Rant: The Oral History of Buster Casey

Just so long as it's got a happy ending.

A love story strained through somebody's rose-colored brain.

Your basic experience, what people called a "boosted peak," is just the file record of somebody's neural transcript, a copy of all the sensory stimuli some witness collected while carving a jack-o'-lantern or winning the Tour de France. Officially, that's what the primary participant is called: the witness. The most famous witness is Little Becky, but that doesn't mean she's the best. Little Becky is just brain-dead enough to appeal to the biggest audience. Her brain chemistry gives a nice, sweet perception to softball peak experiences. Hayrides. Valentine's Day. Christmas bullshit morning.

She's what a movie star used to be. Your vehicle for moving through an experience. Little Becky is just somebody with a sweet disposition, the ideal serotonin levels, I-dopamine—and—endorphin mix.

You could say I'm a little beyond burned out on all this new technology.

And you'd better believe I've screwed with a few transcripts. You take a copy of Little Becky's Halloween Pumpkin Party and you rewitness it through yourself on acid. You hook up for the boost, plug in for all five of the tracks: tactile, audio, olfactory, visual, and taste. Drop a tab of acid. And at the same time out-cord a transcript of you experiencing the Pumpkin Party while on acid.

Then you rewitness that transcript through somebody Down's syndrome or fetal alcohol.

Then you rewitness the resulting transcript through a dog, maybe a German shepherd, and you've got a good product. No shit. A peak worth the time and money to boost. Still, weird as this sounds, you put that on the shelf and don't expect to get anything but complaints.

The bullshit truth is, this entire industry sells to dipshits.

The day that Little Becky's Happy Treasure Hunt hit the shelves, we had assholes lined up around the block. We moved something like fifteen hundred copies.

Over on the Employee Picks shelf, my faves are covered with dust. Nobody wants to plug in and boost ten hours of Getting Gun Shot in Wartime or Last Minutes Alive: The Final Moments Aboard the World's Worst Airplane Crashes. That shit, I love. My favorite part is one crash where the witness has just started to out-cord his peak experience. He's just switched to out-cord his transcript, and you can smell the jet fuel the moment before it flashes. You can taste the bourbon still in his mouth. The airplane seat belt is so tight it cuts across your hips. The armrests are shaking under your elbows, and your bones go stiff, all your joints grinding together inside tight muscle. Then, at the end of every boosted death, you get the blip where transmissions stop. This guy's last neural stream, out-corded to his wife's mobile phone.

When you switch your port, in the back of your neck, to transmit a record of your neural stimuli, when you're broadcasting that experience, officially it's called "out-cording."

A "script artist" is the official term for anybody who monkeys with neural transcripts, whether you're booting, boosting, or damping the tracks.

Just don't expect your artwork to sell. No studio is going to pick up a radically mixed peak for mass distribution. Studios have their own marketing lingo. They'll launch A Tour of Antarctica, witnessed through a primary like Robert Mason, some totally bland pair of eyes and ears. But even the studios will sweeten that boosted peak by rewitnessing it through a neutered cat, a Catholic priest, a housewife overprescribed with estrogen. What hits the market is sugary, sweet crap. The tracks beyond balanced. It's the junk food of boosted peaks.

Plus, you have the new automatic interrupts. If at any time during a boosted peak your heart rate, pulse, or blood pressure exceeds the federal limits, the plug-in stops. Just a bunch of lawyers trying to cover the industry's collective ass.

Sweetened, mellowed, nuanced, remixed crap makes the perfect gift.

This is so beyond boring, but our top-selling experience for all of last year was called Cross Country Steam Train Excursion. No shit. A seventy-two-hour boxed set of plug-ins where you do jack shit except sit on a fucking train and watch the outsides stream past the window. You smell the upholstery, the cleaning fluid. The postproduction people didn't bother to damp out the chemical stink. The witness is Robert Mason, wearing wool pants you feel itch the whole trip. Wearing Old Spice cologne. The highpoint is, you go to the dining car and have breakfast, some greasy ham and eggs.