Bleeding Edge

by Thomas Pynchon

Someday there’ll be a Napster for videos, it’ll be routine to post anything and share it with anybody.” “How could anybody make money doing that?” Maxine can’t quite figure. “There’s always a way to monetize anything.

Some sort of hip-hop mix is coming from hidden speakers, at the moment Nate Dogg and Warren G, doing the huge mid-nineties West Coast hit “Regulate.”

There is a shift in the ambience. The music segues to the theme from Deus Ex, the lights dim, the space is tidied by invisible cyberelves.

It is inevitable that somebody should be masquerading as Osama bin Laden, and here in fact are two of them, whom Maxine recognizes sooner than she wants to as Misha and Grisha. “We were going to go as World Trade Center,” Misha explains, “but decided OBL would be even more offensive.”

Psyduck has powers, but such unhappiness.” Synchronized, she and Fiona grab the sides of their heads like S. Z. Sakall and utter the characteristic “Psy, psy, psy.” It occurs to Maxine that Psyduck, though Japanese, could be Jewish.

As the line creeps forward, everybody makes sure to step on, not over, the fallen line jumper. “Nice to see the ol’ town gettin back to normal, ain’t it.” A familiar voice.

Well, as Winston Churchill always sez, there is nothing more exhilarating than getting shot at without result, though for Maxine there is also a flip side or payback, which arrives a few hours later, on the after-school stoop at Kugelblitz, in front of an assortment of Upper West Side moms whose life skills include an eye for the slightest uptick in the distress of others, not that Maxine quite collapses in tears, though her knees feel unreliable and she may be experiencing a certain lightness of head . . .

Elaine’s dining-room museum of long-operating lightbulbs from this apartment, each in its little foam display holder, labeled with the dates of screw-in and burnout. Sylvania bulbs of a certain era seem to’ve lasted the longest.

You had to been there, kid. Everybody thinks now the Eisenhower years were so quaint and cute and boring, but all that had a price, just underneath was the pure terror. Midnight forever. If you stopped even for a minute to think, there it was and you could fall into it so easily. Some fell. Some went nuts, some even took their own lives.”

“Yep, and your Internet was their invention, this magical convenience that creeps now like a smell through the smallest details of our lives, the shopping, the housework, the homework, the taxes, absorbing our energy, eating up our precious time. And there’s no innocence. Anywhere. Never was. It was conceived in sin, the worst possible. As it kept growing, it never stopped carrying in its heart a bitter-cold death wish for the planet, and don’t think anything has changed, kid.”

“Call it freedom, it’s based on control. Everybody connected together, impossible anybody should get lost, ever again. Take the next step, connect it to these cell phones, you’ve got a total Web of surveillance, inescapable. You remember the comics in the Daily News? Dick Tracy’s wrist radio? it’ll be everywhere, the rubes’ll all be begging to wear one, handcuffs of the future. Terrific. What they dream about at the Pentagon, worldwide martial law.”

She returns to the office, finds the day somehow blighted by this what-is-reality issue,

“Fucking Gabriel Ice,” Grisha indignant, “is oligarch scum, thief, murderer.” “So far, nichego,” Misha cheerfully, “but he’s also working for U.S. secret police, which makes us sworn enemies forever—we have oath, older than vory, older than gulag, never help cops.” “Penalty for violation,” Misha adds, “is death. Not just what they’ll do to you. Death in spirit, you understand.”

“Too institutional. Hacker-school approach. Grisha and I are close-up type of scumbags. You didn’t notice? More personal this way.” “So if it’s personal . . .” She doesn’t quite mention Lester Traipse, but a crinkled, almost-kind look, the sort of expression Stalin liked to beam at you in his publicity shots, has crept into Misha’s eyes. “Isn’t only Lester. Please. Ice has this coming, you know it, we all know it. But better you don’t have full history.”

Deimos-and-Phobos gamer machismo, legitimate avenging angels, what?

“Please just give me a minute, Sugar, I confess at first it was all strictly business, but—” “Don’t call me ‘Sugar’.” “Nutrasweet! I’m pleading here.”