have
actually seen precious little of each other considering that I've been living
under her roof. (Doc Szandor's Cambridge apartment is hardly bigger than my room
at the hospital, and between his snoring and the hard floor, I didn't even last
a whole night there.) We've communicated mostly by notes commed to her fridge
and prototypes left atop my suitcase of day-clothes and sharp-edged toiletries
at the foot of my makeshift bed when she staggered in from her workbench while I
snored away the nights. Come to think of it, I haven't really seen much of Doc
Szandor, either -- he's been holed up in his rooms, chatting away on the EST
channels.

I am well rested. I am happy. My back is loose and my Chi is flowing. I am
driving my few belongings to a lovely two-bedroom -- one to sleep in, one to
work in -- flat overlooking Harvard Square, where the pretty co-eds and their
shaggy boyfriends tease one another in the technical argot of a dozen abstruse
disciplines. I'm looking forward to picking up a basic physics, law, medicine
and business vocabulary just by sitting in my window with my comm, tapping away
at new designs.

We drive up to a toll plaza and I crank the yielding, human-centric steering
wheel toward the EZPass lane. The dealer installed the transponder and gave me a
brochure explaining the Sony Family's approach to maximum driving convenience.
But as I approach the toll gate, it stays steadfastly down.

The Veddic's HUD flashes an instruction to pull over to the booth. A bored
attendant leans out of the toll booth and squirts his comm at me, and the HUD
comes to life with an animated commercial for the new, improved TunePay service,
now under direct MassPike management.

The TunePay scandal's been hot news for weeks now. Bribery, corruption, patent
disputes -- I'd been gratified to discover that my name had been removed from
the patent applications, sparing me the nightly hounding Fede and Linda and her
fucking ex had been subjected to on my comm as the legal net tightened around
them.

I end up laughing so hard that Caitlin gets out of the car and walks around to
my side, opens the door, and pulls me bodily to the passenger side. She serenely
ignores the blaring of the horns from the aggravated, psychotic Boston drivers
stacked up behind us, walks back to the driver's side and takes the wheel.

"Thanks," I tell her, and lay a hand on her pudgy, freckled arm.

"You belong in a loony bin, you know that?" she say