aying that you've got professional expertise in the keeping of
secrets, huh? I suppose I could spill it for you, then." And I do, explaining my
little hack for tricking the door into thinking that I'd left and returned to
the room.

"Huh -- now that you explain it, it's pretty obvious."

"That's my job -- figuring out the obvious way of doing something."

And we fall to talking about my job with V/DT, and the discussion branches into
the theory and practice of UE, only slowing a little when he picks the crud out
of the scrape down my jaw and tugs through a couple of quick stitches. It occurs
to me that he's just keeping me distracted, using a highly evolved skill for
placating psychopaths through small talk so that they don't thrash while he's
knitting their bodies back together.

I decide that I don't care. I get to natter on about a subject that I'm nearly
autistically fixated on, and I do it in a context where I know that I'm sane and
smart and charming and occasionally mind-blowing.

"...and the whole thing pays for itself through EZPass, where we collect the
payments for the music downloaded while you're on the road." As I finish my
spiel, I realize *I've* been keeping *him* distracted, standing there with the
tweezers in one hand and a swab in the other.

"Wow!" he said. "So, when's this all going to happen?"

"You'd use it, huh?"

"Hell, yeah! I've got a good twenty, thirty thousand on my car right now! You're
saying I could plunder anyone else's stereo at will, for free, and keep it,
while I'm stuck in traffic, and because I'm a -- what'd you call it, a
super-peer? -- a super-peer, it's all free and legal? Damn!"

"Well, it may be a while before you see it on the East Coast. It'll probably
roll out in LA first, then San Francisco, Seattle..."

"What? Why?"

"It's a long story," I say. "And it ends with me on the roof of a goddamned
nuthouse on Route 128 doing a one-man tribute to the Three Stooges."

20.

Three days later, Art finally realized that something big and ugly was in the
offing. Fede had repeatedly talked him out of going to Perceptronics's offices,
offering increasingly flimsy excuses and distracting him by calling the hotel's
front desk and sending up surprise massage therapists to interrupt Art as he
stewed in his juices, throbbing with resentment at having been flown thousands
of klicks while injured in order to check into a faceless hotel on a faceless
stretch of highway and insert t