Rewired_ The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology - James Patrick Kelly [11]
His mother sighed, defeated. “Are you eating properly, Lyle? You look peaked.”
Lyle lifted his calf muscle into camera range. “Look at this leg! Does that look like the gastrocnemius of a weak and sickly person?”
“Could you come up to the condo and have a decent meal with me sometime?”
Lyle blinked. “When?”
“Wednesday, maybe? We could have pork chops.”
“Maybe, Mom. Probably. I’ll have to check. I’ll get back to you, okay? Bye.” Lyle hung up.
Hooking the mediator’s cable to the primitive settop box was a problem, but Lyle was not one to be stymied by a merely mechanical challenge. The enamel job had to wait as he resorted to miniclamps and a cable cutter. It was a handy thing that working with modern brake cabling had taught him how to splice fiber optics.
When the settop box finally came online, its array of services was a joke. Any decent modern mediator could navigate through vast information spaces, but the settop box offered nothing but “channels.” Lyle had forgotten that you could even obtain old fashioned “channels” from the city fiber-feed in Chattanooga. But these channels were government-sponsored media, and the government was always quite a ways behind the curve in network development. Chattanooga’s huge fiber-bandwidth still carried the ancient government-mandated “public access channels,” spooling away in their technically fossilized obscurity, far below the usual gaudy carnival of popular virching, infobahnage, demo-splintered comboards, public-service rants, mudtrufflage, remsnorkeling, and commercials.
The little settop box accessed nothing but political channels. Three of them: Legislative, Judicial, and Executive. And that was the sum total, apparently. A settop box that offered nothing but NAFTA political coverage. On the Legislative Channel there was some kind of parliamentary debate on proper land use in Manitoba. On the Judicial Channel, a lawyer was haranguing judges about the stock market for air-pollution rights. On the Executive Channel, a big crowd of hicks were idly standing around on windblown tarmac somewhere in Louisiana waiting for something to happen.
The box didn’t offer any glimpse of politics in Europe or the Sphere or the South. There were no hotspots or pips or index tagging. You couldn’t look stuff up or annotate it — you just had to passively watch whatever the channel’s masters chose to show you, whenever they chose to show it. This media setup was so insultingly lame and halt and primitive that it was almost perversely interesting. Kind of like peering through keyholes.
Lyle left the box on the Executive Channel, because it looked conceivable that something might actually happen there. It had swiftly become clear to him that the intolerably monotonous fodder on the other two channels was about as exciting as those channels ever got. Lyle retreated to his workbench and got back to enamel work.
At length, the President of NAFTA arrived and decamped from his helicopter on the tarmac in Louisiana. A swarm of presidential bodyguards materialized out of the expectant crowd, looking simultaneously extremely busy and icily imperturbable.
Suddenly a line of text flickered up at the bottom of the screen. The text was set in a very old-fashioned computer font, chalk-white letters with little visible jagged pixel-edges “Look at him hunting for that camera mark,” the subtitle read as it scrolled across the screen. “Why wasn’t he briefed properly? He looks like a stray dog!”
The President meandered amiably across the sun-blistered tarmac, gazing from side to side, and then stopped briefly to shake the eager outstretched hand of a local politician. “That must have hurt,” commented the text. “That Cajun dolt is poison in the polls.” The President chatted amiably with the local politician and an elderly harridan in a purple dress who seemed to be the man’s wife. “Get him away from those losers!” raged the subtitle. “Get the Man up to the podium, for the love of Mike! Where’s the Chief of Staff? Doped up on so-called smart drugs as usual? Get with your