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when I was a kid he was one of my all-time great heroes. But my others were more practical.
    Like, the one I was wearing yesterday in the Plaza was a spinning double metal helix; I’d covered it with rainbow strips of lase-cut mesh-weave I found in my mother’s embroidery box. Embroidery is her hobby, but I didn’t think she’d miss them. I don’t suppose that matters much now.
    So anyway I’m strutting along, my helix spinning and flashing in the artificial sunshine, feeling good, looking groovy. We lived in the Frankie Lymon Block, and I’ve always considered cruising the Block Plaza as one of my favourite things to do. I love the feel of being in a crowd, just moving along with it, going nowhere special and then coming back again. I really dig crowds. Lots of other folk do too, of course. 65,000 citizens live in Frankie Lymon, and the Plaza is always crowded. If you find a quiet spot to watch ’em from, you’ll see the same people drifting by time and again. It’s fun being part of a crowd – especially when lots of them are admiring your kneepad and trying to pretend they’re not. All of a sudden Willy grabs my arm and yanks me towards the slidewalk so we’re being carried along towards the Block Park.
    ‘Hey, what’s the big idea, bowb?’ I asked him, annoyed. Already the slidewalk had taken us a hundred meters away, and as it’s illegal to travel the wrong way on a moving slide, I’d have to wait till we hit a cross-over before I could double-back.
    ‘The Plaza’s where the best crowds are, dope,’ I pointed out. ‘The Park’s for kids. The Park’s a drag.’
    ‘You’re the drag, Milton,’ Wally muttered, and I was surprised by the venom in his voice. ‘Ever since you made that new kneepad, your head’s been swelling and swelling. All you ever want to do now is cruise the Plaza and swagger with your kneepad!’
    He broke off, stamping his foot petulantly on the slide’s plascon surface. How childish, I thought irrelevantly.
    The he went on: ‘We used to play a lot in the Park, Milton. We had a lot of fun together there, didn’t we, Milton?’
    I couldn’t meet his eyes. He was right, I suppose – we used to go to the Park most days, and it was a lot of laughs. But somehow, now, it seemed like it was for kids. I mean, I was growing up, leaving my low-teens behind me. I was beginning to realise there were ways of having fun other than swinging through a stand of synthetic trees on a never-snap rope, or playing Judges and Perps in the stone-effect rockery near the Park’s center. I mean, I didn’t know what those other ways were – but I was definitely beginning to wonder!
    But how do you tell your best friend, the buddy that’s played with you since childhood (we lived next door to each other), that you’re growing up faster than he is? I forced a grin and made my voice sound cheerful. Just like Conrad Conn sometimes does in his viddies.
    ‘Okay, Willie, you got it,’ I said breezily – and it sounded more like Conrad Conn than the man himself does. Maybe I should have been an actor. ‘Let’s go check out the Park.’
    Not that we had much choice – the slidewalk was at that very moment carrying us through the wide entrance. A couple of security robots lounging by the low wall gave us a quick once-over, and then we were in the Frankie Lymon Block Memorial Park.
     
    ROBO-DUCKS
     
    It’s quite a place. The walls and huge domed roof are covered in holopix, so it actually looks as if you’re outside the Block – outside the city, even – on a warm, warm day. Only instead of there being nothing but Cursed Earth radiation desert stretching all the way to the horizon, the holopix show forests of real green trees and distant snow-capped hills. And in the sky there are realistic images of fluffy white clouds instead of clouds of radioactive gas. The Park’s where the Block’s senior citizens like to come, which means it’s deadly dull unless you like joining in their games of