The End of FUN (3 page)

As a result of this lax policy, residents were supposed to work out disputes on their own. What this meant IRL was everyone just ignoring everyone else, silent and alone in our individual cubes. Or sometimes not so silent. Take, for example, when Dulah moved into the cube under mine. He moved in about a week after I'd moved in, right around the time I got snitched on for having Zazz
®
in my cube, and although the warning didn't mean anything, and although I knew Dulah wasn't the snitch, I was still kind of steamed.

The reason I knew it wasn't Dulah was because Dulah was a drug dealer, so why would he snitch on me for food? The reason I was steamed was because of the reggae. When Dulah moved in, I thought it would be cool to live above a drug dealer, but I hadn't counted on the reggae. Supposedly the units were soundproof, but actually they weren't, and Dulah had a pair of Blastbeats
™
going on in his, and let me tell you, he played that shit CONSTANTLY.

After a while I couldn't take it anymore. So one night, it was around one o'clock in the morning, I climbed down to his cube to see if we could work out a deal. Dulah's portal was open, and I found him lying on his pad, staring at the ceiling. His eyes were open wide and he was waving his hands around all loopy and funny like some kind of magician or possibly the victim of a seizure.

“Hey, are you all right? Dulah?” I gave him a little shake. “Dulah!”

He touched something in the air and sat up blinking like he was coming out of a trance.

“WHAT UP, NEIGHBOR!” he shouted over the reggae. “WHEN DID YOU GET HERE?”

We went through that complicated handshake ritual that drug dealers have, and then I told him I'd just dropped by to see—

“SPEAK UP, MAN!”

“—JUST DROPPED BY TO SEE WHAT'S UP BECAUSE IT'S PRETTY LATE AND PROBABLY EVERYONE WITHIN THE BLAST RADIUS IS HAVING A HARD TIME SLEEPING ON ACCOUNT OF THE REGGAE, WHICH, DUDE, YOU HAVE TO ADMIT IS—”

And then of course the reggae stopped and the only sound was my voice shouting out those last few words.

Dulah turned to me. His eyes were all funny. “Say that again? What did you have to admit? I couldn't hear you over the music, man.”

“Are you OK? What are you on?”

“FUN
®
.”

“What?”

“I'm having FUN
®
, man.”

“Fun doing what?”

Dulah just looked at me. “The chip in my head. The
lenses
, man. Fully Ubiquitous Neuralnet. That's how you say it: having FUN
®
.”

It wasn't the first time I'd heard of FUN
®
, but it was the first time I really paid any attention. Dulah gave me the rundown. It had started in Korea and spread from there, and now it was coming to America, but the home version was still in beta, and they needed testers to report bugs.

“Get on while you can, neighbor. My whole world has changed. Like right now? I'm running the
frogskin
, man.”

“Frogskin?”

“It makes everyone look like a
frog
. You look like a
frog
, man.”

“Oh.”

“Ribbit ribbit,
man
. And the best part is, I'm earning FUN
®
. And FUN
®
is
money
.”

“Actual money?”

“Enough to pay my rent. More than enough.”

“How?”

“Bug reports, bonuses, gold mining—but the most FUN
®
is with YAY!s.”

“What's a yay?”

Something flickered across his big, dark pupils. “Repeat after me:
Yay for FUN
®
!
”

“What?”

“Say it,” said Dulah. “Say,
Yay for FUN
®
!
”

So I said it. “Yay for fun.”

And Dulah was all, “BAM! I just earned plus 10 for getting you to say that! If I talk about it, I get even more. This shit is for
real
, yo. Once you're having FUN
®
, you won't ever want to stop.
Everyday reality is a drag
™
, man.”

And although he was earning FUN
®
for saying the official tagline, you could tell that he actually kind of meant it, too.

So the next afternoon I went downtown to see about starting to have some FUN
®
.

The lensing station was located in an office on Pine Street, sort of like an optometrist's but without the glasses. The lady handed me a pad, and I clicked through the User Agreement.

YES I AGREE

YES I AGREE

YES I AGREE

She took the pad and sent me to a little room in the back. I sat in the recliner. The machine lowered. A voice said:

CONCENTRATE ON THE DOT.

PREPARE FOR CHIP AND LENSING.

The dot moved around in a jittery circle. I felt a prick in the base of my skull. Then everything went pixelated.

And as I stumbled out of the chair and into the light, the world had changed. It was bigger now, brighter, the entire landscape webbed in a shiny digital overlay, bonuses and interfaces just waiting to be touched. I stood at the doorway with the sensory information blowing over me like sand on a windy day at the beach, and a blinking robot face took shape—two eyes, no mouth. When it spoke, a readout appeared at the bottom of my vision:

OK, now I would like to say YAY! for the Shit. And by “the Shit,” I mean “anything that is superior in a pleasing way.” Like for example fine wines, making out, or Psyke2
®
IntraCranial graphics chips. FUN
®
was the Shit. Especially at the beginning. I mean, people are always talking about some new shit, and sometimes it's decent shit, and occasionally it's good shit, but most of the time it's just…shit.

Not this time.

This
time the Shit was for real. You could see it and hear it and touch it—you could hold the Shit in your hands. You couldn't smell it or taste it, but that was fine because it was FUN
®
and it was everywhere. You were swimming in it. And the other cool part was that not everyone had it yet, so it was like being part of this special club. Of the Shit.

Like, I'd be wandering around the Mission and I'd see a couple exclamation points off in the distance—exclamation points that only I could see—+1 user! +1 user!—and then I'd catch sight of the people under the points, and it'd be a couple cool kids just like me, and as we passed each other we'd YAY! out in our minds like superpsychic adventurers on the hunt for bonus fun.

So that part was cool, and it was fun, and it was FUN
®
. (Well, duh. It was the Shit.)

But there were some minor issues, though. Bugs and glitches or whatever. Take for example Homie
™
. It's evolved over time, but back then it was just this pixelated, barely 3D robot face. Bluish on top, orangish on bottom, no mouth, no nose. Two dark, blinking circles for eyes. Pretty much the first thing my Homie
™
did was catch a communication virus, the infamous allyourbase_ex, and after that you never knew when the voice recognition was gonna glitch out, or maybe it'd start talking in half-Japanese. Both of which happened when I was trying to final confirm my username.

What I wanted was
the last cowboy
, but when I told Homie
™
, it blinked and said,

“Confirm username:
the last cowboy
.”

“Yes, an original name. For a person. Me. I desire to final confirm my username:
the last cowboy
!”

Homie
™
flickered.

“No!”

“THE LAST COWBOY!”

“Start over!”

When I contacted an Admin he told me it was like 800 to unconfirm it, which was total crap, and in the end I was like,
Forget it
.
I'm not paying
. Anyway, it could have been worse. I could've been original boy_3 or 4 or whatever. Sometimes I still feel a little pang of envy toward original boy_1 and, of course, the
original
original boy. Really, though,
the last cowboy
was what I wanted. Personally, I think that would have been the Shit.

So there I was, living in SF, having FUN
®
, free as a bee on the sea. Yeah, the hivehouse was weird, and yeah, I was scamming my family, and yeah, any insect flying over an ocean is bound to get fatigued and crash, but for the moment it was awesome. I'm kind of amazed I got away with it so long, but the truth is this: when people want to believe something, you don't have to work that hard to convince them. Every week or so I called Evie and Dad to give an update on my life in Sacramento. School was fine. California was fine. I was fine. And they bought it! I think they were just happy to have me out of their hair.

As it turned out, I was one of the last people to have FUN
®
for “free.” It was like a week later that they got FDA approval, and people started paying for beta. In retrospect, I should have read the User Agreement, because it was a way crappier deal to get on for “free” than to pay for a contract.