fast that, by the time the windfall tax demands are served, the targets don't
exist anymore, even though the same staff are working on the same software in
the same Mumbai cubicle farms.
Welcome to the twenty-first century.
The permanent floating meatspace party Manfred is hooking up with is a strange
attractor for some of the American exiles cluttering up the cities of Europe
this decade - not trustafarians, but honest-to-God political dissidents, draft
dodgers, and terminal outsourcing victims. It's the kind of place where weird
connections are made and crossed lines make new short circuits into the future,
like the street cafes of Switzerland where the pre Great War Russian exiles
gathered. Right now it's located in the back of De Wildemann's, a three-hundred-year
old brown cafe with a list of brews that runs to sixteen pages and wooden walls
stained the color of stale beer. The air is thick with the smells of tobacco,
brewer's yeast, and melatonin spray: Half the dotters are nursing monster
