Brave New Worlds

of their building and the door closed behind them, their whole affect changed. They slumped, they smiled at one another, they leaned against the mailboxes and set down their bags and took off their hats and fluffed their hair and turned back into people.
    He remembered that feeling from his life before, the sense of having two faces: the one he showed to the world and the one that he reserved for home. In the Order, he only wore one face, one that he knew in exquisite detail.
    He approached the door now, and his pan started to throb ominously, letting him know that he was enduring hostile probes. The building wanted to know who he was and what business he had there, and it was attempting to fingerprint everything about him from his pan to his gait to his face.
    He took up a position by the door and dialed back the pan's response to a dull pulse. He waited for a few minutes until one of the residents came down: a middle-aged man with a dog, a little sickly-looking schnauzer with grey in its muzzle.
    "Can I help you?" the man said, from the other side of the security door, not unlatching it.
    "I'm looking for Anja Krotoski," he said. "I'm trying to track down her brother. "
    The man looked him up and down. "Please step away from the door. "
    He took a few steps back. "Does Ms. Krotoski still live here?"
    The man considered. "I'm sorry, sir, I can't help you. " He waited for Lawrence to react.
    "You don't know, or you can't help me?"
    "Don't wait under this awning. The police come if anyone waits under this awning for more than three minutes. "
    The man opened the door and walked away with his dog.

    His phone rang before the next resident arrived. He cocked his head to answer it, then remembered that his lifelogger was dead and dug in his jacket for a mic. There was one at his wrist pulse-points used by the health array. He unvelcroed it and held it to his mouth.
    "Hello?"
    "It's Gerta, boyo. Wanted to know how your Anomaly was going. "
    "Not good," he said. "I'm at the sister's place and they don't want to talk to me. "
    "You're walking up to strangers and asking them about one of their neighbors, huh?"
    He winced. "Put it that way, yeah, OK, I understand why this doesn't work. But Gerta, I feel like Rip Van Winkle here. I keep putting my foot in it. It's so different. "
    "People are people, Lawrence. Every bad behavior and every good one lurks within us. They were all there when you were in the world—in different proportion, with different triggers. But all there. You know yourself very well. Can you observe the people around you with the same keen attention?"
    He felt slightly put upon. "that's what I'm trying—"
    "Then you'll get there eventually. What, you're in a hurry?"
    Well, no. He didn't have any kind of timeline. Some people chased Anomalies for years . But truth be told, he wanted to get out of the City and back onto campus. "I'm thinking of coming back to Campus to sleep. "
    Gerta clucked. "Don't give in to the agoraphobia, Lawrence. Hang in there. You haven't even heard my news yet, and you're already ready to give up?"
    "What news? And I'm not giving up, just want to sleep in my own bed—"
    "The entry checkpoints, Lawrence. You cannot do this job if you're going to spend four hours a day in security queues. Anyway, the news.
    "It wasn't the first time he did it. I've been running the logs back three years and I've found at least a dozen streams that he tampered with. Each time he used a different technique. This was the first time we caught him. Used some pretty subtle tripwires when he did it, so he'd know if anyone ever caught on. Must have spent his whole life living on edge, waiting for that moment, waiting to bug out. Must have been a hard life. "
    "What was he doing? Spying?"
    "Most assuredly," Gerta said. "But for whom? For the enemy? the Securitat?"
    They'd considered going to the Securitat with the information, but why bother? the Order did business with the Securitat, but tried never to interact with them on any other terms. The Securitat and the Order had an implicit understanding: so long as the Order was performing excellent data-analysis, it didn't have to fret the kind of overt scrutiny that prevailed in the real world. Undoubtedly, the Securitat kept satellite eyes, data-snoopers, wiretaps, millimeter radar and every other conceivable surveillance trained on each Campus in the world, but at the end of the day, they were just badly socialized geeks who'd left the world, and useful