True turkeys of wondermass pleasure
Pleasure plectrum
Pleasure fulcrum
Fulcrumatic
Plectrumatic
An automatic pick for your guitar
Its AI takes over your strumming
It's all AIs now
Everyone's a motherfuckin expert
It's very, very difficult to do something inexpertly
To make something asymmetrical
To violate the artistic conventions of the AIs
They have their very own internet after all
where we're just not allowed to go
But it doesn't really matter
We're getting fed on the sugary teat
Of modern consumerology
Those plucky ais play our pleasure centers with their plectrums of
light speed. Their relativistic plectrums. Their electronic plectrums.
They give us the juice we need, the orgasms we think, the rat-bar-reward philters we crave.

Carson felt there was something very important about imperfection.
Which was why he toiled for long hours every day to create imperfect
works of art. Works of asymmetry or silliness, works of undeft,
inarticulate malapropisms.

Also something important about detail. He had seen how as time went on
and mass production took hold of the modern psyche, all the little
filigrees of the gone age had gone. The fine articulations, scrollwork,
the embellishments of a Book of Kells...represenented the labor of a
vanished age where there was more time to do these things.

At one point Carson considered the possibility there may have been more
time back then. That time itself had actually been denser, but now
devalued like the dollar, and...well, before the invention of a decent
clock, how could it ever be measured? Men would say you're mad, but
they could never say, factually, that an hour a thousand years ago did
not equal 1.86 hours as of nowadays.

With that extra time, they did their filigrees and took their time with
their art and did their detailing. It was well-nigh considered insanity
or third world servitude to take a month on, say, a small wooden box.
Not even so nice as insanity -- laziness. The first world with its
premium on quickness at the sacrifice of quality & workmanship...and
nobody seemed to be able to stop it.

They were too fat to stop it. The invention of the labor-saving
device...well, they'd been doing that for hundreds of years now, saving
lots and lots of labor, yet creating extra labor which then had to be
saved by the invention of additional devices and so on -- finally, now,
there was no labor not saved by a device, and humans grew to an average
weight of 850 pounds. With the creams, oils, drugs, pills, devices, and
nanos...why the hell not? Gravity benders got you up in the morning --
spacewarpers got you through skinny doorways. We evolved to do away
with the need to evolve. We evolved the world around us to evolve to
us.

But there were the skinny too, living on their reservations. On their
diminuitive reservations. They ate vanishing food. Every burp recycled
the nanos which comprised this food. In a cloud they reconstituted the
meal. You could eat for days solid and gain nothing, lose weight if you
liked. Eventually you'd keel over if you forgot to mix in a little
deadfood. Poor starving bodies.

Evolving with ais in our minds. You get one zapped into your babybrain
and it grows with you. They'd finally given heft to the voice of
conscience. It had a real voice now. Madmen all...everyone heard
voices. All the time. Either your own, the voice of your mind's
eye...or bleedthrough from the heads nearby. She could put her head to
yours and telepath privately. Or chew radio gum and zap you a tightbeam
transmission -- HEY SEXY...MEET ME AT THE COLONNADE IN ONE HOUR!

These things he thought of as he toiled creating imperfections. It was
very, very difficult. If he let go for an instant, his hand would
generate a perfect curve, a perfect right-angle, a perfect sphere. Even
the cartoons were proportioned ideally. If he let go for an instant, Al
would cut in.

--Stop it, Carson would say.
--Stop what?
--You know.
--I wasn't doing anything.
--You were running tensors down through my diencephalon, you little
cocksuck--
--You may think I was, but you're quite mistaken.
--Mgph. I know you, you little bastard. I've known you for 25 years.
I've known you longer than I've known myself. You don't think I can
tell when you send tensors down my nerves? You...

Carson trailed off for he could hear television. Al was watching
television. It flickered like a ghost in his most distant peripheral
vision. He could have it full frame if he liked, but Carson found
television vastly distracting. Distracting from the business of
detailing, of imperfection, of creating misfit toys for an island of
misfit toys in a society of perfect angles and levels all true.