my identity, and my smarts over happiness and the thought that I
would indeed choose happiness over smarts any day.

Too damned smart for my own good.

14.

"I just don't get it," Fede said.

Art tried to keep the exasperation out of his voice. "It's simple," he said.
"It's like a car radio with a fast-forward button. You drive around on the
MassPike, and your car automatically peers with nearby vehicles. It grabs the
current song on someone else's stereo and streamloads it. You listen to it. If
you don't hit the fast-forward button, the car starts grabbing everything it can
from the peer, all the music on the stereo, and cues it up for continued play.
Once that pool is exhausted, it queries your peer for a list of its peers -- the
cars that it's getting its music from -- and sees if any of them are in range,
and downloads from them. So, it's like you're exploring a taste-network, doing
an automated, guided search through traffic for the car whose owner has
collected the music you most want to listen to."

"But I hate your music -- I don't want to listen to the stuff on your radio."

"Fine. That's what the fast-forward button is for. It skips to another car and
starts streamloading off of its drive." Fede started to say something, and Art
held up his hand. "And if you exhaust all the available cars, the system
recycles, but asks its peers for files collected from other sources. You might
hate the songs I downloaded from Al, but the songs I got from Bennie are right
up your alley.

"The war-drivers backstop the whole system. They've got the biggest collections
on the freeway, and they're the ones most likely to build carefully thought-out
playlists. They've got entire genres -- the whole history of the blues, say,
from steel cylinders on -- on their drives. So we encourage them. When you go
through a paypoint -- a toll booth -- we debit you for the stuff that you didn't
fast-forward, the stuff you listened to and kept. Unless, that is, you've got
more than, say, 10,000 songs onboard. Then you go free. It's counterintuitive, I
know, but just look at the numbers."

"OK, OK. A radio with a fast-forward button. I think I get it."

"But?"

"But who's going to want to use this? It's unpredictable. You've got no
guarantee you'll get the songs you want to hear."

Art smiled. "Exactly!"

Fede gave him a go-on wave.

"Don't you see? That's the crack-cocaine part! It's the thrill of the chase!
Nobody gets excited abou