# Chapter One

"I'm a memeticist," Chase said. The older couple blinked at him, one and then the other, a habit that they must have developed over years of marriage, and now mirrored unconsciously.

You could hack facial recognition software to output when a person was blinking. Wouldn't be that hard, just if the outline was a round profile, no nose or lips, you would probably also be able to see the corneal rings or whatever. If you couldn't, that meant their eyes were closed. Plot blink rates like a cardiogram. People might end up having unique blink signatures, something that could be used for identification even if someone was wearing a mask.

"Well that's interesting," the man said, making non-commital sounds while his wife squinted and smiled with an almost similar expression, perpetually looking into some Midwestern sunset, even when it was dark outside, and they were under the omnidirectional luminescence of the dining car.

Chase struggled to remember their names, while waiting for the man to complete the long pause between "you're a..." and remembering what he'd just told them, "a meta-cyst?"

"Memecist," he said, genuinely amused. "No wait, memeticist. Now you have me doing it."

"What does a memeticist do?" The woman asked, wiping cream cheese off the plastic table with a napkin, without breaking eye contact. He tried not to think about germs.

There was the surface level conversation, and then the whole sub-level significance of unconscious signals. Like with a lot of things, evolution had favored focus on the eyes. Dilation of pupil indicating interest or attention, how much the muscles around the socket were engaging in conjunction with the mouth. He'd read about how prominent limbal rings were attractive because they were reliable indicators of youth, tending to get obscured by cataracts or glaucomas. Evolutionary psychologists were always on about how some trait or another was a sign of fertility, or fitness. A bunch of horny grad students still under the sway of 19th century ideas about nature's bloody teeth and claws, which in turn had been polite rationalizations of earlier, more brutal histories of colonial racism.

"I'm headed to that conference in Denver. That Truth conference? I...was a researcher. Now I sort of freelance. I'm part of a DAO. Well, I'm applying."

More non-commital noises. He was losing them. By the glance they exchanged he could almost hear their pre-emptive "well, anyway" of a polite preliminary to an exit. They'd only started talking because the man, Charles (that was it!) had commented on the book he'd been reading, an old pulp science fiction novel he'd picked up from a used bookstore. It probably would have been published when this guy was in his twenties, so it made sense he'd recognized it. Not only that, but remembered the plot, and main characters.

"You said you were in finance?"

"Oh, that's a fancy term for it," the man said, looking briefly out the window as they passed the dopplering lights of a rural station. "Bertie's family is in the shipping business. I'm a regional manager, in Minnesota."

"I work as a school nurse, now that the kids are grown. Charles is also a singer. Back in his prime a record he was on with the Ministring Orchestra won a grammy. Show him your bass note, honey."

Charles obliged, opening wide as if to belch, making a sound deeper than the rumbling of the train.