usly as they
squirreled their money away from the taxman. He was, therefore, thrilled and
delighted to be back on British soil, Greenwich+0, where grease ran like water
and his runabout could be kept easily and cheaply fuelled and the vodka could
run down his gullet instead of into his tank.

He was in the Kensington High Street on a sleepy Sunday morning, GMT0300h --
2100h back in EDT -- and the GPS was showing insufficient data-points to even
gauge traffic between his geoloc and the Camden High where he kept his rooms.
When the GPS can't find enough peers on the relay network to color its maps with
traffic data, you know you've hit a sweet spot in the city's uber-circadian, a
moment of grace where the roads are very nearly exclusively yours.

So he whistled a jaunty tune and swilled his coffium, a fad that had just made
it to the UK, thanks to the loosening of rules governing the disposal of heavy
water in the EU. The java just wouldn't cool off, remaining hot enough to
guarantee optimal caffeine osmosis right down to the last drop.

If he was jittery, it was no more so than was customary for ESTalists at GMT+0,
and he was driving safely and with due caution. If the woman had looked out
before stepping off the kerb and into the anemically thin road, if she hadn't
been wearing stylish black in the pitchy dark of the curve before the Royal
Garden Hotel, if she hadn't stepped *right in front of his runabout*, he would
have merely swerved and sworn and given her a bit of a fright.

But she didn't, she was, she did, and he kicked the brake as hard as he could,
twisted the wheel likewise, and still clipped her hipside and sent her
ass-over-teakettle before the runabout did its own barrel roll, making three
complete revolutions across the Kensington High before lodging in the Royal
Garden Hotel's shrubs. Art was covered in scorching, molten coffium, screaming
and clawing at his eyes, upside down, when the porters from the Royal Garden
opened his runabout's upside-down door, undid his safety harness and pulled him
out from behind the rapidly flacciding airbag. They plunged his face into the
ornamental birdbath, which had a skin of ice that shattered on his nose and
jangled against his jawbone as the icy water cooled the coffium and stopped the
terrible, terrible burning.

He ended up on his knees, sputtering and blowing and shivering, and cleared his
eyes in time to see the woman he'd hit being carried out of the middle of t