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of uneasy amusement passed through the audience. Maurice flipped his notebook over to a fresh page.
    â€œI’m quite serious,” Laing said, addressing the hall. “Conference pirates. I met one earlier today.” He had been scanning the audience, and as he said this his eyes fixed on me.
    My first instinct was to laugh. Pirate—it was absurd. The modern meanings of the term—downloaders and desperate Somalians and Swedish political parties—were well known to me. But all the event director’s invocation of it generated for me was a burst of kitsch imagery: peg legs, parrots, rum, X marks the spot. Not me at all.
    â€œHe works for a company called Convex,” Laing continued. “They say they can give their customers the benefit of attending a conference without actually having to attend. They send someone in your place—a double, let’s say. And it costs less than attending the conference because this . . . double . . . can represent several people. You get a report. Meanwhile we only sell one ticket where we might have sold ten or twenty—it’s our customers being skimmed off. And they denigrate the conference industry, say that conferences are a waste of everyone’s time, while selling a substandard product in our name.”
    All this time, Laing had stared me, and I began to fear that others in the hall might be figuring out who he was talking about. One other pair of eyes was certainly on me: Maurice was rapt.
    Laing’s attention flicked away from me. He was warming to his theme, wallowing in his own righteousness, letting his oration build to a courtroom climax. “Lawful or not,” he said, high color apparent in his cheeks, “this practice, this so-called conference surrogacy, is piggybacking on the hard work of others in order to make a quick profit—which is on a natural moral level dubious, unhealthy, unethical and simply wrong!”
    I was being prosecuted. Unable to respond, I wriggled in my seat and felt my own color rise to match Laing’s. How dare he! Flinging slurs around without giving me a space to reply, naming our company in particular—it was unbearable. I imagined springing to my feet, challenging Laing, giving him the cold, hard, facts right between the eyes. We identified a need and we are supplying a service that fulfills it. That’s the free market. If Laing’s events were more interesting, more useful, less time-consuming and less expensive, there would be no need for us. Conferences and trade fairs are almost always tedious in the extreme. People would pay good money to avoid going to them. They do pay good money—to me. All this moral outrage was just a smoke screen for the basic failure of his product. The muscles in my legs primed themselves. I was ready.
    â€œI’ve got to run,” I whispered to Maurice. And with that I scuttled from the room. I have no idea if anyone other than Laing and Maurice even noticed.
    From the lecture hall, I marched down one of the concourses of the MetaCenter conference wing, passing many people strolling between venues or talking in small groups, that damned yellow bag seemingly on every other shoulder. I felt extremely hot in the hands and face. I was moving without a destination clearly in mind, moving forward to keep the unsteadiness from stealing into my muscles. All I wanted was to clear the area of Emerging Threats before the hall emptied out; then, all I wanted was to be off the concourse, away from the other conference-goers, the sight of whom filled me with hatred. Laing had tricked me, and trapped me, and it was hard not to implicate everyone at Meetex in the deed.
    When I saw the sign for some restrooms, I stopped. In the frosty fluorescent light of the toilets, I splashed cold water on my face, trying to get my surface temperature back down and gather myself together. A couple of other men were using the urinals and the other sinks—I