Neal Stephenson - The Big U

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The Big U
By
Neal Stephenson
------------------------
---The Go Big Red Fan---
------------------------
The Go Big Red Fan was John Wesley Fenrick's, and when
ventilating his System it throbbed and crept along the floor with a
rhythmic chunka-chunka-chunk. Fenrick was a Business major and a
senior. From the talk of my wingmates I gathered that he was smart,
yet crazy, which helped. The description weird was also used, but
admiringly. His roomie, Ephraim Klein of New Jersey, was in
Philosophy. Worse, he was found to be smart and weird and crazy,
intolerably so on all these counts and several others besides.
As for the Fan, it was old and square, with a heavy rounded
design suitable for the Tulsa duplex window that had been its station
before John Wesley Fenrick had brought It out to the Big U with
him. Running up one sky-blue side was a Go Big Red bumper
sticker. When Fenrick ran his System—that is, bludgeoned the rest
of the wing with a record or tape—he used the Fan to blow air over
the back of the component rack to prevent the electronics from
melting down. Fenrick was tall and spindly, with a turkey-like head
and neck, and all of us in the east corridor of the south wing of the
seventh floor of E Tower knew him for three things: his seventies
rock-'n'-roll souvenir collection, his trove of preposterous electrical
appliances, and his laugh—a screaming hysterical cackle that would
ricochet down the long shiny cinderbiock corridor whenever
something grotesque flashed across the 45-Inch screen of his Video
System or he did something especially humiliating to Ephraim Klein.
Klein was a subdued, intellectual type. He reacted to his
victories with a contented smirk, and this quietness gave some
residents of EO7S East the impression that Fenrick, a roomie-buster
with many a notch on his keychain, had already cornered the young
sage. In fact, Klein beat Fenrick at a rate of perhaps sixty percent, or
whenever he could reduce the conflict to a rational discussion. He
felt that he should be capable of better against a power-punker
Business major, but he was not taking into account the animal
shrewdness that enabled Fenrick to land lucrative oil-company
internships to pay for the modernization of his System.
Inveterate and cynical audio nuts, common at the Big U, would
walk into their room and freeze solid, such was Fenrick's System, its
skyscraping rack of obscure black slabs with no lights, knobs or
switches, the 600-watt Black Hole Hyperspace Energy Nexus Field
Amp that sat alone like the Kaaba, the shielded coaxial cables
thrown out across the room to the six speaker stacks that made it
look like an enormous sonic slime mold in spawn. Klein himself
knew a few things about stereos, having a system that could
reproduce Bach about as well as the American Megaversity
Chamber Orchestra, and it galled him.
To begin with there was the music. That was bad enough, but
Klein had associated with musical Mau Maus since junior high, and
could inure himself to it in the same way that he kept himself from
jumping up and shouting back at television commercials. It was the
Go Big Red Fan that really got to him. "Okay, okay, let's just accept
as a given that your music is worth playing. Now, even assuming
that, why spend six thousand dollars on a perfect system with no
extraneous noises in it, and then, then, cool it with a noisy fan that
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couldn't fetch six bucks at a fire sale?" Still, Fenrick would ignore
him. "I mean, you amaze me sometimes. You can't think at all, can
you? I mean, you're not even a sentient being, if you look at it
strictly."
When Klein said something like this (I heard the above one
night when going down to the bathroom), Fenrick would look up at
him from his Business textbook, peering over the wall of bright, sto
record-store displays he had erected along the room's centerline;
because his glasses had slipped down his long thin nose, he would
wrinkle it, forcing the lenses toward the desired altitude,
involuntarily baring his canine teeth in the process and causing the
stiff spiky hair atop his head to shift around as though inhabited by a
band of panicked rats.
"You don't understand real meaning," he'd say. "You don't
have a monopsony on meaning. I don't get meaning from books. My
meaning means what it means to me." He would say this, or
something equally twisted, and watch Klein for a reaction. After he
had done it a few times, though, Klein figured out that his roomie
was merely trying to get him all bent out of shape—to freak his
brain, as it were— and so he would drop it, denying Fenrick the
chance to shriek his vicious laugh and tell the wing that he had
scored again.
Klein was also annoyed by the fact that Fenrick, smoking loads
of parsley-spiked dope while playing his bad music, would forget to
keep an eye on the Go Big Red Fan. Klein, sitting with his back to
the stereo, wads of foam packed in his ears, would abruptly feel the
Fan chunk into the back of his chair, and as he spazzed out in
hysterical surprise it would sit there maliciously grinding away and
transmitting chunka-chunka-chunks into his pelvis like muffled
laughs.
If it was not clear which of them had air rights, they would wage
sonic wars.
They both got out of class at 3:30. Each would spend twenty
minutes dashing through the labyrinthine ways of the Monoplex,
pounding fruitlessly on elevator buttons and bounding up steps three
at a time, palpitating at the thought of having to listen to his
roommate's music until at least midnight. Often as not, one would
explode from the elevator on EO7S, veer around to the corridor, and
with disgust feel the other's tunes pulsing victoriously through the
floor. Sometimes, though, they would arrive simultaneously and
power up their Systems together. The first time they tried this, about
halfway through September, the room's circuit breaker shut down.
They sat in darkness and silence for above half an hour, each
knowing that if he left his stereo to turn the power back on, the other
would have his going full blast by the time he returned. This impasse
was concluded by a simultaneous two-tower fire drill that kept both
out of the room for three hours.
Subsequently John Wesley Fenrick ran a fifty-foot tn-lead
extension cord down the hallway and into the Social Lounge, and
plugged his System into that. This meant that he could now shut
down Klein's stereo simply by turning on his burger-maker, donut-
maker, blow-dryer and bun-warmer simultaneously, shutting off the
room's circuit breaker. But Klein was only three feet from the
extension cord and thus could easily shut Fenrick down with a tug.
So these tactics were not resorted to; the duelists preferred, against
all reason, to wait each other out.
Klein used organ music, usually lush garbled Romantic
masterpieces or what he called Atomic Bach. Fenrick had the edge in
system power, but most of that year's music was not as dense as,
say, Heavy Metal had been in its prime, and so this difference was
usually erased by the thinness of his ammunition. This did not mean,
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however, that we had any trouble hearing him.
The Systems would trade salvos as the volume controls were
brought up as high as they could go, the screaming-guitars-from-Hell
power chords on one side matched by the subterranean grease-gun
blasts of the 32-foot reed stops on the other. As both recordings piled
into the thick of things, the combatants would turn to their long thin
frequency equalizers and shove all channels up to full blast like Mr.
Spock beaming a live antimatter bomb into Deep Space. Finally the
filters would be thrown off and the loudness switches on, and the
speakers would distort and crackle with strain as huge wattages
pulsed through their magnet coils. Sometimes Klein would use
Bach's "Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor," and at the end of each
phrase the bass line would plunge back down home to that old low
C, and Klein's sub-woofers would pick up the temblor of the 64-foot
pipes and magnify it until he could watch the naked speaker cones
thrash away at in the air. This particular note happened to be the
natural resonating frequency of the main hallways, which were cut
into 64-foot, 3-inch halves by the fire doors (Klein and I measured
one while drunk), and therefore the resonant frequency of every
other hail in every other wing of all the towers of the Plex, and so at
these moments everything in the world would vibrate at sixteen
cycles per second; beds would tremble, large objects would float off
the edges of tables, and tables and chairs themselves would buzz
around the rooms of their own volition. The occasional wandering
bat who might be in the hall would take off in random flight, his
sensors jammed by the noise, beating his wings against the standing
waves in the corridor in an effort to escape.
The Resident Assistant, or RA, was a reclusive Social Work
major who, intuitively knowing she was never going to get a job,
spent her time locked in her little room testing perfumes and
watching MTV under a set of headphones. She could not possibly
help.
That made it my responsibility. I lived on EO7S that year as
faculty-in-residence. I had just obtained my Ph.D. from Ohio State in
an interdisciplinary field called Remote Sensing, and was a brand-
shiny-new associate professor at the Big U.
Now, at the little southern black college where I went to school,
we had no megadorms. We were cool at the right times and
academic at the right times and we had neither Kleins nor Fenricks.
Boston University, where I did my Master's, had pulled through its
crisis when I got there; most students had no time for sonic war, and
the rest vented their humors in the city, not in the dorms. Ohio State
was nicely spread out, and I lived in an apartment complex where
noisy shit-for-brains undergrads were even less welcome than
tweedy black bachelors. I just did not know what to make of Klein
and Fenrick; I did not handle them well at all. As a matter of fact,
most of my time at the Big U was spent observing and talking, and
very little doing, and I may bear some of the blame.
This is a history, in that it intends to describe what happened
and suggest why. It is a work of the imagination in that by writing it
I hope to purge the Big U from my system, and with it all my
bitterness and contempt. I may have fooled around with a few facts.
But I served as witness until as close to the end as anyone could
have, and I knew enough of the major actors to learn about what I
didn't witness, and so there is not so much art in this as to make it
irrelevant. What you are about to read is not an aberration: it can
happen in your local university too. The Big U, simply, was a few
years ahead of the rest.
--------------------
---First Semester---
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--------------------
--September--
On back-to-school day, Sarah Jane Johnson and Casimir Radon
waited, for a while, in line together. At the time they did not know
each other. Sarah had just found that she had no place to live, and
was suffering that tense and lonely feeling that sets in when you
have no place to hide. Casimir was just discovering that American
Megaversity was a terrible place, and was not happy either.
After they had worked their way down the hail and into the
office of the Dean of the College of Sciences and Humanities, they
sat down next to each other on the scratchy Daygb orange chairs
below the Julian Didius III Memorial Window. The sunlight strained
in greyly over their shoulders, and occasionally they turned to look
at the scene outside.
Below them on one of the Parkway off-ramps a rented truck
from Maryland had tried to pass under a low bridge, its student
driver forgetting that he was in a truck and not his Trans-Am. Upon
impact, the steel molding that fastened the truck's top to its sides had
wrapped itself around the frame of a green highway sign bolted to
the bridge. Now the sign, which read:
AMERICAN MEGAVERSITY
VISITOR PARKING
SPORTS EVENTS
EXIT 500 FT.
was suspended in the air at the end of a long strip of truck that
had been peeled up and aside.
A small crowd students, apparently finished with all their line-
waiting, stood on the bridge and beside the ramp, throwing Frisbees
and debris into the torn-open back of the truck, where its renters
lounged in sofas and recliners and drank beer, and threw the
projectiles back. Sarah thought it was idiotic, and Casimir couldn't
understand it at all.
Out in the hallway, people behind them in the line were being
verbally abused by an old derelict who had penetrated the Plex
security system. "The only degree you kids deserve is the third
degree!" he shouted, waving his arms and staggering in place. He
wore a ratty tweed jacket whose elbow patches flapped like vestigial
wings, and he drank in turns from a bottle of Happy's vodka and a
Schlitz tall-boy which he kept holstered in his pockets. He had the
full attention of the students, who were understandably bored, and
most of them laughed and tried to think of provocative remarks.
As the drunk was wading toward them, one asked another how
her summer had been. "What about it?" asked the derelict. "Fiscal
conservatism? Fine in theory! Tough, though! You have to be tough
and humane together, you see, the two opposites must unite in one
great leader! Can't be a damn dictator like S. S. Krupp!"
This brought cheers and laughter from the upperclassmen, who
had just decided the drunk was a cool guy. Septimius Severus
Krupp, the President of American Megaversity, was not popular.
"Jesus Christ!" he continued through the laughter, "What the hell are
they teaching you savages these days? You need a spanking! No
more circuses. Maybe a dictator is just what you need! Alcibiades!
Pompilius Numa! They'd straighten things out good and fast."
Sarah knew the man. He liked to break into classes at the Big U
and lecture the professors, who usually were at a loss as to how to
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deal with him. His name was Bert Nix. He had taken quite a shine to
Sarah: for her part, she did not know whether or not to be scared of
him. During the preceding spring's student government compaign,
Bert Nix had posed with Sarah for a campaign photo which had then
appeared on posters all over the Plex. This was just the kind of thing
that Megaversity students regarded as a sign of greatness, so she had
won, despite progressive political ideas which, as it turned out,
nobody was even aware of. This was all hard for Sarah to believe.
She felt that Bert Nix had been elected President, not the woman he
had appeared with on the campaign poster, and she felt obliged to
listen to him even when he simply jabbered for hours on end. He was
a ntce lunatic, but he was adrift in the Bert Nix universe, and that
stirred deep fears in Sarah's soul.
Casimir paid little attention to the drunk and a great deal to
Sarah. He could not help it, because she was the first nice-seeming
person, concept or thing he had found in his six hours at the Big U.
During the ten years he had spent saving up money to attend this
school, Casimir had kept himself sane by imagining it.
Unfortunately, he had imagined quiet talks over brunch with old
professors, profound discussions in the bathrooms, and dazzling,
sensitive people everywhere just waiting to make new friends. What
he had found, of course, was American Megaversity. There was only
one explanation for this atmosphere that he was willing to believe:
that these people were civilized, and that for amusement they
were acting out a parody of the squalor of high school life, which
parody Casimir had been too slow to get so far. The obvious
explanation—that it was really this way—was so horrible that it had
not even entered his mind.
When he saw the photo of her on the back page of the back-to-
school edition of the Monoplex Monitor, and read the caption
identifying her as Sarah Jane Johnson, Student Government
President, he made the most loutish double take between her and the
photograph. He knew that she knew that he now knew who she was,
and that was no way to start a passionate love affair. All he could do
was to make a big show of reading about her in the Monitor, and
wait for her to make the first move. He nodded thoughtfully at the
botched quotations and oversimplifications in the article.
Sarah was aware of this; she had watched him page slowly and
intensely through the paper, waiting with mild dread for him to get
to the back page, see the picture and say something embarrassing.
Instead—even more embarrassing
—he actually read the article, and before he reached the bottom
of the page, the student ahead of Sarah stomped out and she found
herself impaled on the azure gaze of the chief bureaucrat of the
College of Sciences and Humanities. "How," said Mrs. Santucci
crisply, "may I help you?"
Mrs. Santucci was polite. Her determination to be decent, and to
make all things decent, was like that of all the Iranian Revolutionary
Guards combined. Her policy of no-first-use meant that as long as
we were objective and polite, any conversation would slide
pleasantly down greased iron rails into a pit of despair. Any first
strike by us, any remarks deemed improper by this grandmother of
twenty-six and player of two dozen simultaneous bingo cards, would
bring down massive retaliation. Sarah knew her. She arose primly
and moved to the front chair of the line to look across a barren desk
at Mrs. Santucci.
"I'm a senior in this college. I was lucky enough to get an out-
of-Plex apartment for this fall. When I got there today I found that
the entire block of buildings had been shut down for eight months by
the Board of Health. I went to Housing. Upon reaching the head of
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file:///F|/rah/Neal%20Stephenson/Stephenson,%20Neal%20-%20Big%20U,%20The\.txtTheBigUByNealStephenson---------------------------TheGoBigRedFan---------------------------TheGoBigRedFanwasJohnWesleyFenrick's,andwhenventilatinghisSystemitthrobbedandcreptalongthefloorwitharhythmicchunka-chunka-chunk.Fenr...

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