Analog SFF, March 2012 by Dell Magazine Authors Page B

took a bit of psych, back in college, though I'm not sure how much I believed.
    I'd learned my lesson, though, and never wanted to be phoning Momma again on a perfume alert. Or “H.S.,” for that matter. But I couldn't afford to quit. Dinah might have worked her way up, but she had expensive tastes.
    So I opted for an upgrade. ‘Wear that would report itself, via a tattooed-on sat link. The installation hurt a bit, but it came not only with a five-hundred-a-month raise but a promise that even the lab techs wouldn't know who the call-in came from if we did get interrupted at a . . . delicate moment. Ideally there would be no interruptions at all, but if I wasn't babbling on the phone at the time I could at least argue it was the weird guy across the courtyard who everyone hated because he kept grilling things that smelled like garlic-smoked socks.
    * * * *
    By the time I was in high school, my mother's body art had maxed. The digital watch hardly even looked like a tattoo. She even had a way to make it disappear. A nanosensor in the bone at the base of her thumb. Tap it just right, and the watch vanished. Tap it again and it would reappear. My satphone tat now does something similar, but hers was the first I'd ever seen.
    "Cool,” I said. “Can you make it into a stopwatch?"
    "Uh-uh. Could have, but didn't want to."
    "Why?” Stopwatch, calendar . . . hell, she could probably have gotten traffic reports. An entire hand-held, imprinted on her wrist.
    "Didn't want it. Just ‘cause you can do something doesn't mean you should."
    * * * *
    With all of us H.S. ‘wearers around, terrorists must be idiots. How could they expect not to be caught?
    The guy I helped nab was in a hardware store on the edge of Harborside. The type of store I thought extinct until I needed one. I was looking for sheetrock screws. Not the type you use to hang sheetrock: the hollow, plastic things you hammer into the wall to hold real screws to keep pictures and things like that from falling off and scaring your girlfriend to death. They probably have a real name, but it's not the type of thing they teach you in college, studying all those credit hours of uselessness.
    I have no idea what the terrorist was looking for. All I know was that my ‘wear went nuts.
    They'd offered to discontinue the visuals and just use the cell link, but I figured I might want warning, so I wouldn't be caught by surprise when the techs descended on me. (Okay, the perfume thing had been scary. There are situations I just don't want to be in if they override the code on my door and clomp into my bedroom.) But I'd never before encountered anything like these. Green lightning bolts on my palms. A ferocious itch behind my earlobes. Even my fingernails got in the act, getting this iridescent color like something you might see on spoiling fish.
    I kind of figured it might be the real thing.
    Nobody had ever told me what to do in such circumstances, so I had to improvise. I wound up roaming the store, trying to triangulate via the brightness of my fingernails and strength of the itch.
    When I spotted him, he was screamingly obvious. Not that he looked all that threatening. He was a small guy, about five foot seven, wiry, with an odd, loose-limbed gait like you sometimes find in construction workers. Carpenter with an attitude—that's how I'd have described him, though it might have been because I'd spent college summers on a house-building crew, and he reminded me of the guy who . . . never mind.
    Not that any of that mattered. Even nonpolitical me had heard of diesel-and-fertilizer bombs. His forehead bore ‘wear for Pellier Bros’ Truck Stop, his right cheek said Gramp's, and his left continued, Farm Store. The cheaper the source, the more garish the wear. He might as well have been proclaiming himself a charter member of Bombers-R-Us. Not to mention he was in an aisle full of building stuff: screws mostly, but also angle brackets and other widgetry that would probably make a