One day some parrots stopped parroting. They spoke, but in sentences of their own invention, and not from mimicry. Somehow, some one or thing had hacked into their birdbrains and downloaded intelligence and eloquence. With help from some sympathetic humans, a delegation of intelligent parrots was brought to the nation’s capital, and through the courts a type of citizenship was fought for and won for them.

Meanwhile, other bird species demonstrated intelligence despite their speech being limited to warbling and other birdsong. Soon they too were talking via prosthetics, and they too became citizens. It was a bit tricky to prove native-born status for non-parrots, but one very smart bird teamed up with Google to develop retroactive surveillance, ironically using the sensoria and memory of birds to “videotape” the births of every sentient, or potentially sentient, being born on or after August 4, 1961, the birthdate of Barack H. Obama. (Yes, he was born in Honolulu. Some of the funding for the project was provided by right-wing groups convinced that he was not. Ouch!)

By the time of the extremely accurate 2030 Census, the birds not only had the vote but they had the numbers, partly thanks to “anchor chicks” from eggs deliberately laid in the USA. Soon humans were voted out and given the boot. Since the birds had a far different agenda than human beings, most industry ground to a halt. The entertainment industry thrived, though. The common ground of the flighted and the flightless, it turned out, was irrational sentimentality.

There is more to the story, but I bawk at continuing.