November1994


Oysterette Postman laughed.

She was reading in a newspaper about a massive crash by the country's largest online service. It was a great middle finger to those arrogant Internet lovers, forever going on about their e-mail addresses. Now they were missing drink dates, doing without new pie recipes, or having their tiresome genealogical queries lost forever. It was the next best thing to having a massive power outage get rid of the Internet entirely.

Oysterette was happy today anyway. Today was the day that odd girl she'd met at the book party for OJ Simpson: American Hero, American Tragedy would be taking over the electronic newsletter, an irritating distractions from the print version she cared about.

She put the newspaper down and walked over to the paste-ups of the next issue. Oysterette walked like Gary Cooper, a snarling walk, with big, Plains-sized, rocking steps. She was colored like the Great Plains, too; with strawlike hair and wheat-colored skin, and her neck always very far forward, as if she were craning to look for a lost herd. She still dressed in the style of the book-publishing house where she had spent the first ten years of her career, a style devoid of any shape or color, except for the stains on her blouse. Dressing well might distract from one's duty to books.

Oysterette loved book publishing. She had worked her way up the publishing ladder at piteous salaries, living on editorial lunches with aging exercise-book writers, and sharing an apartment with three roommates who kept kosher and wouldn't let her touch their silverware. Still, she had a job in publishing. Most of her fellow graduates from the English Literature masters degree program did not, except the ones in the pornography industry.









En Vogue, "Never Gonna Get It," 1994
 

The day a new owner of the once-proud literary house eliminated everything but a line of pop-up puppet books was the worst day of her life. With bills to pay, she had spent an entire roll of stamps mailing out her resume, and she had stumbled into this job. There was a shortage of financial journalists due to the booming stock market, and her new employer had been satisfied with the experience gained from one book on household accounting.

It was still publishing, in a way, still paper and bindings, still the sacred smell of ink.

Journalism, however, distressed her. News events were always popping up at the least convenient moments, and you had to drop everything and run willy-nilly after them, like some sort of trained puppy. Sometimes you'd write a story and, just as you were finishing it, new information would turn up and you'd have to throw away whatever you were working on and start from the beginning again.

How nice it would be to someday go back to book publishing, go back to a long lunches and weeks to linger over galleys and months before you got the beautiful finished book, to be shipped to booksellers and then pulped if it didn't sell within fourteen days. She didn't even care that leaving Wall Street would lower her salary considerably. She missed her days in a civilized industry.


When Veda Bierce got out of the subway at Wall Street, she was wearing the same clothes she had worn to the party. She had washed them again, using six more quarters of emergency money, but they were all she had.

She had very little emergency money left. In the two weeks since she had fled California, she had spent nearly everything she'd brought with her and all the credit on her cards. If she couldn't succeed at this job, disaster loomed. She was, quite possibly, the only actress in the world with no experience as a waitress.

Sixty-five Broad Street, when she found it, was a battered old office building, its doorway marked with a frieze of flattened angels holding lightning bolts. It was the Telegraph Building, according to the frieze, and appeared to have fallen into disuse along with its medium.

Veda rode up in the very old elevator. It quivered on its cable.
 
  

"Come in," said Oysterette Postman. She was on the phone. "I'll be with you in a flash," she said.

There were only two desks in the office, and both looked as if the contents of a wastebasket had been upended on them. Huge piles of paper covered their hulking electronic typewriters, piles spotted with paper clips, pencils, and little white squares of the frosted film for correcting typing mistakes.

Veda sat at the unoccupied desk. To her side was a foot-high black cube containing a glowing green TV screen, covered with lines of pale green words. Oil Prices Higher on Decreased Supply said one line.

Oysterette hung up the phone.

"Good morning," she said. "That's just what you'll be doing. You'll be filling these screens with numbers."

Gasoline May Contacts Up 5/8 to 39 cents. Veda read.

"Wall Street traders," said Oysterette, walking around to the desk, and sitting on it, "can't wait for their numbers with the morning newspaper. They can't even wait for my newsletter to be published at the end of the week. They need their numbers right away." Oysterette tapped the screen. "They get them off these ticker boxes. See?"

Veda did not see, but she nodded.

"We call oil dealers and refineries to get the prices, type it into these boxes, and it goes to them via some wire, to the boxes on our subscribers' desks, " said Oysterette. "They read it and make their deals."

Veda felt a budding panic.

"So that's your job," said Oysterette. "Simple. "
It did not seem simple to Veda, who was quickly left alone with a list of people to call and a list of questions to ask. How many barrels of oil were being released into the market? What was the May contract price? What was the October price? The black box stared at her satanically.

Taking a deep breath, she reached for the telephone.

At the first house on the list, a bored young man answered.

"Excuse me," she said. "I need you to give me some oil numbers."

"4 million barrels, 23 1/2, 25 1/2," he said, having apparently answered Veda's set of questions many times before.

After that, it was easy, and soon after that, it was dull. Veda amused herself by putting on a different character for each call. An elderly widow called the first trading house, an aggrieved feminist the second, and a dumb football player the third. The questions were all the same, but her tone, her motivation, were different. She would use this job for acting practice.

By the end of the day, she had typed hundreds of numbers into the box and stumbled on a piece of actual news, about a production cut by a Canadian refinery, a story Oysterette praised.

"You can put it in your print newsletter," Veda said.

"Oh, no," said Oysterette.

This girl, she thought, was not getting her half-educated ideas anywhere near the sacred world of print, at least as long as Oysterette Postman had anything to say in the matter. After all, the Bible itself was written in ink.
 
  

At the end of the day, and armed with an advance on her salary from the petty cash box, Veda Bierce left exhausted, but confident. As she got out of the elevator on the ground floor, a familiar-looking man got in, and pressed the button for the basement.


In the basement of 65 Broad Street, in the only remaining offices of the brokerage that had once occupied the entire building, Frederic Baby sat with the silent database.

He had nothing to do. Today, he signed on to America Online, heading for the "Single and Seeking" chat room. At 10:15 in the morning, there was only one other person in the there, a woman calling herself RedHead786.

R U Single? he typed, using his screen name, BloodAxe.

Men are like neutered cats to me, she typed back.

After that, Frederic answered a little fan mail for his most recent romantic story, which involved a TV newswoman and a tray of Swedish meatballs, and then downloaded a program he had read about in Newsweek. It was called Mosaic. The magazine said it was the key to the World Wide Web.

He spent hours trying to get it to work, with no success; it had compatibility problems with his DOS system. Finally, he gave up and spent the rest of the day in alt.jokes.sci-fi, arguing with a man in Portland about the sex lives of characters in comic books.
 

Library of Congress Copyright TXu 875-975