wild
kids in the vertical city with whom I spent my days getting in what passed for
trouble around the bat-house.

I did mention it to my counselor, The Amazing Robotron, so-called for the metal
exoskeleton he wore to support his fragile body in Earth's hard gravity. But he
didn't count, then.

#

The reason that Chet can't pinpoint the moment his mother sealed her lips is
because he was a self-absorbed little rodent in those days.

Not a cute freckled hellion. A miserable little shit who played hide-and-seek
with the other miserable little shits in the bat-house, but played it violently,
hide-and-seek-and-break-and-enter, hide-and-seek-and-smash-and-grab. The lot of
them are amorphous, indistinguishable from each other in his memory, all that
remains of all those clever little brats is the lingering impression of loud,
boasting voices and sharp little teeth.

The Amazing Robotron was a fool in little Chet's eyes, an easy-to-bullshit,
ineffectual lump whose company Chet had to endure for a mandatory hour every
other day.

"Chet, you seem distr-acted to-day," The Amazing Robotron said in his artificial
voice.

"Yah. You know. Worried about, uh, the future." Distracted by Debbie Carr's
purse, filched while she sat in the sixty-eighth floor courtyard, talking with
her stupid girlie friends. Debbie was the first girl from the gang to get tits,
and now she didn't want to hang out with them anymore, and her purse was stashed
underneath the base of a hollow planter outside The Amazing Robotron's apt, and
maybe he could sneak it out under his shirt and find a place to dump it and sort
through its contents after the session.

"What is it about the fu-ture that wo-rries you?" The Amazing Robotron was as
unreadable as a pinball machine, something he resembled. Underneath, he was a
collection of whip-like tentacles with a knot of sensory organs in the middle.

"You know, like, the whole fricken thing. Like if I leave here when I'm
eighteen, will my folks be okay without me, and like that."

"Your pa-rents are able to take care of them-selves, Chet. You must con-cern
your-self with you, Chet. You should do something con-struct-tive with your
wo-rry, such as de-ciding on a ca-reer that will ful-fill you when you leave the
Cen-ter." The Center was the short form for the long, nice name that no one ever
used to describe the bat-house.

"I thought, like, maybe I could be, you know, a spaceship pilot or something."

"Then yo