vince 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 mov