Feed

by M.T. Anderson

You need the noise of your friends, in space.

This is the music you heard. This is the music you missed. This is what is new. Listen.

I didn’t have a thing for Calista or Quendy or even completely a thing (anymore) for Loga. But I was watching Link slamming into them, and when he slammed, it said that he and the girls all knew what each other’s bodies would be

like, and that was part of the game.

Her spine was like . . . ? The feed suggested “supple.”

“We enter a time of calamity. Blood on the tarmac. Fingers in the juicer. Towers of air frozen in the lunar wastes. Models dead on the runways, with their legs facing backward. Children with smiles that can’t be undone. Chicken shall rot in the aisles. See the pillars fall.”

That’s one of the great things about the feed — that you can be supersmart without ever working. Everyone is supersmart now. You can look things up automatic, like science and history, like if you want to know which battles of the Civil War George Washington fought in and shit.

But the braggest thing about the feed, the thing that made it really big, is that it knows everything you want and hope for, sometimes before you even know what those things are.

saw fields and fields of black, it was this disgusting black shit, spread for miles. I saw walls of concrete fall from the sky and crush little wood houses.

saw a furry animal trying to stand up on its legs but the back ones were broken or not working, and it dragged itself with the front ones, whimpering, through someplace with gray dust, and needles coming out of the sand. Its

I felt like what she was telling me was real important, but the trees were so green, and I could smell the grass near my face. She told me that her father asked her what she wanted to know, and she asked him whether there was a soul, but I just put my face against the ground, and the dirt was cool, and the grass was tickling my nose, and I fell asleep, and heard the news talking through my eyes.

Titus is so distracted by the feed and everything that doesn’t matter that he is incapable of deep thinking. Symbolism for the way technology destroys our ability to critically think and our ability to focus on what’s happening in front of us. The fee LITERALLY blind Titus.