Aaron asks for the window seat on airplanes.

He likes to curl up, his legs on the seat, one of those airplane blankets, the scratchy-soft acrylic kind, tugged up and everything smelling familiar. Hotels and airplanes, and his mom likes first-class, but Aaron hated it for the longest time, because it smelt different. Now he's grown up, and he can still curl up in the bigger seats.

He asks for orange juice and he pulls the tray over and puts his laptop on it. When they go to Japan, he gets a new one, nearly every year now. Everything's smaller there, and he remembers looking at the Libretto in a magazine and wanting it so badly. Wanting and being able to go out and just get it, which was a different kind of high. He likes pulling out his wallet, sliding across a credit card, supplementary though it's his money that pays for it. He likes the way people smile at him in stores. They smile for everyone, and the shopgirls in Japan do tiny bows and their hands flutter as they unwrap more shiny silver toys. He likes shopping there because they're polite to everyone.

His laptop fits inside his cupped hands. He turns it on once they're in the air and plays a couple of games of Solitaire. Just enough to get the person sitting next to him bored. No-one's rude enough to actually look, except his family, and he doesn't let them sit next to him anymore.

Angel doesn't like flying.

But people still glance, and Aaron doesn't mind Solitaire. He plays until the cards jump around the screen and then he switches over to Explorer.

The directory is three down inside a virus protector program he never uses, and it's called "syslib" and filled with numbered files. He keeps track by date, and he rarely browses backwards. There's always something new to look at. The Firm makes sure of that.

He slides his finger across the touchpad, taps lightly and opens a couple of them. He remembers that shirt. The other one, he wasn't there. A restaurant maybe. Paparazzi or a fan, a quick grainy snap. A press release that he's already read in the stack of work his mother brought for him to finish on the plane ride. A story forwarded and forwarded again, internet headers stripped off by his assistant who asks no questions and never seems to sleep. He's not entirely sure she's human; she gets on too well with his mother.

He scrolls down, looking for his name, then scrolls up and starts reading.

 

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