"Doesn't even have to be that," Atton noted. "That might interest some people, too." He shrugged. "The trick is to seem just unpleasant and shallow enough that someone thinks: you know, I don't want to know. If they're not interested in you, be a creep. If they're interested in you, tell them you're not in whatever they are. That kind of thing."

He reached to pluck an imaginary piece of fluff from his genes.

"If vanishing into the crowd is the kind of thing you want, anyway," he said. "I guess that's the big change between me now and me at 23."