Bleeding Edge

by Thomas Pynchon

Dante's circle, for those who advise others to commit fraud...

Axel’s whistle-blowers tend to be disgruntled employees, he and Maxine in fact met at a Disgruntled Employee Workshop led by Professor Lavoof, generally acknowledged godfather of Disgruntlement Theory and developer of the influential Disgruntled Employee Simulation Program for Audit Information and Review, aka DESPAIR.

Maxine has been in a lengthy though inconclusive discussion with one of the strayed Korean bus passengers about the number 18 in the name of this noraebang. “Bad number,” leers the Korean. “Sip pal. Means ‘sell pussy.’” “Yes, but if you’re Jewish,” Maxine unperturbed, “it’s good luck. Bar mitzvah money, for instance, you should always give it in multiples of 18.” “Sell pussy? for bar mitzvah?” “No, no, in gematria, kind of . . . Jewish code? 18 computes to chai or life.” “Same thing with pussy!”

It’s exactly the sort of patch that makes a developer’s heart sing—typically, “This Land Is My Land, This Land Also Is My Land.”

Whatever migratory visitors are still down there trusting in its inviolability will some morning all too soon be rudely surprised by the whispering descent of corporate Web crawlers itching to index and corrupt another patch of sanctuary for their own far-from-selfless ends.

at least at the edge of possibilities, like whatever the Europeans who first sailed up the Passaic River must have felt, before the long parable of corporate sins and corruption that overtook it, before the dioxins and the highway debris and unmourned acts of waste.

yes, they are now giving themselves lines, with deliveries of the sort that drive high-school drama teachers to drug abuse.

Maxine now has a miraculous Israeli voice analyzer, whose algorithm is supposed to be able to tell the difference between “offensive” and “defensive” lying, plus Only Kidding Around.

Those who can’t help making with the free booze advice, for example, turn out to be Razorfish alumni, still the smartest people in the room.

sentiments like DIE MICROSOFT WEENIES and LARA CROFT HAS POLYGON ISSUES.

“We were going to go as World Trade Center,” Misha explains, “but decided OBL would be even more offensive.”

Your Internet, back then the Defense Department called it DARPAnet, the real original purpose was to assure survival of U.S. command and control after a nuclear exchange with the Soviets.” “What.” “Sure, the idea was to set up enough nodes so no matter what got knocked out, they could always reassemble some kind of network by connecting up what was left.”