I sipped my orange juice and thought about what I was going to do. We were in for a big scandal. An enormous upheaval of government. I was going to cause it, and it was a good thing. Before Virtual Reps, people used to think that maybe a benign dictator would be a good idea—someone who would sort everything out, and then give it back to us. But what they missed was that the fighting, the gridlock, the muddling through—those were the important things. Those meant that we were free, and self-governing, and intelligent enough to make our own decisions.
I got off the plane in San Francisco, and headed for the exit. I wondered if simply changing the Virtual Reps’s programs would solve the problem, or if they needed to be eliminated completely. I thought about it for awhile —and then I had a radical thought: the people would decide.
I hailed a cab. “Take me to the San Francisco Chronicle,” said. “And step on it.”
“You’re the boss,” the driver said.
“So are you,” I muttered. “Let’s keep it that way.”