Feed

by M.T. Anderson

You need the noise of your friends, in space.

I like the description of space. I think this line really punctuates that vast lonely quiet feeling of the airless vacuum.

Then there’s that silence when you’re driving home alone in the upcar and there’s nothing but the feed telling you, This is the music you heard. This is the music you missed. This is what is new. Listen.

Jesus. That’s exactly what it’s like now.

I was trying to talk to Link, but I couldn’t because I was getting bannered so hard, and I kept blinking and trying to walk forward with my carry-on.

I like the use of the word bannered. Reminds me of Altered Carbon

Her spine. Maybe it was her spine. Maybe it wasn’t her face. Her spine was, I didn’t know the word. Her spine was like . . . ? The feed suggested “supple.”

Doh. The feed reads minds too.

their hit single “Bad Me, Bad You”: “I like you so bad And you like me so bad. We are so bad It would be bad If we did not get together, baby, Bad baby, Bad, bad baby. Meg bad.”

I wonder what Steve thinks of this. Ha.

After we were walking for a few minutes, it was, on the scale, maybe closer to hate, because Marty and Link and I were all walking around Violet and asking her all these questions, and she was asking us stuff, and we were telling her, and I don’t think the other girls really were too skip about walking behind us.

The narrative is interesting because it’s more like an oral tale than a written one.

I wanted to buy some things but I didn’t know what they were.

Haha. Classic.

and there were all these frat guys that were wearing these, unit, they were fuckin’ brag, they were wearing these tachyon shorts so you couldn’t barely look at them, which were $789.99 according to the feed, and they were on sale for like $699 at the Zone, and could be shipped to the hotel for an additional $78.95, and that was just one great thing that people were wearing. When I looked around, I wanted so much, that all of the prices were coming into my brain, and it was bam bam bam, like fugue-joy, and Loga and Quendy and Calista were already out on the dance floor, and my feed was like going fried, going things about the dance and pictures they were feedflinging across the dance floor of people on fire doing the moves.

I hope Bezos’s grandkids are reading this.

I missed the feed. I don’t know when they first had feeds. Like maybe, fifty or a hundred years ago. Before that, they had to use their hands and their eyes. Computers were all outside the body. They carried them around outside of them, in their hands, like if you carried your lungs in a briefcase and opened it to breathe.

I like this comparison

I liked being just a few beds away from her. We could wave. We all talked about old music, like from when we were little, and all the stupid bands they had back then, and the stupid fashions we liked in middle school, like the year when the big fashion from L.A. and shit was that everyone wanted to dress like they were in an elderly convalescent home, there was this weird nostalgic chic for that, so we all remembered having stretch pants and velour tops, and Calista had even bought one of those stupid accessory walkers at Weatherbee & Crotch. There were those stupid ads for having your pants

I like this scene. It’s harkens back to old fashioned times of interactions without any kind of electronic device. It’s a bit poignant and melancholic.

TM

I miss that time. The cities back then, just after the forests died, were full of wonders, and you’d stumble on them — these princes of the air on common rooftops — the rivers that burst through city streets so they ran like canals — the rabbits in parking garages — the deer foaling, nestled in Dumpsters like a Nativity.

Nice.

She smiled and put her finger inside the collar of my shirt. “Listen,” she said. “What I’m doing, what I’ve been doing over the feed for the last two days, is trying to create a customer profile that’s so screwed, no one can market to it. I’m not going to let them catalog me. I’m going to become invisible.”

Interesting concepts.

He told us, “You can see shit real good with this one? I have one of these on my upcar. It’s sometimes like — whoa, really — whoa. There was this one time?

I’ve noticed he uses a lot of question marks where they shouldn’t be.

There’s no difference between a song and an advertising jingle anymore. Songs are their own jingles.

Wonder what Steve thinks of this.

Once they started coming, they started to call others to them, and I could feel them doing that call, and they were all around me. They came to us. It was like they were lots of friendly butterflies, and we were smeared with something, and they kept coming and coming, and their wings were winking beautifully, and more and more came. And they were landing on our fingers, and on our lips, and on our eyes, opening and closing? And we were going — Whoa! Whoa! Whoa!

The butterfly imagery is interesting. MT is doing a good job describing things that are going on in their heads. It must be a challenge.

Okay, but sometimes, though, I did get worried that she was too smart for me. I don’t do too good in School™. We were back in School™, so I was reminded pretty often that I was stupid. School™ is not so bad now, not like back when my grandparents were kids, when the schools were run by the government, which sounds completely like, Nazi, to have the government running the schools? Back then, it was big boring, and all the kids were meg null, because they didn’t learn anything useful, it was all like, da da da da, this happened in fourteen ninety-two, da da da da, when you mix like, chalk and water, it makes nitroglycerin, and that kind of shit? And nothing was useful? Now that School™ is run by the corporations, it’s pretty brag, because it teaches us how the world can be used, like mainly how to use our feeds. Also, it’s good because that way we know that the big corps are made up of real human beings, and not just jerks out for money, because taking care of children, they care about America’s future. It’s an investment in tomorrow. When no one was going to pay for the public schools anymore and they were all like filled with guns and drugs and English teachers who were really pimps and stuff, some of the big media congloms got together and gave all this money and bought the schools so that all of them could have computers and pizza for lunch and stuff, which they gave for free, and now we do stuff in classes about how to work technology and how to find bargains and what’s...

Thanks Betsy.

He nodded, then squinted while he like clawed something off the roof of his mouth with his tongue. He told us, “Yeah. Jefferson Park? Yeah. That was knocked down to make an air factory.” “You’re kidding!” said Violet. “Yeah, that’s what happened,” said Dad, shrugging. “You got to have air.”

Oh the bitter irony.

It smelled like the country. It was a filet mignon farm, all of it, and the tissue spread for miles around the paths where we were walking. It was like these huge hedges of red all around us, with these beautiful marble patterns running through them. They had these tubes, they were bringing the tissue blood, and we could see the blood running around, up and down. It was really interesting. I like to see how things are made, and to understand where they come from.

Was lab produced meat a thing in 2002?

We were sitting side by side, with our legs swinging on the wall of the tower, and the Clouds™ were all turning pink in front of us. We could see all these miles of filet mignon from where we were sitting, and some places where the genetic coding had gone wrong and there, in the middle of the beef, the tissue had formed a horn or an eye or a heart blinking up at the sunset, which was this brag red, and which hit on all those miles of muscle and made it flex and quiver, with all these shudders running across the top of it, and birds were flying over, crying kind of sad, maybe seagulls looking for garbage, and the whole thing, with the beef, and the birds, and the sky, it all glowed like there was a light inside it, which it was time to show us now.

This is pretty fascinating.