For Rustle, going to college in 2072 is more complicated than just choosing a major and finding new friends. When terrorists and his own government issue threats and release DNA-altering viruses, Rustle becomes both a rallying point for protest and an accomplice to conspiracy."Rustle's intunity had signed off on his application to Hershenstein, perhaps suspecting Rustle would leave anyway. His own parents had each carried only one of the three banned synesthetic sequences. They named themselves synesthetic, and the intunity said synesthesia was a culmination of many factors, genetic and environmental. Did Rustle's genes cause his brain to process emotions directly into colors? Did he really see his emotions and smell his impressions of others, or was he just trained to think in metaphor? No telling what a gene scan would show, and his intunity claimed it didn't matter. Outside, being non-genotypical meant the loss of free medical care and schooling, but in the intunity, people took care of their own."Now here he was, standing beside a dead bus.

Was he an ambassador or just expendable?".