"All of our employees have been contacted, one time or another, by someone with an offer -- get me a uniform, or a pic of the design roughs, or a recording of the soundtrack, or a copy of the contracts, and I'll make it worth your while. From street-sweepers to senior execs, the money is just sitting there, waiting for us to pick it up." The wench brought them their gigantic pewter plates of roast-beef, Yorkshire pudding, parsnips, and a mountain of french fries, presumably to appease the middle-American appetites of the more unadventurous diners. Freddy sliced off a throat-plugging lump of beef and skewered it on his fork. "You're going to tell me that the temptation overwhelmed one of your employees, yes?" He shoved the entire lump into his mouth and began to masticate it, cheeks pouched out, looking like a kid with a mouthful of bubble-gum. "Precisely. Our competitors don't want to compete with us on a level playing field. They are, more than anything, imitators. They take the stuff that we carefully build, based on extensive research, design and testing, and they clone it for parking-lot amusement rides. There's no attention to detail. There's no attention to safety! It's all cowboys and gypsies." Freddy kept chewing, but he dug in the pockets of his sports-coat and came up with a small stubby notebook and a ball-point. He jotted some notes, shielding the pad with his body. "And these crass imitators enter into our story how?" Freddy asked around his beef. "You know about these New Work people -- they call themselves 're-mixers' but that's just a smokescreen. They like to cloak themselves in some post-modern, 'Creative Commons' legitimacy, but when it comes down to it, they made their fortune off the intellectual property of others, uncompensated use of designs and technologies that others had invested in and created. "So when they made a ride, it wasn't much of much. Like some kind of dusty Commie museum, old trophies from their last campaign. But somewhere along the way, they hooked up with one of these brokers who specializes in sneaking our secrets out of the park and into the hands of our competitors and quick as that, they were profitable -- nationally franchised, even." He stopped to quaff his Bud Light and surreptitiously checked out the journalist to see how much of this he was buying. Impossible to say. He was still masticating a cheekful of rare roast, juice overflowing the corners of his mouth. But his hand moved over his pad and he made an impatient go-on gesture with his head, swallowing some of his payload.