Kim woke with a pounding headache and a terrible golden oldies song looping its most annoying 5 seconds.

"Stop fucking with the goddamn phone, George. Why do we even have that thing? Use the haptinet like a normal fucking person."

George beamed a medicated smile from inside the bioreactor, swaying to the insipid music. When they first started dating, he'd been a traditional catgirl. The kind of furry you could take home to Mom. Now he was anthroplankton. And Kim had to clean the tank.

Kim answered the phone just to shut up Justin Beiber. No spammer could possibly be worse.

"Hello?"

"Good afternoon Sir or Madame, please hold for an operator. Your call is very important to us."

Kim looked at the phone's timestamp as she pecked for the RST button. Stupid Quebecois spamfarms still didn't realize that their noon was nine in the morning for the real world.

"May I speak to Sam Kim?"

The tell tale accent and vaguely desperate intonation of the spamfarmer held Kim's thumb. Fuck it, this was still George's creditphone, so George was buying whatever the Caliphate was making this poor slob sell. Kim had a soft spot for people stuck under the Loud Revolution.

"Sure. Speaking."

"For our records, is your legal name Samuel or Samantha?"

"Ugh, I don't know. I just woke up."

"What?..."

Kim heard real fear over the tinny phone, so reached down to check.

"Samuel" he answered, biting back further comment. It'd only get the poor flunky "penance".

"Thank you Mr. Kim! I have an incredible opportunity for you. We've been emailing you, but haven't gotten a response, so I decided to contact you directly.

"Email? Are... are you from the past?"

"It's still our policy too..."

What the hell kind of spammer still used email? They couldn't afford to be that backward. Oh. Government. Charming.

"Yes, I was born in Ottawa, no, I am not a customer of the Dominion of Toronto, nor was I ever. No, I'm not signing up for an account."

"Certainly not, sir. I'm calling on behalf of the City of Montreal, and we do recognize your Cascadian citizenship. As you may have heard, we have the honour of hosting the Group of 75 Summit next July and we're in need of talented utility fog programmers..."

Kim let the sales pitch drone on while he glared at stupid, stoned George. He had a fetish for uniforms, didn't matter what kind, so he kept submitting Kim's resume for any government job he could find.

Fuck it. Kim had no interest in helping those fascists, but he was sick of George's crap, and they'd pay well enough for him to move. So long as he sold them out.

"Fine. 100,000 RMB signing bonus and 20,000 per month until August."

They were desperate. No decent person wanted to work for them. Kim thumbed RST, dumped the rest of George's ketapellets in his tank, and walked out the door.

*

Orwell puffed out his whiskers and panned his head across the crowd of protesters, sniffing the microwave spectrum.

"I can has ID?"

"Officer ID: fe80::0213:02ff:fe01:4cba"
"Officer ID: fe80::0213:02ff:fe01:4cbb"

Two protesters were lighting a molotov cocktail by an empty police cruiser. They didn't stand out from the group beside them holding a People for the Ethical Treatment of Artificial Meat banner, but they hadn't bothered to have their police issued arphids surgically removed. Orwell perked up his ears and PM'd pictures of the undercover officers to the nearest free speech wardens.

Two movers peeled away from their crew and sprinted to the agent provocateurs. The wrist holding the petrol bomb snapped with a sickening crunch just before it lit, and both were pressed to the ground. The wardens efficiently folded them into secure cryocourier boxes addressed for Shanghai ICC, and dumped them into a GooFedEx collection box.

Orwell logged his bounty from the ICLU and went went back to sniffing. He picked up a familiar scent, encrypted to one of his older public keys. He followed it past the crowd of PETAM protesters, to a van with the official logo of the Caliphate du Quebec.

A man in riot gear opened the door, calling back into the dimly lit interior "Ok, large coffee, and rasher of soggy bacon taped to roast kitten, right? Make sure the door latches behind me."

Orwell slipped inside under the stormtrooper's feet, and crept through the van. Inside, his old arphid's broadcast was strong enough to query, and he had to suppress a contented purr. It was coming from the left thigh of someone in a full length hot pink burqa sitting in an antique aeron. Its occupant was quickly rooting around the Caliphate's Moving Day scheduler, setting huge blocks of leases to expire yesterday and posting the labour contracts to an illegal Albertan immigrant forum.

Orwell mewled in surprise and jumped into his favourite lap.

"I's finded U!"

The hooded figure sighed and rubbed behind Orwell's ears.

"Fuck off, George. Stop following me."