They called it "Us" then instead of "America." As in the popular slogan, "Us is Users and Users is Us." The Governor said that in most of his speeches; which always ended, "Us needs you 'cause you're Younique."
Which was a load of crap, natch. There were Drones and there were Dreamers, and that was about as unique as it got.
The Drones lived in robot-built suburbs. In the daytime they rode the walk-tubes to their offices in the City. Their main job was to fill out probing questionnaires.
The Dreamers lived together in vast apartment blocks. It was easy to spot a Dreamer because of the socket in the base of the skull. If you were a Dreamer, you plugged a wire like a phone cord into that socket every night.
The Drones' questionnaires and the Dreamers' brainwaves all ended up inside Phizwhiz, a vast network of linked computers and robots. Phizwhiz always knew what the Users wanted. If what they wanted was impossible or unsafe, then it was Phizwhiz's job to change the Users' minds before they found out that they wanted something impossible or unsafe. Phizwhiz did this by continually adjusting the Hollows, which everyone watched.
Hollows were holograms . . . three-dimensional, full-color, life-size images which talked and flickered all day long. Everyone had a small padded room called the "Nest" with a Hollows receiver on the floor. In your Nest you could lean against the soft wall and be on a yacht in the Mediterranean, or alone with the Governor while he told you a secret; at the scene of a Public Safety raid, or in bed with a friendly and beautiful couple.
It was all so real that the Users—Drones and Dreamers alike—wanted little else from life. Which was just as well, since Phizwhiz had come to do all the real work there was to do. This was partly because of human laziness, and partly because Phizwhiz had been programmed to value human life above all else. People had tended to hurt themselves when they worked in factories, fields, and laboratories. So by the time 2165 rolled around, Phizwhiz had it set up so that the average User never touched the controls of anything more dangerous than a cold-water tap.
It was an easy life, and with Phizwhiz picking your brain and manipulating the Hollows, you'd usually been psyched into dropping a gripe before you knew you had it. Usually. But there were some problems which were hard to forget about. Like the fact that the machines never did anything quite right. And the fact that there were no real changes anymore. No new inventions, no new ideas, not even any really new shows on the Hollows. Phizwhiz was happy, but Us was bored.
It occurred to someone that Phizwhiz might be more creative if a few human brains could be built into the network. The Governor appealed to the Dreamers to come plug their brains into Phizwhiz's full logical space, and a few ambitious volunteers turned up.
This kind of hook-up was something quite different from the gingerly probing of the Dream Machine, that electronic poll-taker which nightly monitored the collective response of the Dreamers' brains to various weak currents and waveforms. In fact, the incredible thought amplification and information overload experienced upon full brain interlock with Phizwhiz turned all of the sane and healthy people who tried it into drooling undesirables instants after they plugged in.
It began to look like the Users were stuck with their tepid, steady-state society. But then the Angels appeared.