'Is Matt around?' Jeff asked once the preliminaries were taken care of.
Andrew sighed. 'He's always around,' he said. 'Can't get the little bastard to leave this place. Imagine, eighteen years old and still living at home. When are you gonna talk him into marrying that Sharon bitch so we can have this house to ourselves?'
'I've been trying, Mr. M,' Jeff told him. 'You know how Matt is though.'
'Oh yeah,' he said, stepping aside and letting him in. 'He brews dust with his own recipe, that's for sure. He's in his bedroom, doing something on the terminal like always.'
'Thanks, Mr. M,' he said, heading that way.
Carla Mendez was in the kitchen. She was a thin woman with prematurely graying hair. That and the hopeless expression that was always on her face conspired to make her look nearly fifty years old instead of the thirty-six that she was. She was scrubbing dishes with an old washrag and setting them in the rinse tray. Though the apartment possessed an automatic dishwasher it was more than sixty years old and had not worked in generations. It was now utilized for storage space, which was always short in welfare apartments. 'Hi, Jeff,' she greeted as he passed. 'Is your wife knocked up yet?'
'Not yet,' he told her politely. 'We have a fuck scheduled for tonight. Maybe I'll be able to plant something.'
'Best of luck to you,' she said, picking up another dish from the soapy water. 'It's so nice to have the bigger apartment.'
'I can't wait for it,' he said sincerely.
He knocked on the door of Matt's room and a moment later it slid open, allowing him entry. Like all secondary bedrooms in public housing, it was very small, only four meters by three. A simple mattress on the floor was his bed and a simple plastic desk beside it held his main Internet terminal. A few bits of laundry and a few empty Fruity bottles littered the floor. Matt himself was sitting at the desk watching a news program on one of the big three channels.
'What's the word, brother?' Matt greeted, leaning back in his chair and extending his hand.
'Fuckin boredom, that's the word,' Jeff said. They exchanged the Capitalist shake. 'What the hell you watching now?'
'A smear program on Whiting,' he said. 'It didn't take them long to get one together. It's pretty damn funny actually. They're saying that she's a secret communist with ties to EastHem fascist groups. They even have people that claim to be acquaintances of hers that go to the meetings with her.'
'They do work fast, don't they?' Jeff said, rolling his eyes a little. He grabbed a seat on Matt's mattress. He pulled out his bag of marijuana and his pipe. 'Strange how none of this ever came up
'Sure, fire up,' Matt said. While Jeff started stuffing the pipe he changed back to the MarsGroup primary channel, which was showing a special feature on the inauguration speech the night before. Mindy Ming, one of the senior anchors, was analyzing it line-by-line, paying particular attention to the economic plans.
'Can't you put some fuckin porn on?' Jeff asked. 'I'm sick of hearing about that Whiting bitch.'
'This is a historical moment, bro,' Matt told him. 'Mark my words. You'll be glad I made you watch all this shit later on.'
'Let's pretend I'm glad now and put on some porn,' he replied, striking a light with his laser igniter. He applied it to the pipe and took a tremendous hit.
'You can get porn anytime,' Jeff told him, taking the offered pipe and lighter. 'How often do you get to see the corporations smeared on Internet? I'm telling you, bro, it's a beautiful thing that Whiting said last night, fuckin beautiful. That speech is going to immortalized no matter how this shit all turns out, it's going to be right up there with the Gettysburg Address and Martin Luther King's I have a dream spiel.'
Jeff blew out his hit, releasing a cloud of acrid smelling smoke into the unventilated room. He shook his head a little. 'You are undoubtedly the strangest fucking person I've ever hung out with,' he said. 'Why do I come over here so much?'
'Because deep down, you know I'm right,' Matt told him with a grin. He struck a light and inhaled his first hit of the day. He passed the pipe back over. 'So,' he squeaked, holding the smoke in his lungs, 'did you compose that email to Vic Cargill?'
'No, I didn't compose any goddamn email to Vic Cargill,' he said. 'I told you I wasn't going to. I don't correspond with fucking politicians. They don't represent me or my family and they don't do shit for me.'
'Change ain't gonna happen unless we get involved,' Matt said. 'The only way the legislature is gonna be stopped from impeaching her is if enough emails roll in to convince those sell-out bastards that we're serious about recalling them if they do. That asshole Cargill represents the Helvetia district...'
'He ain't ever lived in the hood,' Jeff said. 'Who made him represent us? I didn't vote for him.'
'Neither did I,' Matt said. 'He lives on the edge of downtown, just south of the Garden, in a little sliver of the city that was added to the Helvetia voting district just so someone like him could squeak in instead of a true ghetto dweller. I looked up his record on the Internet last night. Do you know that he was elected by less than a thousand votes? And that's not the margin, that's the total. Only those pricks in the two housing buildings that are part of the Helvetia district were the ones to vote in the election is what I'm thinking. But that don't matter. Vermin or not, we're entitled to organize and sign recall petitions and we're entitled to vote in the recall election whether we voted for him in the first place or not. We need to let him know that we'll hold him accountable for his actions.'
'It's a waste of fucking time,' Jeff insisted.
'So what? Time is all we got here. What else you gonna do? Go to work? Go fuck your wife? Hell, just do it. You don't have to be polite or nothing. All you have do is tell him that you won't stand for him trying to impeach Whiting. If my parents could do it than you can do it. And it feels good to tell one of those pricks off. It feels real good.'
'Really?' he asked, actually starting to warm to the idea a little. He could see how it would be gratifying to talk to a politician in his own words, even if it was a slim to none chance that the politician would ever watch it.
'Really,' Matt assured him. 'Just give it a shot. You can use my terminal.'
Jeff took another large hit, holding it in while he mulled the suggestion over. Finally he blew it out. 'What the hell?' he said with a shrug. 'Set me up and I'll do it.'
'That's the way to show some common sense,' Mark said with a grin. He turned to the Internet terminal. 'Computer, bring up email program and authorize user Jeff Creek to patch in.'
The screen cleared from the MarsGroup program and brought up the email program in its place. 'User Jeff Creek's voice print is on file. Proceed when ready.'
Matt got up from his chair and waved his best friend to it. 'It's all you, bro,' he said.
Jeff handed the pipe and the lighter over and then took his place in Matt's chair, sitting down before the screen. 'What do I say?' he asked.
'Just make it short and sweet,' he told him. 'Identify yourself to him and then explain that you will sign a petition to recall him and then vote for the same if he votes to open an impeachment investigation into Laura Whiting. Don't threaten him with violence or anything like that though. You'd be breaking the law if you did that.'
'I wouldn't want to break the law now, would I?'
'Nope, not here,' Matt said. 'Just tell him the facts and send it off. His address is already in my database so don't worry about looking it up.'
'All right,' he said. 'But give me the pipe back. It's part of my image.'
Matt chuckled and handed it over.
Jeff looked at the screen. 'Computer, compose mail from me to Vic Cargill.'
'User Jeff Creek confirmed,' the computer told him. 'The address of Martian Planetary Legislature representative Victor Cargill of the Helvetia Heights district is on file. Record when ready.'
Jeff thought for a moment and then said: 'Record.' The red light on the screen lit up and the small camera on the screen locked onto his face. Jeff smiled and took a large hit of his pipe, blowing the smoke directly onto the camera. 'Check it, fuckface,' he said, putting a tough expression on his face. 'The name's Jeff Creek and I'm one of your constituents here in this shithole known as Helvetia Heights. I ain't never voted for nothing or no one before but you can bet your ass that if you start fucking around and trying to impeach Laura Whiting, I'll be the first
