Feed

by M. T. Anderson

  Next time, maybe you should try Mars.

  Yeah, I’ve been to Mars, I said. It was dumb.

  Suddenly, she laughed. Are you serious?

  Yeah, I’m serious.

  Omigod, she said. Mars is a whole planet.

  And it’s dumb!

  She was like, Dumb?

  She was starting to piss me off.

  I said, Yes, dumb.

  The whole world?

  Dumb.

  The whole world.

  Dumb.

  Oh, this is golden.

  The Red Planet was a piece of shit.

  I don’t believe you could — but I couldn’t receive any more of her chat because our feeds were spiking, and the music was getting louder, with the band singing “I’ll Sex You In,” and I saw her folding her arms like she didn’t like me, and I didn’t like her, and everyone was pulsing, even the old guy, and everyone was hopping, and they were scatterfeeding pictures across the floor: tribal dances, stuff with gourds, salsa, houses under breaking dams, women grinning, women oiling men with their fingertips, women taking out their teeth, girls’ stomachs, boys’ calves, rockets from old “movies” flaring, bikini tops, fingers creeping into nostrils, silos, suns — and the old man was standing by our side, and trying to yell, but we couldn’t hear him, so he leaned closer, and said to us, to Marty and Violet and now Link and me, he said, yelled, more like, he yelled: “We enter a time of calamity!”

  We stared.

  “We enter a time of calamity!”

  We tried to back up, all of us except Violet, who was confused, and Link was saying, “This unit, he’s like completely fuguing. He has this —”

  “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.

  And he had touched Violet now, and Link, and Marty, and from all of them, it was coming, We enter a time of calamity! We enter a time of calamity!

  And now I could feel that it was coming from other places, too, other people he had touched, and Marty was trying to say that he’d never had this before, it was kind of cool, but he couldn’t because his signal was jammed just with that, over and over again, all of us in a chorus, going, We enter a time of calamity! We enter a time of calamity! and people were turning toward us. People were looking. We were standing in a line and the old guy was standing in front of us. People were moving away. The police were coming. I could see them. I couldn’t really move much.

  I felt a kind of kicking in my face and I discovered it was my mouth, which was saying the time of calamity thing, but at the top of my lungs. We were shouting, we were broadcasting, and then over us all, as the cops came through the crowd, the guy started this crazy calling, both out loud and on the feed, this crazy calling over it all, over our chorus, and it went:

  “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.”

  While we said, again and again, “We enter a time of calamity. We enter a time of calamity,” and others in the room said it, too, and Violet looked as scared as me, and I tried to take her hand, and she tried to take mine, and the police were by our side, hitting the man over the head again and again with stunners and sticks, and he fell on one knee, and finally my fingers found her wrist, Violet’s. It felt so soft, like something I had never felt before. It felt like the neck of a swan in the wind.

  And then the police were at our sides, whispering to us, “We’re going to have to shut you off now. We’re going to have to shut you off.”

  And then they touched us, and bodies fell, and there was nothing else.

  The first thing I felt was no credit.

  I tried to touch my credit, but there was nothing there.

  It felt like I was in a little room.

  My body — I was in a bed, on top of my arm, which was asleep, but I didn’t know where. I couldn’t find the Lunar GPS to tell me.

  Someone had left a message in my head, which I found, and then kept finding everywhere I went, which said that there was no transmission signal, that I was currently disconnected from feednet. I tried to chat Link and then Marty, but nothing, there was no transmission signal, I was currently disconnected from feednet, of course, and I was starting to get scared, so I tried to chat my parents, I tried to chat them on Earth, but there was no transmission etc., I was currently etc.

  So I opened my eyes.

  “Nothing,” she said.

  I had gotten up and was sitting on a chair beside her. We were in a hospital. We took up a ward.

  Link was still asleep. Nurses went by.

  I said, “I can’t see anything. Through the feed.”

  “No,” she said. “Or through my hospital gown. So stop trying.”

  I smiled. “You know, I thought maybe …”

  “Sure you did. Want some apple juice?”

  We’d been up for fifteen or twenty minutes. Everything in my head was quiet. It was fucked.

  “What do we do?” she asked.

  I didn’t know.

  There was nothing there but the walls. We looked at them, and at each other. We looked really squelch. Our hair and stuff. We had remote relays attached to us to watch our blood and our brains.

  There were five walls, because the room was irregular. 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.

  Our parents had been notified while we were asleep. Only Loga hadn’t been touched by the hacker. She hadn’t let him touch her, because he looked really creepy to her, so she stood way far away. There were also others, people we’d never met, who had been touched, and they were in the wards, too. He had touched thirteen people in all.

  There was a police officer there, waiting in a chair. He told us that we would be off-line for a while, until they could see what had been done, and check for viruses, and decrypt the feed history to get information to use against the guy in court. They said that they had identified him, and that he was a hacker and a naysayer of the worst kind.

  We were frightened, and kept touching our heads. Suddenly, our heads felt real empty.

  At least in the hospital they had better gravity than the hotel.

  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.

  People were really excited when they first came out with feeds. It was all da da da, this big educational thing, da da da, your child will have the advantage, encyclopedias at their fingertips, closer than their fingertips, etc. 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 the educational stuff but more regarding the fact that everything that goes on, goes on on the feed. All of the feedcasts and the instant news, that’s on there, so there’s all the entertainment I was missing without a feed, like the girls were all missing their favorite feedcast, this show called Oh? Wow! Thing!, which has all these kids like us who do stuff but get all pouty, which is what the girls go crazy for, the poutiness.

&nb
sp; 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. It can tell you how to get them, and help you make buying decisions that are hard. 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. Plus, they keep like everyone in the world employed, so it’s not like we could do without them. And it’s really great to know everything about everything whenever we want, to have it just like, in our brain, just sitting there.

  In fact, the thing that made me pissy was when they couldn’t help me at all, so I was just lying there, and couldn’t play any of the games on the feed, and couldn’t chat anyone, and 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 had a few pages cached, from right before the feed stopped. I flipped through them sadly. I went back and forth between them. One was a message from the crazy asshole, which said, You have been hacked by the Coalition of Pity. The other was a good sale at Weatherbee & Crotch, which, by this time, I had probably missed. It was too bad, because I would have liked to have been able to take the opportunity to check out these great bargains, for example they had a trim-shirt with side pockets that I thought I probably would have bought, except it only came in sand, persimmon, and vetch.

  It was Saturday night. The main lights were out. It had been a day since any of us had heard from the feed. Our parents were probably already on the moon, and were coming to the hospital the next morning.

  For most of the day since we woke up after the attack, we had stared at the walls. We’d been sitting in our beds, and we tapped our feet on the rails. None of us could get the tune of “I’ll Sex You In” out of our heads. Someone kept starting it up, and then the others would swear and tell them to shut up. Then we couldn’t help ourselves, and we’d start to tap it out on our trays with a spork.

  Link had finally woken up, and he paced up and down the floor. Loga came by during the afternoon and she talked to all of us, and she kept saying, “Ohhhhh! Ohhhhh!” in this sorry tone of voice, which was nice, except that then she would pause and we could tell she was m-chatting all the news back to our friends on Earth. Occasionally, she’d forget and she’d say out loud to no one, “Omigod! Yes! Right here!” or “Hello … ?” or whatever it was she was saying in her head. She would laugh at jokes we couldn’t hear.

  Once, she went to the bathroom, casual-like, and came back with her hair parted a different place. Calista and Quendy watched her.

  Later, without saying anything, they went and did theirs different like that, too.

  Marty was sometimes saying his usual kind of thing, which was like, “Fuck this shit. Fuck this.” He wanted to be out playing basketball or something.

  There was nothing to do. Violet stared at her hands in her lap. I looked over at her. I smiled, you know, supportive. She looked at me and then went back to staring at her hands.

  Now it was night, and all the big lights were out. We were lying there. There were machines that were taking our pulse and shit. We were all supposed to be sleeping.

  I heard Violet walk across the floor and head for the bathroom. A few minutes later, I heard her walking back.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “Yeah. Hey,” she said. She stopped.

  “You can … ,” I said. I pulled myself up against the pillows. “Why don’t you sit down for a sec?”

  She sat down in the chair by my bed. I could see the curve of her nose against my pulse, which was green and bumpy.

  We sat there for a little while. I was thinking, This is nice. We’re just sitting here. We don’t have to say anything.

  I felt real contented. I lay my head back on my pillow.

  I looked over at her face. I could see the light from my heartbeat on her tears.

  I said. “You’re … hey. You’re crying.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “You don’t …” I didn’t know how to say what I wanted. I tried, “You don’t seem like a crier.”

  “No,” she said.

  We sat. Now the silence wasn’t very good. Her head was low. I could see the curve of her cheek against my brain waves, which were red and loopy.

  She said, “You go try to have fun like a normal person, a normal person with a real life — just for one night you want to live, and suddenly you’re screwed.”

  “You’re not screwed.”

  “I’m screwed.”

  We sat there. I wanted to say something to cheer her up. I had a feeling that cheering her up might be a lot of work. I was thinking of how sometimes, trying to say the right thing to people, it’s like some kind of brain surgery, and you have to tweak exactly the right part of the lobe. Except with talking, it’s more like brain surgery with old, rusted skewers and things, maybe like those things you use to eat lobster, but brown. And you have to get exactly the right place, and you’re touching around in the brain, but the patient, she keeps jumping and saying, “Ow.” Thinking of it like this, I started to not want to say anything. I kept thinking of nice things I could say, like, “I’m glad you went out last night, because that’s how I met you,” or, “And I think you are a normal person,” but they all seemed just smarm.

  So we just sat there, together, and we didn’t say anything. And it wasn’t bad.

  I hoped she could see my smile in the light of my brain.

  When my father got there the next morning, he didn’t stay long. He was being very powerful and businesslike. He was dressed up, and he looked like he was ready to give some orders and sort things out. He looked like everyone around us was stupid and he was going to roll up his sleeves and do some real clarity work.

  He stood there staring at me for a few seconds, and I was like, “What? What?”

  He seemed surprised, and then blinked. He said, “Oh. Shit. Yeah, I forgot. No m-chat. Just talking.”

  I was like, “Do you have to remind me? What’s doing? How’s Smell Factor?”

  “Your brother has a name.”

  “How’s Mom?”

  “She’s like, whoa, she’s like so stressed out. This is … Dude,” he said. “Dude, this is some way bad shit.”

  I could completely feel Violet watching us. She was listening. I didn’t want to have her judging us, and thinking we were too boring or stupid or something.

  My father asked me to tell him what happened. I told him, leaving out some parts, like trying to break in to the minibar. He just kept shaking his head and going, “Yeah,” “Yeah,” “Yeah,” “Oh, yeah,” “Yeah,” “Shit,” “Yeah.”

  Finally, he stood up. I could tell he was pissed. He held up his hands. He said, “They want to subpoena your memories. This is this thing which is … Okay, this is bullshit.”

  After a minute, he said to someone who wasn’t there, “Okay. Okay.” He turned to me and said, “I’m going down to the police.”

  “Dad?” I said. “When am I going home?”

  Dad put his hand over his ear. “Okay,” he said. His mouth twitched. He nodded to someone.

  He hit me on the knee and left.
r />   I was staring at the wall and the stupid boat picture.

  I heard Quendy say to Violet, “When are your parents coming?”

  She said in a flat voice, “They’re busy.”

  “Busy?”

  “Yeah. With jobs. I guess they can’t come at all.”

  The next morning, we hadn’t heard anything. We decided we needed to be cheered up big-time.

  So Marty invented this game where we blew hypodermic needletips through tubing at a skinless anatomy man on the wall. We spat the needles and tried to pin his nads.

  It was the beginning of a great day, one of the greatest days of my life. We all played the dart game, and we laughed and sang “I’ll Sex You In.” Everyone was smiling, and it was skip.

  The surprise was, Violet was the best at the dart game. She always won. I sucked.

  She tried to teach me. It was a complete turn-on. She took my hand and put the tube in my mouth.

  She whispered, “Aspirate. With the tongue.”

  People were really impressed. Link and Marty were completely hitting on Violet for it, but she didn’t pay them any attention, and sometimes she would stand there with one hand on my shoulder. I could feel that she was putting pressure on it, and that she didn’t need to stand with all her weight because I was there.

  Then Loga came in to the hospital for a while, and we were all talking to her about stuff when she stopped for a second because the girls’ favorite feedcast, Oh? Wow! Thing!, was on. They were all like, “Tell us what’s happening, tell us what’s happening,” so we all gathered around her in our little gowns, and she sat there cross-legged on the bed and told us, “Okay, so like now Greg’s walking in, and he’s … omigod, he’s completely malfunctioning — he’s completely in mal, and Steph is crying on the sofa. Okay, so she goes …” And she told us the story of what was happening as it happened, and we all sat there, smiling. I never heard Loga tell a story this good before, and she even used her hands and stuff, and her eyes were vacant like she was seeing some other world, which I guess she was. “Jackie is sitting on the front of the boat? And he holds his hand up, and he’s going … he’s going … omigod, he goes, ‘Organelle, I always loved you from when we first went sailing.’”