Some Remarks: Essays and Other Writing

by Neal Stephenson

  Spew (1994)

  Yeah, I know it’s boring of me to send you plain old Text like this, and I hope you don’t just blow this message off without reading it.

  But what can I say, I was an English major. On video, I come off like a stunned bystander. I’m just a Text kind of guy. I’m gambling that you’ll think it’s quaint or something. So let me just tell you the whole sorry tale, starting from the point where I think I went wrong.

  I’d be blowing brown smoke if I said I wasn’t nervous when they shoved in the needles, taped on the trodes, thrust my head into the Big Cold Magnet, and opened a channel direct from the Spew to my immortal soul. Of course they didn’t call it the Spew, and neither did I—I wanted the job, after all. But how could I not call it that, with its Feeds multifarious as the glistening strands cascading sunnily from the supple scalps of the models in the dandruff shampoo ads.

  I mention that image because it was the first thing I saw when they turned the Spew on, and I wasn’t even ready. Not that anyone could ever get ready for the dreaded Polysurf Exam. The proctors came for me when they were ready, must have got my address off that job app yellowing in their infinite files, yanked me straight out of a fuzzy gray hangover dream with a really wandering story arc, the kind of dream concussion victims must have in the back of the ambulance. I’d been doing shots of vodka in the living room the night before, decided not to take a chance on the stairs, turned slowly into a mummy while I lay comatose on our living-room couch—the First Couch Ever Built, a Couch upholstered in avocado Orlon that had absorbed so much tar, nicotine, and body cheese over the centuries that now the centers of the cushions had developed the black sheen of virgin Naugahyde. When they buzzed me awake, my joints would not move nor my eyes open: I had to bolt four consecutive 32-ounce glasses of tap water to reconstitute my freeze-dried plasma.

  Half an hour later I’m in Television City. A million stories below, floes of gray-yellow ice, like broken teeth, grind away at each other just below the surface of the Hudson. I’ve signed all the releases and they’re lowering the Squid helmet over me, and without any warning BAM the Spew comes on and the first thing I see is this model chick shaking her head in ultra-slow-mo, her lovely hairs gleaming because they’ve got so many spotlights cross-firing on her head that she’s about to burst into flame, and in voice-over she’s talking about how her dandruff problem is just a nasty, embarrassing memory of adolescence now along with pimples and (if I may just fill in the blanks) screwing skanky guys who’ll never have a salaried job. And I think she’s cute and everything but it occurs to me that this is really kind of sick—I mean, this chick has admitted to a history of shedding blizzards every time she moved her head, and here she is getting down under eight megawatts of color-corrected halogen light, and I just know I’m supposed to be thinking about how much head chaff would be sifting down in her personal space right now if she hadn’t ditched her old hair care product lineup in favor of—

  Click. Course, it never really clicks anymore, no one has used mechanical switches since like the ’50s, but some Spew terminals emit a synthesized click—they wired up a 1955 Sylvania in a digital sound lab somewhere and had some old gomer in a tank-top stagger up to it and change back and forth between Channel 4 and Channel 5 a few times, paid him off and fired him, then compressed the sound and inseminated it into the terminals’ fundamental ROMs so that we’d get that reassuring click when we jumped from one Feed to another. Which is what happens now; except I haven’t touched a remote, don’t even have a remote, that being the whole point of the Polysurf. Now it’s some fucker picking a banjo, ouch it is an actual Hee Haw rerun, digitally remastered, frozen in pure binary until the collapse of the Universe.

  Click. And I resist the impulse to say, “Wait a minute. Hee Haw is my favorite show.”

  Well, I have lots of favorite shows. But me and my housemates, we’re always watching Hee Haw. But all I get is two or three twangs of the banjo and a glimpse of the eerily friendly grin of the banjo picker and then click it’s a ’77 Buick LeSabre smashing through a guardrail in SoCal and bursting into a fireball before it has even touched the ground, which is one of my favorite things about TV. Watch that for a while and just as I am settling into a nice Spew daze, it’s a rap video, white trailer park boys in Clackamas who’ve actually got their moho on hydraulics so it can tilt and bounce in the air while the homeboys are partying down inside. Even the rooftop sentinels are boogieing, they have to boogie, using their AK-47s like jugglers’ poles to keep their balance. Under the TV lights, the chrome-plated bayonets spark like throwaway cameras at the Orange Bowl Halftime Show.

  And so it goes. Twenty clicks into the test I’ve left my fear behind, I’m Polysurfing like some incarnate sofa god, my attention plays like a space laser across the Spew’s numberless Feeds, each Feed a torrent, all of them plexed together across the panascopic bandwidth of the optical fiber as if the contents of every Edge City in Greater America have been rammed into the maw of a giant pasta machine and extruded as endless, countless strands of polychrome angel hair. Within an hour or so I’ve settled into a pattern without even knowing it. I’m surfing among 20 or so different Feeds. My subconscious mind is like a retarded homunculus sacked out on the couch of my reptilian brain, his thumb wandering crazily around the keypad of the world’s largest remote control. It looks like chaos, even to me, but to the proctors, watching all my polygraph traces superimposed on the video feed, tracking my blood pressure and pupil dilation, there is a strange attractor somewhere down there, and if it’s the right one. . . .

  “Congratulations,” the proctor says, and I realize the chilly mind-sucking apparatus has been retracted into the ceiling. I’m still fixated on the Spew. Bringing me back to reality: the nurse chick ripping off the handy disposable self-stick electrodes, bristling with my body hair.

  So, a week later I’m still wondering how I got this job: patrolman on the information highway. We don’t call it that, of course, the job title is Profile Auditor 1. But if the Spew is a highway, imagine a hard-jawed, close-shaven buck lurking in the shade of an overpass, your license plate reflected in the quicksilver pools of his shades as you whoosh past. Key difference: we never bust anyone, we just like to watch.

  We sit in Television City cubicles, VR rigs strapped to our skulls, grokking people’s Profiles in n-dimensional DemoTainment Space, where demographics, entertainment, consumption habits, and credit history all intersect to define a weird imaginary universe that is every bit as twisted and convoluted as those balloon animals that so eerily squelch and shudder from the hands of feckless loitering clowns in the touristy districts of our great cities. Takes killer spatial relations not to get lost. We turn our heads, and the Demosphere moves around us; we point at something of interest—the distinct galactic cluster formed by some schmo’s Profile—and we fly toward it, warp speed. Hell, we fly right through the middle of it, we do barrel rolls through said schmo’s annual mortgage interest statements and gambol in his urinalysis records. Course, the VR illusion doesn’t track just right, so most of us get sick for the first few weeks until we learn to move our heads slowly, like tank turrets. You can always tell a rookie by the scope patch glued beneath his ear, strong mouthwash odor, gray lips.

  Through the Demosphere we fly, we men of the Database Maintenance Division, and although the Demosphere belongs to General Communications Inc., it is the schmos of the world who make it—every time a schmo surfs to a different channel, the Demosphere notes that he is bored with program A and more interested, at the moment, in program B. When a schmo’s paycheck is delivered over the I-way, the number on the bottom line is plotted in his Profile, and if that schmo got it by telecommuting we know about that too—the length of his coffee breaks and the size of his bladder are an open book to us. When a schmo buys something on the I-way it goes into his Profile, and if it happens to be something that he recently saw advertised there, we call that interesting, and when he uses the I-way to phone his friends and family, we Profil
e Auditors can navigate his social web out to a gazillion fractal iterations, the friends of his friends of his friends of his friends, what they buy and what they watch and if there’s a correlation.

  So now it’s a year later. I have logged many a megaparsec across the Demosphere, I can pick out an anomalous Profile at a glance and notify my superiors. I am dimly aware of two things: (1) that my yearly Polysurf test looms, and (2) I’ve a decent chance of being promoted to Profile Auditor 2 and getting a cubicle some 25 percent larger and with my choice from among three different color schemes and four pre-approved decor configurations. If I show some stick-to-it-iveness, put out some Second Effort, spread my legs on cue, I may one day be issued a chair with arms.

  But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Have to get through that Polysurf test first. And I am oddly nervous. I am nervous because of Hee Haw.

  Why did my subconscious brain surf away from Hee Haw? That wasn’t like me at all. And yet perhaps it was this that had gotten me the job.

  Disturbing thought: the hangover. I was in a foul mood, short-tempered, reactionary, literal-minded—in short, the temporary brain insult had turned me into an ideal candidate for this job.

  But this time they will come and tap me for the test at a random time, while I am at work. I cannot possibly arrange to be hung over, unless I stay hung over for two weeks straight—tricky to arrange. I am a fraud. Soon they will know; ignominy, poverty will follow.

  I am going to lose my job—my salaried job with medical and dental and even a pension plan. Didn’t even know what a pension was until the employee benefits counselor clued me in, and it nearly blew the top of my skull off. For a couple of weeks I was like that lucky conquistador from the poem—stout what’s-his-name silent upon a peak in Darien—as I dealt this wild surmise: 20 years of rough country ahead of me leading down to an ocean of Slack that stretched all the way to the sunlit rim of the world, or to the end of my natural life expectancy, whichever came first.

  So now I am scared shitless about the next Polysurf test. And then, hope.

  My division commander zooms toward me in the Demosphere, an alienated human head wearing a bowler hat as badge of rank. “Follow me, Stark,” he says, launching the command like a bronchial loogie, and before I can even “yes sir” I’m trying to keep up with him, dodging through DemoTainment Space.

  And 10 minutes later we are cruising in a standard orbit around your Profile.

  And from the middle distance it looks pretty normal. I can see at a glance you are a 24-year-old single white female New Derisive with post-Disillusionist leanings, income careening in a death spiral around the poverty line, you spend more on mascara than is really appropriate compared to your other cosmetics outlays, which are Low Modest—I’d wager you’re hooked on some exotic brand—no appendix, O positive, HIV-negative, don’t call your mother often enough, spend an hour a day talking to your girlfriends, you prefer voice phone to video, like Irish music as well as the usual intelligent yet primal, sludgy yet danceable rock that someone like you would of course listen to. Your use of the Spew follows a bulimic course—you’ll watch for two days at a time and then not switch on for a week.

  But I know it can’t be that simple, the commander wouldn’t have brought me here because he was worried about your mascara imbalance, there’s got to be something else.

  I decide to take a flyer. “Geez, boss, something’s not right here,” I say, “this profile looks normal—too normal.”

  He buys it. He buys it like a set of snow tires. His disembodied head spins around and he looks at me intently, an oval of two-dimensional video in DemoTainment Space. “You saw that!?” he says.

  Now I’m in deep. “Just a hunch, boss.”

  “Get to the bottom of it, and you’ll be picking out color schemes by the end of the week,” he says, then streaks off like a bottle rocket.

  So that’s it then; if I nab myself a promotion before the next Polysurf, they’ll be a lot more forgiving if, say, the little couch potato in my brain stem chooses to watch Hee Haw for half an hour, or whatever.

  Thenceforward I am in full Stalker Mode, I stake out your Profile, camp out in the middle of your income-tax returns, dance like an arachnid through your Social Telephony Web, dog you through the Virtual Mall trying to predict what clothes you’re going to buy. It takes me about 10 minutes to figure out you’ve been buying mascara for one of your girlfriends who got fired from her job last year, so that solves that little riddle. Then I get nervous because whatever weirdness it was about you that drew the Commander’s attention doesn’t seem to be there anymore. Almost like you know someone’s watching.

  OK, let’s just get this out of the way: it’s creepy. Being a creep is a role someone has to take for society to remain free and hence prosperous (or is it the other way around?).

  I am pursuing a larger goal that isn’t creepy at all. I am thinking of Adderson. Every one of us, sitting in our cubicles, is always thinking of Adderson, who started out as a Profile Auditor 1 just like us and is now Vice President for Dynamic Programming at Dynastic Communications Inc. and making eight to nine digits a year depending on whether he gets around to exercising his stock options. One day young Adderson was checking out a Profile that didn’t fit in with established norms, and by tracing the subject’s social telephony web, noticed a trend: Post-Graduate Existentialists who started going to church. You heard me: Adderson single-handedly discovered the New Complacency.

  It was an unexploited market niche of cavernous proportions: upwards of one-hundredth of one percent of the population. Within six hours, Adderson had descended upon the subject’s moho with a Rapid Deployment Team of entertainment lawyers and development assistants and launched the fastest-growing new channel ever to wend its way into the thick braid of the Spew.

  I’m figuring that there’s something about you, girl, that’s going to make me into the next Adderson and you into the next Spew Icon—the voice of a generation, the figurehead of a Spew channel, a straight polished shaft leading direct to the heart of a hitherto unknown and unexploited market. I know how awful this sounds, by the way.

  So I stay late in my cubicle and dig a little deeper, rewinding your Profile back into the mists of time. Your credit record is fashionably cratered—but that’s cool, even the God of the New Testament is not as forgiving as the consumer credit system. You’ve blown many scarce dollars at your local BodyMod franchise getting yourself pierced (“topologically enhanced”), and, on one occasion, tattooed: a medium #P879, left breast. Perusal of BodyMod’s graphical database (available, of course, over the Spew) turns up “(c) 1991 by Ray Troll of Ketchikan, Alaska.” BodyMod’s own market research on this little gem indicates that it first become widely popular within the Seattle music scene.

  So the plot thickens. I check out of my cubicle. I decide to go undercover.

  Wouldn’t think a Profile Auditor 1 could pull that off, wouldja? But I’m just like you, or I was a year ago. All I have to do is dig a yard deeper into the sediments of my dirty laundry pile, which have become metamorphic under prolonged heat and pressure.

  As I put the clothes on it occurs to me that I could stand a little prolonged heat and pressure myself.

  But I can’t be thinking about that, I’m a professional, got a job to do, and frankly I could do without this unwanted insight. That’s just what I need, for the most important assignment of my career to turn into a nookie hunt. I try to drive it from my mind, try to lose myself in the high-definition Spew terminals in the subway car, up there where the roach motel placards used to be. They click from one Feed to another following some irrational pattern and I wonder who has the job of surfing the channels in the subway; maybe it’s what I’ll be doing for a living, a week from now.

  Just before the train pulls into your stop, the terminal in my face surfs into episode #2489 of Hee Haw. It’s a skit. The banjo picker is playing a bit part, sitting on a bale of hay in the back of a pickup truck—chewing on a stalk of grass, surprisingly eno
ugh. His job is to laugh along with the cheesy jokes but he’s just a banjo picker, not an actor, he doesn’t know the drill, he can’t keep himself from looking at the camera—looking at me. I notice for the first time that his irises are different colors. I turn up the collar on my jacket as I detrain, feeling those creepy eyes on my neck.

  I have already discovered much about the infrastructure of your life that is probably hidden even from you, including your position in the food chain, which is as follows: the SRVX group is the largest zaibatsu in the services industry. They own five different hotel networks, of which Hospicor is the second-largest but only the fourth most profitable. Hospicor hotels are arranged in tiers: at the bottom we have Catchawink, which is human coin lockers in airports, everything covered in a plastic sheet that comes off a huge roll, like sleeping inside a giant, loose-fitting condom. Then we have Mom’s Sleep Inn, a chain of motels catering to truckers and homeless migrants; The Family Room, currently getting its ass kicked by Holiday Inn; Kensington Place, going for that all-important biz traveler; and Imperion Preferred Resorts.

  I see that you work for the Kensington Place Columbus Circle Hotel, which is too far from the park and too viewless to be an Imperion Preferred, even though it’s in a very nice old building. So you are, to be specific, a desk clerk and you work the evening shift there.

  I approach the entrance to the hotel at 8:05 p.m., long-jumping across vast reservoirs of gray-brown slush and blowing off the young men who want to change my money into Hong Kong dollars. The doorman is too busy tapping a fresh Camel on his wrist bone to open the door for me so I do it myself.

  The lobby looks a little weird because I’ve only seen it on TV, through that security camera up there in the corner, with its distorting wide-angle lens, which feeds directly into the Spew, of course. I’m all turned around for a moment, doing sort of a drunken pirouette in the middle of the lobby, and finally I get my bearings and establish missile lock on You, standing behind the reception desk with Evan, your goatee-sporting colleague, both of you looking dorky (as I’m sure you’d be the first to assert) in your navy blue Kensington Place uniforms, which would border on dignified if not for the maroon piping and pseudo-brass name tags.