For some reason, the software had told them not to eat pigs.

"Who would do that in the first place?" Aya asked.

"Aren't pigs extinct?" Ren giggled. "They seriously need to update that code."

"Gods are so last year," Hiro said, and Aya smiled.

Resurrecting old religions had been kick right after the mind-rain, when everyone was still trying to figure out what all the new freedoms meant.

But these days so many other things had been rediscovered—family reunions and crime and manga and the cherry blossom festival. Except for a few Youngblood cults, most people were too busy for divine superheroes.

"What's the Nameless One up to?" Hiro said, switching the sound to another feed.

The Nameless One was what the two of them called Toshi Banana—the most brain-missing big face in the city. He was more of a slammer than a real tech-kicker, always attacking some new clique or fashion, stirring up hatred for anything unfamiliar. He thought the mind-rain had been a disaster, just because everyone's new hobbies and obsessions could be unsettling and downright weird.

Ren and Hiro never said his name, and changed his nickname every few weeks, before the city interface could figure out who they meant—even mocking people helped their face stats. In the reputation economy, the only real way to hurt anyone was to ignore them completely. And it was pretty hard to ignore someone who made your blood boil. The Nameless One was hated or loved by almost everybody in the city, which kept his face rank floating around a hundred.

This morning he was slamming the new trend of pet owners and their ghastly breeding experiments. The feed showed a dog, dyed pink and sprouting heart-shaped tufts of fur. Aya thought it was kind of cute.

"It's just a poodle, you truth-slanting bubblehead!" Ren shouted, tossing a cushion at the wallscreen.