Bogus to Bubbly

by Scott Westerfeld

  RADICAL HONESTY

  I guess sometimes you have to lie to find the truth.

  —FRIZZ

  After I had finished writing Extras, I learned that there really was a group called Radical Honesty. The founder, Brad Blanton, wrote a book of that name in 1994, which advises its readers to tell the truth every time they open their mouths. Just as Extras was coming out, I read an interview with him, and he’s not nearly as sweet a guy as Frizz. To read this interview yourself, just Google the phrase “I think you’re fat.” (Warning: for reasons of radical honesty, the interview contains profanity.)

  Of course, the members of real-world Radical Honesty don’t have brain surge to enforce their honesty. Part of their philosophy is that you yourself have to make the choice to be honest. With that, I’m sure Frizz would agree.

  NEOFOODIES ARE REAL!

  A recent movement in food preparation is called “molecular gastronomy.” They use scientific equipment and a vast knowledge of chemistry and physics to create weird dishes like the ones in Extras. Examples of dishes include popcorn soup, pizza pebbles, sardine sorbet with toast, and salmon poached with licorice. Basically, molecular gastronomists are a cross between chefs and mad scientists, though some people call them “food hackers.” Don’t be afraid! A lot of the stuff they make is really delicious (and amusingly perplexing). For NeoFoodies in your area, check out WD-50 in New York, Moto and Alinea in Chicago, Le Sanctuaire in San Francisco, and Cafe Atlantico in Washington, D.C.

  HIRO RULES

  The first sixteen hundred words (about sixty pages) of Extras was written from Hiro’s perspective rather than Aya’s. He was going to be the “Hiro” of the book, because I thought a male perspective on Tally’s world would be interesting. But all the cool stuff kept happening to Aya, so I wound up throwing away Hiro’s chapters and starting over.

  But I did manage to steal a few images here and there, like being “ping-bashed.” Here’s the original first chapter of Extras from Hiro’s point of view (and includes some of the original names of the characters):

  Hiro woke to the usual ping-bashing: thousands of messages, one night’s buildup of tips and scams and invitations. They gabbled at him from attached soundfiles, flickered with videos of surge-monkeys and manga-heads, and bubbled up smiley faces, exclamations, and fluttering hearts.

  He lay in bed for a moment, eyes closed, enjoying the rumble of the multitude clamoring for his attention. A good omen for the day.

  “Tea, please,” he asked the room. “And show my face rank.”

  As the percolator began to bubble and hiss, Hiro lay there, a nervous tingle building in his stomach. Last night he’d kicked a story—a big story, maybe. He’d stayed up late watching it spread through the feeds, remixed and debated. People were definitely talking.

  The question was, were they talking about him ?

  It was time to find out. Taking a deep breath, he opened his eyes. Meter-high digits flickered on the wallscreen . . . 991.

  Hiro stared at the number. Out of a million citizens, his face rank had reached the top thousand. . . .

  No wonder he had so many pings in his stack—the story was huge.

  Overnight he’d become famous.

  He was still staring when his door chime sounded.

  “Rez Iyama,” said the room.

  “Let him in!”

  The door slid open and Rez strode through. He glanced at the wallscreen and tried to hide his lip-splitting grin with a deep bow.

  “Meditating, Hiro-chan? Or are you too famous to get out of bed?”

  Hiro sat up and dragged on a hoverball sweatshirt, smiling himself. Rez joking about it made his rank suddenly seem real. “Guess I stayed up late.”

  “Waste of beauty sleep,” Rez said. “Your face didn’t move much last night. But when the crumblies started waking up, you went legendary.”

  “Of course!” Hiro rolled his eyes at his own stupidity.

  He’d kicked the story late at night, to let it build with feed-junkies and tech-heads. But the story was really about crumblies. . . .

  A few days before, Hiro had received a random ping laying out a weird conspiracy theory: Doctors secretly knew how to keep people alive forever. He’d followed up and discovered a new clique of crumbly surge-monkeys. Unlike normal surgery addicts, they didn’t care about beauty or freaky body mods—only life extension. Liver refits every six months, new cloned hearts once a year.

  The only reason anyone died of old age, they were convinced, was to keep the population steady. It was just like the brain lesions back in the Prettytime: The doctors were hiding the truth.

  So the crumblies were planning to sue the city . . . for immortality.

  They were crazy, probably, but that never stopped a good story. All night the debate had been kicking through the city interface. Was immortality a bogus idea? Could your brain stay bubbly forever? And if no one died, where on earth would you put everybody?

  All that talk had pushed Hiro’s rank to its best spot ever. Out of a million citizens, 991 was awesome face.

  “I guess we can’t hang out anymore.” Rez sighed. “Now that you’re top thousand.”

  Hiro laughed. Before this morning’s craziness, Rez had been a lot more famous than him, with a face rank that usually broke ten thousand. He was a tech-kicker, his feed packed with hardware designs and city interface mods. Most extras didn’t care about Rez’s tricks, but he was legendary to the people who mattered.

  The wallscreen flickered with a rankings update, and they both turned to watch. Hiro had lost face, dropping to 997.

  “Huh,” he said. “Immortality sure got old fast.”

  “That’s what you get for sleeping late,” Rez said. “You’ll be back to six figures in no time. Do I smell tea?”

  Rolling out of bed, Hiro put two mugs under the percolator. Green tea swirled from the spigots, filling the room with the smell of cut grass and caffeine.

  “I liked your last image,” Rez said. “The cities growing. Scary.”

  “Yeah, can you imagine?” Hiro shuddered. He’d used satellite pictures from the Rusty era: billions of extras crowding the planet, most living in total obscurity. If everyone lived forever, how long would it take humanity to fill up the planet again?

  He pulled his mug from under the percolator and took a swig.

  “Mmph!” The still-boiling tea burned its way across his lips and tongue. He forced himself to swallow, and the liquid seared his throat. “Ouch!”

  “Do you need medical attention?” asked the room.

  “No!” He angrily blew on the tea.

  “Nice one, Hiro-chan.” Rez grinned, inhaling the scent from his mug. “Maybe you should set your room to ‘bubblehead.’ ”

  Hiro snorted. Back in the Prettytime, the hole in the wall wouldn’t give you anything tongue-scalding. True, the tea was much better this way, but only if you remembered not to burn yourself.

  Freedom had some annoying features.

  “Should we check the competition?” Hiro asked.

  Rez nodded, then told the room, “Top twelve.”

  The wallscreen split into a dozen panels: the most popular kickers in Yokohama. Hiro took a cautious sip of his tea. It was the usual bunch; no new faces had hit the top twelve in a month.

  The familiar voices washed over Hiro like a conversation with old friends, soothing his burn-addled nerves. The city’s big faces weren’t just idols, they were companions. Sometimes it felt like he knew them better than he did himself.

  He wondered if after last night’s story, any of them actually knew his name in return. But none of them was kicking immortality.

  In the upper right corner, Frizz Motsui had discovered yet another new religion. Some pre-Rusty-history clique had averaged the world’s great spiritual books with an AI, then programmed it to spit out godlike decrees. For some reason, the software had told them not to eat pigs.

  But who would do that in the first place?

  “Pig-eating!” Rez
giggled. “They seriously need to debug that code.”

  “Gods are so last year,” Hiro said.

  Resurrecting old religions had been kicked right after the mind-rain, when everyone was still trying to figure out what all the new freedoms meant. But these days so many other things had been rediscovered—karate and family reunions and manga and the cherry blossom festival—that most people were too busy to try to impress invisible superheroes.

  “What’s the Nameless One doing?” Rez said, switching the sound to another feed.

  The Nameless One was Yosh Banana—the most brain-missing kicker in Yokohama. Hiro and Rez had suffered through littlie school with Yosh, and ten years later the guy was still an inescapable bully, always picking on some new clique. He seemed to think the mind-rain was a bad thing, just because other people’s obsessions could seem so weird these days.

  This morning he was yammering about ghastly pet-breeding experiments. A dog appeared, dyed pink and sprouting weird tufts of fur.

  “It’s just a poodle, you moron!” Rez shouted, tossing a pillow at the wallscreen.

  “Even the Rusties had those,” Hiro said. One eye-kicking pet was hardly the first step on the path back to fur coats—or eating pigs, for that matter.

  “Kill that feed,” Rex told the room. Every second they spent watching Yosh boosted his already overstuffed ranking. Even mentioning someone’s name while the city interface could hear you—which was always—went into the face stats. In the reputation economy, the best way to hurt someone was to ignore them.

  Rez brought up the rankings, checking which stories were making their kickers more famous. The AI religion was a flop—Frizz had lost face all morning. But the weird-looking dog was working, sending the Nameless One all the way up to 275.

  “Depressing,” Rez pronounced. Then he smiled. “Shall we check in on Ama-chan?”

  Hiro sighed. He needed to get to work on the stack of pings, but he couldn’t resist the second-most-famous person in Yokohama.

  “Okay, maybe for a minute.”

  The screens flipped to twelve new feeds, all dedicated to Ama Love.

  She was having a breakfast of plum sandwiches and chatting with her surged-up friends about the parties they’d dropped in on last night. From a dozen angles, her huge eyes seemed to gaze straight at Hiro—somehow the hundreds of paparazzi cams hovering in the background didn’t spoil the intimacy. Crowded ranks of icons showed the other feeds covering her, with the choice of adoring, mocking, and outright obsessed streams of commentary.

  It was the same chatter as every morning, and Hiro had work to do, but it wasn’t easy tearing himself away. He hated getting stuck in feeds—it was better to be watched instead—but there was something about Ama’s legendary face that made him shiver. All that beauty and not one cut of surge.

  The only natural-born pretty in a generation.

  “Hey, did you catch that?” Rez said. “They’re talking about the party!”

  “What party?” Hiro tried to focus through Ama’s dazzling glow.

  “The party. The Thousand Faces is in three weeks.” Rez punched Hiro’s shoulder. “Awesome timing for you!”

  “No way,” Hiro murmured. One night every year, Ama invited the thousand most-famous Yokohamans to her mansion. The event filled every feed in the city, and everyone watched—even those who lied and said they didn’t.

  If he could keep his ranking up, Hiro Torrent might actually be one of the Thousand Faces this year.

  He glanced out the window—the sky was bright, the heavy clouds like burnished gray metal. Even light, no shadows; a perfect day for hovercams.

  “Rez, it’s time I got kicking.”

  “You’re right.” Rez stood up, bowing low at the door. “Good luck today, Hiro-chan.”

  “Thanks. I’ll need it.” Rule number one of fame: Follow up a big kick with an even bigger one.

  Hiro cleared his wallscreen, feeling the usual tug of melancholy as Ama’s face disappeared. But he had work to do: thousands of pings to explore. Humanity was free now, with wild new forms of insanity and brilliance to invent. Millions of extras were out there, begging to be noticed.

  There was a big story in the pile—he could feel it. Something bigger than poodles, plum sandwiches, and rumors of immortality.

  All Hiro had to do was track it down.

  FICTIONAL REPUTATION SYSTEMS

  Thanks to all the ranking systems on the Internet, lots of science fiction writers have been asking if reputation will ever replace money. Here’s a couple of books that I borrowed while working on Extras. (Remember: It’s okay to steal ideas, as long as you mention where they came from!)

  In Cory Doctorow’s 2003 novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, a currency called “whuffie” works sort of like merits in Aya’s city. Every time you do something good for the community (from baking cookies to fixing the problem of air pollution), you get whuffie. You lose whuffie when you do something bad, like playing your music too loud and keeping everyone awake.

  In Iain M. Banks’s 2004 novel The Algebraist, a fame/reputation system uses a currency called “kudos,” from the Greek word for praise. It’s a bit more like face rank than merits. In Charles Stross’s Accelerando, the hero makes a career of giving away ideas and living off only his reputation. And in Bruce Sterling’s Distraction, a motorcycle gang determines its members’ status by online voting. (Hah!)

  CUTTING

  Right. You’re so special no one can touch you. . . . You’re so special you have to cut yourself just to feel anything.

  —ZANE

  A lot of readers have asked about the cutting in the books. Was I thinking about the cutting that some teenagers do in our modern-day world? Well, yes. But I was also thinking about the way cutting and plastic surgery fit together in our society.

  Surgery also involves slicing flesh, after all, and both cutting and cosmetic surgery stem from not feeling right in your own body. Society accepts face-lifts and nose jobs, while, for obvious reasons, cutting is considered an illness. But in a way they’re two sides of the same coin.

  It didn’t make sense to me for Tally’s world to have one and not the other. The books are partly about how our beliefs get expressed through our bodies—flash tattoos for Crims, beauty for bubbleheads, and super-strength for Specials. The media-obsessed people in Aya’s city all have eyescreens, and the Extras, who want to live in space, have genuinely alien bodies. So it seemed kind of lame not to include the dark side of this phenomenon: the way that people’s desperate need to feel something involves harm to themselves.

  After all, to help people who cut themselves, we have to at least try to understand what’s going on inside their heads. I’ve gotten a lot of e-mail from teens who injure themselves, actually. A few found those parts of the books too intense and skipped right past them. But most said that I’d captured some aspect of their experience in a way that helped them.

  Seeing a part of your own life in a book, especially one set in a faraway time and place, can give you perspective. I hope that the Uglies series has helped a few of you resolve issues, whether with cutting or looks or your own struggles against the Dr. Cables of this world.

  GLOSSARY

  Bogus is used by pretties to mean anything bad or broken. It’s the opposite of “bubbly.” I stole “bogus” from Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies, about a rich, party-loving social group in the 1920s. The “pretty young things” in Waugh’s novel also use “shaming” and “nervous-making,” so I stole those too.

  Bubbleheads is a dismissive term for pretties. Originally, only Specials used this word to show their superiority to the pretty-minded. But after the mind-rain, everyone began to use it for citizens who chose not to reverse the mental effects of the operation.

  Bubbly means a lot of things to pretties: the champagne they drink, the way they act at parties, and how they feel when they like someone. Anything stimulating is bubbly. It’s a lazy way to talk, but the pretties are lazy-brains, so I thought it made s
ense for their world to fall into two simple categories (see bogus). Of course, when Tally and Zane start to be cured, they use “bubbly” as their secret code for “thinking clearly.” (In a way, they’re flipping the meaning of the word to its opposite.)

  Bungee jackets are safety devices for building evacuation. (See “Gadgets and Inventions.”)

  Crash bracelets are hoverboard safety equipment. (See “Hoverboard Manual.”)

  Crims are Zane’s clique, named after Australian slang for “criminals.” (See “Cliques.”)

  Crumblies is slang for late pretties. Uglies also tend to call their parents “crumblies,” even if they’re only middle pretties. In our world, “crumbly” is British slang for an older person. (See “Life Phases in the Prettytime.”)

  Crumblyville is where late pretties live, tending to their gardens and waiting out their life-extension treatments. (See “Maps.”)

  The cure is the term for the unauthorized de-bubbleheading nanos invented by Maddy. Easy to produce and fast-acting, the cure was widely distributed and caused the mind-rain and the end of the Prettytime.

  Cutters See “Cliques.”

  Diego is a city where the government was never as controlling as in other cities. Teachers and other care-givers were not given the bubblehead operation, which encouraged independent thinking in all levels of society. For this reason, the mind-rain started here, though it was first called the “New System.”

  The Diego War was a conflict between Tally’s city and Diego, and was the first organized warfare in a hundred years. It was caused by Dr. Cable, who disapproved of Diego’s New System, which allowed citizens to reverse the effects of the bubblehead operation if they wanted. Diego also harbored runaways from other cities. (See “History #5: The Diego War.”)

  Expansion is a general term for the population and construction explosion caused by the mind-rain. With the constraints of the Prettytime lifted, no one knows how far the cities will expand into the wild.