Brian Elliott’s feet ached. He climbed the dark stairs to his second-story apartment as though in a fog and fumbled the keys at the lock. He hated his job. Still, he was lucky to have one. If he got too sick of restaurant work he could always go the route most had gone after the big computer crash had left companies too frightened to rely on such vulnerable technology. He could always enlist.
Brian only occasionally wondered why he had not been drafted along with all the other healthy male seventeen- to twenty-five-year-olds. He had filed the registration forms as required and that had been the end of it. It was probably just another cluster of data that had been left useless in the aftermath of the computer virus wars. Brian felt little disappointment or curiosity. He had long since ceas
