Eastern Standard Tribe

toll booth-we debit you for the stuff that you didn't fast-forward, the stuff you listened to and kept. Unless, that is, you've got more than, say, 10,000 songs onboard. Then you go free. It's counterintuitive, I know, but just look at the numbers.'

'OK, OK. A radio with a fast-forward button. I think I get it.'

'But?'

'But who's going to want to use this? It's unpredictable. You've got no guarantee you'll get the songs you want to hear.'

Art smiled. 'Exactly!'

Fede gave him a go-on wave.

'Don't you see? That's the crack-cocaine part! It's the thrill of the chase! Nobody gets excited about beating traffic on a back road that's always empty. But get on the M-5 after a hard day at work and drive it at 100 km/h for two hours without once touching your brakes and it's like God's reached down and parted the Red Seas for you. You get a sense of accomplishment! Most of the time, your car stereo's gonna play the same junk you've always heard, just background sound, but sometimes, ah! Sometimes you'll hit a sweet spot and get the best tunes you've ever heard. If you put a rat in a cage with a lever that doesn't give food pellets, he'll push it once or twice and give up. Set the lever to always deliver food pellets and he'll push it when he gets hungry. Set it to sometimes deliver food pellets and he'll bang on it until he passes out!'

'Heh,' Fede said. 'Good rant.'

'And?'

'And it's cool.' Fede looked off into the middle distance a while. 'Radio with a fast-forward button. That's great, actually. Amazing. Stupendous!' He snatched the axe-head from its box on Art's desk and did a little war dance around the room, whooping. Art followed the dance from his ergonomic chair, swiveling around as the interface tchotchkes that branched from its undersides chittered to keep his various bones and muscles firmly supported.

His office was more like a three-fifths-scale model of a proper office, in Lilliputian London style, so the war dance was less impressive than it might have been with more room to express itself. 'You like it, then,' Art said, once Fede had run out of steam.

'I do, I do, I do!'

'Great.'

'Great.'

'So.'

'Yes?'

'So what do we do with it? Should I write up a formal proposal and send it to Jersey? How much detail? Sketches? Code fragments? Want me to mock up the interface and the network model?'

Fede cocked an eyebrow at him. 'What are you talking about?'

'Well, we give this to Jersey, they submit the proposal, they walk away with the contract, right? That's our job, right?'

'No, Art, that's not our job. Our job is to see to it that V/DT submits a bad proposal, not that Jersey submits a good one. This is big. We roll this together and it's bigger than MassPike. We can run this across every goddamned toll road in the world! Jersey's not paying for this-not yet, anyway-and someone should.'

'You want to sell this to them?'

'Well, I want to sell this. Who to sell it to is another matter.'

Art waved his hands confusedly. 'You're joking, right?'

Fede crouched down beside Art and looked into his eyes. 'No, Art, I am serious as a funeral here. This is big, and it's not in the scope of work that we signed up for. You and me, we can score big on this, but not by handing it over to those shitheads in Jersey and begging for a bonus.'

'What are you talking about? Who else would pay for this?'

'You have to ask? V/DT for starters. Anyone working on a bid for MassPike, or TollPass, or FastPass, or EuroPass.'

'But we can't sell this to just anyone, Fede!'

'Why not?'

'Jesus. Why not? Because of the Tribes.'

Fede quirked him half a smile. 'Sure, the Tribes.'

'What does that mean?'

'Art, you know that stuff is four-fifths' horseshit, right? It's just a game. When it comes down to your personal welfare, you can't depend on time zones. This is more job than calling, you know.'

Art squirmed and flushed. 'Lots of us take this stuff seriously, Fede. It's not just a mind-game. Doesn't loyalty mean anything to you?'

Fede laughed nastily. 'Loyalty! If you're doing all of this out of loyalty, then why are you drawing a paycheck? Look, I'd rather that this go to Jersey. They're basically decent sorts, and I've drawn a lot of pay from them over the years, but they haven't paid for this. They wouldn't give us a free ride, so why should we give them one? All I'm saying is, we can offer this to Jersey, of course, but they have to bid for it in a competitive marketplace. I don't want to gouge them, just collect a fair market price for our goods.'

'You're saying you don't feel any fundamental loyalty to anything, Fede?'

'That's what I'm saying.'

'And you're saying that I'm a sucker for putting loyalty ahead of personal gain-after all, no one else is, right?'

'Exactly.'

'Then how did this idea become 'ours,' Fede? I came up with it.'

Fede lost his nasty smile. 'There's loyalty and then there's loyalty.'

'Uh-huh.'

'No, really. You and I are a team. I rely on you and you rely on me. We're loyal to something concrete- each other. The Eastern Standard Tribe is an abstraction. It's a whole bunch of people, and neither of us like most of 'em. It's useful and pleasant, but you can't put your trust in institutions-otherwise you get Nazism.'

'And patriotism.'

'Blind patriotism.'

'So there's no other kind? Just jingoism? You're either loyal to your immediate circle of friends or you're a deluded dupe?'

'No, that's not what I'm saying.'

'So where does informed loyalty leave off and jingoism begin? You come on all patronizing when I talk about being loyal to the Tribe, and you're certainly not loyal to V/DT, nor are you loyal to Jersey. What greater purpose are you loyal to?'

'Well, humanity, for starters.'

'Really. What's that when it's at home?'

'Huh?'

'How do you express loyalty to something as big and abstract as 'humanity'?'

'Well, that comes down to morals, right? Not doing things that poison the world. Paying taxes. Change to panhandlers. Supporting charities.' Fede drummed his fingers on his thighs. 'Not murdering or raping, you know. Being a good person. A moral person.'

'OK, that's a good code of conduct. I'm all for not murdering and raping, and not just because it's wrong, but because a world where the social norms include murdering and raping is a bad one for me to live in.'

'Exactly.'

'That's the purpose of morals and loyalty, right? To create social norms that produce a world you want to live in.'

'Right! And that's why personal loyalty is important.'

Art smiled. Trap baited and sprung. 'OK. So institutional loyalty-loyalty to a Tribe or a nation-that's not an important social norm. As far as you're concerned, we could abandon all pretense of institutional loyalty.' Art dropped his voice. 'You could go to work for the Jersey boys, sabotaging Virgin/Deutsche Telekom, just because