"Careful," Rosario said, aiming a soft swat at Lyra's hand.
It was an hour's ride from Bushwick to Columbia and she hadn't spent the time idly. AG2 had been born in the late seventies – call it 1978, if he'd been eighteen when he started his undergrad. She'd given AG1 the benefit of the doubt and gone with the assumption that the kid had come after his own graduation, which might put him in the class of... somewhere in the early to mid-seventies? She could probably narrow it down further with the student directories, but she was already in a rhythm with the microfilm reader, so she'd just grabbed the first four reels dating from 1970 and got scrolling.
She'd had a half-formed idea in her head, going back to the fraud hypothesis. Maybe the reason it was so hard to find Archer Goldenhawk II online was that he wasn't using the name anymore. Maybe it hadn't been his to begin with. If you wanted to get in with a bunch of rich kids, passing yourself off as a legendary-but-reclusive alum's son was a clever hustle, right?
The first photo she'd hit on, in the winter of 1972, had blown that theory right out of the water.
"Hey, check this out." Rosario took control of the buttons herself and the monitor became a blur of streaking black-and-white lines as the film whipped back through days and then weeks of newspapers. She overshot the date she was looking for and had to fast forward again, but once she was in the right ballpark the huge photo under the masthead made it easy to find. The date read Monday, 9 April, 1973. The picture was unmistakably the Alpha Pi Omicron frat house with its ostentatious columns, and the student in front of it, dazzling the camera with a million-dollar grin? "That's Gen One."