Thunk. And more red lights come up on the windshield: the perimeter security of the Deliverator’s vehicle has been breached.

No. It can’t be. Someone is shadowing him. Right off his left flank. A person on a skateboard rolling down the highway right behind him. The Deliverator, in his distracted state, has allowed himself to get pooned. As in harpooned. There’s a big round padded electromagnet, on the end of an arachnofiber cable. It has just thunked on the back of the Deliverator’s car and stuck. Ten feet behind him, the owner of this cursed device is surfing, taking him for a ride. Skateboarding along like a water-skier behind a boat.

In the rearview, flashes of orange and blue. The parasite is not just a punk out having a good time. It is a businessman making money. The orange and blue coverall, bulging all over with sintered armorgel padding, is the uniform of a Kourier. A Kourier from RadiKS, Radikal Kourier Systems. Like a bicycle messenger, but a hundred times more irritating because they don’t pedal under their own power - they just latch on and slow you down.

No need to get rattled. The Kourier will have to unpoon or else be slammed sideways into the slower vehicle.

Done. The Kourier isn’t ten feet behind him anymore - he is right there, peering in the rear window. Anticipating the maneuver, the Kourier reeled in his cord, which is attached to a handle with a power reel in it, and is now right on top of the pizza mobile…

An orange-and-blue-gloved hand reaches forward, a transparent sheet of plastic draped over it, and slaps his driver’s side window. The Deliverator has just been stickered. The sticker is a foot across and reads, in big orange block letters, printed backward so that he can read it from the inside:

THAT WAS STALE