Read Online M. T. Anderson by Feed - Free Book Online

shirt, and besides that she was smiling, and really excited for her idea.
    For a second we said hello and just laughed about all of the stupid things people were buying and then Violet, she pointed out that, regarding legs to stand on, I didn’t have very much of one, because I was wheeling around a wheelbarrow full of a giant hot cross bun from Bun in a Barrow.
    I said, “Yum, yum, yum.”
    She was like, “You ready?”
    I asked her what the idea was.
    She said, “Look around you.” I did. It was the mall. She said, “Listen to me.” I listened. She said, “I was sitting at the feed doctor’s a few days ago, and I started to think about things. Okay. All right. Everything we do gets thrown into a big calculation. Like they’re watching us right now. They can tell where you’re looking. They want to know what you want.”
    “It’s a mall,” I said.
    “They’re also waiting to make you want things. Everything we’ve grown up with — the stories on the feed, the games, all of that — it’s all streamlining our personalities so we’re easier to sell to. I mean, they do these demographic studies that divide everyone up into a few personality types, and then you get ads based on what you’re supposedly like. They try to figure out who you are, and to make you conform to one of their types for easy marketing. It’s like a spiral: They keep making everything more basic so it will appeal to everyone. And gradually, everyone gets used to everything being basic, so we get less and less varied as people, more simple. So the corps make everything even simpler. And it goes on and on.”
    This was the kind of thing people talked about a lot, like, parents were going on about how toys were stupid now, when they used to be good, and how everything on the feed had its price, and okay, it might be true, but it’s also boring, so I was like, “Yeah. Okay. That’s the feed. So what?”
    “This is my project.”
    “Is . . . ?”
    She smiled and put her finger inside the collar of my shirt. “Listen,” she said. “What I’m doing, what I’ve been doing over the feed for the last two days, is trying to create a customer profile that’s so screwed, no one can market to it. I’m not going to let them catalog me. I’m going to become invisible.”
    I stared at her for a minute. She ran her finger along the edge of my collar, so her nail touched the skin of my throat. I waited for an explanation. She didn’t tell me any more, but she said to come with her, and she grabbed one of the nodules on my shirt — it was one of those nodule shirts — and she led me toward Bebrekker & Karl.
    We went into the store, and immediately our feeds were all completely Bebrekker & Karl. We were bannered with all this crazy high-tech fun stuff they sold there. Then a guy walked up to us and said could he help us. I said I didn’t know. But Violet was like, “Sure. Do you have those big searchlights? I mean, the really strong ones?”
    “Yeah,” he said. “We have . . . yeah. We have those.” He went over to some rack, and he took these big searchlights off the rack. He showed us some different models. The feeds had specs. They showed us the specs while he talked.
    When he went into the back to get another, cheaper searchlight, I said to Violet, “What next?”
    She whispered, “Complicating. Resisting.”
    Bebrekker & Karl were bannering us big. It was,
We’ve streamlined the Tesla coil for personal use — you can even wear it in your hair! With these new, da da da,
and
Relax, yawn, and slump! While our greased cybermassage beads travel up and down your back! Guaranteed to make you
etc., like that.
    I was like, “Okay, huh?” but the guy came back and he had another searchlight.
    He told us, “You can see shit real good with this one? I have one of these on my upcar. It’s sometimes like — whoa, really — whoa. There was this one time? And I was flying along at night and I shined the light down at the ground, to look