harried restaurateur dealing with his regulars, and said
something in Korean to the busgirl, who along with the Vietnamese chef and the
Congolese sous chef, lent the joint a transworld sensibility that made it a
favorite among the painfully global darlings of O'Malley House. The bus-girl
found a pad and started totting up numbers, then keyed them into a Point-of-Sale
terminal, which juiced Art's comm with an accounting for their lunch. This
business with hand-noting everything before entering it into the PoS had driven
Art to distraction when he'd first encountered it. He'd assumed that the
terminal's UI was such that a computer-illiterate busgirl couldn't reliably key
in the data without having it in front of her, and for months he'd cited it in
net-bullshit sessions as more evidence of the pervasive user-hostility that
characterized the whole damned GMT.

He'd finally tried out his rant on the counterman, one foreigner to another,
just a little Briton-bashing session between two refugees from the Colonial
Jackboot. To his everlasting surprise, the counterman had vigorously defended
the system, saying that he liked the PoS data-entry system just fine, but that
the stack of torn-off paper stubs from the busgirl's receipt book was a good
visualization tool, letting him eyeball the customer volume from hour to hour by
checking the spike beside the till, and the rubberbanded stacks of yellowing
paper lining his cellar's shelves gave him a wonderfully physical evidence of
the growing success of his little eatery. There was a lesson there, Art knew,
though he'd yet to codify it. User mythology was tricky that way.

Every time Art scribbled a tip into his comm and squirted it back at the PoS, he
considered this little puzzle, eyes unfocusing for a moment while his vision
turned inwards. As his eyes snapped back into focus, he noticed the young lad
sitting on the long leg of the ell formed by the counter. He had bully short
hair and broad shoulders, and a sneer that didn't quite disappear as he shoveled
up the dhal with his biodegradable bamboo disposable spork.

He knew that guy from somewhere. The guy caught him staring and they locked eyes
for a moment, and in that instant Art knew who the guy was. It was Tom, whom he
had last seen stabbing at him with a tazer clutched in one shaking fist, face
twisted in fury. Tom wasn't wearing his killsport armor, just nondescript
athletic wear, and he wasn't with Lester and Tony, but it