Finally, the meeting dissolved in a welter of ill-will and refusal of anyone to take legal or even nominal responsibility for the collapse of my deck and the injuries suffered by poor Cherry.
I turned despondently to FooDog, once we were alone again. “Looks like we’re boned, right? All our evidence is circumstantial. There’s no way we can redress this through the system. I mean, aside from convincing any wikis I’m personally involved in to boycott these buggers, what else can I do?”
FooDog, good friend that he was, had taken my dilemma to heart.
“Damn! It’s just not right that they should be allowed to get away with hurting you and Cherry like this.”
He pondered my fix for another minute or so before speaking.
“Seems to me our problem is this. You got no throw-weight here, nephew. You’re only one aggrieved individual. Your affiliate wikis are irrelevant to the cause. But if we could get the whole country behind you, that’d be a different story.”
“And how do we do that?”
“Well, we could mount a big sob campaign. Get all the oprahs and augenblickers talking about you. Make you and Cherry into Victims of the Week.”
“Oh, man, I don’t know if I want to go that route. There’s no guarantee we wouldn’t come out of it looking like jerks anyway.”
“Right, right. Well, I guess that leaves only one option—”
“What’s that?”
FooDog grinned with the nearly obscene delight he always expressed when tackling a task deemed impossible by lesser mortals.
“If we want satisfaction, we’ll just have to take over the UWA.”
7. STARTING AT THE TOP
I had always steered clear of politics. Which is not to say I had neglected any of my civic duties. Voting on thousands of day-to-day decisions about how to run my neighbourhood, my city, my state, my bioregion and the UWA as a whole. Debating and parsing Wikitustional Amendments. Helping to formulate taxes, tariffs and trade agreements. Drafting criminal penalties. Just like any good citizen, I had done my minute-to-minute share of steering the country down a righteous path.
But I never once felt any desire to formally join one of the wikis that actually performed the drudgery of implementing the consensus-determined policies and legislation.
The Georgetown Girls. The Slick Willy Wonkettes. The Hamilfranksonians. The Founding Flavours. The Rowdy Rodhamites. The Roosevelvet Underground. The Cabal of Interns. The Technocratic Dreamers. The Loyal Superstition. The Satin Stalins. The Amateur Gods. The Boss Hawgs. The Red Greens. The Rapporteurs. The Harmbudsmen. The Shadow Cabinet. The Gang of Four on the Floor. The Winston Smiths. The Over-the-Churchills.
Maybe, if you’re like me, you never realized how many such groups existed, or how they actually coordinated.
By current ubik count, well over five hundred political wikis were tasked with some portion of running the UWA on non-local levels, each of them occupying some slice of the political/ideological/intellectual spectrum and performing one or another “governmental” function.
Each political wiki was invested with a certain share of proportional power based on the number of citizens who formally subscribed to its philosophy. The jimmywhales of each wiki formed the next higher level of coordination. From their ranks, after much traditional politicking and alliance building, they elected one jimmywhale to Rule Them All.
This individual came as close to being the President of our country as anyone could nowadays.
Until deposed, he had the power to order certain consequential actions across his sphere of influence by fiat; to countermand bad decisions; to embark on new projects without prior approvaclass="underline" the traditional role of any jimmywhale. But in this case, his sphere of influence included the entire country.
Currently this office was held by Ivo Praed of the Libertinearians.
FooDog set out to put me in Ivo Praed’s seat.
“The first thing we have to do,” Foolty Fontal said, “is to register our wiki.”
The three of us—myself, a fully recovered Cherry and the Dog—were sitting on the restored deck of the Sandybump house, enjoying drinks and snacks under a clear sunny sky. (This time, concrete pilings upheld the porch.)
“What should we call it?” I asked.
Cherry jumped right in. “How about the Phantom Blots?”
FooDog laughed. I pulled up the reference on the ubik, and I laughed too.
“Okay, we’re registered,” said FooDog.
“Now what? How do we draw people to our cause? I don’t know anything about politics.”
“You don’t have to. It would take too long to play by the rules, with no guarantees of success. So we’re going to cheat. I’m going to accrue power to the Phantom Blots by stealing microvotes from every citizen. Just like the old scam of grifting a penny apiece from a million bank accounts.”
“And no one’s going to notice?”
“Oh, yeah, in about a week, I figure. But by then we’ll have gotten our revenge.”
“And what’ll happen when everyone finds out how we played them?”
“Oh, nothing, probably. They’ll just seal up the backdoor I took advantage of, and reboot their foolish little parliament.”
“You really think so?”
“I do. Now, let me get busy. I’ve got to write our platform first—”
FooDog fugued out. Cherry got up, angled an umbrella across the abstracted black man to provide some shade, and then signalled me to step inside the house.
Out of earshot of our pal, she said, “Russ, why is FooDog going to all this trouble for us?”
“Well, let’s see. Because we’re buddies, and because he can’t resist monkey-wrenching the system just for kicks. That about covers it.”
“So you don’t think he’s looking to get something personal out of all this?”
“No. Well, maybe. FooDog always operates on multiple levels. But so long as he helps us get revenge—”
Cherry’s expression darkened. “That’s another thing I don’t like. All this talk of ‘revenge.’ We shouldn’t be focused on the past, holding a grudge. We came out of this accident okay. I’m healthy again, and the house is fixed. No one was even really to blame. It’s like when those two species of transgenic flies unpredictably mated in the wild, and the new hybrid wiped out California’s wine grapes. Just an act of God….”
In all the years Cherry and I been together, we had seldom disagreed about anything. But this was one matter I wouldn’t relent on. “No! When I think about how you nearly died— Someone’s got to pay!”
Shaking her head ruefully, Cherry said, “Okay, I can see it’s a point of honour with you, like if one of the Oyster Pirates ratted out another. I’ll help all I can. If I’m in, I’m in. I just hope we’re not bringing down heavy shit on our heads.”
The door to the deck slid open, admitting a blast of hot air, and FooDog entered, grinning face glistening with sweat.
“Okay, nephew and niece, we’re up and running. Even as we speak, thousands and thousands of microvotes are accumulating to the wiki of the Phantom Blots every hour, seemingly from citizens newly entranced by our kickass platform. You should read the plank about turning Moonbase Armstrong into the world’s first offworld hydroponic ganja farm! Anyhow, I figure that over the next forty-eight hours, the Blots will rise steadily through the ranks of the politco-wikis, until our leader is ready to challenge Praed for head jimmywhale.”