He had a vision of the carnival atmosphere in the market stalls outside and knew that even after the ride had broken down, the crowd had lingered, laughing and browsing and enjoying a night's respite from the world and the cold city. The Whos down in Who-ville had gone on singing even after he'd Grinched their ride. That was it. The ride didn't just make use of user-created content -- it *was* user-created content. He could never convince his bosses in Orlando to let him build anything remotely like this, and given enough time, it would surely overtake them. That Tjan -- someone like him wouldn't be involved if there wasn't some serious money opportunity on the line. He'd seen the future that night and he had no place in it. # It only took a week on the Boston ride before they had their third and fourth nodes. The third was outside of San Francisco, in a gigantic ghost-mall that was already being used as a flea-market. They had two former anchor-stores, one of which was being squatted by artists who needed studio space. The other one made a perfect location for a new ride, and the geeks who planned on building it had cut their teeth building elaborate Burning Man confectioneries together, so Perry gave them his blessing. The fourth was to open in Raleigh, in the Research Triangle, where the strip malls ran one into the next. The soft-spoken, bitingly ironic southerners who proposed it were the daughters of old IBM blue-tie stalwarts who'd been running a women's tech collective since they realized they couldn't afford college and dropped out together. They wanted to see how much admission they could charge if they let it be known that they would plow their profits into scholarship funds for local women. Perry couldn't believe that these people wanted to open their own rides, nor that they thought they needed his permission to do so. He was reminded of the glory days of New Work, when every day there were fifty New Work sites with a hundred new gizmos, popping up on the mailing lists, looking for distributors, recruiting, competing, swarming, arguing, forming and reforming. Watching Tjan cut the deals whereby these people were granted permission to open their own editions of the ride felt like that, and weirder still. "Why do they need our permission? The API's wide open. They can just implement. Are they sheep or something?" Tjan gave him an old-fashioned look. "They're being polite, Perry -- they're giving you face for being the progenitor of the ride." "I don't like it," Perry said. "I didn't get anyone's permission to include their junk in the ride. When we get a printer to clone something that someone brings here, we don't get their permission. Why the hell is seeking permission considered so polite? Shit, why not send me a letter asking me if I mind receiving an email? Where does it end?" "They're trying to be nice to you Perry, that's all."