Crooked Little Vein

I looked at Zack. “The hell?”

He pointed ahead, smiling proudly. Every cubicle I looked in had a similar arrangement. Some of them replaced girls with boys. A few had boys dressed as girls. One had a woman in her late sixties. The only cubicle with two people in it featured a pair of Japanese girls doing something just frighteningly hideous with a bucket of baby eels. Every last one of them was performing sex acts in front of a dedicated camera.

We went through the next set of heavy double doors, into a corridor.

“What did I just see, Zack?”

“One part of my business. Cool, no?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know what I just saw.”

“Okay. You go to one of my Web sites. The Web site connects to the laptops in the cubes. The girl with the laptop performs to the camera. The camera connects to the Net. The video from the cam shoots down the Net to the Web site. You see the girl in the cube. The whole thing’s on a ten-second delay. The signal basically wraps around the world before it comes to your computer. Legal reasons, I’m not going into it. You pay for the video by credit card, I sanitize the sale in Russia, we’re all good.”

“But…Why so many? Jesus Christ, man, why the eels?”

Zack giggled. “Because everyone has a different kink, man. The more Web sites with unique content I provide, the more customers I get. Not everyone gets off on a softcore murder mystery on Skinemax, you know? And once the infrastructure was down, adding new sites was almost costless.”

“Kinda fringe-y, though, surely? I mean, girls with eels in their…Is there a lot of call for that?”

“Think of it as exploded television. Every station has at least one show you want to see, right? Well, on my network, your favorite show is on all the time. Everyone’s favorite show is on all the time, whenever you want to watch it. Add up all the viewers on my network, and I have a bigger audience than HBO. This ain’t fringe anymore, friend. If you define the mainstream as that which most people want to watch, then I’m as mainstream as it gets.”

“Exploded television.”

“Exactly. Exploded television. I am the ultra cable company. This is the way of the future. Anything you want, on a computer screen, whenever you want it, through a subscription or a micropayment of a few bucks through your credit card. That eel thing? For a buck a time you can download the day’s highlights to your iPod and watch it while you’re in the can. Huge in Japan. And it pays for all kinds of interesting stuff.”

“Whoa. Hold up.” I wanted a minute to catch up with this. “You’ve got like fifty people in wired-up video Internet sex boxes out there…and that’s not the whole thing?”

“It’s not even the whole of the cubicle farm. We’ve got another hundred people upstairs.”

“Yeah, I get that you have a porn army in here. But you’re leading me to believe that this isn’t all about you getting richer than God. Because if you’re not bullshitting me then you have got to be richer than God.”

Zack opened the nearest door and gestured for me to go in. “Oh, hell, yeah. I could buy Paris Hilton and sell her body to medical science while she was still alive if I wanted to. And, believe me, there are times I’ve considered it. In here.”

The door led only to a small gray cell with another door, much heavier, on the opposite wall. This one had a keypad lock. Zack made a sheepish face as he shielded the keypad with his body to input the number code that popped the door. And pop it did, with a hiss: hermetically sealed.

It opened on what I can only describe as Nerd Mission Control. Rows of desks with flat computer screens and keyboards, racks of machinery on the walls, cables carpeting the floor like a mass of snakes. Three guys and two girls who all looked like they popped out of the same pod as Zack, uniform in bad T-shirts and baggy jeans, sat among the screens, moving from desk to desk, tapping or mouse-clicking the occasional command.

“This,” said Zack with pride, “is what I’m talking about.”

“Looks like you could launch a space rocket from here.”

“Ha!” Zack liked that. “Elon Musk only wishes he had a setup this sweet.”

“Who?”

“The guy who sold PayPal to eBay for one point five billion. He used the money to create his own space-launch company.”

“A guy from the Internet has his own space rockets now?”

“Yeah, welcome to the late twentieth century there, Mike.”

“Funny. So if you’re not launching the next probe to Mars in here…”

Zack sat down at one of the workstations, calling up a window with a sweep of its mouse, peering intently at the string of numbers it coughed up for him. “Do you even know why people want to go to Mars? I don’t get it. There’s nothing there except probably some bacteria, if we go up to look at the bacteria then the bacteria we carry will kill it and therefore we’ve made life on Mars extinct, we can’t learn shit from the geology because the gravity isn’t the same and gravity commands geology and—”

“Zack.”