Tribe's native time
zone, your sleep sched is just *raped*. You live on sleepdep and chat and secret
agentry until it's second nature. You're cranky and subrational most of the
time. Close your eyes on the freeway and dreams paint themselves on the back of
your lids, demanding their time, almost as heavy as gravity, almost as
remorseless. There's a lot of flaming and splitting and vitriol in the Tribes.
They're more fractured than a potsherd. Tribal anthropologists have built up
incredible histories of the fissioning of the Tribes since they were first
recognized -- most of 'em are online; you can look 'em up. We stab each other in
the back routinely and with no more provocation than a sleepdep hallucination.

"Which is how I got here. I'm a member of the Eastern Standard Tribe. We're
centered around New York, but we're ramified up and down the coast, Boston and
Toronto and Philly, a bunch of Montreal Anglos and some wannabes in upstate New
York, around Buffalo and Schenectady. I was doing Tribal work in London, serving
the Eastern Standard Agenda, working with a couple of Tribesmen, well, one
Tribesman and my girlfriend, who I thought was unaffiliated. Turns out, though,
that they're both double agents. They sold out to the Pacific Daylight Tribe,
lameass phonies out in LA, slick Silicon Valley bizdev sharks, pseudo hipsters
in San Franscarcity. Once I threatened to expose them, they set me up, had me
thrown in here."

I looked around proudly, having just completed a real fun little excursion
through a topic near and dear to my heart. Mount Rushmore looked back at me,
stony and bovine and uncomprehending.

"Baby," Lucy said, rolling her eyes again, "you need some new meds."

"Could be," I said. "But this is for real. Is there a comm on the ward? We can
look it up together."

"Oh, *that*'all prove it, all right. Nothing but truth online."

"I didn't say that. There're peer-reviewed articles about the Tribes. It was a
lead story on the CBC's social science site last year."

"Uh huh, sure. Right next to the sasquatch videos."

"I'm talking about the CBC, Lucy. Let's go look it up."

Lucy mimed taking an invisible comm out of her cleavage and prodding at it with
an invisible stylus. She settled an invisible pair of spectacles on her nose and
nodded sagely. "Oh yeah, sure, really interesting stuff."

I realized that I was arguing with a crazy person and turned to the doctor. "You
must have read about the Tribes, rig