Everybody wants to be somebody but nobody wants to be just anybody. - Pat Cadigan

If a dataline is running and there’s no one there to watch it, has anything really happened?

The Beater has still been young enough to feel immortal, at least on his better days. It was all, Wow, if we don’t slow down, we’re gonna die before we get old, except somehow it hadn’t happened that way. So they’d all assumed it never would, not dying, not getting old—hell, not even growing up.

Everything seemed to happen when you were looking the other way.