1. Miss Radiation

Technology is a branch of moral philosophy, not of science

Paul Goodman

We deliver, because pets can’t drive.

Slogan of Pets.net

She was the worst woman in the world, capable of unspeakable crimes that, despite being unspeakable, no one could stop talking about.

Mary Trudeau, née Mary Pigeon, had spent her adult life holding the hands of the dying, fun running with the living, and raising money for cancer research as the CEO of the charity she had founded. Her story was well known in philanthropic circles: her entire family extinguished by cancer before she was twenty. She was herself a survivor of the disease by twenty and lived to current age of fifty-five.

It was stoic math, the stuff of suffering and legend. Her undoing was receiving a medal from President Bush just one month ago. For Mary, this was the culmination of a lifetime’s work, even though the event was broadcast on the outer reaches of satellite television, somewhere between C-Span and the Garbage Network.

One old man, who gave much of his monthly pension to the bastards at Time Warner Cable, was so angered by seeing Mary on his TV that he came forward.

Mary’s father, Whitey Pigeon, yellow-toothed and bitter, phoned the local paper from his retirement shack in Iowa. As this paper was a pennysaver they didn’t know what to do with Whitey’s news. So they looked online to see where news came from. They contacted a wire service and heard nothing back. Then they contacted a website that reviewed New York restaurants and crowd sourced celebrity gossip. The rest happened quickly. Her father claimed to the cameras that made the pilgrimage to his shack that Mary had never been ill. He had never died, he exclaimed hoarsely. She had stolen from him, he spat out. Lied about everything. Just like her mother, who was also not dead though he wished she was. After he vented to the largest audience he’d ever have in his life he looked sad and lost, before retreating into his dark shack where he sat down and let the light from shoddy satellite service wash over him. TV can be a lava lamp for the hate filled.

Mary was ruined, charged with fraud and her two homes seized by the IRS. Being a popular animated web gif was about the only thing going for her. Handshakes with first ladies were disavowed. Seats on hospital boards were wheeled away. Photos of Mary posing beside rock stars at charity tattoo benefits, pushing fists towards the camera to display matching W-O-N-T-Q-U-I-T letters kerned wide across knuckles, were removed from websites, much easier than the tattoos themselves.

I’m not reveling in what happened to Mary Pigeon, no. When a Frenchman said there is something more mysteriously attractive than beauty: it is corruption he had people like Mary and me in mind. She got caught. I never did.

My company, Bio Essence Direct, relies on search engine optimization. If you dropped by our offices all you would see outside would be a vaguely named place that held a lease on an entire wing of a Glendale office park. Single level, with some grass and gravel. One picnic table. Our neighbor used to be the ShamWow company but now it’s completely empty—the ShamWow was just that powerfully absorbent— and I’ve been thinking of expanding the warehouse.

I sell spam, which isn’t really a thing, it’s more a state of mind. I also sell a great many medical remedies that the government would rather you not have access to. To get traffic and customer data, we keep on top of trending topics and make sure it becomes a part of our site for the time it’s a popular search term. I’m a little too old to quite understand it all but I do know that Mary Pigeon became imbedded on our sites and stuck in my head again too.

Technology is a branch of moral philosophy, not of science

Paul Goodman

We deliver, because pets can’t drive.

Slogan of Pets.net

She was the worst woman in the world, capable of unspeakable crimes that, despite being unspeakable, no one could stop talking about.

Mary Trudeau, née Mary Pigeon, had spent her adult life holding the hands of the dying, fun running with the living, and raising money for cancer research as the CEO of the charity she had founded. Her story was well known in philanthropic circles: her entire family extinguished by cancer before she was twenty. She was herself a survivor of the disease by twenty and lived to current age of fifty-five.

It was stoic math, the stuff of suffering and legend. Her undoing was receiving a medal from President Bush just one month ago. For Mary, this was the culmination of a lifetime’s work, even though the event was broadcast on the outer reaches of satellite television, somewhere between C-Span and the Garbage Network.

One old man, who gave much of his monthly pension to the bastards at Time Warner Cable, was so angered by seeing Mary on his TV that he came forward.

Mary’s father, Whitey Pigeon, yellow-toothed and bitter, phoned the local paper from his retirement shack in Iowa. As this paper was a pennysaver they didn’t know what to do with Whitey’s news. So they looked online to see where news came from. They contacted a wire service and heard nothing back. Then they contacted a website that reviewed New York restaurants and crowd sourced celebrity gossip. The rest happened quickly. Her father claimed to the cameras that made the pilgrimage to his shack that Mary had never been ill. He had never died, he exclaimed hoarsely. She had stolen from him, he spat out. Lied about everything. Just like her mother, who was also not dead though he wished she was. After he vented to the largest audience he’d ever have in his life he looked sad and lost, before retreating into his dark shack where he sat down and let the light from shoddy satellite service wash over him. TV can be a lava lamp for the hate filled.

Mary was ruined, charged with fraud and her two homes seized by the IRS. Being a popular animated web gif was about the only thing going for her. Handshakes with first ladies were disavowed. Seats on hospital boards were wheeled away. Photos of Mary posing beside rock stars at charity tattoo benefits, pushing fists towards the camera to display matching W-O-N-T-Q-U-I-T letters kerned wide across knuckles, were removed from websites, much easier than the tattoos themselves.

I’m not reveling in what happened to Mary Pigeon, no. When a Frenchman said there is something more mysteriously attractive than beauty: it is corruption he had people like Mary and me in mind. She got caught. I never did.

My company, Bio Essence Direct, relies on search engine optimization. If you dropped by our offices all you would see outside would be a vaguely named place that held a lease on an entire wing of a Glendale office park. Single level, with some grass and gravel. One picnic table. Our neighbor used to be the ShamWow company but now it’s completely empty—the ShamWow was just that powerfully absorbent— and I’ve been thinking of expanding the warehouse.

I sell spam, which isn’t really a thing, it’s more a state of mind. I also sell a great many medical remedies that the government would rather you not have access to. To get traffic and customer data, we keep on top of trending topics and make sure it becomes a part of our site for the time it’s a popular search term. I’m a little too old to quite understand it all but I do know that Mary Pigeon became imbedded on our sites and stuck in my head again too.