Feed

When Titus first spots Violet on the moon, he thinks she’s the most beautiful girl he’s ever seen, and he’s intrigued because she is different from the girls he knows. She is wearing a wool dress, which isn’t trendy, and watching juice float out of her mouth with fascination in the anti-gravity. Unlike Titus and his friends, Violet is poor, but she is also intelligent, educated, and socially aware. She was raised by her father, a professor of dead languages, and has been homeschooled. The trip to the moon was an expensive extravagance her father saved to give her, so Violet has great appreciation for it. Her feed wasn’t installed until she was six, which is abnormal and contributes to the damage the hacker’s attack does to her feed and the neurological systems it affects. Violet tries to rebel against the feed by confusing the consumer profile created by data miners, but this ends up hurting her when the corporations won’t pay to save her life. Violet romanticizes her relationship with Titus, especially after she learns she might be dying and tries to turn him into a great love story before she dies. Like the others, Violet was also conceived in a genetics lab, and she sees her entrance into the world as a lonely one, hoping that her exit will be less lonely. However, Titus can’t handle her sickness and leaves her to deal with the breakdown of her body with only her father to care for her. By the end of the novel, Violet is braindead, and Titus finally comes back to be with her.

Titus’s friend Link is from an extremely wealthy family with old money. He is also the only member of their friend group who is unattractive because, although he was also created in a gene lab, he was cloned from the blood left on Mary Todd Lincoln’s cloak after her husband, Abraham Lincoln, was assassinated. Link is therefore extremely tall, but he is not any more intelligent than the rest of the group, which suggests that any mind would atrophy in a corporation-based education system with a feed that is supposed to replace the need for learning. Link is also popular with girls, which Titus suspects is because he is rich, but suggests a level of magnetism about his personality. Even Violet was interested in him first because she thought his ugliness might give him some depth as a person. While on the moon, Link starts dating Calista, who is beautiful and popular. Link is privileged and competitive, a sore loser, and he is the most dedicated to finding a way to become intoxicated whether through drinking or going into malfunction. Link is the leader of the boys side of the group, and he gets upset when Marty beats him at games and challenges his dominance.

Another member of Titus’s friend group, Marty is gregarious, athletic, and very good at sports and games. He attracts girls because he is good-looking and always stands out in competitions. In the hospital, Marty starts to invent games while they can’t play on their feed. On the way to the moon, Link bullies Marty playfully, making sure that Marty knows he isn’t in charge. Marty was the one who suggested the trip to the moon in the first place, where he apparently went on family vacation at one point. He is disappointed when nothing is as he remembered, and the others are unimpressed with the trip. Marty always suggests they go into mal when they’re having a party. In the last section of the book, Marty has paid a lot of money for a Nike voice tattoo, which seems both silly and undesirable, but it makes his friends laugh.

Calista is the most beautiful and popular of the three girls in the friend group. She maintains her alpha status by staying perfectly updated on every trend and sometimes being mean and condescending to the other girls. Calista is immediately wary of Violet as a potential threat when the boys start to show interest in her. Although Violet proves to be fairly guileless in social settings, Calista makes a point to insult her when Titus brings her to parties to make Violet feel unwelcome. While the group is in the hospital on the moon, Calista and Link become a couple, and they continue dating throughout the novel. One day, Calista shows up to school with a huge fake lesion on the back of her neck because lesions are glamorized when they start to show up on top celebrities. Link tickles the lesion, much to Titus’s disgust. This shows that Calista and Link are entirely invested in superficiality and their images with no sense of irony or interest in real world issues.

Titus describes Quendy as a less-successful version of Calista, who is painfully aware of her second-tier status. Quendy had a brief fling with Link long before the novel begins, and she is desperately jealous when Calista starts to date him. She attempts hopelessly to get Link’s attention. After Calista shows up with the fake lesion, Quendy goes several steps further and has fake lesions put all over her body, which horrifies the others more than it gains positive attention. Quendy is much kinder and more empathetic than the other girls in the group, which is why she can’t compete with Calista. Quendy is also more susceptible to Calista’s bullying. She is quick to forgive Violet for screaming at her, even though her feelings were badly hurt, and she tells Titus not to abandon Violet when she needs him. By the end of the novel, Quendy and Titus are dating, which makes sense as a match because Titus has become more emotionally intelligent and sensitive.

Loga is the only member of the friend group who manages to avoid the hacker. As seen through Titus’s perspective, Loga seems emotionally disconnected and indistinctive, following the trends blandly like the other girls but without Calista’s cutthroat meanness or Quendy’s insecure empathy. Titus and Loga have a romantic history, having dated about six months before the narrative of the novel begins. They had broken up with a huge fight that had led to Loga never wanting to see Titus again. Now that they’re able to be friends again, Titus is bothered that he and Loga seem to have no connection. Titus watches her dancing with Link and wonders why they have no special sense of communication with each other, but he also considers that they might hook up on the moon if neither finds someone better. When Loga visits the others in the hospital, she is distracted by her feed, contrasting the way Titus talks about the endless media and engagement of the feed with what it looks like to someone who is outside and unable to look in. While visiting, their favorite show comes on the feed, and Loga describes it for everyone. Titus notes that Loga has never been so animated when telling a story, suggesting that the creative act of describing a story for people who can’t see or hear it momentarily unlocks something in her.

Titus only refers to his parents as “mom” and “dad,” and only calls his six-year-old brother “Smell Factor.” Although his mother refers to his father by his name (Steve) a few times, it’s apparent that Titus views his family with a sense of disconnect that is indicative of not only his perspective as a teenager but the way the feed has become more real to him than the people in his presence. Titus’s parents had him created in a genetics lab, using specific physical features from each of them mixed with some of the characteristics of an extremely attractive actor. This suggests that they were only concerned with Titus being beautiful, and not particularly interested in whether he was born with other qualities. Titus’s father works in banking in a position that has made the family wealthy, but he has little emotional connection with his family. He fulfills his role by buying things for them and expecting gratitude and respect in return. Even when he visits Titus in the hospital, he is barely present, paying more attention to his feed than his son. When Violet criticizes the damage corporations have done to the environment, Titus’s dad becomes cold and belittling, unaccustomed to having his authority challenged. Titus’s mother is much warmer, though she prefers to sweep unpleasantness under the rug. However, she does take note and challenge Titus’s father when his memories of a corporate trip suggest he may be having an affair with a woman at work. Smell Factor is constantly immersed in the content on his feed, ignoring orders to stop during meals and be present with the family and even disrupting those around him by singing along and interacting with the media on his feed. Smell Factor’s presence in the novel raises the question as to how this immersion with the feed will affect his brain development and his ability to connect with other people as he gets older.