"The train is pulling in. I'll talk to you later."
"OK, OK."
Art formed up in queue with the rest of the passengers and shuffled through the
gas chromatograph, tensing up a little as it sniffed his personal space for
black powder residue. Once on board, he tore a sani-wipe from the roll in the
ceiling, ignoring the V/DT ad on it, and grabbed the stainless steel rail with
it, stamping on the drifts of sani-wipe mulch on the train's floor.
He made a conscious effort to control his breathing, willed his heart to stop
pounding. He was still juiced with adrenaline, and his mind raced. He needed to
do something constructive with his time, but his mind kept wandering. Finally,
he gave in and let it wander.
Something about the counterman, about his slips of paper, about the MassPike. It
was knocking around in his brain and he just couldn't figure out how to bring it
to the fore. The counterman kept his slips in the basement so that he could sit
among them and see how his business had grown, every slip a person served, a
ring on the till, money in the bank. Drivers on the MassPike who used traffic
jams to download music from nearby cars and then paid to license the songs. Only
they didn't. They circumvented the payment system in droves, running bootleg
operations out of their cars that put poor old Napster to shame for sheer
volume. Some people drove in promiscuous mode, collecting every song in every
car on the turnpike, cruising the tunnels that riddled Boston like mobile pirate
radio stations, dumping their collections to other drivers when it came time to
quit the turnpike and settle up for their music at the toll booth.
It was these war-drivers that MassPike was really worried about. Admittedly,
they actually made the system go. Your average fartmobile driver had all of ten
songs in his queue, and the short-range, broadband connection you had on
MassPike meant that if you were stuck in a jam of these cars, your selection
would be severely limited. The war-drivers, though, were mobile jukeboxes. The
highway patrol had actually seized cars with over 300,000 tracks on their
drives. Without these fat caches on the highway, MassPike would have to spend a
fortune on essentially replicating the system with their own mobile libraries.
The war-drivers were the collective memory of the MassPike's music-listeners.
Ooh, there was a tasty idea. The collective memory of MassPike. Like Dark Ages
scholars, memorizing entire texts to preserve them against the depredations of
barbarism, passing their collections carefully from car to car. He'd
investigated the highway patrol reports on these guys, and there were hints
there, shadowy clues of an organized subculture, one with a hierarchy, where
newbies tricked out their storage with libraries of novel and rare tuneage in a
bid to convince the established elite that they were worthy of joining the
collective memory.
Thinking of war-drivers as a collective memory was like staring at an optical
illusion and seeing the vase emerge from the two faces. Art's entire perception
of the problem involuted itself in his mind. He heard panting and realized it
was him; he was hyperventilating.
If these guys were the collective memory of the MassPike, that meant that they
were performing a service, reducing MassPike's costs significantly. That meant
that they were tastemakers, injecting fresh music into the static world of
Boston drivers. Mmmm. Trace that. Find out how influential they were. Someone
would know -- the MassPike had stats on how songs migrated from car to car. Even
without investigating it, Art just *knew* that these guys were offsetting
millions of dollars in marketing.
So. So. So. So, *feed* that culture. War-drivers needed to be devoted to make it
into the subculture. They had to spend four or five hours a day cruising the
freeways to accumulate and propagate their collections. They couldn't *leave*
the MassPike until they found someone to hand their collections off to.
What if MassPike *rewarded* these guys? What if MassPike charged *nothing* for
people with more than, say 50,000 tunes in their cache? Art whipped out his comm
and his keyboard and started making notes, snatching at the silver rail with his
keyboard hand every time the train jerked and threatened to topple him. That's
how the tube cops found him, once the train reached Elephant and Castle and they
did their rounds, politely but firmly rousting him.
13.
I am already in as much trouble as I can be, I think. I have left my room, hit
and detonated some poor cafeteria hash-slinger's fartmobile, and certainly
damned some hapless secret smoker to employee Hades for his security lapses.
When I get down from here, I will be bound up in a chemical straightjacket. I'll
be one of the ward-corner droolers, propped up in a wheelchair in front of the
video, tended twice daily for diaper changes, feeding and re-medication.
That is the worst they can do, and I'm in for it. This leaves me asking two
questions:
1. Why am I so damned eager to be rescued from my rooftop aerie? I am sunburned
and sad, but I am more free than I have been in weeks.
2. Why am I so reluctant to take further action in the service of getting
someone up onto the roof? I could topple a ventilator chimney by moving the
cinderblocks that hold its apron down and giving it the shoulder. I could dump
rattling handfuls of gravel down its maw and wake the psychotics below.