Rant

drinking a Coca-Cola and wearing Nike clothing, always looking straight at the logos and brand names of the products. Eating stuff that tastes so incredible, so drool-inducing, that you know the taste track had to be rewitnessed through some starving tribesman in some famine-ravaged nowhere.
    How weird is this? But for fifty bucks’ worth of rice and canned milk, somebody’s reboosted the entire taste track through so many human skeletons that you can hardly get through the peak without interrupting, you’re so hot to buy a soda. A doughnut. A hamburger. Old Spice cologne.
    In transcription school, you learn all about effective pacing, so you don’t overwhelm your user. You learn all the legal criteria for the production codes and rating system. What distinguishes a G-rated peak from a PG-13. Classifications based on the physical reactions, the electrolyte balance and hormone levels, pulse and respiration of a test audience. A good way to flatten a peak—say, lower it from an R rating to a PG, is you rewitness through a dope-smoking stoner. An easy fix.
    To graduate, we each had to produce a feature-length peak experience. For my thesis, I had a great concept. We’re talking three to six hours of marketable sensory content. My idea I had, it was so great. I threw a party. Invited one Asian friend. One Jew. One black. One queer. One hot lesbian. One straight cheerleader girl. One Native American. One redneck hillbilly. One Hispanic guy. An Irish. An Eskimo. You get the idea. One of everything. They didn’t know, but I was boosting while I played host, spending almost exactly ten minutes talking with each person. The cream on my idea was, I’d ask each guest back, to rewitness the party. Each guest would meet themselves and see, hear, smell, and feel themselves for those ten minutes we’d talked.
    Splicing all the boosts together, I made it so the whole four-hour peak was tinted by each person meeting him-or herself. The Hindu meeting the Hindu. The Quaker meeting the Quaker. Shit like that, for hours.
    Another student in my same class, he boosted the birth of his first kid, then rewitnessed it through himself while he held the kid on a sunny day. Four hours of sentiment, tinted with Percodan. You can tell by the slight halo effect you get boosting through somebody on painkillers.
    The Percodan guy, the faculty committee said his thesis peak was extremely commercially viable. And they gave him 360 points out of a possible four hundred.
    My thesis, the committee didn’t like so much.
    It went beyond a disaster. Nothing sharps the contrast like adrenaline. Each guest got so tweaked, seeing how they occurred to strangers, it made the boost almost unbearable to stay plugged into. Beyond bitter. Boosting the peak, you’d sweat so hard it kept interrupting the feed. Some faculty members couldn’t stay plugged in past the second hour.
    My concept was, I figured people would love to meet people just like themselves. Like, why most French people stay living in France. Why all the Southern Baptists go to the same church. You know, birds of a feather.
    What totally wipes ass is, the committee withheld my degree. The bunch of dipshits.
    These days, every month, when I have to send the school a payment on my loans, at the bottom of the check, where it says “For…,” in that blank I always write, “Thanks for the best rim job ever!”
    To make those dipshit payments, I work here. Renting out copies of Little Becky’s Easter Egg Hunt to people who just want to get through another awful night, alone. These people, boring themselves to death.
    How weird is this? But inside me, in secret, I know that thesis didn’t wreck my life. Not by much. Even saddled with a hundred grand in student loans to pay, I can’t get too upset. I learned something, maybe not about boosting peaks, but about people.
    Whatever the blessing, the talent, or technology, we can still find some way to fuck it up. The other day, the Percodan guy who graduated with top honors after his boosted birthing experience, he comes in here to rent a peak, still lugging around that baby. He tells me, he just lets it slip, that he’s got Robert Mason under contract to boost an upcoming white-water raft trip. Such a bullshit bigname fucking player he’s turned into. Such an industry hotshot.
    It’s not even a year old, and he’s already stuck a little black port into the back of his kid’s neck.
    14–Going Away
    Bodie Carlyle ( Childhood Friend): It