est as personal loyalty is. The Tribe takes care of me, I
take care of the Tribe. We'll negotiate a separate payment from Jersey for this
-- after all, this is outside of the scope of work that we're being paid for --
and we'll split the money, down the middle. We'll work in a residual income with
Jersey, too, because, as you say, this is bigger than MassPike. It's a genuinely
good idea, and there's enough to go around. All right?"

"Are you asking me or telling me?"

"I'm asking you. This will require both of our cooperation. I'm going to need to
manufacture an excuse to go stateside to explain this to them and supervise the
prototyping. You're going to have to hold down the fort here at V/DT and make
sure that I'm clear to do my thing. If you want to go and sell this idea
elsewhere, well, that's going to require my cooperation, or at least my silence
-- if I turn this over to V/DT, they'll pop you for industrial espionage. So we
need each other."

Art stood and looked down at Fede, who was a good ten centimeters shorter than
he, looked down at Fede's sweaty upper lip and creased brow. "We're a good team,
Fede. I don't want to toss away an opportunity, but I also don't want to exploit
it at the expense of my own morals. Can you agree to work with me on this, and
trust me to do the right thing?"

Fede looked up. "Yes," he said. On later reflection, Art thought that the *yes*
came too quickly, but then, he was just relieved to hear it. "Of course. Of
course. Yes. Let's do it."

"That's just fine," Art said. "Let's get to work, then."

They fell into their traditional division of labor then, Art working on a
variety of user-experience plans, dividing each into subplans, then devising
protocols for user testing to see what would work in the field; Fede working on
logistics from plane tickets to personal days to budget and critical-path
charts. They worked side by side, but still used the collaboration tools that
Art had grown up with, designed to allow remote, pseudonymous parties to fit
their separate work components into the same structure, resolving schedule and
planning collisions where it could and throwing exceptions where it couldn't.
They worked beside each other and each hardly knew the other was there, and
that, Art thought, when he thought of it, when the receptionist commed him to
tell him that "Linderrr" -- freakin' teabags -- was there for him, that was the
defining characteristic of a Tribalist. A norm, a