200,000 years.

Fede crumpled back into the office's wall, slid down it into a sitting position.
His eyes were open and staring. Blood streamed over his face.

Art looked at Fede in horrified fascination. He noticed that Fede was breathing
shallowly, almost panting, and realized dimly that this meant he wasn't a
murderer. He turned and fled the office, nearly bowling Tonaishah over in the
corridor.

"Call an ambulance," he said, then shoved her aside and fled O'Malley House and
disappeared into the Piccadilly lunchtime crowd.

29.

I am: sprung.

Father Ferlenghetti hasn't been licensed to practice psychiatry in Massachusetts
for forty years, but the court gave him standing. The judge actually winked at
me when he took the stand, and stopped scritching on her comm as the priest said
a lot of fantastically embarrassing things about my general fitness for human
consumption.

The sanitarium sent a single junior doc to my hearing, a kid so young I'd
mistaken him for a hospital driver when he climbed into the van with me and
gunned the engine. But no, he was a doctor who'd apparently been briefed on my
case, though not very well. When the judge asked him if he had any opinions on
Father Ferlenghetti's testimony, he fumbled with his comm while the Father
stared at him through eyebrows thick enough to hide a hamster in, then finally
stammered a few verbatim notes from my intake interview, blushed, and sat down.

"Thank you," the judge said, shaking her head as she said it. Gran, seated
beside me, put one hand on my knee and one hand on the knee of Doc Szandor's
brother-in-law, a hotshot Harvard Law post-doc whom we'd retained as corporate
counsel for a new Limited Liability Corporation. We'd signed the articles of
incorporation the day before, after Group. It was the last thing Doc Szandor did
before resigning his post at the sanitarium to take up the position of Chief
Medical Officer at HumanCare, LLC, a corporation with no assets, no employees,
and a sheaf of shitkicking ideas for redesigning mental hospitals using
off-the-shelf tech and a little bit of UE mojo.

30.

Art was most of the way to the Tube when he ran into Lester. Literally.

Lester must have seen him coming, because he stepped right into Art's path from
out of the crowd. Art ploughed into him, bounced off of his dented armor, and
would have fallen over had Lester not caught his arm and steadied him.

"Art, isn't it? How you doin', mate?"

Art ga