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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.”
    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 neighborhood, my city, my state, my bioregion and the UWA as a whole. Debating and parsing Wikitustional Amendments. Helping to formulate taxes, tarrifs 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 Flavors. 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 approval: 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