The Deliverator used to make software. Still does, sometimes. But if life 
were a mellow elementary school run by well-meaning education Ph.D.s, the 
Deliverator's report card would say: "Hiro is so bright and creative but 
needs to work harder on his cooperation skills."

So now he has this other job. No brightness or creativity involved -- but 
no cooperation either. Just a single principle: The Deliverator stands 
tall, your pie in thirty minutes or you can have it free, shoot the 
driver, take his car, file a class-action suit. The Deliverator has been 
working this job for six months, a rich and lengthy tenure by his 
standards, and has never delivered a pizza in more than twenty-one 
minutes.

Oh, they used to argue over times, many corporate driver-years lost to it: 
homeowners, red-faced and sweaty with their own lies, stinking of Old 
Spice and job-related stress, standing in their glowing yellow doorways 
brandishing their Seikos and waving at the clock over the kitchen sink, I 
swear, can't you guys tell time?

Didn't happen anymore. Pizza delivery a major industry. A managed 
industry. People went to CosaNostra Pizza University four years just to 
learn it. Came in its doors unable to write an English sentence, from 
Abkhazia, Rwanda, Guanajuato, South Jersey, and came out knowing more 
about pizza than a Bedouin knows about sand. And they had studied this 
problem. Graphed the frequency of doorway delivery-time disputes.

Wired the early Deliverators to record, then analyze, the debating 
tactics, the voice-stress histograms, the distinctive grammatical 
structures employed by white middle-class Type A Burbclave occupants who 
against all logic had decided that this was the place to take their 
personal Custerian stand against all that was stale and deadening in their 
lives: they were going to lie, or delude themselves, about the time of 
their phone call and get themselves a free pizza; no, they deserved a free 
pizza along with their life, liberty, and pursuit of whatever, it was 
fucking inalienable.

Sent psychologists out to these people's houses, gave them a free TV set 
to submit to an anonymous interview, hooked them to polygraphs, studied 
their brain waves as they showed them choppy, inexplicable movies of porn 
queens and late-night car crashes and Sammy Davis, Jr., put them in 
sweet-smelling, mauve-walled rooms and asked them questions about Ethics 
so perplexing that even a Jesuit couldn't respond without committing a 
venial sin.

The analysts at CosaNostra Pizza University concluded that it was just 
human nature and you couldn't fix it, and so they went for a quick cheap 
technical fix: smart boxes. The pizza box is a plastic carapace now, 
corrugated for stiffness, a little LED readout glowing on the side, 
telling the Deliverator how many trade imbalance-producing minutes have 
ticked away since the fateful phone call. There are chips and stuff in 
there.

The pizzas rest, a short stack of them, in slots behind the Deliverator's 
head. Each pizza glides into a slot like a circuit board into a computer, 
clicks into place as the smart box interfaces with the onboard system of 
the Deliverator's car. The address of the caller has already been inferred 
from his phone number and poured into the smart box's built-in RAM. From 
there it is communicated to the car, which computes and projects the 
optimal route on a heads-up display, a glowing colored map traced out 
against the windshield so that the Deliverator does not even have to 
glance down.

If the thirty-minute deadline expires, news of the disaster is flashed to 
CosaNostra Pizza Headquarters and relayed from there to Uncle Enzo himself 
-- the Sicilian Colonel Sanders, the Andy Griffith of Bensonhurst, the 
straight razor-swinging figment of many a Deliverator's nightmares, the 
Capo and prime figurehead of CosaNostra Pizza, Incorporated -- who will be 
on the phone to the customer within five minutes, apologizing profusely. 

The next day, Uncle Enzo will land on the customer's yard in a jet 
helicopter and apologize some more and give him a free trip to Italy -- 
all he has to do is sign a bunch of releases that make him a public figure 
and spokesperson for CosaNostra Pizza and basically end his private life 
as he knows it. He will come away from the whole thing feeling that, 
somehow, he owes the Mafia a favor.