"Thanks for taking lunch with me, doc," Rake said. 

"You kidding? I would never miss a chance to spend another moment with you. You're the only real man I know anymore. The rest are just overgrown kids who will never grow up now that doctors like me can keep feeding their juvenile fantasies forever. I'm Eve to a new world order of perpetual adolescents." 

Rake smiled and pulled his plate toward him as the waitress set his place and Doc Holiday's down, along with their drinks, before leaving without so much as a word. "Nice to know some things never change," Rake said, "like bad diner service." 

She laughed. "Why haven't you hit on me yet, Rake? A woman could get her feelings hurt." 

"I'm old enough to be your father. Hell, I'm old enough to be your grandfather." 

"You know that doesn't matter anymore. I can age-reverse you to forty, give or take, with all the enhancements I can ply you with. I can even make myself more worldly with the biochip for worldliness. We can meet in the middle." 

He laughed. "Dear God, the real horror of what you just said is that you're halfway serious." 

"I'm entirely serious." 

"I'd be no good for you. You know interpersonal affairs don't interest me. It's humanity I love, just people I hate." 

"You make an exception for me." 

"For lunch. Don't test my endurance sans one of your chip upgrades." 

She eased off the pedal. She supposed she'd had enough fun with him for one day. Though, truth be told, he was about the best candidate she had right now for a serious partner. "So what's got your goat this time?" 

He poured the cream in his coffee. He claimed to eat, and he did a good job of hiding the fact that he didn't eat much with these huge plates of diner food. But honestly, she'd never see him pump anything into himself but coffee. But then again, he took coffee with a lot of milk, so maybe that's how he got his necessary protein.  

"Saw one too many people reading books today?" 

"Seriously? People still do that." 

"You can understand my concern. An outbreak of pox I could take in stride. Everyone expects that. But who expects an outbreak of reading?" 

"Could just be the latest crowd-sourced news extravaganza." 

"I thought about that. But, well, it's a long walk over here from the book store." 

"It's okay for people to read in a bookstore," she said. "Though, honestly, I didn't think there were any of those anymore, either." 

"What teenager you know power-reads book after book and doesn't get up for hours?" 

"I never saw one of those, even before upgrades became common." 

"Precisely. It can only mean one thing: the end of the world." 

She laughed so hard, she spit out her soda. "You might need to dial it down a tad, Rake." 

"What can you tell me about these chips? Can they be hacked?" 

"How?" 

"Like a perfectly peace-loving guy who lives to tend his rose garden ups and jumps off the top of a skyscraper for no apparent reason, or decides to blow up a train full of people?"  

"The chip-luddites, whose thinking ran along similar channels, dominated the news for the first five years chip-enhancements became a reality. Thanks to them the early-adoption wave took a lot longer to complete before the more squeamish types were ready to jump in. By now there's so many people with chip enhancements..." 

"Precisely, so many people. What if someone thought it was time to put the brakes on?" 

"With less than half the population upgraded? Doubtful. These guys would want to maximize their profit before calling the end to one age and inaugurating another." 

"You could slash half the people in the world and it'd still be overpopulated. From that perspective, we already have too many chip-enhanced." 

"What do we do with the rest?" 

"Get rid of them, of course. A plague or two here, a weather-related wipe out there, a famine the next country over. Did you know they can trigger weather wars with a fairly high degree of control these days?" 

"One paranoid fantasy at a time, Rake. I'm having trouble keeping up." 

"Conspiracy theory lightweight." 

"And how does your genocidal idea tie in with the sudden desire by large numbers of the populace to become literate?" 

"It's all so obvious. I can't believe I even have to say it. If you wanted to slow the demand for the real world, even a real world as captivating as one with bioenhancements, and be-all-you-want-to-be makeovers, you'd need to make the virtual world a hell of a lot more enticing. That way, you can just scan that half of the world's population and upload them to a computer farm, end of population problem." 

"Whoa. That's as disturbing in its brilliance as it is in its believability. I'm going to breathe easy in knowing the likelihood of books winning the bulk of these converts over to the digital nirvana realm is just about zero."  

"I'm not saying they plan to stop there. It'll be whatever works next. Some bean counter will analyze the demographics of the people they most want to eliminate, figure the best ways to reach them, and cater a virtual world product just for them. Soon we'll have tree people in the amazon forgetting to feed themselves because they can't look up from their PDA screens, furnished for free by those advocating the new world order." 

"Well, a couple things. First of all, I'm not even sure this needs to be a conspiracy. I mean, I'm sold, and I'm as liberal as they come. Why should billions starve in a biosphere that's overrun, that can't possibly support this many people without destroying everybody, when you can eliminate all suffering with one master stroke? Hell, you wouldn't have to trick people into uploading; most of the kids today live more in the virtual world than the real world anyway. The chip enhancements haven't slowed that trend, well, not much anyway. I'm betting the ones who will be seduced by the real world now that we're into an age of enhancements will still be so few that those that remain can live like kings, all without disturbing the biosphere one stitch." 

Rake took a deep breath, and let it out. "I guess you're right, why formulate a conspiracy to get over on people when you can just tell them the truth and get them to do what you want? Doesn't make sense even to a conspiracy nut like myself." 

She shrugged her shoulders. "You're talking about people who live and breathe by margins. The scenario I advocate would have the world's population righting itself within a few decades tops. I know because we had to study waves of innovation. You have the people at the front of the line who can't wait for the future to happen and want to beta test everything. You have the next wave of folks behind them who are also very eager, but want the dangers squeezed out of the prototypes first. Once they're convinced it's safe, they jump in. Then you have the people who not only want it to be safe but cheap, and more customizable to suit their own takes on the future. Finally you have the guys at the back of the line who refuse to have anything to do with the latest breakthrough until they're forced to by the economy and have no choice but to submit or risk starvation. And behind them are the true recalcitrant who will never buy in for religious reasons, or backwards leaning, preferring a more primitive lifestyle, like the Amish. Now, if your bean counters can tweak how fast we get from one wave to the next, then they stand to save billions, even trillions in today's global market. So yeah, even in a new world order that isn't particularly a tough sell there's always room for a good conspiracy." 

"That's very kind of you, what you just did," Rake said, wiping his lips with the napkin, actually having deigned to eat some solid food. "I think you know if you didn't put up a better fight I'd just go home thinking I missed something, and get even more carried away in my head." 

"I'm not just your friend, Rake, I'm your doctor." 

He laughed. "Touché." His phone beeped. He took it out of his pocket, and stared at the text on the screen. 

"Seriously? A cell phone? You don't have an implant that connects you wirelessly to the net? Rake, you can't be retro about everything. It's just too time consuming." 

"Looks like I have a murder to investigate, which means I guess I have to put my conspiracy theories on hold a while longer." 

"Not necessarily. They could be tracking you. After all, you're a threat to them, and now that you're getting close they're distracting you with a juicy murder that you can believe will tie into a conspiracy that's far harder to deny, and you'll be off like a dog with a bone, forgetting about the conspiracies that matter to them, as per the plan." 

"You sure you don't want to be a conspiracy nut? Because you have the proper street cred." 

"You're just too easy, Rake." 

"You're the second person today to say that. I'll have you know that my persecution complex far outstrips my relish of conspiracy theories, ensuring that I always think I'm the subject of not one but multiple conspiracies. So don't you worry about me getting caught with my guard down." 

He stood up and threw enough money on the table to cover for both of them. Her eyes went wide. "So this is what real money looks like." She picked up one of the twenty dollar bills. "Looks cheap." 

"Nothing like you, if the cost of this lunch is any indicator." 

"Hey, I'm the one who has to pay with a broken heart. You give some thought to being less of a dinosaur. And it can be you and me against the world, baby. You fighting the Big Brother ethos and all the ones who want to parent us to death by taking control of our lives out of our hands. And me fighting the perpetual children who never want to grow up and are only too happy to let the grownups run the world for them." 

"Tempting offer," he said, smiling at her, and leaning over and giving her a kiss on the cheek. "It might take both of us at that."