"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 about beating traffic on a back road that's always empty. But get on the M-5 after a hard day at work and drive it at 100 km/h for two hours without once touching your brakes and it's like God's reached down and parted the Red Seas for you. You get a sense of *accomplishment*! Most of the time, your car stereo's gonna play the same junk you've always heard, just background sound, but sometimes, ah! Sometimes you'll hit a sweet spot and get the best tunes you've ever heard. If you put a rat in a cage with a lever that doesn't give food pellets, he'll push it once or twice and give up. Set the lever to always deliver food pellets and he'll push it when he gets hungry. Set it to *sometimes* deliver food pellets and he'll bang on it until he passes out!"
"Heh," Fede said. "Good rant."