LL :: Volume 39 :: LR

A more active display feature is to compute the consanguinity between everyone you see wearing a medallion -- everyone and everyone else pairwise, that is. The color coding appears as an elongated ellipsoid of light joining each pair of medallions in your view. The farther apart they are, the dimmer the light -- so it's not entirely overwhelming -- but it's also biased towards closer connections, since they're the most interesting. A crowd scene, nonetheless, is just a confusing blur.

(The hashing function is necessarily imperfect, since one has to be able to measure a degree of congruence between two records, not just identity. But the designers of the medallions have posted a proof that they meet medium-confidence voluntary privacy standards, which seems a fair compromise.)

But sometimes the children crack one, to dry off on a damp foggy day.

The "species" has not been observed to breed true -- that is, as a field-plant symbiosis. This certainly implies that it is a hand-created hack, distributed to various locations by graffitists or their tools. And it seems unlikely in the extreme that a plant-field symbiosis could evolve without human aid. Nonetheless, City Museum biologists are studying maskweed with fascination.

However it came about, Field Safety has not disproven the possibility that the field app can spread on its own (either with the natural spread of the biological component, or opportunistically). Accordingly, maskweed has been rated a Class Two Unprecedented threat, and all known stands are under observation.

The final round was set on a five-meter crest, never before used in competition, which was recorded off the Transal Barrier three months ago in a spring monsoon. Murek performed with his trademark flair, despite starting in pole position. Based solely on his observation of the warmup run, with nobody surfing except the guidance buoy, he worked out a jump-and-jump routine ending with a triple flip at the end of the crest. He called it and he rode it: champion quality.