Part 12 (1/2)

”What is *wrong* with you, man?” Fede said.

”One of the guys who mugged me,” he hissed. ”He was sitting right across from us. He's a couple steps behind you. I'm in the tube station. I'll ride a stop and catch a cab back to the office.”

”He's behind me? Where?”

Art's comm lit up with a grainy feed from Fede's comm. It jiggled as Fede hustled through the crowd.

”Jesus, Fede, stop! Don't go to the G.o.dd.a.m.ned tube station -- he'll follow you here.”

”Where do you want me to go? I got to go back to the office.”

”Don't go there either. Get a cab and circle the block a couple times. Don't lead him back.”

”This is stupid. Why don't I just call the cops?”

”Don't bother. They won't do s.h.i.+t. I've been through this already. I just want to lose that guy and not have him find me again later.”

”Christ.”

Art squeaked as Tom filled his screen, then pa.s.sed by, swinging his head from side to side with saurian rage.

”What?” Fede said.

”That was him. He just walked past you. He must not know you're with me. Go back to the office, I'll meet you there.”

”That dips.h.i.+t? Art, he's all of five feet tall!”

”He's a f.u.c.king psycho, Fede. Don't screw around with him or he'll give you a Tesla enema.”

Fede winced. ”I hate tazers.”

”The train is pulling in. I'll talk to you later.”

”OK, OK.”

Art formed up in queue with the rest of the pa.s.sengers and shuffled through the gas chromatograph, tensing up a little as it sniffed his personal s.p.a.ce 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 Ma.s.sPike. 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 bas.e.m.e.nt 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 Ma.s.sPike who used traffic jams to download music from nearby cars and then paid to license the songs. Only they didn't. They circ.u.mvented 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 Ma.s.sPike 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 Ma.s.sPike 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, Ma.s.sPike 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 Ma.s.sPike's music-listeners.

Ooh, there was a tasty idea. The collective memory of Ma.s.sPike. Like Dark Ages scholars, memorizing entire texts to preserve them against the depredations of barbarism, pa.s.sing 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 Ma.s.sPike, that meant that they were performing a service, reducing Ma.s.sPike'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 Ma.s.sPike 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 acc.u.mulate and propagate their collections. They couldn't *leave*