More than a few among the crowds and police initially used the words sick, sickening, and/or nasty when the tank’s deltate nozzle was affixed to the protuberance at the center of the figure’s rear end’s white-and-navy bullseye design. All such expressions of distaste were silenced by the subsequent inflation. First the bottom and belly and thighs ballooned, forcing the figure out from the window and contorting him slightly to keep his forehead’s cup affixed. The airtight Lycra rounded and became shiny. The long-haired man on Dexedrine patted his bicycle’s slim rear tire and told the young lady he’d lent the field glasses to that he’d figured all along what they (presumably meaning the little protuberances) were. One shoulder’s valve inflated the left arm, the other the right arm, & c., until the figure’s entire costume had become large, bulbous, and doughily cartoonish. There was no coherent response from the crowd, however, until a nearly suicidal-looking series of nozzle-to-temple motions from the figure began to fill the head’s baggy mask, the crumpled white Mylar at first collapsing slightly to the left and then coming back up erect as it filled with gas, the face’s array of patternless lines rounding to resolve into something that produced from 400+ ground-level US adults loud cries of recognition and an almost childlike delight.
. . . And that the time, Schmidt told the Focus Group, had—probably not at all to their disappointment, he said with a tiny pained smile—that the time had now arrived for them to elect a foreman and for Schmidt himself to withdraw and allow the Focus Group’s constituents to take counsel together here in the darkening conference room, to compare their individual responses and opinions of the Taste, Texture, and Overall Satisfaction of Felonies! and to try now together to come up with agreed-upon GRDS ratings for same. In some of the fantasies in which he and Darlene Lilley were having high-impact intercourse on the firms’ conference tables Schmidt kept finding himself saying Thank you, oh thank you in rhythm to the undulatory thrusting motions of the coitus, and was unable to stop himself, and couldn’t help seeing the confused and then distasteful expression that the rhythmic Oh God, thank yous produced on Darlene Lilley’s face even as her glasses fogged and her crosstrainers’ heels drummed thunderously on the table’s surface, and sometimes it almost wrecked the whole fantasy. If, after time and a reasonable amount of discussion, the Focus Group by chance for whatever reason found that they couldn’t get together on a certain specific number to express the whole group’s true feelings, Schmidt told them (by this time three of the men actually had their heads down on the table, including the overeccentric UAF, who was also emitting tiny low moans, and Schmidt had decided he was going to give this fellow a very low TFG Performance Rating indeed on the evaluations all Team Δy facilitators had to fill out on UAFs at the end of a research cycle), what he’d ask is that the Focus Group then just go ahead and submit two separate Group Response Data Summaries, one GRDS comprising each of the numbers on which the Focus Group’s two opposed camps had settled—there was no such thing as a hung jury in TFG testing, he said with a grin that he hoped wasn’t rigid or pained—and that if splitting into even two such subgroups proved unfeasible because one or more of the men at the table felt that neither subgroup’s number adequately captured their own individual feelings and preferences, why then if necessary three separate GRDSs should be completed, or four, and so on—but with the overall idea being please keep in mind that Team Δy, Reesemeyer Shannon Belt, and the Mister Squishy Co. were asking for the very lowest possible number of separate GRDS responses an intelligent group of discerning consumers could come up with today. Schmidt in fact had as many as thirteen separate GRDS packets in the manila folder he now held rather dramatically up as he mentioned the GRDS forms, though he removed only one packet from the folder, since there was no point in proactively doing anything to encourage the Focus Group to atomize and not unite. The fantasy would of course have been exponentially better if it were Darlene Lilley who gasped Thank you, thank you in rhythm to the damp lisping slapping sounds, and Schmidt was well aware of this, and of his apparent inability to enforce his preferences even in fantasy. It made him wonder if he even had what convention called a Free Will at all, deep down. Only two of the room’s fifteen total males noticed that there had been no hint of distant window-muffled exterior noise in the conference room for quite some time; neither of these two were actual test subjects. Schmidt knew also that by this time—the exordial presentation had so far taken 23 minutes, but it felt, as always, much longer, and even the more upright and insulin-tolerant members’ restive expressions indicated that they too were feeling hungry and tired and probably thinking this preliminary background was taking an oppressively long time (when in reality Robert Awad had explicitly told Schmidt that Alan Britton had authorized up to 32 minutes for the putatively experimental Full-Access TFG presentation, and had said that Terry’s reputation for relative conciseness and smooth preemption of digressive questions and ephemera was one of the reasons he [meaning R. Awad] had selected Schmidt to facilitate the quote unquote experimental TFG’s GRDS phase)—Schmidt also knew that by this time Darlene Lilley’s own Focus Group was in camera and deeply into its own GRDS caucus, and that Darlene was thus back in the R.S.B. Research green room making a brisk cup of Lipton tea in the microwave, what she liked to call her grownup shoes off and resting—one perhaps on its burgundy side—with her briefcase and purse beside one of the comfortable chairs opposite the green room’s four-part viewing screen, Darlene at this moment facing the microwave and with her great broad back to the door so that Schmidt would have to sigh loudly or cough or jingle his keys as he came down the hall to the green room in order to avoid making her jump and lay her palm against the flounces of her blouse’s front by ‘com[ing] up behind [her] like that,’ as she’d accused him of doing once during the six-month period when SRD Awad really had been coming up stealthily behind her all the time and her own and everyone else’s nerves were understandably strung out and on edge. Schmidt would shortly then pour a cup of R.S.B.’s strong sour coffee and join Darlene Lilley and today’s so-called experimental project’s other two Field Researchers and perhaps one or two silent and very intense young R.S.B. Market Research interns in the row of cushioned chairs before the screens, Schmidt next to Lilley and somewhat in the shadow of her very tall hair, and Ron Mounce would as always produce a pack of cigarettes, and Trudi Keener would laugh at the way Mounce always made a show of clawing a cigarette desperately out of the pack and lighting it with a tremorous hand, and the fact that neither Schmidt nor Darlene Lilley smoked (Darlene had grown up in a household with heavy smokers and was now allergic) would cause a slight alliance of posture as they both leaned slightly away from the smoke. Schmidt had once swallowed hard in his chair and mentioned the whole smoking issue to Mounce, gallantly claiming the allergy as his own, but since R.S.B. equipped its green room with both ashtrays and exhaust fans and it was eighteen floors down and 100 yards out the Gap’s rear service doors into a small cobbled area where people without private offices gathered on breaks to smoke, it wasn’t the sort of issue that could really be pressed without appearing either like a militant crank or like someone putting on a show of patronizing chivalry for Darlene, who often crossed her legs ankle-on-knee-style and massaged her instep with both hands as she watched her Focus Group’s private deliberations and Schmidt tried to focus on his own TFG. There was never much conversation; the four facilitators were still technically on, ready at any moment to return to their respective groups’ conference rooms if the screen showed their foreman moving to press the button that the Groups were told activated an amber signal light.
Team Δy chief Alan Britton, M.S. & J.D., of whom one sensed that no one had ever even once made fun, was an immense and physically imposing man, roughly 6'1" in every direction, with a large smooth shiny oval head in the precise center of which were extremely tiny close-set features arranged in the invulnerably cheerful expression of a man who had made a difference in all he’d ever tried.
In terms of administration
there was, of course, the ramified problem of taste and/or texture. Ricin, like most phytotoxins, is exceedingly bitter, which meant that the requisite 0.4 mg must present for ingestion in a highly dilute form. But the dilution seemed even more unpalatable than the ricin itself: injected through the thin wrapper into the 26 × 13 mm ellipse of fondant at the Felony!’s hollow center, the distilled water formed a soggy caustic pocket whose contrast with the deliquescent high-lipid filling itself fairly shouted adulteration. Injection into the moist flourless surrounding cake itself turned an area the size of a 1916 Flowing Liberty Quarter into maltilol-flavored sludge. A promising early alternative was to administer six to eight very small injections in different areas of the Felony! and hope that the subject got all or most of the snack cake down (like Twinkies and Choco-Diles, the Felony! was designed to be a prototypical Three-Biter but also to be sufficiently light and saliva-soluble that an ambitious consumer could get the whole thing into his mouth at once, with predictably favorable consequences for IMPCs* and concomitant sales volume) before noticing anything amiss. The problem here was that each injection, even with a fine-gauge hypodermic, produced a puncture of .012 mm diameter (median) in the flimsy transpolymer wrapper, and in home tests of individually packaged cakes at average Midwest-New England humidity levels these punctures produced topical staleness/desiccation within 48-72 hours of shelving. (As with all Mister Squishy products, Felonies! were engineered to be palpably moist and to react with salivary ptyalin in such a way as to literally ‘melt in the mouth,’ qualities established in very early Field tests to be associated with both freshness and a luxe, almost sensual indulgence.†) The botulinus exotoxin, being tasteless as well as 97% lethal at .00003 g, was thus rather more practical, though because its source is an anaerobe it must be injected into the direct center of the product’s interior filling, and even the microscopic air pocket produced by evacuation of the hypodermic will begin to attack the compound, requiring ingestion within one week for any predictable result. The anaerobic saprophyte Clostridium botulinum is simple to culture, requiring only an airtight home-canning jar in which are placed 2-3 ounces of puréed Aunt Nellie-brand beets, 1-2 oz. of common cube steak, two tablespoons of fresh topsoil from beneath the noisome pine chips under the lollipop hedges flanking the pretentiously gated front entrance to Briarhaven Condominiums, and enough ordinary tap water (chlorinated OK) to fill the jar to the absolute top. This being the only exacting part: the absolute top. If the water’s meniscus comes right to the absolute top of the jar’s threaded mouth and the jar’s lid is properly applied and screwed on very tightly w/ vise and wide-mouth Sears Craftsman pliers so as to allow 0.0% trapped O2 in the jar, ten days on the top shelf of a dark utility closet will produce a moderate bulge in the jar’s lid, and extremely careful double-gloved and -masked removal of the lid will reveal a small tan-to-brown colony of Clostridium awash in a green-to-tan penumbra of botulinus exotoxin, which is, to put it delicately, a byproduct of the mold’s digestive process, and can be removed in very small amounts with the same hypodermic used for administration. Botulinus had also the advantage of directing attention to defects in manufacturing and/or packaging rather than product tampering, which would of course heighten the overall industry impact.
The real principle behind running Field research in which some of the TFGs completed only IRPs and some were additionally convened in juridical groups to hammer out a GRDS was to allow Team Δy to provide Reesemeyer Shannon Belt with two distinct and statistically complete sets of market research data, thereby allowing R.S.B. to use and evince whichever data best reinforced the research results that they believed Mister Squishy and N.A.S.C. most wanted to see. Schmidt, Darlene Lilley, and Trudi Keener had all been given tacitly to understand that this same principle informed the experimental subdivision of today’s TFG juries into so-called No-Access and Full-Access groups, which latter were to be given what the members were told was special behind-the-scenes information on the genesis, production, and marketing goals of the product—meaning that, whether retroscenic access to marketing agendas created substantive differences in the Focus Groups’ mean GRDSs or not, Team Δy and R.S.B. clearly wanted access to different data fields from which they could pick and choose and use slippery hypergeometric statistical techniques to manipulate as they believed Client saw fit. In the green room, only A. Ronald Mounce, M.S.—who is Robert Awad’s personal mentee and probable heir apparent and is also his mole among the Field Researchers, whose water cooler chitchat Mounce distills and reports via special #0302 Field Concerns and Morale forms that Awad’s earnest young Administrative Asst. provides Mounce with in the same manila envelopes all the day’s IRP and GRDS packets are distributed to Field Teams in—only Mounce has been told privately that the unconventional Full- and No-Access Mister Squishy TFG design is in fact part of a larger field experiment that Alan Britton and Team Δy’s upper management’s secret inner executive circle (said circle incorporated by Britton as a §543 Personal Holding Company under the dummy name Dy2 Associates) is conducting for its own sub rosa research into TFGs’ probable role in the ever more complex and self-conscious marketing strategies of the future. The basic idea, as Robert Awad saw fit to explain to Mounce on Awad’s new catamaran one June day when they were becalmed and drifting four nautical miles off Montrose-Wilson Beach’s private jetties, was that as the ever-evolving US consumer became more savvy and discerning about media and marketing and tactics of product positioning—a sudden insight into today’s average individual consumer mind which Awad explained he had achieved in his health club’s sauna one day after handball when the intellectual property attorney he had just decisively trounced was praising an A.C. Romney-Jaswat campaign for the new carbonated beverage Surge whose tightly demotargeted advertisements everyone had been seeing all over the metro area that quarter, and remarked (the nude and perspiring intellectual property attorney* had) that he probably found all these modern youth-targeted ads utilizing jagged guitar riffs and epithets like dude and the whole ideology of rebellion-via-consumption so fascinating and got such a hoot out of them because he himself was so far out of the demographic (using the actual word demographic) for a campaign like Surge’s that even as an amateur he found himself disinterestedly analyzing the ads’ strategies and pitches and appreciating them more like pieces of art or fine pastry than like mere ads, then had (meaning the attorney had, right there in the sauna, wearing only plastic thongs and a towel wrapped Sikh-style around his head, according to Awad) proceeded casually to deconstruct the strategies and probable objectives of the Surge campaign with such acuity that it was almost as if the fellow had somehow been right there in the room at A.C. Romney-Jaswat’s MROP team’s brainstorming and strategy confabs with Team Δy, who as Mounce was of course aware had done some first-stage Focus Group work for A.C.R.-J./Coke on Surge six quarters past before the firm’s gradual emigration to R.S.B. as a Captured Shop. Awad, whose knowledge of small craft operation came entirely from a manual he was now using as a paddle, told Mounce that the idea’s gist’s thrust here involved what was known in the industry as a Narrative (or, ‘Story’) Campaign and the concept of making some new product’s actual marketers’ strategies and travails themselves a part of that product’s essential Story—as in for historic examples that Chicago’s own Keebler Inc.’s hard confections were manufactured by elves in a hollow tree, or that Pillsbury’s Green Giant-brand canned and frozen vegetables were cultivated by an actual giant in his eponymous Valley—but with the added narrative twist or hook now of, say for instance, advertising Mister Squishy’s new Felony! line as a disastrously costly and labor-intensive ultra-gourmet snack cake which had to be marketed by beleaguered legions of nerdy admen under the thumb of, say, a tyrannical mullah-like CEO who was such a personal fiend for luxury-class chocolate that he was determined to push Felonies! into the US market no matter what the cost- or sales-projections, such that (in the proposed campaign’s Story) Mister Squishy’s advertisers had to force Team Δy to manipulate and c
ajole Focus Groups into producing just the sort of quote unquote ‘objective’ statistical data needed to greenlight the project and get Felonies! on the shelves, all in other words comprising just the sort of arch and tongue-in-cheek pseudo-behind-the-scenes Story designed to appeal to urban or younger consumers’ self-imagined savvy about marketing tactics and ‘objective’ data and to flatter their sense that in this age of metastatic spin and trend and the complete commercialization of every last thing in their world they were unprecedentedly ad-savvy and discerning and canny and well nigh impossible to manipulate by any sort of clever multimillion-dollar marketing campaign. This was, as of the second quarter of 1995, a fairly bold and unconventional ad concept, Awad conceded modestly over Ron Mounce’s cries of admiration and excitement, tossing (Mounce did) another cigarette over the catamaran’s side to hiss and bob forever instead of sinking; and Awad further conceded that obviously an enormous amount of very carefully controlled research would have to be done and analyzed in all sorts of hypergeometric ways before they could even conceive of possibly jumping ship and starting their own R. Awad & Subordinates agency and pitching the idea to various farsighted companies—certain of the US Internet’s new startups, with their young and self-perceivedly renegade top management, looked like a promising market—yes to various forward-looking companies that craved a fresh, edgy, cynicism-friendly corporate image, rather like Subaru’s in the previous decade, or also for example FedEx and Wendy’s in the era when Sedelmaier’s own local crew had come out of nowhere to rule the industry. Whereas in point of fact none of what Robert Awad had brought his mentee four miles out onto the lake to whisper in Mounce’s big pink ear was true or even in any sense real except as the agreed-upon cover narrative to be fed to select Team Δy SRDs and Field Researchers as part of the control conditions for the really true Field experiment, which Alan Britton and Scott R. Laleman (there was really no §543-structured Dy2 Associates; that little fiction was part of the cover narrative that Britton had fed to Bob Awad, who unbeknownst to him [= Awad] was already being gradually eased out in favor of Mrs. Lilley, who Laleman said was a whiz on both Systat and HTML, and on whom [= Darlene Lilley] Britton had had his eye ever since he’d sent Awad around with covert instructions to behave in such a way as to test for faultlines in Field Team morale and the girl’d shown such an extraordinary blend of personal stones and political aplomb in defusing Awad’s stressors) so but yes which field experiment Britton and his mentee Laleman had been told by no less a personage than T. Cordell (‘Ted’) Belt himself was designed to produce data on the way(s) certain received ideas of market research’s purposes affected the way Field Researchers facilitated their Targeted Focus Groups’ GRDS phase and thus influenced the material outcome of the TFGs’ in camera deliberations and GRDSs. This internal experiment was the second stage of a campaign, Britton had later told Laleman over near-zeppelin-sized cigars in his inner office, to finally after all this time start bringing US marketing research into line with the realities of modern hard science, which had proved long ago (science had) that the presence of an observer affects any process and thus by clear implication that even the tiniest, most ephemeral details of a Field test’s setup can impact the resultant data. The ultimate objective was to eliminate all unnecessary random variables in those Field tests, and of course by your most basic managerial Ockham’s Razorblade this meant doing away as much as possible with the human element, the most obvious of these elements being the TFG facilitators, namely Team Δy’s nerdy beleaguered Field Researchers, who now, with the coming digital era of abundant data on whole markets’ preferences and patterns available via cybercommerce links, were soon going to be obsolete (the Field Researchers were) anyway, Alan Britton said. A passionate and assuasive rhetor, Britton liked to draw invisible little illustrations in the air with his cigar’s glowing tip as he spoke. The mental image Scott Laleman associated with Alan Britton was of an enormous macadamia nut with a tiny little face painted on it. Laleman did unkind impersonations of Britton’s speech and gestures for some of the boys in Technical Processing when he was sure Mr. B. was nowhere around. Because the whole thing from soup to nuts could soon be done via computer network, as Britton said he was sure he didn’t have to sell Laleman on. Scott Laleman didn’t really even like cigars. Meaning the coming www-dot-slash-hypercybercommerce thing, which there’d already been countless professional seminars on and all of US marketing and advertising and related support industries were terribly excited about. But where most agencies still saw the coming www primarily as just a new, fifth venue* for high-impact ads, part of your more forward-looking Reesemeyer Shannon Belt-type vision for the coming era involved finding ways to exploit cybercommerce’s staggering research potential as well. Undisplayed little tracking codes could be designed to tag and follow each consumer’s w3 interests and spending patterns—here Laleman once again told Alan Britton what these algorithms were commonly called and averred that he personally knew how to design them; he of course did not tell Britton that he had already secretly helped design some very special little tracking algorithms for A.C. Romney- Jaswat & Assoc.’s sirenic Chloe Jaswat and that two of these quote unquote Cookies were even at that moment nested deep within Team Δy’s SMTP/POP protocols. Britton said that Focus Groups and even n-sized test markets could be assembled abstractly via ANOVAs† on consumers’ known patterns, that the TFG vetting was built right in—as in e.g. who showed an interest? who bought the product or related products and from which cybervendor via which link thing?—that not only would there be no voir dire and no archaic per diem expenses but even the unnecessary variable of consumers even knowing they were part of any sort of market test was excised, since a consumer’s subjective awareness of his identity as a test subject instead of as a true desire-driven consumer had always been one of the distortions that market research swept under the rug because they had no way of quantifying subjective-identity-awareness on any known ANOVA. Focus Groups would go the way of the dodo and bison and art deco. Alan Britton had already had versions of this conversation with Scott Laleman several times; it was part of Britton’s way of pumping himself up. Laleman had a vision of himself at a very large and expensive desk, Chloe Jaswat behind him kneading his trapezius muscles, while an enormous macadamia nut sat in a low chair before the desk and pleaded for a livable severance package. Sometimes, on the rare occasions when he masturbated, Laleman’s fantasy involved a view of himself, shirtless and adorned with warpaint, standing with his boot on the chest of various supine men and howling upward at what lay outside the fantasy’s frame but was probably the moon. That in other words, gesturing with the great red embrous tip, the exact same wonkish technology that Laleman’s boys in Technical Processing now used to run analyses on the TFG paperwork could replace the paperwork. No more small-sample testing; no more β-risks or variance-error probabilities or 1 – α confidence intervals or human elements or entropic noise. Once, in his junior year at Cornell U., Scott R. Laleman had been in an A.C.S. Dept. lab accident and had breathed halon gas, and for several days he went around campus with a rose clamped in his teeth, and tried to tango with anyone he saw, and insisted everybody all call him The Magnificent Enriqué, until several of his fraternity brothers finally all ganged up and knocked some sense back into him, but a lot of people thought he was still never quite the same after the halon thing. For now, in Belt and Britton’s forward-looking vision, the market becomes its own test. Terrain = Map. Everything encoded. And no more facilitators to muddy the waters by impacting the tests in all the infinite ephemeral unnoticeable infinite ways human beings always kept impacting each other and muddying the waters. Team Δy would become 100% tech-driven, abstract, its own Captured Shop. All they needed was some hard study data showing unequivocally that human facilitators made a difference, that variable elements of their appearance and manner and syntax and/or even small personal tics of individual personality or attitude affected the Focus Groups’ findings. Something on paper, with all the Systat t’s cro
ssed and i’s dotted and even maybe yes a high-impact full-color graph—for these were professional statisticians, after all, the Field Researchers; they knew the numbers didn’t lie; if they saw that the data entailed their own subtraction they’d go quietly, some probably even offering to resign, for the good of the Team. Plus then also Laleman pointed out that the study data’d also come in handy if some of them tried to fight it or squeeze Team Δy for a better severance by threatening some kind of bullshit WT suit. He could almost feel the texture of Mr. B.’s sternum under his heel. Not to mention (said Britton, who sometimes then held the cigar like a dart and jabbed it at the air when stipulating or refining a point) that not all would need to go. The Field men. That some could be kept. Transferred. Retrained to work the machines, to follow the Cookies and run the Systat codes and sit there while it all compiled. The rest would have to go. It was a rough business; Darwin’s tagline still fit. Britton sometimes addressed Scott Laleman as Laddie or Boyo, but of course never once as The Magnificent Enriqué. Mr. B. had absolutely 0% knowledge of what and who Scott R. Laleman really was inside, as an individual, with a very special and above-average destiny, Laleman felt. He had practiced his smile a great deal, both with and w/o rose. Britton said that the sub rosa experiments’ stressors would, as always in nature and hard science, determine survival. Fitness. As in who fit the new pattern. Versus who made too much difference, see, and where, when push came to shove there in camera. This was all artful bullshit. Britton poked glowing holes in the air above the desk. To see, he said he meant, how the facilitators reacted to unplanned stimuli, how they responded to their Focus Groups’ own reactions. All they needed were the stressors. Nested, high-impact stimuli. Shake them up. Rattle the cage, he said, watch what fell out. This was all really what was known in the game as Giving Someone Enough Rope. The big man leaned back, his smile both warm and expectant. Inviting the Boyo he’d chosen to mentor to brainstorm with him on some possible stressors right here and now. As in with Britton himself, to flesh out the needed tests. No time like now. Scott Laleman felt a kind of vague latent dread as the big man made a show of putting out his Fuente. A chance to step up to the plate with the big dogs, get a taste of real frontlines creative action. Right here and now. A chance for Dy’s golden boy to strut his stuff. Impress the boss. Run something up the rampant pole. Anything at all. Spontaneous flow. To brainstorm. The trick was not to think or edit, just let it all fly.* The big man counted down from five and put one hand to his ear and came down with the other hand to point at Scott Laleman as if to signal You’re On the Air, his eyes now two nailheads and tiny mouth turned down. The finger had something dark’s remains in the rim around its nail. Laleman sat there smiling at it, his mind a great flat blank white screen.