Bleeding Edge

by Thomas Pynchon

Yes maybe they’re past the age where they need an escort, maybe Maxine doesn’t want to let go just yet, it’s only a couple blocks, it’s on her way to work, she enjoys it, so?

Maternal, hanging on to youth - hers and kids - identifies as mom.

As Maxine watches, sunlight finds its way past rooflines and water tanks to the end of the block and into one particular tree, which all at once is filled with light.

foreshadow, and biblical vision; propgecy?

usual hurry.

Sunlight reflected from east-facing apartment windows has begun to show up in blurry patterns on the fronts of buildings across the street.

More foreshadowing.

Cops are in coffee shops dealing with bagel deficiencies.

brilliant description of a minor scene.

taking much longer than she has to, a West Coast thing, it seems to Maxine.

Silicon Alley in the nineties provided more than enough work for fraud investigators. The money in play, especially after about 1995, was staggering, and you couldn’t expect elements of the fraudster community not to go after some of it, especially HR executives, for whom the

invention of the computerized payroll was often confused with a license to steal. If this generation of con artists came up short now and then in IT skills, they made up for it in the area of social engineering, and many entreprenerds, being trusting souls, got taken. But sometimes distinctions between hustling and being hustled broke down. It didn’t escape Maxine’s notice that, given stock valuations on some start-ups of interest chiefly to the insane, there might not be much difference. How is a business plan that depends on faith in “network effects” kicking in someday different from the celestial pastry exercise known as a Ponzi scheme? Venture capitalists feared industrywide for

their rapacity were observed to surface from pitch sessions with open wallets and leaking eyeballs, having been subjected to nerd-produced videos with subliminal messages and sound tracks featuring oldie mixes that pushed more buttons th...

“I didn’t mean that. The day was a terrible tragedy. But it isn’t the whole story. Can’t you feel it, how everybody’s regressing? 11 September infantilized this country. It had a chance to grow up, instead it chose to default back to childhood. I’m in the street yesterday, behind me are a couple of high-school girls having one of these teenage conversations, ‘So I was like, “Oh, my God?” and he’s like, “I didn’t say I wasn’t see-een her?”’ and when I finally turn to look at them, here are these two women my own age. Older! your age, who should know better, really. Like trapped in a fuckin time warp or something.”

When she goes to Shawn with this, she finds her guru, in his own way, freaking out also. “You remember those twin statues of the Buddha that I told you about? Carved out of a mountain in Afghanistan, that got dynamited by the Taliban back in the spring? Notice anything familiar?” “Twin Buddhas, twin towers, interesting coincidence, so what.” “The Trade Center towers were religious too. They stood for what this country worships above everything else, the market, always the holy fuckin market.”

“A religious beef, you’re saying?” “It’s not a religion? These are people who believe the Invisible Hand of the Market runs everything. They fight holy wars against competing religions like Marxism. Against all evidence that the world is finite, this blind faith that resources will never run out, profits will go on increasing forever, just like the world’s population—more cheap labor, more addicted consumers.”

“Do you remember that piece of footage on the local news, just as the first tower comes down, woman runs in off the street into a store, just gets the door closed behind her, and here comes this terrible black billowing, ash, debris, sweeping through the streets, gale force past the window . . . that was the moment, Maxi. Not when ‘everything changed.’ When everything was revealed. No grand Zen illumination, but a rush of blackness and death. Showing us exactly what we’ve become, what we’ve been all the time.” “And what we’ve always been is

“Is living on borrowed time. Getting away cheap. Never caring about who’s paying for it, who’s starving somewhere else all jammed together so we can have cheap food, a house, a yard in the burbs . . . planetwide, more every day, the payback keeps gathering. And meantime the only help we get from the media is boo hoo the innocent dead. Boo fuckin hoo. You know what? All the dead are innocent. There’s no uninnocent dead.” After a while, “You’re not going to explain that, or . . .” “Course not, it’s a koan.”

“Right. Meantime, for DeepArcher to be untraceable, we happen to need a high-quality supply of random numbers. What we’ve done is create globally a set of virtual nodes on volunteer computers. Each node only exists long enough to receive and resend, and then it’s gone—we use the random numbers to set up a switching pattern among the nodes. Soon as we found out about this Princeton source, Lucas and I were into the site, bootlegging the product. All goes well till the night of September 10th, when suddenly these numbers coming out of Princeton began to depart from randomness, I mean really abruptly, drastically, no explanation. You can look it up, the graphs are posted on their Web site for anybody to see, it’s . . . I’d say scary if I knew what any of it meant. It kept on that way through the 11th and a few days after. Then just as mysteriously everything went back to near-perfect random again.”

“Look at it, every day more lusers than users, keyboards and screens turning into nothin but portals to Web sites for what the Management wants everybody addicted to,

shopping, gaming, jerking off, streaming endless garbage— “Gee Eric, li’l judgmental. How about some what the Buddha calls compassion here?” “Meantime hashslingrz and them are all screaming louder and louder about ‘Internet freedom,’ while they go on handing more and more of it over to the bad guys . . . They get us, all right, we’re all lonely, needy, disrespected, desperate to believe in any sorry imitation of belonging they want to sell us . . . We’re being played, Maxi, and the game is fixed, and it won’t end till the Internet—the real one, the dream, the promise—is destroyed.”