THE NATURAL STRANGER :: BOOK 1, "THE AEON" :: CHAPTER 12 EPISODE 1

We call the program source "bank" in Jersey; idealists of the Barry stripe cling to the term "library" but that, Egg, implies freedom of both economy and intellect... which ain't applicable, here. No choice, though plenty of distractions... movies and sitcoms, soap opera and QXR-type nature documentaries. Even skin flicks a touch tone phone away... the very walking fingers to vex Reverend Wildmon, Tom Neptune and all God's self-anointed agents of virtue... speaking of filthy pictures, I ask Tess in Dorado's lounge, "what do the Russians really want? Liberty? Security."

He ponders, great white head shaking like a mop, infested by great white moths. "Both! And why not, also... bananas?"

Anyway saints and sinners stand equal before the FCC; since Quad never allows its ghosts to break out of their wiry Panoptica, we're prepared to argue that content's beyond the agency's legislative reach. The FCC attorney on Quad's case was a Nixon holdover, a colleague of Evan Wright, of Charles, of Walter Billows. By keeping his head down during Jimi Carter's lapinium, he'd retained his job... now that Jimi's appointees are departing (having failed to nationalize the airwaves, as Tom Wendell feared, four years ago) it's off to the casino where the slot machines of law are generous as the defective one armed bandits in Bobby's lobby. "Try not to pressure for too much too soon," Evan had advised just before our first appointment last February, "it's not only the public we're up against... it's the phone company and the networks. Where the Man Upstairs got his leg up! Don't think because of Dallas, NBC news and Lou Grant he's going to piss over his master's voice without very good cause."

"At least not until he can find better radar suppliers," Sopher chuckles.

So in we go to meet the Feds. We're in this little hobbity hole on the west shore of Maryland, Evan's pissed. "Burroughs has its corporate jet. Honeywell has jets..." So does Paul McCartney, I think, or did he only sing about one?

"How do you know who has jets?" I ask Evan and he looks like a man caught sucking lemons at the Mermaid Room.

"They jewed us out of IRS interest-checking hardware, they can afford jets. IBM has a whole goddam Air Force and they got the US Geological Survey to do moon maps out of Flagstaff... hell, Evie, you wanted that more than I did!" See what I mean, Arizona never stops. Still, once we're talking to the G-Men I'm glad Evan's on our side... even simple questions sound grave and learned... penetrating bureaucratic fog, like curses from the thin lips of nuns. His first question to me, hearing I plan to flood Daimon with ice... and maybe sink a Max beneath... was "how much fucking insurance do we carry on the building?"

"What you propose makes sense," their lawyers lawyerize, "but over the long-term. For the time being, we've done a lot of arm twisting just to standardize protocols..."

"With metal crap that ought to be in people's teeth, not running out of their TVs," Evan interrupts. "Copper transmits what... five million baud (industry speak for bits per second, and the font of bad jokes from clackety-toothed Brits), six million tops? We've projections of one trillion baud fiber optic... that my friend, is one hundred years' worth of Wall Street fucking Journals per second. Get it? When modem tech catches up, we're going to melt copper down for teakettles."

"Since Lentex is a modem provider, I just thought you should know," says the Federal lawyer.

"Look, the Guggenheims... or whomever runs copper these days... trusted Jimmy Carter, made a bad business decision and now they're going to get screwed. What's wrong with that?"

The lawyer cleared his throat. "Well the administration has promised Commissioners who won't stand in the way of the free market, but I have to say you people are the only element capable of uniting the networks, cable companies and Ma Bell. To blow you out of the water. How, for example, do you intend to finance this scheme."

Wilson Leonard Junior has come down with us, representing Tom, who's off somewhere... Ankara, Alaska?... and he smiles, six chins jiggling, and says "Pete, you just let us take care of that." The beard Republic's sent nods... neither Uli, Orr nor anybody from Datorium has come, on Evan's counsel... we don't want to give these fellows heart attacks, not yet. Kharragh, of course, knows all about the meeting before I brief Fabian - his antennae have antennae.

Off that session, by the way, I get a pile of free games Datorium's beta testing. Paul hates Foodchain but Bud grooves on it - the graphics aren't much better than Atari's on "Space Invaders" but it's way more colorful... yellow-oranges and lavenders, even the browns are wet, and it pushes the envelope on taste, like Lenny Bruce used to do during the sixties. Little animals frolick, fight, some actually seem to fuck... Fabian says penetration's all in the imagination. Dirty little minds filling the gaps in baud, and the devoured pop between predators' teeth with a visual explosion of blood and bone, sprinkling little tombstones to clutter up the way with little epitaphs from Mao, Clausewitz and Spengler. "History's war, all else is literature" or "Life, if it would be great, must be hard".

Just the ticket to traumatize kiddies, professional parent-surrogates believe (or maybe prepare them for real life that gets stranger as it's getting meaner). I find myself wondering whether I'd ever told Kharragh about tombstones that really fell out the back of a Suelan truck, squashing some poor family in their Volkswagen. That white-suited, walking Uncertainty Principle Uli winches out cheap thrills from all his friends, then has them incorporated by his bizarre assemblage of brains into game cartridges. How many know Dogs and Dominoes owes its soul to game show huckster Dennis DeFranco... and what ever did happen to Libby Knoop, her prizes and the taxes...

A friend I had once, yes I do wonder what happened to her... a simple OATMEAL test reveals only that she's moved, died, maybe changed her name. Less than a decade after Nolan Bushnell installed his first Pong! in a bar out in California, games take in twice the swag of all Hollywood combined. Too little time for friends...

Bud gives Foodchain an A minus, deducting only for the violence of the graphics. "It's a little... well, sinister?... maybe they ought to put a label on this stuff like movies? G for little kids, PG, I'd put an R on this, restricted under oh... not thirteen... ten? At least nine, Evie, eight?"

Fabian says they're looking for a way to get game trailers into the arcades, like movies. If Wildmon and Neptune get their way with the networks and move against games, how do you slap ratings on a trailer?

Too much Utah cork to plug those bullet holes!

The best of the rest's a cops and dealers' chase called "Bust", busy... busy and familiar... and full of bugs. After having to REstart> six times, Bud throws it aside even though the suave blond cop Max Penalty's cool in a sort of musclebound way.

Who, I ask, be the spiders, who the flies?

Of such questions are the meaning of why we bother to get up in the morning constituted.