She stayed with me for another couple of months. During that time, I tried to monitor-and moderate-her chip usage. For the first few weeks, she spent most of her waking hours with simsense drek pouring directly into her brain. After that, though, she started to pull back. She was still a user, but at least she wasn't the full-blown addict chiphead I feared she'd become. I guess I was hard on her. Like a self-righteous teetotaler, I ground her for using chips at all, for using them to dilute and escape reality. (And, at the same time, I was almost single-handedly supporting the synthahol industry.) I ground her too much. A few weeks before I was to enter Lone Star basic training, I came home and found her gone. The note she left made it abundantly and painfully clear that she could do without my lectures and my posturing. She'd found somewhere else to crash, with people who weren't so fragging tight-assed. The note was scrawled longhand on a scrap of paper, and was wrapped around her credstick. My baby sister had dropped out for real.