"A spokesdemon for the Transgenic Oversight Committee has issued a warning that the notorious rogue splice known as Krazy Kat is suspected to have infiltrated the GLB. All franches are asked to report any suspicious sightings to their commensal buzzworms or to patrolling TAC-TOCs.

''An Anti-Em demonstration in front of the Board of Trade erupted in violence late in the afternoon. The familiar chant of 'No mods, no mixes!' soon changed to shouts of 'Burn the miscegenators!' Authorities declared an emergency risk bubble of ninety naders intensity covering three square blocks for a duration of thirty minutes plus-minus and dispersed clouds of Riotnip and Incontibarf.

"On financial fronts, the Hang Seng Index registered a day of heavy trading, reflecting the turmoil on the Prague exchange. Dalal Street responded by… "

"Softer," I ordered the bird, and the parrot voice of the Central Nerve Net dipped in audibility to a low reassuring murmur.

A wordbird is a primitive, limited way to interface with CNN, I know, but it was all I was permitted by my altered bioparms. The same incident that had left my neurocircuits a bit scrambled and prone to rhyme-times made it impossible for me to experience virtuality or even plain three-dee anymore.

You see, I was one of the Hiphop Heads.

Not many people remembered the incident. I mean, so much happened nowadays, and things changed so fast. What with the Temp-Trop War and the Grey Goo Booboo intervening-Well, it's not surprising lots of lesser scandals and yocto-minute wonders were forgotten. After all, the whole affair happened over ten years ago. Though it did affect three million plus-minus people. But scattered across the whole North American Union, the victims were only about 4 percent of the population. Anyway, what happened was this.

Some three million percipients were tuned into Virtual Music Transmission's half-hour show known as "Rap Klassix" when VMT experienced an act of sabotage. (As I recall, the individual or group responsible was never positively identified; suspects ranged from the Sons of Dixie to the Limbo Cannons.) In an instant, before any of the perks knew what was happening or could disengage, VMT's baud rate was tripled, safety overrides were disabled, and new templates were laid over the standard transmission.

The add– on routines consisted of an illegal copy of Microprose's Hardcore Reform, which was normally licensed only to government and gembaitch penal institutions.

The intruder master software did its job. Locking out the volition centers of the perks, taking as its text the innocent raps, Hardcore Reform reamed new neural pathways in three million brains, establishing the fifty-year-old raps as dominant behavior paradigms.

By the time the authorities shut VMT down, three million people had had their brains rewired.

At age thirteen, innocent cheb still living with his mom and sis in the gecekondu projex, I was one of them.

Well, to make a hairy narry less scary, the trope dosers and mccoys eventually fixed most of the neural damage the terrorists had wrought. Except for one minor tic.

All us perks who got our brains skew-fried Would carry inside till the day we true-died A distributed web of spurting nerve gaps That made us want to rhyme out our urb raps.

The best that the big labs like Novo Nordisk and Cantab and NeosePharm could do was batch up a trope that alleviated the symptoms. A daily dose of poemasomes kept the Tourette-like syndrome mostly in check. Except during times of stress, or often just upon waking, or if I ingested any other really radical tropes, I was pretty much normal in my speech and thought patterns.

Naturally there were lawsuits and, eventually, damages awarded. Each victim got ten thousand NU-dollars.

I gave half to my mom. I'm sorry to say that she nulled the whole balance on a single trip to the tribal casinos at Second Mesa, without even enough left for the side excursion to the Grand Canyon by LED-zep that she had always wanted to take. I gave a thousand to my sister, Charmaine, and we all know how she spent hers. As for me, I was determined not to waste my share.

Although before the incident I hadn't really devoted much thought to getting out of the projex, afterwards I was really determined to make a life for myself, having seen the trouble that could come from lying around all day on the prole-dole just inhabiting virtuality. So I daleyed a minor city official and got my name illegally posted to the list of lottery-chosen prospects for CivServ jobs. With the remainder of the eft, I latched the black meds that allowed me to pass the aptitude test with a low grade. (I would have scored higher, but under the stress my essay came out rhymed, and they took off points.) Combined with my official disability status, the score got me my first-ever and still current job: humble Eater Feeder under the boss of our corps, Cengiz Ozturk.

Who was going to be mighty pissed this morning if I was late again.

So I poured Pioneer plantmilk over a bowl of Stressgen Supercereal and slurped it down. I slipped into my blue and gold CivServ Windskin uniform and was almost out the door of my fission-cee when a personal message with a high priority code got past my filters and loudly interrupted the barely audible CNN feed.

" Corby," squawked the parrot, "this is your mother! I'm calling from home! Get over here right away, it's your sister!"

Before I could argue back that I'd be late for work if I did what she wanted and couldn't she handle things herself, Mom had cut the connection, leaving me with no choice except to jump my rump to her bawl-call.

I kicked a chair and started to swear, then I bolted down the stairs.

On the intrametro train I cudgled my brain. What could have gone amiss with Sis?

Before you could count from two to six, there I was at the gecekondu projex.

The projex had been old when I was a tad; now they looked ancienter than Adam's NAD. Unsmart buildings lined dingy streets; hustling nonfranches littered the plazas of grocrete. Each had a scam or a story to tell; a tale of woe or something to sell. Mutawins and hojats were on stroll-patrol, encountering vexy derision from babydolls with sexy sincisions. The scene was total jhuggi jopri, and all my troubled past flooded back on me. But I held my head high and walked on by. In blue and gold, now adult-old, I strode

past the various hawkers proud and tall, showing them I didn't belong here at all.

Hoping I could control my rhymes if only I thought about neutral times, I remembered the history of the projex.

Way back in the teens, during the Last Jihad, just after the Fall of Istanbul, the IMF began allotting refugees to various countries, cities, and bioregions. Chicago had gotten mostly Turks and a smattering of Crobanians, who had all been forcibly funnelled into the hastily constructed projex.

One of these flee-gees had been my dad.

Dad had fallen in love with a local girl named Chita Garvey-my mom, of course-who happened then to be a very xinggan Cubaitian some sixteen years old. Dad's relatives weren't too uptaking about the eventual multicult marriage, which was soon followed by the birth of a son, then a daughter.

One day when I was eight and Sis was just born, Dad and a hardline cousin named Zeki got into a serious argument about how Dad had betrayed his heritage. Zeki claimed Dad had been verraten und verkauft. Words escalated into blows, and that's when cruel cuz put the boot in.

Out of his pocket, Zeki whipped a military model neural shunt (Snowy surplus from Operation Rock the Casbah) and slapped it on Dad's neck. Quickly burrowing spineward, the boot grabbed control of Dad's motor impulses and literally forced Dad to choke himself to true-death.

Ever since I had kind of been the man of the house.

Which was why Mom was turning to me now, even though I no longer lived with her and Sis.