I don't consider myself a privacy freak. I don't care how many Department of Health nanofluorobots I swallow every time I brush my teeth. I don't need extra-crispy 2x1011-bit encryption to keep my vidphone safe from eavesdropping. But I draw the line at breaking and entering, and when the avenue of entry is my personal commode, my private throne — well, that's where the Sewergate scandal hits a little too close to home.

But what really happened? Did Singing Frog president Bart Farabee really take amnesia pills? What went on in the Lincoln Bedroom between the President of the United States and Warm 'n' Cuddly Chief Financial Officer Pamela Kirkwarden? And most important of all, could cyborganic sewage-eating JellyBots really crawl out of my toilet at any moment?

Even in the high-stakes atmosphere of the Sewage Frontier, the bitter feud between rival waste-processing corporations Singing Frog and Warm 'n' Cuddly took the nation by surprise. Sewage processing used to be considered a service-level market, and a rather degrading one, but the Vermont-based Singing Frog Corp. changed all that. Singing Frog turned sewage processing into a growth industry by figuring out how to mine the effluvia of major cities for information. Who's eating what? Who's popping what pills? What key nutrients are missing from the city's diet? With its advanced sewage-analysis tools, Singing Frog could datamine the medical health of whole cities with its patented Mass Urinalysis technology, reaping a stupendous fortune in pharmaceuticals, not to mention service and consultancy fees. Its market cap soared. Huge sewage franchises sprang up across the major cities of the Sunbelt and the Midwest as fast as gourmet mushrooms.

A market that rich couldn't remain uncontested for long. In 2022, Delaware-based Warm 'n' Cuddly jumped into the market, and the race was on to leverage the incredible potential of urban effluent. The rival firms won praise from Congress and a host of ardent investors. Warm 'n' Cuddly and Singing Frog were shining examples of today's friendly, whimsical megacorporations, taking proper pride in their high Environment and Employee Morale ratings. The sky was the limit.

Then everything started to go wrong. Warm 'n' Cuddly's engineers may have lacked the originality of their competitors, but they were determined to take the Sewage Revolution to new extremes. Not content to monitor sewage through random samples, Warm 'n' Cuddly deployed its infamous JellyBots, a new generation of neural-network robots that took over sewer systems wholesale, patrolling them 24 hours a day, seeking out information-rich strata in the sludge and following the trails of certain trace contaminants back to their sources.

Had they pushed the envelope too far? Whatever their value as gatherers of data, the JellyBots gave Warm 'n' Cuddly a direct conduit into every government office, every private home and every corporate headquarters — including that of its archrival, Singing Frog. According to sources within the Federal Trade Commission, investigators are now trying to determine just how far and fast those JellyBots can penetrate. "I keep telling the Justice Department, the ftc and the American people: just follow the JellyBots," says Singing Frog attorney Kelly Howe. "Weeks of our disks have gone missing, our cell phones keep disappearing, car keys and palmtops are vanishing. It all adds up, and it all smells to high heaven!"

If this were just a straightforward case of corporate espionage, the Warm 'n' Cuddly story would have stayed in the BioTech section of the paper. But when your company's chief financial officer is sleeping with the President, your business isn't just your business anymore. Last spring Pamela Kirkwarden, Cuddly's gifted and ambitious cfo, hooked up with President Raul Stafford at a glamorous Washington fundraiser for the PokŽmon Cultural Center. It was mere months after he lost his wife, and the gossip columnists were instantly abuzz. The move netted Warm 'n' Cuddly quadrillions in free publicity, but when the Feds started looking into the company's business practices, what had once seemed a PR coup — getting a corporate officer to date the widowed President — began to turn sour.

This reporter recently met with the comely 35-year-old finance whiz at Warm 'n' Cuddly's Wilmington, Del., headquarters, and she had this to say in defense of the JellyBots. "Look at the bottom line. Our sweet little robots save our urban clients hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in water leaks and put a swift end to toxic pollution. In 95 cases out of a hundred, when a JellyBot involuntarily climbs out of a commode, it is following an illegal trail of toxic or genetic contamination — especially at Singing Frog."