewhere, but nowadays you had to hunt hard to find it, and the people discussing it didn't seem to have much in the way of budgets. Somewhere along the line, the entire global village had slipped into neurotic denial.

Today, as an adult, Alex found the glass pipelines of the Net chockablock with jet-set glamour weddings and cute dog stories.