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state-administered antidote you were going to get swept.
    … cramps, buboes, and convulsions ending in death by suffocation…crash vaccination program…available November 17–20 at these local centers …
    Bodine checked the date on the paper. Today was the 20th. Now where was the nearest center? After a few minutes he knew where to go. Off the interface, brought down in the marketplace, running scared like they wanted.
    Halfway down the block Bodine bumped into his friend Ace High. Ace was standing on the sidewalk with his head thrown far back and his arms wrapped around his legs. The Metal Crane position.
    Bodine stopped to look at Ace for a minute. Ace’s eyes were aimed at him, but there was nobody home. Bodine was clearly in the presence of an unvaccinated fellow-citizen.
    “Hey Ace,” he said, trying to straighten up his friend’s bent body, “Come on, uh, it’s eigenstate time.”
    Ace High was infinitely differentiable. He got the message and locked in on the signal. His face split like a melon when he smiled, as he did now, uncleaned teeth glistening in the sun. “Why…does the doctor…have no face?” he crooned, guessing Bodine’s meaning. “Lez go, boss.”
    Bodine and Ace High started off for the vaccination center. It was easier to be going together. That way if you forgot where you were going, your friend might still know.
    “Let’s get some stunglasses on,” Bodine suggested, feeling through his pockets. He still had his pair. Ace had lost his, so they decided to stop in at the next news-shop to get some.
    Bodine was already feeling the effects of his stunglasses. His mind was filled with safety tips, news updates, and new product information. Purposefully he went into the news-shop and bought a pair of stunglasses for Ace High. It was an attractive little shop with a big multiplexed holographic display in the corner. If Bodine looked in just the right direction, the image his stunglasses produced fit right on top of the image displayed in the news-shop. An indescribably beautiful moiré interference pattern appeared, and he was gone again.
    Fortunately Ace High had already put on his new stunglasses. As he watched, Bodine slowly assumed the Silent Planet posture, his face turned rapturously to the news-shop’s advertising display. Ace High looked at the floor, not wanting to disturb his friend. The stunglasses were projecting a three-dimensional holographic image in front of everything he looked at. The image was multiplexed, so he couldn’t actually say for sure what it was of. It was a lot things at once, and his brain knew how to sort out and store the information. His trusting brain was soaking it right up.
    As he watched the stunglasses’ images, Ace High’s slack exuberance turned to responsible concern . Concern that he had not drawn his paycheck for two months. Concern about what he had been doing for two months. Concern that everyone receive their Enlightenment Rabies vaccination, particularly himself and Bodine. Concern with the fact that more and more young people were turning their backs on the real world, only to go chasing after some kind of crazy half-scientific hopped-up occultist mystagogic blue-dome swizzle, uh.
    Bodine was more or less squatting on the floor with his arms between his knees. He was singing or moaning a wavering note. The Music of the Spheres is what the kids called it, and ordinarily if your best friend was singing the Music of the Spheres you left him alone for a few days. But they had to get that vaccination or they’d be swept.
    “Are we crazy / are we insanéd / are we zeroes / that someone painted?” Bodine muttered when Ace shook him. Then he shifted phases, the images unlocked, and he was walking out the door with a headache.
    “The old bus station, right?” Ace High said. Bodine nodded, and they started down the cold and dry sidewalk, flooded yellow with clear November sun. They were wearing their stunglasses, and each of them had about half