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corridor branched, then stopped. One of those cleanbots seemed out of synch. She peered back around
     the corner and saw it approaching purposefully, away from the herd. Immediately it sensed her, it swung around and zoomed
     back to the others. Almost as if it had been…following her?
    She laughed at herself and kept walking. It would be a glitch in the recognition function. The bot probably thought she was
     one of its herd.
    As she entered her elevator, she thought she saw a movement down the corridor. She’d better mention the wayward bot to management
     tomorrow. If it kept leaving the herd, it could disrupt the entire sequence for the others as well.
    The elevator doors shut as soon as she entered. Its sensors would have read her chip signal, accessed her resident information,
     and noted that she had placed a high priority on privacy in her preferences section. She hated standing in crowded elevators
     while people stared at her, then pretended nonchalance when she caught their eyes.
    She and Masao lived on the outer third floor in a four-room unit. Not high enough to have a view, but they were lucky to live
     in a Betta at all. Even if the Sam project was axed—horrible thought—she couldn’t afford to leave the company. It would mean
     leaving the Betta.
    She kicked her sandals off in the entry to their apartment and left her bag propped against the wall. Masao was asleep in
     the inner room, curled happily in their futon with the air conditioner set to autumn chill. Eleanor turned it up five degrees,
     peeled off her clothes, and crawled in beside him.
    “I’m home,” she said.
    He muttered and rolled over automatically, curling the other way so she could snuggle.
    She was dimly conscious that her last waking thoughts were about that damn welder.
    Eleanor and Masao reached the station closest to the Tanaka family house shortly before midday. The temperature had reached
     thirty-eight degrees again, according to the environment monitor outside the station, and there was no shade between the station
     and the house except for the overhang of blocks of flats and two trees drooping brownish leaves over a temple wall. Eleanor
     carried a parasol.
    “You know how in the movies you can hear cicadas in summer?” said Masao. “When I was a child, we couldn’t find any insects
     to study in our summer holiday projects. People suddenly realized that me reason they didn’t hear cicadas anymore was that
     the larvae were stuck under concrete.”
    “What did they do?” asked Eleanor.
    “There was a bit of a fuss, some people made gardens in their backyards, but the developers kept coming.” He pushed his glasses
     straight—they tended to slide off crookedly when he spoke about something that affected him.
    After the Quake came the Seikai reforms and the Bettas, with their self-contained roof gardens. But by that time the cicadas
     were gone from the city. Now, enterprising tourist agencies ran summer tours for people to go to the countryside to experience
     the sound.
    Masao gestured at the bitumen and concrete around them. The only living things were pot plants arranged carefully in some
     doorways. “When my father was a boy it was still a suburb. There was a creek and rice paddies. It was a lot cooler then. You
     could see to the mountains.”
    Now vistas of tall buildings stretched into the thick air. The streams were either buried beneath the concrete or had degenerated
     into smelly storm water outlets, and the closest mountains had been leveled to build a Betta.
    It won’t be like this when they set up a Betta here, thought Eleanor. We can stay cool all the way from our place. It’s not
     that I don’t like visiting, she told herself, but getting here is so exhausting.
    But she said nothing to Masao, who tramped stolidly along the road that was too narrow to allow a footpath, his round face
     running with sweat. He regarded the visits as a necessary duty and would never dream of shirking. The outline