g around Harvard Square
could.

He'd always felt at a slight angle to reality in California, something that was
reinforced by his continuous efforts in the Tribe, from chatting and gaming
until the sun rose, dragging his caffeine-deficient ass around to his clients in
a kind of fog before going home, catching a nap and hopping back online at 3 or
4 when the high-octane NYC early risers were practicing work-avoidance and
clattering around with their comms.

Gradually, he penetrated deeper into the Tribe, getting invites into private
channels, intimate environments where he found himself spilling the most private
details of his life. The Tribe stuck together, finding work for each other,
offering advice, and it was only a matter of time before someone offered him a
gig.

That was Fede, who practically invented Tribal agent-provocateurs. He'd been
working for McKinsey, systematically undermining their GMT-based clients with
plausibly terrible advice, creating Achilles' heels that their East-coast
competitors could exploit. The entire European trust-architecture for relay
networks had been ceded by Virgin/Deutsche Telekom to a scrappy band of AT&T
Labs refugees whose New Jersey headquarters hosted all the cellular reputation
data that Euros' comms consulted when they were routing their calls. The Jersey
clients had funneled a nice chunk of the proceeds to Fede's account in the form
of rigged winnings from an offshore casino that the Tribe used to launder its
money.

Now V/DT was striking back, angling for a government contract in Massachusetts,
a fat bit of pork for managing payments to rightsholders whose media was
assessed at the MassPike's tollbooths. Rights-societies were a fabulous
opportunity to skim and launder and spindle money in plenty, and Virgin's
massive repertoire combined with Deutsche Telekom's Teutonic attention to detail
was a tough combination to beat. Needless to say, the Route 128-based Tribalists
who had the existing contract needed an edge, and would pay handsomely for it.

London nights seemed like a step up from San Francisco mornings to Art --
instead of getting up at 4AM to get NYC, he could sleep in and chat them up
through the night. The Euro sensibility, with its many nap-breaks, statutory
holidays and extended vacations seemed ideally suited to a double agent's life.

But Art hadn't counted on the Tribalists' hands-on approach to his work. They
obsessively grepped his daily feed of spreads