t 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 bes