The Internet—what Dodge used to call the Miasma—had just gone completely wrong. Down to the molecular level it was still a hippie grad student project. Like a geodesic dome that a bunch of flower children had assembled from scrap lumber on ground infested with termites and carpenter ants.

He went into the building musing on the weird role that his society had picked out for him as a guy who had built, or caused to be built, an imaginary world.

Corvallis Kawasaki

But why this particular something? He construed it as black and yellow danger stripes, on-the-fritz TV sets, etc., but that was only because he was a white guy of a certain age from Iowa. A Maori midwife or a gay Roman centurion or an eleventh-century Shinto Buddhist, in the grip of the same underlying neurological phenomenon, would fill in the “no

more likely what edit stream he subscribed to and what particular flavor of post-reality it was pumping into his mind.

Richard, who was ruddy and freckle prone, had for decades been psyching himself up for a climactic battle with melanoma, which, according to dark prophecies uttered by multiple dermatologists, loomed as a near certainty in his future. Early on he had performed his monthly skin checks with anxiety bordering on clinical paranoia. But then years had f

become conscious and extracted his soul from chaos,

Direct, unfiltered exposure to said flumes—the torrent of porn, propaganda, and death threats, 99.9 percent of which were algorithmically generated and never actually seen by human eyes—was relegated to a combination of AIs and Third World eyeball farms, which was to say huge warehouses in hot places where people sat on benches or milled around gaz

But he could remember being eighteen years old, driving all over the western United States and Canada in various beat-up vehicles, and being overtaken every afternoon by a need for sleep so intense it was almost painful.