TV channel collapse. The whitenoise babies are crying in the bowling alley gutters, while the drug-blanked kids suck down Hot Cats drenched in mustard. Outside the sentient sky-whale blimps are locking their signals onto journalists so that they can kill undercover reporters.
The bastard monster of a lifetime president and a porn orangutan is running the country further into the ground if possible. Fake News Network tries to regain credibility despite being forced to carry a disclaimer with a presidential seal before every episode, and the No Fucks Network, which is certified president-friendly, continues to have excellent ratings. Stories about Mexicannibals, Demonstercrats and their evil ways choke the airwaves.
Jolly is navigating the walkway that zips through the centre of the house, and all his feeds trough into his filter databank, where a fact-checker sputters out a brief for him. He steps outside his front door and fires his data-freeze gun at the Postal Man, walks over to him and hacks his reach-back feed to get into the central Post Office databanks. It’s a daily need, and a daily change to the feed.
He plugs the data into his Roamin-Roman Cockroachbot and sends it to go and find the mail of his disappeared ex. She had supposedly crafted a data-child from their data-ghosts and he was worried about the decompression of its psychic make-up, in a world that was promising to make AIs virtually indestructible. There were clues.
The roachbot dropped the mail into the Edward Hopper, and it began to thread through all the data and paint a picture. Early birds at the donut shop. And there she was, and he swore he had never fed in any data of what she looked like.
Jolly didn’t have to pop re-motes to emote – no deep-dust for him; no angle-anger. He took the picture and gave it to the Recog-Nice, and that zip-glanced through surveillance footage to find where he needed to go.
A bullet through the head of a thing that is part of you and part of someone you loved. Jolly was a symptom, but maybe Jolly is a cause. And what has he caused? His finger moved, and he erased a thing that may have been a being. TV channel collapse.