ess steel rail with
it, stamping on the drifts of sani-wipe mulch on the train's floor.

He made a conscious effort to control his breathing, willed his heart to stop
pounding. He was still juiced with adrenaline, and his mind raced. He needed to
do something constructive with his time, but his mind kept wandering. Finally,
he gave in and let it wander.

Something about the counterman, about his slips of paper, about the MassPike. It
was knocking around in his brain and he just couldn't figure out how to bring it
to the fore. The counterman kept his slips in the basement so that he could sit
among them and see how his business had grown, every slip a person served, a
ring on the till, money in the bank. Drivers on the MassPike who used traffic
jams to download music from nearby cars and then paid to license the songs. Only
they didn't. They circumvented the payment system in droves, running bootleg
operations out of their cars that put poor old Napster to shame for sheer
volume. Some people drove in promiscuous mode, collecting every song in every
car on the turnpike, cruising the tunnels that riddled Boston like mobile pirate
radio stations, dumping their collections to other drivers when it came time to
quit the turnpike and settle up for their music at the toll booth.

It was these war-drivers that MassPike was really worried about. Admittedly,
they actually made the system go. Your average fartmobile driver had all of ten
songs in his queue, and the short-range, broadband connection you had on
MassPike meant that if you were stuck in a jam of these cars, your selection
would be severely limited. The war-drivers, though, were mobile jukeboxes. The
highway patrol had actually seized cars with over 300,000 tracks on their
drives. Without these fat caches on the highway, MassPike would have to spend a
fortune on essentially replicating the system with their own mobile libraries.

The war-drivers were the collective memory of the MassPike's music-listeners.

Ooh, there was a tasty idea. The collective memory of MassPike. Like Dark Ages
scholars, memorizing entire texts to preserve them against the depredations of
barbarism, passing their collections carefully from car to car. He'd
investigated the highway patrol reports on these guys, and there were hints
there, shadowy clues of an organized subculture, one with a hierarchy, where
newbies tricked out their storage with libraries of novel and rare tuneage in a
bid to con