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not going to let them catalog me. I’m going to become invisible.”
thumbs-up. Music is marketing. They have lists of key changes that get thirteen-year-old girls screaming. There’s no difference between a song and an advertising jingle anymore. Songs are their own jingles.
Pull My Strings- Dead Kennedy's!
She waited there, pinching and pulling, and then went in.
She is nervous
For example, he said she couldn’t have toy guns, because they were against his beliefs, so she had to pick up anything — pieces of wood or bent metal — and use them like a toy gun, and pretend it was just as good as a real one made of plastic.
Violet actually has an imagination. She had to use her mind growing up.
together we went to an old place, and it was a new place. We went there holding hands.
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?
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.
That is no BETTER!!!!! OMFG! I am pissed off at this kid!!!!!!
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.
Bullshit kid, you are fucking stupid!!!
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 the best way to get a job and how to decorate our bedroom.
Fucking consumer school!!!! WTF!!!!!
Like she was always reading things about how everything was dying and there was less air and everything was getting toxic. She told me about how things were getting really bad with some things in South America, but she couldn’t really tell exactly how bad, because the news had been asked to be a little more positive.
Fuck. Anderson called it! Sounding pretty close to home! Catch and kill anyone?
You should do something. She was like, Nothing’s ever going to happen in a two-party system. She was like, da da da, nothing’s ever going to change, both parties are in the pocket of big business, da da da, all that? So I was like, You got to believe in the people, it’s a democracy, we can change things. She was like, It’s not a democracy.
I love Violet! She is awesome!
only about seventy-three percent of Americans have feeds. Oh, I said. Yeah. And so I felt stupid. There’s that many who don’t? Then she told me, I didn’t used to have a feed. I was like, What do you mean? She was quiet like she didn’t want to chat.
Because of the feed, we’re raising a nation of idiots. Ignorant, self-centered idiots.
YES!!!!!!!! That is our now!!!!!!! We don't fucking have feeds like this, but we do nonetheless!!!!!!!!
“DelGlacey Murdoch,” said my mom, kind of smoothing things over. “That’s right. And we thought he was the most beautiful man we’d ever seen. So after the movie we went right to the conceptionarium and told them, ‘We want the most beautiful boy you’ve ever made. We want him with my nose and his dad’s eyes, and for the rest, we have this picture of DelGlacey Murdoch.’” I said, “I’ve never even like heard of DelGlacey Murdoch.”
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.” Violet pointed out, “Trees make air,”
He rattled them against the rim of the junktube as he threw them away.
“It’s just, my foot’s fallen asleep.” “Shake it,” I said. She looked down at the table. I mean my foot isn’t working. Don’t say anything. It’s happened a couple of times since the hack. Something just won’t work for an hour or two. My finger or something.
Mom and Smell Factor crinkled up the disposable table together and threw it away.
“He says the language is dying. He thinks words are being debased. So he tries to speak entirely in weird words and irony, so no one can simplify anything he says.”
Yup, married, and with the scars to prove it.
She said she had a theory that everything was better if you delayed it.
Oh? Wow! Thing! had got lesions, so lesions were hip now, real hip, and mine looked like a million dollars.
And we are the nation of dreams. We are seers. We are wizards. We speak in visions. Our letters are like flocks of doves, released from under our hats.
It is the age of oneiric culture. And we, America, we are the nation of dreams.
Then came all these pictures, and I was seeing all over the world, and there were explanations, but I was still asleep, and I couldn’t figure them out. I saw khakis that were really cheap, only $150, but I didn’t like the stitching, and then I saw them torn and there was blood on them. It was a riot on a street, and people were screaming in some other language, they were in khakis or jeans and T-shirts, and they were throwing stones and bottles, and the police were moving forward on horses, and a man in the crowd waved a gun, and then the firing started. They were in front of factories, and
...more
I saw people praying over missiles. I smelled the summer in this rocky place, and the summer smelled like electrical burns.
There’s someone else here. Can you feel it? Who? Someone else. They just tapped in, just a second ago.
Someone once said it was easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich guy to get into heaven.
“This top is the Watts Riot top.” Violet said, “I can never keep any of the riots straight. Which one was the Watts riot?” Calista and Loga stopped and looked at her. I could feel them flashing chat. “Like, a riot,” said Calista. “I don’t know, Violet. Like, when people start breaking windows and beating each other up, and they have to call in the cops. A riot. You know. Riot?” “Oh, I just thought you might . . . know. . . . Maybe . . . I wondered what incited it.”
“They don’t know. I could lose my ability to move; I could lose my ability to think. Anything. It’s tied in everywhere. They said the limbic system, the motor cortex . . . the hippocampus. They listed all this stuff. If the feed fails too severely, it could interfere with basic processes. My heart could just . . .”
because her whole skin was cut up with these artificial lesions. We were all just looking at her. They were all over her.
there’s this weird moment where you realize that you’re alone, and no one else has been walking for a while. You realize that the moment, the exact moment, when you became alone is already over. You’ve been that way for a while. So you’re walking around this empty house, and all the towels are folded up, and the soap is still wet on the soap dish. That’s the creepy thing.
We looked at them. Ships at sea. Old-time faces, painted without smiles or anything, dressed in black, holding pieces of paper or big books. Link’s dead relatives from long ago. They had old-time names, ones from the past: Abram. Jubilee. Noah. Ezekial. Hope. Jubilee was frowning. Ezekial was covered with pockmarks. Hope was this fat old woman with a little dog. Hope was looking off to the side, as if someone she missed was calling her name.
This is a good juxtaposition to the earlier scene in the hospital with her mural of the rowboat and pond. He thought the painting was bogus and boring, but this shows he's changed, he's grown.
I was disgusted, like, Huh? You can see her like muscles and tendons and ligaments and stuff through the lesions.
Violet was completely white. She was shaking. Her head, I mean, it was bobbing. She suddenly was yelling, “Can I tell you what I see? Can I tell you? We are hovering in the air while people are starving. This is obvious! Obvious! We’re playing games, and our skin is falling off. We’re losing it, and we’re making out. And you’re talking — you’re starting to talk in a fucking sestina! Okay? A sestina! Okay? Stop it! Fuck you! We’ve got to all stop it!” She was screaming.
“Look at us! You don’t have the feed! You are feed! You’re feed! You’re being eaten! You’re raised for food! Look at what you’ve made yourselves!” She pointed at
Quendy, and went, “She’s a monster! A monster! Covered with cuts! She’s a creature!”
Some cops found a bunch of rods in a warehouse and were trying to figure out what they were.
She was like, Don’t worry, Titus. We’re still together. No matter what, we’ll still be together. Oh, I went. Yeah. She reached out and rubbed my hand. I’ll remember you. I’ll hold on to you.
all my ideas are just the opening credits of sitcoms.
My idea of life, it’s what happens when they’re rolling the credits.
Really good, just to scream finally. I felt like I was singing a hit single. But in Hell.
I was so living eternally in a tool shed.
“You know,” said Quendy, “this isn’t re: the world serving you some meg three-course dump banquet. It isn’t re: the world serving me some dump banquet. She’s the one who this is happening to.
I think my first memory of my mom is her carrying me on her shoulders through the mall. She would constantly be whispering jokes to me, little jokes between the two of us. She especially made fun of plastic. She’d say, “They’re all wearing oil. All their clothes. They don’t have anything on but oil.” I would whisper back to her, “They’re wearing dinosaurs. Dead dinosaurs drippy all over them.” She would whisper, “Trilobites.” I would whisper, “Old plants.” She would whisper, “It’s the height of fashion.” And I would say, “Missus — missus lady — those are some nice old plankton.”
I won’t remember what’s really going to happen, that nerve-silence spreading over the whole of my body, like a purple cloud, that emptiness, that inactivity. I won’t remember watching you stand by my bed when I can’t move, watching you staring down; I won’t remember you apologizing for not coming sooner; I won’t remember you standing there bored by my bedside as I slur words, standing there waiting to feel like you’ve stayed long enough so that you’re a good person and you’re allowed to leave.
I didn’t send a message back to Violet. I didn’t even listen to her list all the way through the first time. I skimmed it. I fast-forwarded it. Then, like each hour or so, I’d go back, and I’d listen to one part of it.
Have you heard about this Central American stuff? Two villages on the Gulf of Mexico, fifteen hundred people — they’ve just been found dead, covered in this black stuff.
“the physical and biological integrity of the earth relies at this point upon the dismantling of American-based corporate entities, whatever the cost.”
We’re sorry, Violet Durn. Unfortunately, FeedTech and other investors reviewed your purchasing history, and we don’t feel that you would be a reliable investment at this time.
