Neil Stephenson - Spew

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Spew

Are you on the trail of the next unexpoilted market niche - or just on a nookie

hunt?

New fiction by Neal Stephenson

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

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file:///H|/eMule/Incoming/Stephenson,%20Neal%20-%20Spew%20(ss)%20v1.0.1.txt

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

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Neil Stephenson - Spew

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