"Where can we four live long-term with no rent, Bernardo?" said Jayjay, wanting to please Thuy. "We're tired of crashing in halls with it raining all the time."
President Bernardo appeared in their overlays; trudging along Mission Street same as them, dressed in baggy jeans and a hooded sweatshirt like a homie. "Get an SUV," he suggested. "There's a nice big one near here, with enough gas to drive it a mile or two. The owner would even give you the title, camaradas. " Bernardo gestured and a little map popped up with a highlighted image of a bloated, obsolete fuel-burner.
"Vibby!" said Thuy. "Good old President Bernardo-hey! What's he doing now?"
A flicker, a pop, and control of this particular President Bernardo icon had shifted into the hands of his political rivals. Wearing a slack, imbecilic grin, the president dropped his pants, squatted on the sidewalk, relieved himself, and-
"Hurry up!" interrupted Kittie, looking back at them. "We're gonna lose the pancakes. Oh, what is that supposed to be?"
"Homesteady Party attack ad," said Jayjay, looking away from the degraded President Bernard Lampton. "They're pumping out all this viral adware for the election." Lampton's image duck-walked toward Kittie, the president leering up at her.
A banner unfurled across their visual fields, reading Vote for Dick Too Dibbs! Beneath it appeared two vaguely similar men in red ties and blue suits: former President Dick Dibbs of Ohio, and his second cousin Dick Too Dibbs from Owensboro, Kentucky. President Dibbs had been convicted of treason and executed by lethal injection a few years back-the fallout of his scheme to turn the entire planet Earth into a Dyson sphere of nants, with the networked system supposedly running a Virtual Earth simulation, including a perfect copy of each and every former Earthling. It had come out in the trial that actually President Dibbs had instructed the nants to simulate only registered USA Homesteady Party members, condemning the rest of Earth's population to vanish without a trace. President Dibbs had planned to install himself as an all-powerful president-for-eternity, or, not to put too fine a point on it, God. No matter, his Kentucky lawyer cousin Dick Too Dibbs stood a good chance of being voted into office. Too Dibbs seemed more honest and intelligent than the original Dibbs. And he had great ads.
"I was a private man," said former President Dick Dibbs, with the very slightest gesture toward the obscene Bernard Lampton. "A clean man. Misled by corporate criminals. Unjustly executed by activist judges. We can control the Singularity. We can have a lasting paradise safe from woe. Dick Too Dibbs in November. He's learned from my mistakes." He gazed earnestly at Dick Too, with the faintest hint of a smile at the corners of his thin-lipped mouth.
Dick Too made a wry face. "I learned I don't want to end up in the death house like you!" he said, giving his cousin's icon a poke. President Dibbs shriveled up and shrank. "Forget him, folks. I know you've got every reason to be mistrustful of the Dibbs name. But I'll do right by the common people. I know how the system works. And I'm honest. Which is more than can be said for Bernard Lampton. Why don't you use one of your speeches to wipe yourself with, Bernardo? That's about all it's worth."
"Put your filter dogs on that junk," said Kittie. "Own your reality, pigheads."
It was a little harder than usual for Jayjay to teach his virtual guard dogs to recognize this particular type of ad, which had arrived compressed within a single vertex of Lampton's image-mesh. The orphidnet was getting very flaky thanks to all the spam and adware it was carrying. Jayjay had seen, like, two hundred Dick Too Dibbs ads yesterday. No matter how strenuously he tutored and upgraded his filter dogs, new ads kept romping in. The Homesteady Party was hi-tech and relentless. They seemed to be using programmers with an exceedingly deep understanding of the orphids' code and to have a very large and effective PR force embedding ad-triggers into unexpected contexts.
"Get outta there!" Sonic was yelling, sprinting across the nearly empty McDonald's parking lot, beautiful plumes of water splashing from each of his heavy-booted steps.
Too late. A couple of middle-aged bums in watch caps were already scarfing down the pancakes from the trash, and not even Sonic was up for hassling shaky pathetic winos over-garbage.
"Where's some other food, Bernardo?" said Kittie. This time, the president's icon didn't come up at all; instead a Dick Too Dibbs ad appeared right away, the ad pebbled and glittery in the rain, Dick Too talking about the danger of letting big companies control the orphidnet-reasonable and populist remarks, really, but they seemed shady and insincere since they were coming via an ad.
Seeking a filter to block this ad too, Jayjay searched the orphidnet and found a high-rated virtual defender resembling a chihuahua. He scanned the chihuahua's machine code to make sure the virtual dog didn't have Homesteady hookworms, then recruited him into his kennel. The chihuahua yapped at the other filter dogs, educating them. They set off in a baying pack, digging through Jayjay's recent inputs, competing to be the fastest and the most accurate filter dog of all, mating and spawning as they ran. All this took only seconds. And then Jayjay messaged his Best Dog in Hunt to the other Posse members, the mutated beast resembling a scaly dachshund by now.
Jayjay was wet and getting cold, although the rain-pocked wavy sheets of water undulating across the parking lot were still inconceivably beautiful-if he relaxed and actually looked at them. Seemed like he was pissing away too much time on low-level maintenance these days.
Thuy glanced over at Jayjay with a secret smile. She saw the water too. She liked it best when Jayjay was in the real world with her. She'd only left him for Kittie because he was spending too much time high on the Pig or plugging into his physics seminars. But she still thought he was the cutest, smartest guy she'd ever met.
"Let's walk to that car Bernardo showed us," said Kittie.
"I wonder if that was Bernardo at all," said Thuy. "Maybe he was a spoof from the start. Maybe the car is a trap."
"I'll take that chance," said Kittie, wiping the rain from her eyes.
On the way, Jayjay used the orphidnet to see into the garbage cans standing on the curb for pickup day. He was a bit gingerly in his scanning-lest a hidden Homesteady Party ad surprise him. He found a meaty roast chicken carcass, a third of a chocolate cake, a half-full box of Thai takeout, a couple of slices of pizza, and a bunch of brown bananas.
"Food links, Kittie," he said, messaging her the locations.
They scooped up the grub and hurried for the shelter of the puffy silver SUV, which was parked in a driveway by a beat old Victorian house on a side street between Mission and Guerrero, right where the Bernardo icon had said they'd find it. The Posse piled in, glad to be out of the rain, Jayjay in the driver's seat, Sonic shotgun, the women in back. Jayjay would have liked to be the one in back with Thuy.
Looking through the orphidnet, Jayjay could see and hear the old couple in the flat on the house's first floor. With nanocomputing orphids meshed upon every surface on Earth and linked together by quantum entanglement, you could peep anything you liked.
"Red! There's some kids in our car!" said the woman. She was soft-chinned, not unbeautiful, sitting on the couch knitting. "They're eating garbage! Why didn't you lock the car like I told you? Get out there and chase off those dirty kiqqies!"