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person did on-Cam from the time ISpy began to follow to the time it was told to stop. (The fun thing to do with ISpy was to find identical twins in a single frame, and ask it to follow one of them. Then you just sat back and watched the machine’s head explode.) Glynis told it to run all night, enough time to assemble Steve’s last three days and this night.
    Glynis executed ISpy and told it to run on the Net, so that she could turn off the computer even as ISpy was running. As if on cue, she heard her mother’s car pull in.
    Her heart raced. She felt like a little kid that was almost caught doing something her parent disapproved. She turned the computer off and ran to the living room. When Olivia came in, she found Glynis watching the 24-hour Tonight Show Network and laughing hard. It was Steve Allen month.
    During dinner, her mother said, “I figured out what I want to do for your birthday.”
    “Really?!”
    “Sure. It’s something special. Something we’ve never done before.”
    “What is it?”
    “I’m not telling. You’ll have to wait three more days. We’ll do... something,” Olivia smiled mysteriously, and despite her daughter’s urgings added no more.
    When dinner was over, Olivia’s phone rang. It was Ron from work. Half an hour she spent chewing him out over something he did and giving him new instructions. Glynis didn’t listen; her mother’s work always seemed boring to her. But it gave her time to think about the other things. Obviously, she could say nothing about Steve. But there were other things. Like the fact that her mother was registered as living someplace else – hmm, she could check that out with the PubliCams, too. Then there was the fact that she had an uncle she’d never seen. And maybe even the fact that there was no record of Glynis being born – although surely that was just a glitch, and the least important of all these things.
    Suddenly she felt an uncontrollable need to confront her mother with something, to prove to her that she knew more than Olivia had told her. Maybe even to hint that she shouldn’t keep her secrets to herself, that Glynis could figure things out. As soon as Olivia was off the phone, Glynis began, “Mom, I...” suddenly, a rush of adrenaline told her that maybe telling this to her mother was dangerous, “uh... I...” Still, it wasn’t about her father. It was something about public records. “I... Uh... I noticed something by accident today on the Net.”
    “Oh?” Olivia prepared herself a drink.
    “Yeah, it’s just... I happened to look for my birth certificate, and... It wasn’t there. There’s no record of my birth.
    “Really?” Olivia raised an eyebrow. “That’s weird. I’ll have to fix that. Well,” she shrugged, “when I have time. No rush.” She drank a bit, then said thoughtfully, “I think maybe you spend too much time on the Net, Glynis.”
    Glynis froze. Not now! Not with her so close to finding out everything about her father! She’d been stupid-stupid-stupid for raising the subject! “No, no, really, I’m not,” she said immediately. “I just needed it for some stupid club I wanted to join and they needed my birth certi—But really, it was just some stupid club. Just some kid stuff. I mean, you know. Don’t worry about it. Really. I won’t do it.”
    “We’ll see.”
    Glynis cracked jokes all evening, trying to amuse her mother, until she was sure Olivia had forgotten all about the Net incident.
    That night, Glynis dreamed about the man in the picture. She attached a voice to him. She phoned him and told him he had to come to this address and that it was really important. A day later, there was a knock on the door. And it wasn’t Ron or Elizabeth or mother. It was him. He’d come. She was hesitant at first, and tried to procrastinate as long as she could, but eventually she told him who she was. For a minute he was shocked. He never knew he had a kid. He had been estranged from her mother since a year