He read it.
All of it. The way you read something you already knew but needed to see arranged in front of you in the specific geometry of organized information before it became fully real.
His eyes stopped at the line about 1,000 vehicles.
He looked at his hand.
Turned it over. The same hand. The knuckles, the tendons under the skin. Nothing visible had changed. He looked like a twenty-year-old man in a hotel bathroom in Las Vegas. The kind of man who would be carded at a bar. The kind of man who would not be selected from a crowd as the variable.
He closed the system.
Looked at his reflection.
"'Hm,'" he said.
Then he went to the window.
The Las Vegas morning was clear.
Not the wet grey of London or the layered haze of Shanghai. Desert clear, the kind that hurt slightly at the edges, the blue of the sky above the strip so consistent it looked manufactured.
He opened the window.
