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The gang who beat the crap out of us were a mix of the militia and some other guys from the town, including Lane’s boyfriend. Pretty funny that he’d take out his frustration on us, but that just shows you how good Fearing had that whole town wrapped around his finger.

Outside of town we found an old house that we could hide in and get some sleep. I slept longer than Gloria. When I woke up she was on the front steps rubbing a spoon back and forth on the pavement to make a sharp point, even though I could see it hurt her arm to do it.

“Well, we did get fed for a couple of days,” I said.

Gloria didn’t say anything.

“Let’s go up to San Francisco,” I said. “There’s a lot of lonely women there.”

I was making a joke of course.

Gloria looked at me. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Just that maybe I can get us in for once.”

Gloria didn’t laugh, but I knew she would later.

Yeyuka

Greg Egan

Though not all of his stories are about information technology, and most make only passing nods, if any, to the icons of classic CP, most Greg Egan stories are like’ 80s CP in their foregrounding of ideas over character. A typical Egan story bombards the reader with ideas and their implications and lets literary concerns go hang. This one has a nifty technological device at its heart. But it turns into a story about first-vs.-third world economics, and then, uncharacteristically, into a story about one person’s moral decision.

Neuromancer, through its transnational megacorporations and the brutal struggle of its protagonists in a street-level no-holds-barred marketplace, offers an implicit critique of capitalism. Here the critique of corporate power bound only by profit margins is overt.

On my last day in Sydney, as a kind of farewell, I spent the morning on Bondi Beach. I swam for an hour, then lay on the sand and stared at the sky. I dozed off for a while, and when I woke there were half a dozen booths set up amid the sun bathers, dispensing the latest fashion: solar tattoos. On a touch-screen the size of a full-length mirror, you could choose a design and then customise it, or create one from scratch with software assistance. Computer-controlled jets sprayed the undeveloped pigments onto your skin, then an hour of uv exposure rendered all the colours visible.

As the morning wore on, I saw giant yellow butterflies perched between shoulder blades, torsos wrapped in green-and-violet dragons, whole bodies wreathed in chains of red hibiscus. Watching these images materialise around me, I couldn’t help thinking of them as banners of victory. Throughout my childhood, there’d been nothing more terrifying than the threat of melanoma — and by the turn of the millennium, nothing more hip than neck-to-knee lycra. Twenty years later, these elaborate decorations were designed to encourage, to boast of, irradiation. To proclaim, not that the sun itself had been tamed, but that our bodies had. To declare that cancer had been defeated.

I touched the ring on my left index finger, and felt a reassuring pulse through the metal. Blood flowed constantly around the hollow core of the device, diverted from a vein in my finger. The ring’s inner surface was covered with billions of tiny sensors, spring-loaded, funnel-shaped structures like microscopic Venus fly-traps, each just a few hundred atoms wide. Every sizable molecule in my bloodstream that collided with one of these traps was seized and shrink-wrapped, long enough and tightly enough to determine its shape and its chemical identity before it was released.

So the ring knew exactly what was in my blood. It also knew what belonged, and what didn’t. Under its relentless scrutiny, the biochemical signature of a viral or bacterial infection, or even a microscopic tumour far downstream, could never escape detection for long — and once a diagnosis was made, treatment was almost instantaneous. Planted alongside the sensors were programmable catalysts, versatile molecules that could be reshaped under computer control. The ring could manufacture