A tourist boat putters by in the canal the sails of the huge windmill overhead cast long, cool shadows across the road. A couple of punks – maybe local, but more likely drifters lured to Amsterdam by the magnetic field of tolerance the Dutch beam across Europe like a pulsar – are laughing and chatting by a couple of battered mopeds in the far corner. They compete for his attention, bickering and rudely waving in front of the scenery. His channels are jabbering away in a corner of his head-up display, throwing compressed infobursts of filtered press releases at him.

Manfred sits on a stool out in the car park at the Brouwerij ‘t IJ, watching the articulated buses go by and drinking a third of a liter of lip-curlingly sour gueuze. If the mood holds, someone out there is going to become very rich indeed. Amsterdam is making him feel wanted already, even though he’s fresh off the train from Schiphol: He’s infected with the dynamic optimism of another time zone, another city. The bandwidth is good here, he realizes and it’s not just the bandwidth, it’s the whole scene. He glances up and grabs a pigeon, crops the shot, and squirts it at his weblog to show he’s arrived.

The square smells of water and dirt and hot metal and the fart-laden exhaust fumes of cold catalytic converters the bells of trams ding in the background, and birds flock overhead. It’s a hot summer Tuesday, and he’s standing in the plaza in front of the Centraal Station with his eyeballs powered up and the sunlight jangling off the canal, motor scooters and kamikaze cyclists whizzing past and tourists chattering on every side. Manfred’s on the road again, making strangers rich.

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