Off they go, then. "That was informative, is it always the same booths or does it vary?"

"It's probably mostly the same, maybe some of the little companies change year to year. I don't remember exactly."

"Then I guess that's most of the relevant information I'm going to get about that."

"Yeah. Well, the contact info might change, so if you don't pick something in the next year you could go update your phone numbers."

"I don't think picking anything while I'm technically a... what am I even, a sophomore? A freshman? Anyway, that, would be a good idea."

"Agreed."

"And actually what am I? Like, officially? This doesn't really have the structure regular high schools do..."

"I don't think you are anything in the category of a grade or a nickname for a grade," she says. "It's just not structured that way. It's not a law that you have to be in a grade, you know, homeschooling exists." She heads for the building exit.

He, of course, follows. "I suppose. Does that mean I could just stretch my stay here indefinitely?"

"I think they boot you when you're eighteen or complete all your requirements and some further number of credits, whichever comes second."

"So, if I don't complete all my requirements for a long time I could stay for a long time if I wanted to," he muses.

"And I don't think I've ever heard of anyone here older than like 'just recently twenty' so there might be an age past eighteen where you have to hurry up and shoo anyway, you don't look like such a potential generous alumnus if they think you dawdle on getting things done."

"True. What do other eclipsed do between school and being able to effectively produce mountains of money?"

"I don't think society has evolved a good standard answer to that question. Virtuality's not that old."

"A few nonstandard answers would be interesting, if they were any different than what we've talked about so far."

"Mooch off parents, work unskilled labor, life of crime..."

"...I think I prefer our nonstandard answers," he decides.

"What were you classing as those?"

"Mostly college and possibly working at the plastic magery place."

"Yeah. I might go government, actually, precogs averting disaster work for them anyway, I'd have to find out if they wanted more than eclipse work out of me for the G.I. Bill lookalike program though."

"What other kind of work would they want, do you think?"

"Precogs are useful for a lot of things, they're just completely irreplaceable for eclipse disasters. Police work, I think there are finance applications if you have enough temporal range, I don't want to go military but I know they use precogs for strategy and such, natural disaster forecasting, infrastructure outage advance warning..."

"Again: so jealous of psions."

"Aww, pet. You can do cool shit too." Scritch scritch. "Terraform me a planet."

He giggles. "Okay, point."