T he Leased Territories were too valuable to leave much room for Nature, but 
the geotects of Imperial Tectonics Limited had heard that trees were useful for 
cleaning and cooling the air, and so they had built in greenbelts along the 
borders between sectors. In the first hour that they lived free in the streets, 
Nell glimpsed one of those greenbelts, though it looked black at the time. She 
broke away from Harv and ran toward it down a street that had developed into a 
luminescent tunnel of mediatronic billboards. Harv chased her, just barely 
matching her speed because he had gotten a worse spanking than she had. They 
were almost the only people on the street, certainly the only ones moving 
purposefully, and so, as they ran, the messages on the billboards pursued them 
like starving wolves, making sure they understood that if they used certain 
ractives or took certain drugs, they could rely on being able to have sex with 
certain unrealistically perfect young persons. Some of the billboards made an 
even more elemental pitch, selling the sex directly. The mediatrons on this 
street were exceptionally large because they were made to be seen clearly from 
the heaths, bluffs, terraces, and courts of the New Atlantis Clave, miles up 
the mountain.