2.I’m illegal.
No, no, not that kind of illegal. I won’t be thirty-five and eligible for the Shield’s Longevity Treatment for another four-plus years. So I’m not one of those legendary illegals, the worn-out, twisted faces they show often on the Tattletale above the Grand Mezzanine. The old ones who have failed the Treatment and are eventually chased down by the Yakuza bounty hunters and their cyber-hounds. Actually, no one I know has ever really seen an illegal in person. The conventional wisdom is that when they fail their first aging test after Treatment, they are whisked away by the Company, quickly given a judgment of color, dyed, and dumped out into Cal Wild to wander with the other dyed criminals. But I’m not one hundred percent convinced that is correct; they don’t seem to have co
