Rant: The Oral History of Buster Casey

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.

Me making that transcript, I'd step off the train at every stop. Walk around in places like Reno and Cincinnati and Missoula. I'd rewitness the whole trip through a dog, a perfect old-school trick for heightening the olfactory track. Really make the smells pop. For the taste track, I'd borrow from the best gourmet boosts, then strain that track through somebody on a starvation diet to really beef up each flavor. That's called 'sharpening.'

Half of the industry is freaks who rewitness shit to amp the tracks. You hire blind folks to build up the audio track. It's so beyond illegal, but you rewitness the tactile track of anything through a year-old baby, and velvet feels like velvet. Granite like granite. No sloppy guesswork about the texture of anything. No calluses to fudge the feel of real skin or hair. No baby needs a boost port stuck in the back of its neck, but you see them around. This industry is full of assholes ready to let you remix your porno peaks through their kid. It's beyond tasteless, but you can tell porn peaks reboosted through a kid's soft, sensitive skin. It's no wonder the real world can't hold a candle to a boosted experience.

Babies amp the touch track. Blind people ramp up the sound. Hunger, the taste track. Dogs, the smells. To ramp the visual track, some production techs swear by rewitnessing through birds. Hawks. You know, birds of prey. In school, kids I knew used to rewitness through deaf people, saying it gave the final visual track the best resolution. You take all these reboosted tracks, mix them, and you have a train ride worth taking. My point is, if you're going to sell a crap experience, at least the quality should be the best.

My point is, this seventy-two hours is coming out of someone's life. This boost will replace something real a person might do, so it should be decent. Hell, it ought to be beyond decent. If some asswipe's handing over his time, he should get the train trip sweetened by having the whole mess rewitnessed through a Playboy Bunny on heroin. Morphine at least. Watch those boring, bullshit mountains roll past while zonked on opiates and fondling your own set of love-a-luscious titties. You want to wish the old man a happy Father's Day, that would be my gift suggestion.

In school, after all the film schools switched over, after the entire film industry switched over to neural transcriptions, I did my best work by getting it reboosted through junkies. Hang around any transcription program and you'll meet needle freaks who'll sweeten student work for the extra cash. Or speed freaks who'll let you boost a boring peak through them to amp the pace. If you only need some soft-focus, hook up with a codeine fanatic, run your final mix through him for out-cording, and your edges will look a little relaxed. Very damped.

In transcription school, the programs have random piss-testing. That's why you rewitness through some outsider. If you're financing a hundred thousand to get your M.F.A. in neural transcription, you don't want to piss hot and get booted out of school. Before you can boost anything for the industry, you need to learn how to identify a marketable peak. Then how to choose the right primary participant as your witness. How to structure that experience. If it's a sixteen-course meal or a hot-air balloon ride over Holland, you need to deliver the payoffs at regular intervals. Plus, you need to keep your focus; if this is a boosted peak about swimming the English Channel, you don't want to get distracted by muscle cramps or a headache. Nobody is going to buy a bullshit feature-length headache. Even boosted through an OxyContin high, it's beyond impossible to remove a headache from your tactile track. Trust me.

About going professional, a solid method is to boost for the consumer-product market—you know, those boosted peaks where you're always drinking a Coca-Cola and wearing Nike clothing, always looking straight at the logos and brand names of the products. Eating stuff that tastes so incredible, so drool-inducing, that you know the taste track had to be rewitnessed through some starving tribesman in some famine-ravaged nowhere.

How weird is this? But for fifty bucks' worth of rice and canned milk, somebody's reboosted the entire taste track through so many human skeletons that you can hardly get through the peak without interrupting, you're so hot to buy a soda. A doughnut. A hamburger. Old Spice cologne.

In transcription school, you learn all about effective pacing, so you don't overwhelm your user. You learn all the legal criteria for the production codes and rating system. What distinguishes a G-rated peak from a PG-13. Classifications based on the physical reactions, the electrolyte balance and hormone levels, pulse and respiration of a test audience. A good way to flatten a peak—say, lower it from an R rating to a PG, is you rewitness through a dope-smoking stoner. An easy fix.

To graduate, we each had to produce a feature-length peak experience. For my thesis, I had a great concept. We're talking three to six hours of marketable sensory content. My idea I had, it was so great. I threw a party. Invited one Asian friend. One Jew. One black. One queer. One hot lesbian. One straight cheerleader girl.