Nomad Codes

contagion, a pirate transmitter in a world jammed with increasingly vivid and increasingly delirious signals.
    1989

THE SOFT MACHINE

    A glossy, violet glop is oozing through ten-year-old Magda Gross’s fingers. “It feels like clams,” Magda says, holding a pendulous glob over a nearby minirecorder. “It doesn’t drip that easily.” With the air of a fifthgrade science whiz, she pads the clammy goo together and holds it next to my Sony. “Let’s see what it sounds like,” she says, shoving her fingers into the synthetic sludge. “Here’s the music!”
    Ffflarrpptt.
    The source of the emission was not Magda’s intestinal tract but Gak, the latest pop virus to blaze through the pleasure circuits of America’s prepubescents. What is Gak? On the one hand, it is the latest mutation in the phylogenic line of kidgoop (Silly Putty/Flubber/Play-Doh, etc.), whose last evolutionary leap was Slime, that ’70s sticky green goo that came stuffed in plastic garbage cans. The first known Gak sighting occurred not in toy stores but on television—Nickelodeon’s anarchic and messy Double Dare to be exact. There, Gak smothered folks and grossed-out kids competing for prizes. Like Tribbles or Transformers, Gak is one of those odd things that are born and nurtured on TV before oozing through the tube into three-dimensional reality.
    In fact, Gak may also be as virulent among adolescents as that fire-breathing, PBS-shilling purple doofus, Barney, is among tots. In 1992, the year it was introduced, Gak was Mattel’s best-selling product; for 1993, the company estimated it would sell eight million “splats”—the air-tight plastic containers that package Gak. Teachers across the land, tipped off by the unusually animated expressions on their pupils’ faces, have snatched away their charges’ Gak, while some schools have simply banned the stuff. “That’s a good sign,” says John Handy, the head of the Mattel design team that spawned the glop. “If it’s so prevalent that they actually have to form a rule that you’re not allowed to bring it, then you know you’ve arrived.”
    But unlike other kid fads—action figures or water pistols or noisemakers—Gak is as difficult to classify as its globular, shifting shape—which is part of its appeal. Drooping the cool glop through your fingers, one cannot help but muse on its meanings. Toy? Compound? Food? Industrial by-product? Entity? Is it a solid or a liquid? Does it take a definite article? If you split your Gak in half are there two Gaks? Or is each splat a node in the great Gak Monad?
    Magda has no interest in such questions. Like most kids, she’s an imaginative pragmatist, focusing not on Gak’s essence, but on its attributes. “Its squooshy and good to play with and you can throw it around and drip it.” She also notes that it smells like tempera paints, shakes like Jell-O, and hardens into clay if you leave it outside of its splat for too long.
    Magda’s thirteen-year-old brother Tomek has been conducting research of his own. Employing experimental parameters appropriate to his age group, he threw Gak against the nearest vertical surface. “It doesn’t stick very well. It kinda flops up against the wall and falls off. Cafeteria food sticks much better.”
    “Yeah,” Magda chimes in. “You know the scrambled eggs that are actually made out of powder and you put water in them? If you touch those scrambled eggs it feels exactly like the Gak. I’m serious.” She pauses. “Except you can’t drip it as well.”
    While Magda covers her face with a Gak pancake, Tomek drops the stuff on the floor to see how well it bounces. Then he demonstrates how you can rip Gak apart to make it resemble chunks of chicken meat. Tomek acquired his first splat of Gak with two Rice Krispies proof-ofpurchase seals, but he swears the stuff dissolved—a mysterious process the boy links to the tiny clear crystals he found buried in the substance. “They’re kinda hard to find. I was taking them out because I thought they weren’t supposed to be there. And the gak got smaller. It would, like, shrink.” So in order to prove his hypothesis, Tomek starts picking out the crystals and putting Gak back in its splat and eyeing the change. “It’s definitely getting smaller,” he insists. “It’s really annoying. This is a gyp.”
    Magda gets the experimental urge, and leans towards the cassette recorder to document her protocol. “I’m putting an ice cube in the