The Officer of the Watch
- Now we jump ahead: Robert passed his finals; and the secret plan to break into the lab is going forward.
- Meanwhile, Bob Gu is the Officer of the Watch for the Southwest area. Which means that for the next four hours, he's the one who has got to look out for things like terrorist attacks in this area.
- Here we get to hear how things are in the future: Bob has very few people under his command, but he has lots of drones and other gadgets.
- They also have an analyst pool, ready to crunch numbers and give real-time estimates. (Sound exciting, right? Estimates—in real-time!) And Alice Gu is in charge of the analysts tonight.
- But it looks like a pretty quiet night, where the biggest probable event is a fight between the Hacek belief circle and the Scooch-a-mouti belief circle.
- While Bob reviews the secret information about persons of interest, he finds out that Xiu Xiang is in a class with Robert and lives with Lena Gu. So he begins to suspect that Miri has a gang of people to snoop on Robert.
- Meanwhile, Robert's Elder Cabal is getting ready for their expedition. There's something going on at the library, which the Mysterious Stranger tells him is a diversion he created to get people out of the biotech labs.
- Meanwhile, over in the GenGen biotech labs, we meet even more people. See, all the scientists (and student-workers) in the lab are big fans of Scooch-a-mouti. Or at least, they like the idea of doing something different for a night.
- Supervisor Sheila Hanson leads them into the belief circle battle for the Geisel Library against the Hacek fans.
- So they put on their virtual avatars, both on themselves and on their helper robots. (Imagine a Roomba that has a virtual costume on it that makes it look like something from Pokemon. That's what we're imagining here. And we love it.)
- (What is a "belief circle battle"? Now, usually, belief circles don't fight because they each occupy different virtual overlays. So if you like Hacek, you can see that world, and your friend who likes Scooch-a-mouti can be in the same physical space, but see a different virtual world. However, as we'll see, because of the way the library is set up, only one virtual space can exist at a time. So a belief circle battle is when one group tries to make their vision the default. So as Sheila Hanson's group goes on, they try to make the area around the Geisel library look like something from Scooch-a-mouti. It's not a real "I'm going to hit you" fight; it's more like a "my vision is cooler and so more people are going to vote for it" fight.)
- Since this is also a virtual battle: there are not only the people here, but the people online who are tele-conferencing in.
- Also, for some reason, the Scoochis are chanting that they want "Real books!"
- Somewhere during this initial meeting, Sheila Hanson and her group find an Indian man and a virtual Rabbit. These two remind Sheila's group that Bollywood is watching. (Bollywood is the term for the Indian film industry.) Which means they might become famous if they put on a big show.