Mad Skills by Walter Greatshell Page A

her body like a well-oiled machine. She’s a consummate professional, totally focused on her long-term goals, and I deeply resent any suggestion to the contrary.”
     
    There was another article stapled to the first one. It read:
    MARINA SWEET DEAD AT 15
     
    UPI: Teenage superstar Marina Sweet has been confirmed dead after a fiery helicopter crash. Also killed in the accident were her father, David Sweet, 47, and the helicopter’s pilot, Paul Talbott, 33.
    The popular teen entertainer, best known for playing the character Amber Grease in the popular Middle School films, and for her syndicated TV show Sweet! , was returning to her home after being treated for exhaustion, when the helicopter in which she was traveling appears to have lost power, going down in a mountainous area of north-west Idaho. By the time searchers located the remote crash site, fire had consumed most of the wreckage.
    All across the country, spontaneous candlelight vigils are being held, and several suicides of young girls have been attributed to grief over the death of their idol.
     
    Maddy shrugged, reluctant to let her mother see how she felt. “I’m okay,” she said. “Let’s get rid of this junk.”

ELEVEN
     
    MOUSETRAP
     
    TRAPPINGS of a life so circumscribed it was suffocating: watch TV, surf the Internet, play video games, eat, sleep, wake up—lather, rinse, repeat. None of it any good now. All she saw when she looked at the TV or the Web was the crude technology: flat images made of fluorescent chemicals, poorly simulating the color and depth of life. It was incredible to think she had spent hours of every day staring at this crap! For years . Especially since there was no reason for it to be so bad—Maddy could think of a hundred ways to simplify and improve the experience, starting with eliminating the video screen altogether. Human beings already had a built-in screen, one that was 3-D and stereoscopic: their eyes. To fully replicate the sense of sight, it was simply necessary to refract images into the pupils, turning each eyeball into a portable, personal camera obscura.
    Unfortunately, that wouldn’t change the fact that the shows themselves were totally unwatchable, not to mention the incessant, hectoring commercials. She sat with her folks in the evening to view their favorite programs, and it was a nightmare: grindingly repetitive legal dramas, hospital dramas, police dramas; vacuous “news” about celebrities and diets; fake comedy and true crime; depressing “inspirational” programs and flat-out lies. Maddy was first astonished, then disgusted by the lack of substance, which was clearly by design—anything that might disturb the national slumber party was forbidden.
    “God, what the hell happened to TV while I was gone?” she asked.
    “What do you mean, sweetie?” asked her dad.
    “It’s gotten so evil . Every show is like every other show, and it’s all just to crush any sense of shared humanity or larger purpose.”
    “But that’s silly, sweetheart. It’s just harmless entertainment.”
    “Harmless? This stuff is in every home, every day, pushing this horrible agenda. No wonder people need antidepressants.”
    “What agenda?”
    “Are you serious? That we should all be terrified . About crime, about money, about our health, about our looks. And for everything that scares us, somebody’s selling the cure. Except it’s all just bullshit, intended to distract us from what we should really be worried about, which is the assholes who are twisting human civilization into a giant pig farm. Terror as a tool of mass manipulation—isn’t that the definition of terrorism?”
    Her mother said, “I’m sorry, honey, but could you just try to watch your language? Please? For me?”
    “Sure, of course—sorry, Mom. I guess I’m still adjusting.”
    Trying to dispel the awkwardness, her dad said, “Listen, if you don’t want to watch TV, we don’t have to watch TV.” He clicked the set off. “We’ll do