Feed

by M.T. Anderson

“I’m so null,”

we were all pretty null, because for the last like hour we’d been playing with three uninsulated wires that were coming out of the wall. We were trying to ride shocks off them.

They were getting high off of zapping themselves! Lol

Whoa, unit! The moon! The goddamn moon!

I feel real sorry for people who have to travel by themselves.

Is this because the feed isn’t working while traveling in space? It’s too quiet?

just like in a commercial for jeans, or something with nougat.

Brand recognition

At parties, I was starting to get real lonely, even when there were other people around me, and it’s worse when you leave.

It would be good to have someone in the upcar with you, flying home with the lights underneath you,

So the feed is no cure for loneliness. It’s an empty space filled with nothing to break that sense of being alone. Yeah. I get that from our own social media.

Marty would be all, “Unit! Just wait one —” and Link would be, “Go for it. Try! Try it!” and Marty would be like, “Unit! You are so —

The use of slang in this is interesting. I get Null and Unit, but youch I’m still insure what that is supposed to be. Tired maybe?

I had been drinking pretty hard the night before and had been in mal and I was feeling kind of like shit.

When we got off the ship, our feeds were going fugue with all the banners. The hotels were jumping on each other, and there was bumff from like the casinos and mud slides and the gift shops and places where you could rent extra arms. 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.

Even with his impact helmet on, Link stood out. He’s much taller than anyone else, because he’s part of a secret patriotic experiment.

were riding big proteins across the craters.

Quendy and Loga went off to the bathroom because hairstyles had changed.

“Oh, what about my lesion? Let’s talk more about me and my open sores.”

Image of a girl weeping on a courtroom floor. “I am not Girl Number Two! Please, Judge Spandex! I’m also Number One! I’m not a product, but a person!”

After we walked around for a while, everything seemed kind of sad and boring so we couldn’t tell anymore what we wanted.

The mall in a nutshell.

Loga rolled her eyes and was like, “Omigod.”

It was meg big big loud.

He was maybe a hundred or so, dancing with the ripplechicks, a man in a dirty old tweed jacket, and he had this long white hair that looked kind of yellow, and his eyes were wide, like he was in mal, but I’m not sure he was in mal. He kept on sticking his thumbs up in the air.

“We enter a time of calamity! We enter a time of calamity!” The old man reached out and, with a metal handle, touched me on the neck. Suddenly, I could feel myself broadcasting. I was broadcasting across the scatterfeed, going, helplessly, We enter a time of calamity! We enter a time of calamity! I couldn’t stop.

“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.”

One of them had a picture of a boat on it. The boat was on a pond or maybe lake. I couldn’t find anything interesting about that picture at all. There was nothing that was about to happen or had just happened. I couldn’t figure out even the littlest reason to paint a picture like that.

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. It’s more now, it’s not so much about

Everything we think and feel is taken in by the corporations, mainly by data ones like Feedlink and OnFeed and American Feedware, and they make a special profile, one that’s keyed just to you, and then they give it to their branch companies, or other companies buy them, and they can get to know what it is we need, so all you have to do is want something and there’s a chance it will be yours.

Of course, everyone is like, da da da, evil corporations, oh they’re so bad, we all say that, and we all know they control everything. I mean, it’s not great, because who knows what evil shit they’re up to. Everyone feels bad about that. But they’re the only way to get all this stuff, and it’s no good getting pissy about it, because they’re still going to control everything whether you like it or not.

And it’s really great to know everything about everything whenever we want,

I couldn’t do a fuckin’ thing except look at that stupid boat painting, which was even worse, because now I saw that there was no one on the boat, which was even more stupid, and was kind of how I felt, that the sails were up, and the rudder was, well, whatever rudders are, but there was no one on board to look at the horizon.

I could see the light from my heartbeat on her tears.

“This is fun.” “It weirdly is,” I said. “Maybe these are our salad days.” “Huh?” “You know. Happy.” “What’s happy about a salad?” She shrugged. “Ranch,” she said.

“You’re the only one of them that uses

metaphor.”

When I asked her what her dad did, she said, “He’s a college professor. He teaches the dead languages.”

“Okay. So what are the dead languages?” “They’re languages that were once important but that nobody uses anymore. They haven’t been used for a long time, except by historians.”

“It means, ‘I came, I saw, I conquered.’”

“I’m pretentious,” she said. “Really pretentious.”

I asked Violet, “Your father, he’s a college professor, but he was too busy to come see you after you like completely collapsed from a hacker attack? Too busy?” She looked me in the eye. “No,” she said, “but that’s what I told you.”

The salad days couldn’t last forever.

Raising Arizona, the salad days.

Smell Factor

This is actually the kid's name? Hahaha!

That was when everyone was having those choking parties. I mean, it was completely midlife crisis.

Like a David Carradine party? Choking? Wtf?

School™?”

Looks like Betsy Devos gets her way with corporate run schools in this future. Seriously freaking trademarked?!

Clouds™.

Clouds too?!

By this I mean that we shouldn’t think that there are any truth to the rumors that the lesions are the result of any activity of American industry.

“What is this, shitheads?” I said. “Cut the ABC Afterschool Special.”

Hahaha!!

“Keep thinking. You can hear our brains rattling inside us, like the littler Russian dolls.”

I like this sentiment about the litteler Russian dolls and how what is really us rattles around inside us.

In my dream, I thought they were the hacker group, the Coalition of Pity. But when I woke up, I didn’t remember that for weeks. What I remembered was just the games, which, once I was awake, I couldn’t find, and the elf gloves, and the bow, and the lizard that was all mine.

Violet was standing near the fountain and she had a real low shirt on, to show off her lesion, because the stars of the Oh? Wow! Thing! had started to get lesions, so now people were thinking better about lesions, and lesions even looked kind of cool.

Everything we’ve grown up with — the stories on the feed, the games, all of that — it’s all streamlining our personalities so we’re easier to sell to. I mean, they do these demographic studies that divide everyone up into a few personality types, and then you get ads based on what you’re supposedly like.

And gradually, everyone gets used to everything being basic, so we get less and less varied as people, more simple.

“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’