The year before Denise met Robin, Billy was released on parole and attended a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a Community Computing Center in the poor near-north neighborhood of Nicetown. One of the many policy coups of Mayor Goode's popular two-term successor was the commercial exploitation of the city's public schools. The mayor had shrewdly cast the deplorable neglect of the schools as a business opportunity ("Act Fast, Be Part of Our Message of Hope," his letters said), and the N——— Corporation had responded to his pitch by assuming responsibility for the city's severely underfunded school athletic programs. Now the mayor had midwifed a similar arrangement with the W——— Corporation, which was donating to the city of Philadelphia sufficient units of its famous Global Desktop to "empower" every classroom in the city, plus five Community Computing Centers in blighted northern and western neighborhoods. The agreement granted W— the exclusive right to employ for promotional and advertising purposes all classroom activities within the school district of Philadelphia, including but not limited to all Global Desktop applications. Critics of the mayor alternately denounced the "sellout" and complained that W—— was donating its slow and crashprone Version 4.0 Desktops to the schools and its nearly useless Version 3.2 technology to the Community Computing Centers. But the mood in Nicetown on that September afternoon was buoyant. The mayor and W—— ' s twenty-eight-year-old corporate-image vice president, Rick Flamburg, joined hands on big shears to cut ribbon. Local politicians of color said children and tomorrow. They said digital and democracy and history.