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finance. A zombie picture. The zombies played almost exclusively by sleepless extras.
    A new standard in zombie verisimilitude.
    Or so he said.
    I said nothing, sometimes finding that even I can be rendered speechless. A not unpleasant sensation, except for those times when it is engendered by the rising of my gorge.
    In any case, the traffic jam I found myself caught in was not caused by the shooting of this breakthrough in cinema, but it was indeed the result of a film crew somewhere in the waning afternoon light, ahead of me on Santa Monica.
    SOP in traffic jams, and therefore SOP whenever one got in one's car, was to roll down the windows and turn off the engine. It was no longer a simple matter of common sense, it was also now enforceable by law. Sitting in deadlocked traffic with your engine running, powering your stereo, AC, seatback TV, game console, and recharging your various portable devices, was both unpatriotic and illegal.
    Not being a patriot, giving not a damn about getting a ticket, and having more than enough wealth to fill the tank of my resolutely gas-guzzling STS-V, I blasted the air conditioner, listened to a bootleg MP3 of an original recording of Giuseppe di Stefano performing Faust at the Met in 1949, and ran my Toughbook off the AC outlet. I did, out of courtesy, keep the windows up, not wanting the people sweltering around me to grow resentful, but I suspect the low grumble of the V-8 gave me away. Certainly I registered a few nasty looks shot at me through the tinted glass, but those would have concerned me only if the glass, indeed the whole car, were not bulletproof. Had I been so inclined, I could have rammed my way straight through the mass of traffic and come out the other end with little more to worry about than scratched paint and a few dents, but I was surfing the Net, reading up on di Stefano's biography, so I endured.
    Ten percent of the world's population could not sleep.
    They were dying, yes, but it took the average sleepless as much as a year to die after becoming symptomatic. Once the oddly stiff neck, pinprick pupils, and sweat manifested, insomnia shortly followed, gradually worsening, until it was absolute. Months were endured by the sufferers, months of constant wakefulness, plunging in and out of REM-state dreams without ever falling asleep, alert, always, to the terrible wrack of their bodies. There was no cure, death was inevitable, and while one's self might gradually slip away, one's awareness of the pain and physical chaos never ceased.
    The most sensible thing was to dose on massive quantities of speed.
    By the time the sleepless entered the later stages and sleep became an utter impossibility, there was little the average amphetamine could do to the human body that it was not already doing to itself. But it could lend some artificial burst of vigor, it could also sharpen and focus the mind and sometimes stave off the disorienting slippage into dream and memory. Condemned to disquietude and fueled by bennies, one-tenth of the world's population not only wanted to go to the movies at midnight, they also wanted to surf the Internet.
    At first glance it would appear a losing proposition to market to this demographic, seeing as they were set to expire. And that would have been true if the disease were not spreading.
    It hadn't, after all, always been ten percent that were infected. It had, of course, started quite small. Indeed, in its infancy, the sleepless prion had been little more than a boutique disease. A fringe illness known as fatal familial insomnia. The name tells you all you need to know about its quaint beginnings.
    Familial.
    For virtually all of the 245-odd years of its recorded history, FFI had restricted itself to less than a handful of genetic lines. How and why it widened its scope so terribly and suddenly was, you'll understand, a subject greatly debated.
    To be more precise, the sleepless prion was not the same as the FFI prion. For better or worse, FFI