“No. I’m an officer,” said Jamie, no longer afraid of that pulsing. “I have actual responsibility.”

Mike leaned forward with the intent look that signaled to anyone, even an officer, that he or she was a single step away from receiving a heavy blow from one of his massive hands.

“The hell with you, Jamie,” said Mike. “I don’t care if you embarrass yourself in front of me, but you ought to think twice before you embarrass yourself in front of the crew again.”

Mike turned around and stomped off, each angry footfall muffled by the non-skid rubber in the passageway.

Daniel Aboye couldn’t help but stare. Before the war, this had been a regular haunt of his investors, the types who had net worths so big they’d stopped counting their money. He’d come here tonight with a new sense of awe, mostly at how wrong the place felt on so many levels.

He watched a tuna as long as his motorcycle swim steadily around the restaurant’s tank in the ceiling. The readout on his glasses showed how many other diners had bid on it. Seven. He decided he would be the eighth and end the auction. The other bidders would likely interpret it as his showing off the depth of his wallet, but it was more an indication of the depth of his annoyance that they were all still carrying on this way in the midst of a war.

When he looked down, there she was.

“When you asked to meet for dinner,” said Aboye, “this was certainly not the place I expected you would choose.”

“I like the fresh fish,” said Cory Silkins with mock innocence. “It’s at least something that isn’t rotting around here.”

Aboye took in the woman across from him. She was always smiling ironically. Back at Stanford, they’d been first-year hall mates. It had taken him a while to get used to her sarcasm, but he quickly came to appreciate the fact that she didn’t put him on a pedestal like the other students did once they knew his backstory. Instead, she treated him like she treated everyone else: as a target.

They’d even become friends of a sort after Cory realized his gentle nature truly was genuine, and he realized that her acidity meant that she couldn’t help but tug and trick. She soon found bigger and better targets than the gangly but confident Aboye. Besides writing code, Cory’s main passion on campus had been pranking assholes. Faculty or student, it didn’t matter; she’d outed the members of a secret fraternity after they tried to cover up a date rape that occurred at their initiation ceremony, and she’d posed as a former U.S. president, using his hacked e-mail account to carry on a three-month-long online conversation with the old provost.

Of course, Cory had grown up and “sold out like the rest of them,” as she joked at the sale of her software-encryption company, a deal brokered by Aboye. When he asked what she was going to do next, she told him that she was off on a quest for a glass of the most remarkable red wine in the world. He’d thought it was another joke, but she’d spent the past year chronicling it all in real-time for her online followers. Before this, he hadn’t heard from her since the post about a Malbec in Argentina.

“So what brings you back?” asked Aboye now.

“I heard you went to Washington,” Cory said. “I thought they might have drafted you, so I had to come back and rescue you.”

“They wanted nothing to do with me,” he said. “That, I must say, hurt deeply.”

“Morons… You know, I’ve gotten a few quiet offers to leave. Finland. Brazil. Argentina,” she said. “I wish France, but I think I am still on some blacklist there.”

He’d heard the same from several of his other friends. From a business perspective, it made sense to him: America’s wealthy were distressed assets themselves right now. The right luminaries, along with their intellectual capital and their bank accounts, could be had cheap.

“Are you considering it?” he asked.

“No, I prefer the life of an itinerant bacchanal,” she said.

“That’s for the best; you are indeed a national treasure,” he said. “Okay, what is really up, Cory, why did you ask me here?”

A waiter wordlessly brought them their wine. Neither needed to be told what it was because the Firestone Petite Syrah’s label was already displayed on their viz glasses. She pulled her wineglass over and held the stem between her long fingers, which were adorned with a dozen slim brushed-platinum-and-diamond rings. The rings gleamed with flecks of light from the fish tank’s blue glow overhead and the red wine before them.

“Daniel, do you know why I love wine? It’s not the taste. It’s the history. And not just the history of the grape or the terroir that defines it. I mean the history of wine itself. Wine was the very first drink of equality,” said Silkins. “The ancient Greeks would pour it into a bowl in the middle of a room and guests would gather around. They’d share it, the same bowl, and just talk. Philosophy. Rights. Democracy. Hell, maybe even sports. Anyone and everyone could take part in the conversation, from Socrates to his youngest student.”

She laughed to herself. “Of course, it was all men, and then the Romans ruined it by conquering Greece and turning wine into a prestige item so assholes like me could run around chasing a perfect glass of it.”

He looked at her and took a sip. Clearly Cory was building up to something.

She swirled her glass. “That sense of equality is what made the net so great. Anyone and everyone could gather and participate. And that too is at risk of being ruined by assholes.”

“And?” he said.

She looked down at her glass and then directly up at Aboye. “I know what you’re up to.”

Aboye distractedly glanced up at one of the divers gently herding a fish into a net. “What could I possibly be up to?” he asked.

“Daniel, you’re not a good liar, so let’s not screw around,” she said. “I know what you and your buddies are doing in Hangar One, and I know that it’s not going well, what with all the water damage to your library.”

Aboye pinched the bridge of his nose, pausing as if to think but mostly to cover his concern. If she knew, who else did? And was Cory going to cause problems just because she was pissed off that he hadn’t asked her to join?

“Let’s go,” said Aboye in a whisper.

Aboye and Silkins walked out of the restaurant, Silkins paying with her iTab bracelet at the table as she got up. They stood outside in front of the motorbike stand.

“Okay, Cory, what is it you want? And I still don’t get why you asked me here.”

“You needed a visual reminder. Restaurants like this? They’re for a certain kind of person, the kind you’ve been hanging out with. Nobody is angry. How far is San Francisco? The city is transforming itself into a Navy town again. Ugly, rusting gray ships being fixed all over the place. Sailors getting drunk and fighting, not out of malice but to release something, anger at not being out there or maybe just some newfound hate. Down here, it’s business as usual. Where can I get my fresh fish or my favorite pizza next?”

She climbed aboard his yellow electric BMW C1, as usual taking things without asking.

“You have great people in Hangar One, but they know only how to build. You also need people who know how to tear down,” she said. “You need assholes like me… Get on, and I’ll show you.”

Aboye folded his body uncomfortably behind her under the C1’s canopy and they glided off silently through downtown Palo Alto.

Light from restaurants and storefronts that were being used as sidewalk cafés after hours spilled out onto the road before them. Since the war, everyone wanted to spend more time outside, it seemed to Aboye. It made Palo Alto more festive than he had ever seen it, as if all of the town’s residents were Stanford seniors and this was commencement week.