Oblivion_ stories - By David Foster Wallace Page 0,28

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