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his way of saying he knew about the Atticus Finch disaster at school today and he didn’t want anything untoward happening under his roof, but he’d never embarrass Syd by bringing that sort of thing up directly. Or maybe he’d known about Syd for years. Sometimes an open door was just an open door.

[5]
    “I BROUGHT THE . . . UH . . . projector,” Tom said, keeping his distance from Syd, as if he were contagious.
    “Well? You gonna give it to me?”
    “Right, yeah,” Tom said and pulled the small device from his tattered canvas bag. Syd took it from him and went back to his bench. The kid didn’t move.
    The projector was smooth gray plastic, about an inch thick and three inches long. It had a small slot for the battery and another for the lens. The receiver in the middle picked up its owner’s datastream and transmitted to the lens. This model had all kinds of problems with interference from background radiation. Even new, it hadn’t been very high quality, and it was very far from new.
    Syd set it in a cradle and fired a laser into it. The specs popped up in a holo in the air and he grabbed his micro tools and set to work. He removed the cover and the sensor inlay. He pulled apart the processor and looked at the power supply. He studied the parts under different beams and magnifications. He tested the signal strength one more time, and set the whole mess down and started to rummage for something to repair it with that might at least get Tom through exams.
    Tom watched him carefully, stepping up on tiptoes to see what Syd was doing, as if he’d understand.
    It amazed Syd how much people relied on these little devices for their datastreams, without having the slightest idea how they worked. The biodata everyone had installed when they were born (or in the case of the refugees, when they were rescued) linked everybody to the network so that creditors and advertisers could track you, but if you wanted to use the datastream yourself, you needed your own projector. Knowing how they worked, Syd felt more like a shaman than a repairman, a keeper of wisdom and mystery. He liked the feeling. It was good to be admired for something. Everyone should feel that way sometimes, he thought. He wondered if Tom ever had.
    He doubted it.
    The kid’s device was glitched beyond belief. It looked like he’d dropped it into sewage more than a few times. “I gotta look in the storage for a second, okay?” Syd stood. “I’ll be right back. Don’t . . . touch anything.”
    Tom nodded and Syd went down the concrete stairs next to his bench. They kept most of the parts in the basement storage room. When the hatch was closed over the stairs you could barely see it was there, which kept things difficult for thieves or anyone else who felt like looking around. When they were in the shop, they left it open. Syd almost tumbled down it by accident every other day.
    Once he was down the stairs, motion sensors flicked on the LEDs, so the room didn’t feel like a creepy, cluttered cellar. It was a mess, but a brightly lit mess. There were holos on the wall where he could watch the shop from down there. He saw Mr. Baram back on his stool again, although he was slightly tilted toward the door to the workshop, keeping his eye on Syd and Tom.
    As if.
    Tom stood where Syd had left him, shoving his hands into his pockets and pulling them out again. He didn’t know what to do with his limbs. He picked his nose. He clearly had no idea anyone could see him.
    “Glitched.” Syd shook his head.
    He rummaged through bins of glass fronts and outdated monitors, antique keyboards, some of them going back two hundred years or more, before the melt, before the storms, before the resource wars. They were probably worth a lot to collectors in Upper City. Baram should have an expert do an inventory sometime. Syd found robot wheel treads and cracked motherboards and leaking jars of who-knew-what. He found all kinds of drives and discs and cords for