Feed

by M. T. Anderson

So we started to chat.

  She was like, What?

  Nothing.

  What nothing?

  What nothing what?

  She was like, What are you angry about?

  I breathed, loud and kind of angry. Why are we going away?

  Because they were making fun of me.

  I didn’t say anything. I was like, to myself, This is dumb. The whole thing was dumb. It was stupid, and it pissed me off.

  Violet was pushing me, like, Well?

  So I, like a shithead, said, Well, maybe you shouldn’t, you know, show off like that.

  Show off? Like what?

  Like the way you do sometimes. Using weird words.

  I don’t use weird words.

  Okay. Saying weird shit.

  “Oh, screw you!” she yelled out loud. “What do you mean?”

  “You know what I mean. It’s, like … It’s something I like about you, but you have to … like …”

  “You like it about me. What is it you like?”

  “I like … you know, you’re so funny, and beautiful, and you …”

  “Everyone’s beautiful. Everyone’s pretty as a pansy in a blister pack. That’s not what you’re talking about.”

  “You can be a little … You can … It’s kind of scary for people sometimes. It feels … It sometimes feels like you’re watching us, instead of being us.”

  “Well, I’m not used to the things you’re used to.”

  “I’m just telling you how it sometimes … it feels.”

  “Thanks for telling me how it feels.”

  “I’m just telling you.”

  “Thanks.”

  We drove on. On Sky Offenders, they were having a live thing about drug smugglers getting caught on parasails. There was a lot of static from her chat breaking through. She was pushing it hard.

  I dropped my feedwall and let her chat me again.

  You think I’m a bitch, don’t you?

  This is stupid. This is dumb.

  She stared out the window.

  There’s something else wrong, isn’t there? I asked her. Isn’t there?

  Nothing. No answer.

  For a long time, nothing.

  Then I was like, Is there something else wrong?

  She looked at me. I could tell she was trying not to cry. She said, “Yes.”

  I was like, What is it?

  She whispered, “Talk to me. In the air.”

  I was like biting my lip. I hate these kinds of conversations. I was feeling completely squeam. I went, “Okay. What’s, uh, what’s wrong?”

  For a long time, we went through columns of smoke. They were coming up from below. They were like the rows of trees up the sides of Link’s driveway. If we had been happier, I would have done them slalom. They were as gray as, I don’t know. They were just gray, okay? The rain hit them.

  She said, “My feed is really malfunctioning.”

  “Right now?”

  “I can’t feel it right now. But yes.”

  “Go to a technician.”

  “I have. I’ve gone to a bunch. I don’t think you … Okay, my feed is really, really malfunctioning.”

  “I don’t understand. You told me this already.”

  “Shut up. I’ve been going to technicians. The feedware is starting to produce major errors.” She looked scared. She wasn’t looking at me. I could feel how much she wasn’t looking at me but was looking other places.

  “I got my feed later … than some kids.” She said evenly, “I got my feed really late.”

  “You told me. So?”

  “But the problem is, if you get the feed after you’re fully formed, it doesn’t fit as snugly. I mean, the feedware. It’s more susceptible to malfunction.”

  “Susceptible?”

  “It can break down more easily.”

  “What does this mean?”

  “Nobody knows. The feed is tied in to everything. Your body control, your emotions, your memory. Everything. Sometimes feed errors are fatal. I don’t know. I could lose … I don’t know. They thought it would stabilize. But it didn’t. It’s getting worse. Meg worse. They told me yesterday it’s deteriorating.”

  “Like rusting?”

  “I mean, not the hardware, but the software/wetware interface. They said they didn’t … I’m not going to cry. I am not going to cry.”

  I didn’t know what I should do. I guessed that I should put my arm around her. I went to move my arm that way. She didn’t look very huggable. She was all slouched. She was saying, “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 …”

  We were sitting there, going through the air. My hands felt really useless. I said, “This sucks. They can’t just turn it off? They turned it off before.”

  “No, they didn’t. They disconnected us. They shut down most of the functions. The feed was still on. It’s part of the brain.”

  I looked over at her. She was looking right at me. We were going down the aisle of smoke through the sky. Somewhere over Nebraska, the drug parasailers were being shot out of the air.

  She said, “Just drop. Drop and then catch us.”

  I was staring at the steering column, wondering what the hell she was talking about.

  She said, “I want to feel something. Let’s feel vertigo together.”

  That sounded okay to me.

  I dropped us.

  When we stopped, suddenly both of us had sweat. It was just mainly across our foreheads and fingertips.

  She smiled at me. We both felt meg nauseous.

  “My fingertips,” I said. “They’re sweaty.”

  She nodded.

  We flew for a bit. She chatted me like, Let’s go back now. I’m okay.

  No. You don’t want to go back, I said. They were being jerky.

  They weren’t being jerky. I was being pretentious.

  You weren’t —

  “I’m fine now.”

  I said, “We can’t just go back. I am like completely — I am — I’m this thing. It’s this whole meg thing. I can’t go back. Let’s go to your house.”

  “My dad will be there.”

  “Let’s go to my house, then.”

  “Okay.”

  With one hand, I changed the course. I held out the other hand. She took it. We flew over gray piles and gray piles and gray piles toward home.

  When we got to my house, we went inside and I shut the garage door behind us. We went up the steps and into the family room. We were going to watch something on the feed. We sat there. We weren’t really interested in the feed. It was daytime shit, anyway. Soap operas with all these people with the big hair going on crying jags. And lots of puppets. Puppets telling you about every goddamn thing.

  “I wish there was someplace we could go,” Violet said. “I want to … I don’t know.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just, there’s a whole universe out there.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’ve never been underwater for a really long time.”

  “I been down on a couple of vacations into the really deep part. It’s pretty good. There’s a lot of stuff to do.”

  “I’m just using that as an example,” she said, stroking my face.

  “You have to have reservations. Otherwise, if you go by yourself, you get the bends.”

  She was stroking my face and was like, “I probably don’t have much time. There’s just so much I want to do,” which was a difficult thing for her to say, because when she was stroking my face, it looked like it might mean one thing, but on the other hand, it probably meant something else, and it would be embarrassing if it didn’t mean what I thought it meant, and if I said something, and then if it turned out that by “so much she wanted to do,” she really meant riding trikes a
cross the Sahara.

  That would suck.

  I said, “Do you mean …” I stopped, and tried, “That could be taken to mean that … you know … we …”

  My feed was like, Tongue-tied? Wowed and gaga? For a fistful of pickups tailored extra-specially for this nightmarish scenario, try Cyranofeed, available at rates as low as —

  She was like, “I’m sorry if I embarrassed you at Marty’s.”

  “Would you stop?”

  After a minute, I said, “You kept quiet about this for a long time.”

  She nodded. “A few weeks. I’ve known.”

  “You could’ve told me.”

  “I could’ve,” she said.

  “You didn’t need to be thinking about it all alone.”

  She had her hands in her lap now. She said, “I want to go out and see the world. There’s so much. There’s … just so much.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Yeah. I don’t know. Yeah. This sucks. It meg sucks.” I didn’t know what to say. We sat there, side by side. We were sitting there, and it seemed like nothing was right. We were done talking.

  I held on to her, and she held on to me. We held like that. We were staring at the wall.

  She blew out all her breath.

  It was a strange moment, like when you get sad after sex, and it feels like it’s too late in the afternoon, even if it’s morning, or night, and you turn away from the other person, and they turn away from you, and you lie there, and when you turn back toward them, you can both see each other’s moles. Usually there seem to be shadows from venetian blinds all across your legs.

  She said, “You toss something up in the air, and you expect it to come back down again.”

  Which made absolutely no sense to me.

  We sat and we looked at the fireplace. There were the fake logs and the fake iron parts. All the bricks were perfect. The walls were all a weird color of white.

  Then there was the sound of the front door banging open. Mom was home with Smell Factor. We both were like, Whoa.

  We pulled apart, and were sitting there. Smell Factor ran into the family room and took off his sneakers one at a time and threw them at the wall. Then he fell down on the rug and phased out and started watching Top Quark. Mom was like yelling for him to go pick up his room. He just lay there. She was clapping and calling his name. He just kept up with Top Quark. He didn’t have it shielded, so we were picking up the whole thing.

  Aw, Top Quark, I’ll never get the prize at the fair.

  Listen up, Down Quark — don’t get so down! Remember all your friends are right behind you.

  Yeah, Down Quark!

  Yeah, we’ll sing a song for you! It’s a happy, zappy song, full of chuckles and chortles.

  Violet ate dinner with us. My father wasn’t there, so it went better than the last time. She said some stuff that made my mother laugh. Mom was chatting me about how she was a great girl.

  We flew back late at night.

  I finally asked her, Do they know how long?

  No. Earlier, they were saying it could take years. Now they’re not sure. They’re saying it will be much faster.

  It still could be years.

  It’s not going to be years. It could happen anytime.

  I dropped her off at her house. We didn’t make any plans. There weren’t any plans.

  I spent the rest of the night doing homework. It seemed like that was the only thing left to do.

  … from Bow-Wow and Plucky, on the Christian Cyberkidz Network:

  “… Dad? I keep thinking she’ll come back, but I know now that she’s going to stay away.”

  “Yeah. It’s like, it’s been so long, I don’t know what she would look like if she came back, how long her hair would be.”

  “She was the best dog. If she came back, it would make everything right.”

  “Billy: Nothing will make everything right. That dog was a good dog, but she wasn’t like a superdog, with powers. And I think you’ll see a little voice inside you that will tell you the same.”

  “I still put the suet out by the mailbox, and I still sing her my —”

  We went to the sea, because there wasn’t time after School™ to go under it. She and I went to stand beside it. We watched it move around. It was dead, but colorful.

  It was blue when the sun hit it one way, and purple when the sun hit it another way, and sometimes yellow or green. We had on suits so we wouldn’t smell it.

  We sat in the sand. I made an angel with my arms and legs. She piled sand on my stomach. The suits were orange, which was stupid. I hate it when a suit is a really ugly color so you look completely dumb. After she was done piling sand and I was done with my angel, we stared up at the sky.

  I was like, I don’t think you have to worry. Science is like, they’re always discovering things.

  Yeah. Have you looked at the sea?

  You’ve been reading more of that depressing shit.

  Everything’s dead. Everything’s dying.

  Some upcars floated over in the Clouds™. Some cargo ships. Some transit needles, heading off to Norway or Japan or something.

  I sat up. I was pissed off with things.

  I went, You know the part that’s the really ironic thing? The guy? The hacker? You almost agree with him. He completely fucked you over, and you almost agree with him.

  Yeah, she said. That’s certainly the really ironic thing.

  What? What are you being sarcastic about?

  I’m screwed.

  See? Like, that’s so big negative.

  What do you mean? What’s positive? My body is completely falling apart. I mean, you saw it with my foot — but it’s happening more often. One of my fingers or a part of my face will just freeze up. It’s getting more frequent. Like once every other day, for ten or fifteen minutes. Sometimes for a few hours.

  Oh shit. Don’t tell me this. Oh shit.

  And I’m not getting all the images that are supposed to come through on the feed. I’m getting a lot of error messages.

  They can fix that.

  I don’t know. I don’t know. I just don’t know.

  I kicked at the sand. I looked at her. She looked good, through the mask, her big sunglasses brown and purple in the light. I was like, You know, I …

  What?

  I really like you.

  She hit me on the back of the head. That’ll do, she said.

  … to Crackdown Alley … only on Fox …

  “Have you given it to her?”

  “You can kiss my ass.”

  “Have you given it to her?”

  “What do you think I am?”

  “Want me to tell you what I think?”

  “Don’t breathe in my face. Go breathe in someone else’s face.”

  “I’ll breathe in whatever face I want to breathe in.”

  “I didn’t give it to her.”

  “What do you think I am?”

  “She doesn’t have it.”

  “You can kiss my ass.”

  “Don’t breathe in my face.”

  “Have you given it to her?”

  “Want me to tell you what I think?”

  “What do you think I —”

  On Monday, I went into School™ and I was sitting in homeroom when I saw that Calista had her hair up in this new way, and on the back of her neck was this total insane macro-lesion that I never even saw before. I guess I was looking at it kind of Holy shit!, because Quendy sat down next to me and chatted, Impressed? Ain’t even real.

  Quendy still hated Calista, because Quendy wanted to be going out with Link herself.

  I asked her, What do you mean?

  Calista got it done yesterday. Quendy made this face. Now that lesions are “brag.” Now that they’re the spit.

  It’s huge. It’s fuckin’ huge.

  It’s not even real. I mean, it’s an incision, but it’s artificial. It’s not even really weeping. Those are beads of latex.

  Whoa. I’m surprised her head doesn’t, you
know, topple off. Like: *badump.*

  It’s so stupid. God. I can’t believe how stupid it is.

  Link came in and was kissing Calista on the forehead, with his hand behind her skull, and then he tickled her lesion.

  Oh! Unit! I grabbed Quendy’s wrist. Oh, unit, this is like — whoa — total error message. Major system error!

  It’s so stupid. I can’t believe he’s falling for that. It’s so dumb.

  Whoa! I got to tell Violet about this. She’ll go crazy.

  Yeah.

  She’s always looking for like evidence of the decline of civilization.

  Yeah.

  I looked at Quendy. What do you mean by that?

  Nothing. Just that Violet is always, like you said. She’s always looking for stuff about the decline of civilization, and everything’s a mess, da da da.

  Is that a problem?

  I don’t have a problem with it. I think she’s nice.

  I’m going to chat her about this.

  Yeah. Do. She’ll think it’s funny.

  I found a hitch-up to Violet. You sitting down? I said. Calista got an artificial lesion.

  So much for my Frosted Flakes.

  Link is tickling her lesion.

  Let me just push the bowl toward the wall.

  You heard it here first.

  Link is … He’s a great guy, but do you mind if I say he’s not the quickest bunny in the centrifuge?

  I laughed. No. Not our Link.

  Did I tell you I thought he was youch the first time I saw him?

  Link? Our Link?!? He’s butt-ugly. Have you met him?

  That’s why I thought he was youch. You all were so beautiful. He was hideous. There was some, I don’t know, some texture there.

  Are you kidding?

  Until he opens his mouth.

  Right now, he and Marty are skipping rope with some coaxial cable. Ah, he’s tripping. He’s falling into a desk.

  I liked talking to her like this, first thing in the morning. It had a kind of bedroom feel to it. It was kind of flirty, kind of drowsy.

  She was like, Can I ask you a question about Link?

  Yeah?

  The name. Link. As in “Missing …”?

  No, I said.

  So?

  I don’t think you want to know. It won’t help much with your worry, you know, about civilization ending and stuff.