Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

Pop Apocalypse: A Possible Satire
Pop Apocalypse: A Possible Satire
Pop Apocalypse: A Possible Satire
Ebook325 pages4 hours

Pop Apocalypse: A Possible Satire

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

3.5/5

()

Read preview

About this ebook

The United States and its Freedom Coalition allies are conducting serial invasions across the globe, including an attack on the anti-capitalist rebels of Northern California. The Middle East—now a single consumerist Caliphate led by Lebanese pop singer Caliph Fred—is in an uproar after an attack on the al-Aqsa Mosque gets televised on the Holy Land Channel.

The world is on the brink of a total radioactive, no-survivors war, and human­kind's last hope is Eliot R. Vanderthorpe, Jr., celebrity heir, debauched party animal, and Elvis impersonation scholar. But Eliot's got his own problems. His evangelical dad is breeding red heifers in anticipation of the Rapture. Eliot's dissertation is in the toilet. And he has a doppelgänger. An evil doppelgänger.

LanguageEnglish
PublisherHarperCollins
Release dateMay 12, 2009
ISBN9780061868481
Pop Apocalypse: A Possible Satire
Author

Lee Konstantinou

Lee Konstantinou fled the corporate world to join a doctoral program in the English department at Stanford University. Born in New York City, he now lives in San Francisco.

Related to Pop Apocalypse

Related ebooks

General Fiction For You

View More

Related articles

Reviews for Pop Apocalypse

Rating: 3.3214286 out of 5 stars
3.5/5

14 ratings2 reviews

What did you think?

Tap to rate

Review must be at least 10 words

  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    It’s the near future. Money has been replaced by Reputation, which calculates a person’s net worth based on their popularity. The Christians are fighting the Muslims, everyone’s got a camera trying to record the next big thing and the world is about to come to an end.Perhaps the author has a point with his “possible satire” qualifier in the title.Lee Konstantinu looked into his crystal ball and pulled out “Pop Apocalypse: A Possible Satire.” The book follows Eliot R. Vandethorpe, a celebrity heir, from his ethical epiphany (he shouldn’t be having sex with passed-out teenagers on camera) all the way to his preventing Armageddon. Oh, and there’s a love story, too.Everyone seems to be rooting for Armageddon, which in this reality involves a dispute between the Freedom Coalition (basically the American Empire) and the Caliphate (a Muslim-only version of the United Nations). The Armageddon looks to be very profitable for the Vandethorpe family, owners of a corporation that is essentially the facilitator of an omniscient Big Brother (in the Orwellian sense).There really is far too much back-story and plot to squish into one review, so a summation will have to do. Essentially the story is the not-to-distant future, but with everyone’s attention focused oxymoronically both upon celebrities and themselves, to the exclusion of almost everything else.The book was fairly enjoyable on the whole, though the satire unfortunately devolves into camp a few times throughout the novel. A few episodes in particular draw heavily upon the “I, Robot” school of engaging the audience.But perhaps that’s being a bit harsh; after all, satire is but a mirror placed against our culture. Surely the best – or at least, the easiest – should be as close to indistinguishable from reality as possible.“Pop Apocalypse” turns out to be what most of us wished “Idiocracy” was before we had the misfortune to watch it. Most of the people I spoke to before seeing “Idiocracy” expected it to be the comeuppance of the dumbing-down of American culture. What we got were sophomoric jokes that, if satiric, were so well-executed no one seemed to be able to tell.Don’t get me wrong. I enjoy any artistic attempt to invigorate culture and attempt to shake it from its intellectual slumber. I just prefer it when the creators actually attempt something beyond the blindingly obvious and childishly simplistic. Though modern dystopian futures often sink to the lowest common denominator (even while mocking it), luckily for us Konstantinu manages to keep his wits about him throughout the book.While I certainly don’t think “Pop Apocalypse” is intended as a prognostication of what is to come, the novel nonetheless offers a biting view at modern society. Not only do wars – invasions, as they’re known in this time – have their own theme music, but missions such as Operation Muscles in Brussels (the invasion of Belgium, Luxemburg and the Netherlands) have copyrighted and trademarked everything from the name to video footage of the event.This book is the perfect companion for those who stop every once in a while during the day and just gaze in wonderment at something everyone else takes for granted. Perhaps you’re wandering through the bookstore and see Kanye West (a self-described “non-reader”) listed as the co-author of a sub-100-page book. Maybe you’re struck dumb by the interior set of doors leading into the CUB – which have pull handles on both sides of the door, even though one side obviously requires a push.If you sometimes pause in wonderment at the absurdities of everyday life, this is the book for you. It’s always nice to visit a place a little crazier than the one where you live.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I have narrow tolerances for if-this-goes-on satire, because mostly if this goes on I think we’re going to drown and/or starve, and for the first half of this book I thought that the over-the-top world of intellectual property claims (perpetrators of a terrorist act own the rights to it, make lots of money), capitalism (the Freedom Coalition invades places, including Berkeley, to make them safe for Milton Friedman official ideology with crony capitalism reality), and evangelical Christian end-times theology (the people in power in the US think they can win the apocalypse) was not going to do it for me at all. But the satire grew on me, and while I don’t think there’s any particular lesson in it on the dangers of extreme IP rights, extreme capitalism/industry capture, or extreme piety, I did ultimately enjoy the adventures of Eliot Vanderthorpe, wayward scion of the country’s most powerful family, drawn through a combination of stupidity and growing moral uncertainty into a plot that just might trigger global thermonuclear war.

Book preview

Pop Apocalypse - Lee Konstantinou

PROLOGUE

CALL TO PRAYER

FROM THE NEWLY BUILT MINARET of the al-Aqsa Mosque, the mu’azzin shouts the noontime call to prayer, sponsored today by the Caliph Fred Entertainment Group.

Outside the wall of the Old City, Jerusalem’s lunchtime crowds compete with electric mopeds for space on narrow lanes. Vans bring in Ethiopian and Filipino laborers from distant worker barracks to stations by the Lions’ Gate. Eastward, smoke rises from Arab ghettos and from inside the heart of the Riot Zone, inside a Palestine gripped by a Fourth or, depending on which pundits you believe, Fifth Intifada.

Today’s Terror Forecast has predicted a day of low-to-moderate unrest for East Jerusalem with mild political pressure moving inward from the west. Offprints of the Jerusalem Post jam defabricator bins and proclaim in three-inch headlines that some new atrocity has been committed somewhere against someone. Have no doubt: many someones are furious about this outrageous crime. Pundits across the global mediasphere are certain that the Situation could erupt into a veritable Crisis at any moment, if not a total Catastrophe. Everything is, in other words, more or less normal here.

The mu’azzin repeats his phrase, lengthens and elaborates it. His voice, amplified by loudspeakers, adds a spiritual humidity to the summer’s drier, more disputative heat.

In Western Wall Plaza, Hasidim consult outmoded mobile phones, download news from the mediasphere, and loudly debate the Situation among themselves in Hebrew. American evangelicals dressed in Hawaiian shirts and khaki shorts, pretty blouses and flowery skirts, tour the courtyard of the mosque, recently reopened to non-Muslims after the previous Crisis resolved itself. The Christians, awed at the glimmering golden Dome of the Rock, take video with palmcams, documenting this climax to their Holy Land vacation package tour.

From the mu’azzin’s vantage point atop the new minaret, a gift of the Caliph, the Christians are tiny and insignificant. Clustered together, they record everything, pointing cyclopean palmcam eyes at the sky, uploading images wirelessly onto their mediasphere travelogues for friends, family, and coreligionists. They seem, the mu’azzin notices, very interested in the sky.

A pale blue dot cuts a parabola across the sky’s deeper blue. When the dot reaches the apex of its arc, it spreads what look like wings. The dot—which now looks like a man with wings, what an angel might look like if angels still visited the earth—is coming fast. Something is about to happen. There are a series of pops, explosions. The mu’azzin adjusts the brown skullcap on his hairless head. The Hasidim turn away from their debate. The evangelicals gasp and cheer, then pause expectantly.

And this is how the end begins.

PART I

THE TERROR FORECAST

ELIOT R. VANDERTHORPE, JR., HAS a curious revelation.

It hits him like a cartoon anvil during a self-consciously hip, sincerely debauched party—raging now into its second week—in the executive suite of Barcelona’s Hotel Internacional. Something doesn’t sit right with Eliot as he watches his friend William Pearson, the British prime minister’s son, take off his plaid boxer shorts and climb onto the king-sized bed. William is wearing a puffy white tuxedo shirt and is kneeling on the mattress, his lower body exposed, penis engorged. Two girls, a blonde and a brunette, lie on either side of him. They had until recently been wearing scanty party dresses. Now they’re zoned out. You might say passed out.

A man with a palmcam records William and the girls while another man wearing mediashades orchestrates their action. These two, the videographer and the director, work for the show That’s So Fucked Up, which streams every evening on the popular Sex, Lies, and Celebrities Channel. A curt wave of the director’s hand indicates that the time has come for Eliot to strip off his tux and join in the fun.

At that moment some long-forgotten inner gear begins to move within Eliot.

We’re exploiting these girls, Eliot says. We shouldn’t have sex with them.

William turns to Eliot. Wha? Have the drugs finally gotten to you, dude?

True, hallucinogens, amphetamines, entactogens, and a number of other substances whose pharmacological effects have yet to be fully mapped have all taken turns blasting Eliot’s brain over the last few weeks, so this strange feeling of ethical revulsion might be the byproduct of an unforeseen drug interaction. And yet.

No, man, I think I may have achieved a legitimate ethical realization.

Does that mean I’ve gotta, like, fuck both these birds by myself?

We’re on a tight schedule here, the director says. We’re streaming for the East Coast markets in two hours. So could you please take your ethical qualms outside? Just, well, out there.

The door to William’s bedroom is open. A private bodyguard stands watch, smoking and waiting for the orgy to begin. Music pulses in from the main dance floor. Eliot feels the beat.

Well, no, Eliot says. I can’t take my qualms outside. He deepens his voice to make it resonate and feels oddly noble as he speaks. And I’m not going to participate in this.

What the hell has gotten into you, Eliot? William says.

This is wrong. These girls don’t even speak English.

They spoke through their actions. Look, they’re on the bed.

"They’re passed out on the bed."

"We were making out before. And they signed release forms to appear on That’s So Fucked Up."

Man, William—that’s, like, so totally beside the point.

William’s erection slackens slightly at the labor of thought. They want this. We’ll give their Reputations a huge boost on the market.

QED.

With every philosophical angle now satisfyingly covered, William turns back to the blonde girl, begins kissing her unresponsive lips in an effort to reinvigorate his deflated penis. The videographer moves in closer to the action.

In his hyperconscious state, Eliot becomes aware that he is holding a champagne bottle. I’m holding a giant bottle of Dom Pérignon, he thinks. The container of prestige cuvée seems suddenly more like a bludgeon than a bottle.

Eliot jumps on the bed. His vintage ’00s-era Converse All Star high-tops sink into the mattress, but Eliot manages to keep his balance. William doesn’t so much react to the bottle clocking him on the head as simply decide to give up on sex for the night and take a nap. The next blow breaks the videographer’s palmcam into three pieces. The director, eyes wide, instinctively shouts Cut! and runs away.

The bodyguard approaches cautiously, probably convinced that Eliot has had an amphetamine-fueled psychotic break. Perhaps he has. The bodyguard calls for backup on his communications rig, which sprouts from his left ear like tiny calla lilies. The girls, Eliot thinks. I have to save the girls. But he can’t carry both of them, so he has to choose. Eliot picks the blonde who’d been making out with him earlier, figuring that if she wakes up soon she might even consensually sleep with him. He thinks her name is Sonya.

Sonya is unexpectedly light. If not for his amphetamine high, Eliot imagines, he might not be able to simultaneously carry the blonde and fight the bodyguard. But he is and somehow he does. When the guard gets near the bed, Eliot kicks out his leg. The kick misses but the bodyguard takes a step back to dodge the blow, slips on a fragment of the videographer’s palmcam, and falls on his ass. Holding Sonya in a fireman’s carry, Eliot flees the bedroom.

Eliot shoves his way through dancing drugged-out revelers. The electronic backbeat of party music quickens his pulse. The bodyguard follows from William’s bedroom and is joined by two others, all three dressed in matching black outfits featuring private security logos on red armbands. One fires his stun gun. Its projectile claw misses Eliot and instead sticks to a random dancer, a tall blond man. The blond man flies backward into other dancers, setting off a chain reaction of party panic.

Eliot lopes across the common area of the suite—littered with cracked champagne glasses, empty beer bottles, uneaten crab cakes, used and unused condoms, dried and drying bodily fluids, and a stratum of multicolored drug vials, among other things—toward the relative safety of his bedroom. He makes it to his room and kicks the door shut behind him. The door locks automatically. Within seconds, the bodyguards start pounding on it.

Sonya groans. Eliot screams when he sees his room.

Someone has thrown up on Eliot’s bed, maybe the same guy who’s masturbating on it now. The large print of Guernica, a gift from Sarah, has been ripped from the wall. Give war a chance is scrawled in black marker over one of the Cubist figures. Eliot’s fancy new holographic tablet computer has been cut in half with garden shears, which are jammed into the wall. Partiers have ransacked the room’s drawers and cabinets: clothes everywhere, empty bottles of wine, bookshelf tipped over, offprints of his philosophy books in shambles. Russell, Wittgenstein, Quine, Kripke, Davidson, Putnam. Someone has defiled his books with crayon-drawn picture stories that seem to involve lots of stick-figure men with hard penises and stick-figure women with their legs spread. Years of annotations, destroyed. The pounding on the door intensifies. Fuck. The door to his walk-in closet is open. Inside, two men are making out.

Fuck! he says.

Sorry, dear, but we’re married, says one of the guys, a beautiful East Asian man with a British accent. He holds up his left hand and shows his ring. It’s a nice ring.

Glad to hear it, Eliot says. Would you make sure no one, ah, manhandles this girl?

We don’t manhandle girls in this closet, the Asian-British man says, arching an eyebrow. Put her over there by the shoes and shut the door behind you.

Super! Eliot says. Great! Thanks so much!

Eliot lays Sonya down and closes the closet door. At exactly that moment, his bedroom door flies inward off its hinges. The three bodyguards, accompanied now by a few entrepreneurial partiers, who seem excited about the prospect of smashing in someone’s head, have repurposed a heavy coatrack into a battering ram. Eliot still has his champagne bottle. I can fight them, he thinks, trying to talk himself into a posture of macho bravado. No you can’t, another, more Eliot-like voice tells him. They’ll break your bones into toothpicks and pick their teeth clean.

A window with a gaudy art deco frame is open nearby. Although completely panicked, Eliot does the only rational thing: he goes out the open window into Barcelona’s August heat. As he shuffles his way along the narrow ledge outside, Eliot does his best not to look at the barrio below, fifteen stories down. The most nimble of the bodyguards follows Eliot onto the ledge. Eliot grips the champagne bottle—his only weapon if he’s cornered—as if his life depends on it. A dozen feet along the ledge there is another window, open. Eliot climbs in, slams the window shut, and locks it.

A sound-canceling curtain dampens the outside music here in the executive suite’s third bedroom. A different aural mood dominates this space: drums, sitars, electric guitar, Indo-Pakistani Pop. A dense sweet pot smell. This room has for the last few weeks been occupied by Sen. Jim Johnson’s (R-KA) son Paul Johnson, the party’s DJ. On Paul’s king-sized bed sits a group of teenagers, Indians or Pakistanis. They pass around a bong and play make-out games. The bodyguard on the ledge, meanwhile, squats outside the window and talks into his communications rig. Eliot can sort of read his lips. Get. Get the. Third bedroom. The bedroom’s door, Eliot notices, cannot be closed. It has been ripped from its hinges.

Shit, Eliot says.

Are you troubled about something? asks one of the boys.

Troubled? You could say that.

Might we be of assistance? He offers a bong hit to Eliot.

Who’re you and how exactly might you assist me?

The boy pulls opens his dress shirt, Supermanlike, to reveal his answer. Stenciled on the T-shirt underneath is a white logo against a green field: NATIONAL INDIAN TEENAGE COED JUJITSU TEAM.

What are you doing in Barcelona?

What do you think we’re doing? We participated in the International Teen Coed Jujitsu Championship.

Of course, I should’ve guessed. And how did it go for you?

Poorly. We placed second.

To answer your initial question then, ah, yeah, you can help me, Eliot says. A bunch of guys who are somewhat angry at me and who are carrying tasers are about to come through that door. What can you do about that?

I suppose that depends on why they are angry at you.

Because, well, I used this champagne bottle here to hit William Pearson.

The prime minister’s son? asks a girl.

I had my reasons. They were good reasons.

Awesome! say a few of the kids on the bed.

Without another word, the teammates, six boys and six girls, put their bong aside and position themselves strategically around the room. When the first bodyguard charges in, the kids engage in an amazing display of defensive offense, leveraging the bodyguard’s own weight against him, knocking him into the door frame. The second guard, operating according to a sort of cartoon logic, trips over the first and falls on top of him. No one else tries to come through. Eliot runs toward the stacked bodyguards, turns and says, Thanks a bunch, kids, and steps over the bodies. Eliot leaps off the back of the second guard and flies past the freelance goons.

Eliot finds himself near the suite’s main entrance and pushes his way into the hall through a clot of fresh partiers. He runs past the elevator bank and into the building’s stairwell. The stairs are packed with partiers sitting around, tripping and talking. The sound of heavy running echoes through the stairwell, rising upward from the lower floors. Two armbanded guards stomp up the stairs toward this floor. Out of his mind with drugged panic, unable to think where else to run, Eliot climbs up the stairs to the roof.

The roof of the hotel is full of people, maybe a hundred. Most are smoking cigarettes. Many dance to music synchronized across their earbuds. Some lie down flat on their backs and admire the stars. Large black cylinders with yellow crosshatching stand sentry on the far end of the roof. Eliot navigates around the partiers toward the edge of the building, hoping to find someplace to hide. Barcelona looks beautiful splayed out below; La Sagrada Familia is visible in the distance. When they figure out I’m up here, he wonders, will they beat the shit out of me or throw me off the top of the building? Probably both, he decides, and in that order.

On the canisters is stenciled the picture of a stick figure wearing a funny jumpsuit and leaping off a building. Emergency Building Escape System. Parachutes or ultralight kites. Thank God everyone’s so paranoid about terrorism. Eliot opens one canister, finding an array of rectangular escape packages inside. Eliot picks one that claims it’s designed for a six-foot-tall frame and breaks its seal.

The package unfurls into the form of a bulky red jumpsuit with yellow bulges. A small parachute-like bulge protrudes from the back. Additional bulges wrap around knees, elbows, shoulders, and around the midsection. Yellow gauntlets cover hands and booties cover feet. The suit even has a bulky yellow hood. Japanese and Korean instructions are inscribed everywhere.

The guards, now also on the roof, command the partygoers to get out of their way. One uses his stun gun to shut up an aggressive man, inspiring the rest to scatter. Eliot doesn’t have any time to waste.

As he zips up the escape suit, Eliot finally notices, juxtaposed with one set of Japanese characters, the English-language suggestion that he Please remember the string. Eliot assumes this means he’s supposed to pull the thick red chord hanging off the bulge on the suit’s chest—which is, by no reasonable definition, a string—after he jumps off the building.

Eliot climbs onto the roof’s parapet, the toes of his yellow booties hanging over seventeen stories of empty space. He looks back over his shoulder. The guards have finally pushed their way through the partiers, and they look sort of agitated. Behind the guards some partiers have regrouped, forming a stoned insurgency. For about two seconds the guards seem uncertain about what to do. They must think he’s trying to commit suicide. When they realize that he has put on a building escape jumpsuit, they charge, stun guns ready.

Stay calm. Eliot looks down. Seventeen stories. He would be crazy to jump. They’re coming. He can’t jump. Why does he still have the champagne bottle? One guard aims his stun gun. Jump, you idiot. He jumps. He pulls the chord. The partiers whoop with joy.

Two contradictory emotions shake his soul in quick succession. He feels at first very powerful and capable, practically omnipotent, James Bond on a mission to save the world. Then, when he realizes that no parachute will be opening for him, he feels ridiculous, shameful and pathetic, a loser driven by stupidity and lust, a bit more like Wile E. Coyote than James Bond.

This is what happens next: The jumpsuit stiffens Eliot into a cruciform position, a spinning spread-eagled human X. The yellow bulges pop in a preprogrammed sequence. Airbags rapidly inflate from these areas. In under three seconds Eliot R. Vanderthorpe, Jr., has transformed from a person into a gigantic inflated red and yellow beach ball. Beach Ball Eliot first bounces off the wall of the hotel and then off the plaza seventeen stories below.

Eliot bounces. Then bounces again. And again. Each bounce carries him a bit farther away from the hotel. Bounce, free-fall, bounce, free-fall, bounce, free-fall. Each bounce hurts a lot. Eliot loses count of the number of bounces at around thirty. The suit has become very hot. At some ambiguous moment Eliot’s bouncing becomes rolling.

Rolling down an incline away from the Hotel Internacional, away from the drugged mania of the weeklong party, toward the beach, Eliot wonders whether he’s going to stop rolling before he throws up and, more important, whether this feeling of shame will ever leave him.

Shortly before dawn, Eliot wakes up in Plaça Catalunya, lying on his back in a shallow fountain, near the massive El Corte Inglés building. Beside him loiter families of homeless Turks who, too proud to be filthy, clean old-fashioned natural-fiber clothing. The men chain-smoke cigarettes and jabber in Turkish while their women scrub socks and underwear in fountain water. Kids huddle together nearby in sleeping bags. The sky is clear of clouds and the day is going to be hot. An absurdly large champagne bottle is wedged between Eliot’s legs. Two rubber chickens float languidly beside him.

On the nearby steps, teenaged partiers play drums, work hard to seem soulful. You can tell they’re not Americans. They’ve ignored the return of the ’00s, so popular now in the States, and wear instead re-fashioned particolored West African robes and sandals, a fashion for brown-skinned sun worshippers from Barcelona to Buenos Aires.

A man dressed in a corduroy jacket and jeans pushes through the kids and approaches the fountain, heading straight for Eliot. He ignores the kids and they ignore him; they exist in parallel subcultural universes, unbreachable parapets of style standing between them. The Turks get out of the man’s way. His wraparound mirrored mediashades mark him as an American.

The man makes it to the fountain. His mediashades glow darkly. His crew cut is very black. A bike messenger bag hangs limply at his side. Eliot pretends to be dazed, averts his eyes, and lolls his head. The man is wearing nice shoes, shiny and new.

Eliot R. Vanderthorpe, Jr., he says, his familiar voice penetrating in the manner of a corporate executive. You’re coming with me.

He squats and grabs for Eliot’s wrist. Eliot weakly waves him away.

Leave me alone. I’m so hungover.

Eliot looks up. The man has taken off his mediashades, revealing a familiar face. Tom Feldman, one of Eliot’s best friends from his undergraduate days at Harvard. They met ten years ago through heavyweight crew and became fast friends shortly before uncontrolled partying had gotten Eliot kicked off the team. Tom is, as always, rugged and handsome. The crew cut is a new look.

Dude! Eliot says. How’d you find me, man?

"I used Omni, man. How else could I have found you?"

No, I mean, how’d you, like, know to come looking for me in the first place?

A smarter question to ask, my friend, would be how I could have avoided knowing. Footage of your performance last night is all over the mediasphere. Your father’s lawyers are billing crazy hours to put the genie back in its bottle. Mr. and Mrs. Vanderthorpe are less than happy with you right now. They’ve asked me to bring you home.

My parents are such sweethearts.

"That’s So Fucked Up looped this one shot of you striking the prime minister’s son on the head with a champagne bottle, over and over."

You’re shitting me. They recovered that footage?

They also have footage of you attacking the videographer. You were practically foaming at the mouth.

Eliot grins. "That is fucked up!"

Tom smiles, teeth large and perfectly straight. His jaw juts squarely, green eyes reflecting the light of the rising sun.

Funny, Eliot. That’s just what your father said.

Eliot tries to remember everything that happened last night, to find among all the confusing episodes a fragment of memory that might justify his conduct.

I was trying to do the right thing. I had, like, an ethical realization.

Whoa, my apologies. Did your ethical realization involve discovering new things to do with bottles of Dom Pérignon? I think Moët et Chandon is suing the Vanderthorpe Family for brand degradation.

I’m too hungover for your sarcasm, man.

Tom puts his mediashades back on, releasing Eliot’s eyes from judgment, and extends a conciliatory hand. Eliot lets Tom help him up this time. His body burns with simultaneous hangovers from multiple drugs. On his feet again, still shaky, Eliot wipes his hair away from his eyes, adjusts his tux, and meditates on what to do with his oversized champagne bottle. He gives it to one of the homeless Turks in exchange for a cigarette; Tom lights the cigarette for him.

So about the rubber chickens, Tom says.

I honestly can’t remember, Eliot says. And really, I think I’d rather not know.

Fair enough.

They walk together, abreast, slowly and in silence, toward the southern end of the plaza.

So, man, Eliot says. You’re the business-guru-to-be. How’s my Name doing post-party?

Tom pulls out his tab. It’s a mixed picture. Analysts aren’t sure how your shenanigans are going to impact your Name’s value in the long run. Look here. Immediately after the footage aired, the price your Name could demand from the mediasphere skyrocketed. I’m talking a median of more than fifteen hundred dollars per minute. The illegal sites popped up shortly afterward, cutting into the official value, but you’re still raking it in.

Too bad Dad still owns the rights to my Name, Eliot says.

The polling data, meanwhile, is pretty mixed. Tom opens the appropriate graphs. Overall, your likability quotient has dipped slightly, most severely in heartland communities, but among certain global market segments you’ve shot up in a big way. It’s the ’tweens: they’re hungry for Eliot R. Vanderthorpe, Jr.,–branded merchandise: T-shirts, masks, toy robots, mediasphere avatars. You’re a walking, talking counterculture. Sticking it to The Man in ways they can’t. You speak for them. Karl ran some focus groups and—

Fuck Karl. Fuck his focus groups. I hate this shit. That’s why I had to get away, Tom. I’m more than just a spur to consumption, man. I’m, like, a man.

Yeah, I sympathize, Eliot. Truly, I do. But I’m telling you, look at this.

Tom navigates to Pricewaterhouse’s Name Consultancy site. Eliot’s Name, which was steadily declining in value during the years that he had attended grad school, has made up more than half of what it lost over those four years. The Discussion Board at Eliot’s Den, the most popular unofficial fan site, lists eighty-five new topics and seven thousand text-original and transcripted postings. There are five thousand hours of voice chat archived. Fifty text-chat channels with subject names in a dozen languages are active right now. The Japanese and Simplified Chinese Rooms, filled by students posting from school, are running up the numbers fast. All this in less than seven hours.

Wow.

"Wow is right. You’ve become unusually popular in India and Pakistan—historically not

Enjoying the preview?
Page 1 of 1