Rod Townsend sometimes receives phone calls from The Future, a mysterious entity that knows where things will be in New York after the Starbucks and Whole Foods have blanketed the town and then disappeared.

"Hello?"

"Zhe shi shenme? Is that you, nanonips? I must have hit the wrong avatar on my iPortal! I meant to call the police!"

"The police? Are you okay?"

"I was just having lunch at CNNZone in Times Square when all hell broke loose."

"Is it a terrorist attack?"

"A what? ... No. Far worse. It's a Tranny Reclamation Riot."

"What does that even mean?"

"It all started when the Supreme Court overturned the extension of copyright laws. For years, Congress, at the behest of big business had prevented the passage to public domain just about anything. The original intent of the laws, to protect creators, had been perverted to just sustain creative ideas as corporate assets."

"And how would that affect trannies?"

"I'm getting there, micromuff. At first some of the smaller companies were affected. Characters like Spider-Man going into public domain meant that the assets of places like Marvel Comics were simply wiped out. Some of the larger concerns had some adjustments. TWA for example just shifted some assets around."

"TWA?"

"Time Warner/American Media? The company Harry Levin runs? Hold on. I have to find a place to hide. I'm going to try this closet. ... Damn!"

"What happened?"

"Anderson Cooper's in there with Rick Sanchez. There's no more room. I could make try to run across the street to Madame Tussaud-o-Vision."

"Where?"

"MTV. It's a portal-vision network that shows programming by wax dummy replicas of humans. Another result of the copyright rollback. Viacom, which had very little creative content, did fine. I wish the same could be said for Walt Disney. If they had survived I wouldn't be hiding from the tranny rebels out there."

"How would Walt Disney affect ..."

"Duibuqi. Walt Disney was pretty much propped up by their licensed holdings. Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Jessica Simpson. All those lunch boxes, t-shirts, toasters and everything else were where their money really was. Following the copyright changes, they quickly went bankrupt. And for Times Square, that meant that about 70 per cent of the theaters and other businesses were suddenly just gone. Completely undisnified. Some locals tried their hand at bringing theater back, but people were wholly uninterested in shows like "Rosie's Ruff-Riding Rodeo" or "Apprentice, the Musical".

"So without theater, what happened to Times Square?"

"There was an attempt to continue some of the tourist interests. ESPNZone became where I'm hiding out right now, CNNZone. LOLCaiteteria has very nice interpretations of Franco-American products. And the Jolie-Pitt Adopt-o-rama is quite popular with the gays. But the area is sort of going downhill. Thus the reclamation riots."

"What exactly are the trannies trying to do?"

"When they were first pushed out of the area back in last century, many of the trannies and the prostitutes and the hustlers all felt that they had been pushed away from their motherland. They had to leave the streets and hole up, resorting to advertising for their services. At some point, local magazines pushed them out as well. Now with so many of the buildings in Times Square just sitting empty, they're trying to reclaim the land from which they were forced out. Last year they used slingshot garters to take out the Macy's balloons from the top of the former Conde Nast building. And now, with the riots, I don't even know if there will be a parade this year."

"But trannies can't be that scary."

"Are you kidding me, robo-roids? They're thousands strong and ... Oh, no. Zhe shi shenme? ... It's a Press-On Pipebomb! I'll call you soon!"