Suddenly a gaggle of political consultants come squawking through the place. They resemble penguins but these tuxedoed waddlers begin by asking inane questions and end by whining meaningless platitudes. "The Mayor's a Monarchist!" the manchu shrieks inscrutably, handing in her resignation two months too late.

The air is full of music. There's an ancient AM radio playing in the Boiler Room. "Don't piss on my gate!" the singer chimes. The manchu enters the Boiler Room, in search of the source of music, oblivious to the whirling dervishes gathering around her. She seems helplessly drawn inexorably closer to the horrible nasty complicated dreaded entity, Server. The political consultants flock around her, whirling warnings. The manchu pushes a button . You wince.
"I don't think ..."

And suddenly they are! Out of nowhere, appropos of nothing, quite like a black hole in fact, you find yourself in the middle of an election. There is a screech of metal on metal and suddenly the card readers start to seize! The lights brown out! Server is down!! The mists begin to creep up in the halflight like up the equally dilapidated walls of a cheap horror movie set and the only person in the room is you. YOU are responsible, YOU have to count the vote, YOU have to give everyone a vote and make sure nobody votes twice, and there is nobody else in the entire department, and as you run out the door and down the hall and through the metal detector and out onto the street,
you discover that you are COMPLETELY alone.
There's nobody else in the entire city!

You rush back, only to see the countless red metal boxes are now sitting in the middle of the floor like children spilling out of their neat classrom rows. You shake your head but this time it stays on, you're not quite that far gone, so you begin the task of counting the votes of the Silent Majority, every last nonexistant soul. You open up box after box after box, but you always find the same thing. Dollar bills, sacred manna of the Novus Ordo Sucklowermum, colored wildly, perfumed, perforated, stabbed, chewed up, wadded, spitwadded, covered in shit, shredded, salad, stapled and mutilated...

Perfect! you cry, giving up and making your way to the front doors and the inevitable metal detector. You step through, setting it off, but there's nobody there to arrest you. In fact you're beginning to realize that there's nobody anywhere at all. The existence of other people is a highly overrated and completely unproven theory. You walk on down the hall and out into the empty, dreary, rainy streets. You wish you could hail a taxi, but you know that would be pointless, so you hail Eris instead and climb to the top of the TransAmerica Pyramid, determined to jump off.

Behold, the Bear is written against the dead of night and he employeth the unredeemably useless, praised be the name of the panic stricken, blessed be the changing of the guard, and remember to watch your step
WHEN THE CIRCUS COMES TO TOWN.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Those were the days when votes were counted twice, once by card readers (which had their problems, but were verifiable and nearly impossible to hack) and once by hand. The vote was a pain in the ass back then, but it was honest as long as the rules were followed.

Time goes on and things change, or so I'm told. Some things don't seem to change though. Greed is that perfect example, basic human drama at its most divine, as old as Greek tragedy, as inbred as the 23rd chromosome.