Of course, in that logic-missing first year a lot of people were confused. Some actually decided to reverse the mind-rainnot just old crumblies, but new pretties, too. Even Hiro had talked about turning back into a bubblehead.
Then two years ago came the news that the economy was in trouble. Back in the Prettytime, bubbleheads could ask for anything they wanted: Their toys and party clothes popped out of the hole in the wall, no questions asked. But creative, free-minded human beings were more ravenous than bubbleheads, it turned out. Too many resources were going to random hobbies, new buildings, and major projects like the mag-lev trains. And nobody was volunteering for the hard jobs anymore.
Some people wanted to go back to Rusty "money," complete with rents and taxes and starving if you couldn't pay for food. But the City Council didn't go that crazy; they voted for the reputation economy instead. From now on, merits and face ranks would decide who got the best mansions, the most carbon emissions, the biggest wall allowances. Merits were for doctors, teachers, wardens, all they way down to littlies doing schoolwork and their choreseveryone who kept the city going, as determined by the Good Citizen Committee. Face ranks were for the rest of culture, from artists to sports stars to scientists. You could use all the resources you wanted, as long as you captured the city's collective imagination.
And to keep the face ranks fair, every citizen over the age of littlie was given their own feeda million scattered threads of story to help make sense of the mind-rain.
The word "kicker" hadn't even been invented yet, but somehow Hiro had understood it all instinctively: how to make a clique huge overnight, how to convince everyone to requisition some new gadget, and most of all how to make himself legendary in the process.
As Aya landed outside the mansion's elevator door, she sighed quietly. Hiro had been so smart since they'd fixed his brain If only all that fame hadn't turned him into such a self-centered snob.