Microserfs

MONDAY (One week later)

From behind the fabric-covered disassemblable wall partitions of our office I heard Emmett mumble to Susan: “Hey, Sooz — want to go out tonight?”

“I don’t know, Emm …”

“Hey, it’ll be great. We can listen in on cellular calls with my Radio Shack Pro-46 scanner — I altered its megahertz range with a soldering gun — or maybe listen to some crank calls I have on tape — hack a few passwords. Grab some calzones …”

Susan played it cool: “Uh huh — I’ll, umm, think on it.”

But the moment Emmett was out of sight, Susan instant-mailed Karla and they scurried down to the street for a debriefing, Susan’s hoop earrings jangling like Veronica Lodge’s tambourine. Karla told me afterward that Susan said it was the best date proposal she’d ever had. “Dream date!”

No conversation is private in our small office, and every day I listen in on what is becoming a female bond-o-thon.

Today, however, Karla, Susan, and Dusty really broke through a wall into a new level. It started out simply enough, with all of us discussing the way that food products in recent years have been cloning themselves out into eighteen versions of themselves. For example, old Coke, new Coke, diet Coke, old Coke without caffeine, new Coke without caffeine, Coke with pulpy bits, Coke with cheese … We tried to figure out the roots of product multiplication and we decided it was peanut butter manufacturers who decades ago invented chunky and smooth versions of themselves.

Then things went out of control. Karla suddenly remembered to tell Susan about how Fry’s doesn’t sell tampons, and Susan got angrier and angrier, and the conversation became entirely tamponic.

“I don’t know why they don’t sell them. If nothing else, they’re so damned expensive the profit margin must be like 1,000 percent.”

She phoned to fact-check that Fry’s indeed did not sell them.

Karla said, “This woman Lindy that I met at last week’s geek party works at Apple, and she told me that in all of the women’s bathrooms there they have these clear Lucite dispensers of tampons that are free. Now that’s corporate intrusion into employee’s lives that I could live with.”

They all agreed tampons gratis are the acme of hip.

“Apple must be run by a woman,” said Dusty. “Maybe it is and they’re hiding it to stay on good terms with the Japanese.”

Karla said, “Wha …?” and Dusty replied, “Oh, come on, babe, Japanese businessmen are notoriously adverse to accepting authority from women, no matter how powerful they are in their American companies.”

Conversation lapsed into a discussion of Apple’s charisma deficit crisis, but then soon enough returned to tampons, and for me it was so embarrassing, like watching Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom with your mom, and suddenly a Summer’s Eve commercial comes on, and Mom scurries out of the room and you’re not sure why you’re supposed to be embarrassed, only that everybody is.

Karla said, “But the bad thing about the free tampons at Apple is that they’re Playtex, not O.B.”

All three in unison: “Designed by a woman gynecologist …”

Susan said, “Playtex suck because they just get longer, not wider … When I bleed, it’s not a vertical thing … it’s 360 degrees. And it’s so freaky because when you put it in, it’s this innocuous little lipstick size, and then when you take it out there’s this long cotton rope at the end of the string! I’m afraid it’s going to hook my uterus and I’ll accidentally drag it out!”

Todd sent me an instant mail, which blinked on my screen, saying, I can’t believe what I’m hearing.

Dusty said, “O.B.’s rock! But I guess not every powerful female executive is comfortable enough with her body to put her finger (fake ‘50s housewife voice) you know where.”

They all laughed ironically.

Susan said, “I think that the lamest excuse women use about why they don’t use O.B. is because they don’t want their index finger to get dirty … I mean whenever you pay for something with a dollar bill your hand gets filthy, but does that stop them from making purchases with dollar bills?”

“They need to make tampons for those ‘chunky’ days … ‘light’ days panty-liners blow!” said Karla.

This is obviously a universal tampon concern judging by the enthusiasm that ensued.

Todd instant-mailed me, Women have *chunky* days? Are guys supposed to know this stuff? I am experiencing fear.

I was trying to think of a “guy” equivalent of chunkiness, but I couldn’t, and meanwhile, the three of them just kept rocking on, and Todd, Bug, and I just buried our heads deeper into our work areas.

Dusty said, “Gawd … I was rilly, rilly freaked out the first time I had chunks. No one ever tells you about that in, like, school or at home or anything. You see those Playtex commercials and they’ve got this watery blue liquid and that’s what you’re expecting, and then one day you look at your pad and there are … chunks there. Grotacious.”

Karla, ever logical, said, “I knew intellectually it had to be uterine lining, but I envisioned the lining as being thin, wispy … not like chunks of liver.”

Dusty figured, “We, as women, also need to invent some alternative to that adhesive they use on pads. I wouldn’t even wear them if it weren’t for chunks. It rilly bothers me to think of these chunks that want to migrate south, but they can’t because of this Tampon Roadblock. So I always wear pads on like the second day, but I hate them. It’s like getting a drive-by waxing.”

Karla suggested, “If they ever made ‘chunky-style’ tampons, we wouldn’t need to ever wear pads.”

Susan said, “I’ll bet you anything Fry’s doesn’t carry tampons because they’re misogynist and afraid of adult, bleeding women … they can’t accept the non-Barbie, fully-functional female!”

Karla and Dusty: “Right on, Sister!”

Susan said, “Yet again men win: with condom hysteria and semen they monopolize the notion of sacred body fluids. Women lose again. I want pads to be to the 1990s what condoms were to the 1980s. Destigmatize the flow!”

Susan had the idea to start up a support group for Valley women who code. She’s calling it Chyx and has put word out on the Net. She said, “I was going to spell it ‘Chycks’ but then ‘Chyx’ sounds more like a bioengineering firm, and that’s kind of cool.”

Prerequisites for joining Chyx (which makes you a “Chyk”) are “fluency in two or more computer languages, a vagina, and a belief that Mary Tyler Moore as Mary Richards in a slinky pantsuit is the worldly embodiment of God.”

Susan will probably be swamped. Karla and Dusty have Chyx member numbers 0002 and 0003 respectively. They have been given a full set of photocopied writings of Brenda Laurel.

This reminds me, the lower your employee number down here, the higher your status — and the more likely you are to hold equity.

Later on in the day, our lives devolved into an Itchy & Scratchy cartoon. We all decided we needed sunlight — we’ve all been working so hard lately and our internal clocks are somewhere in the Eastern Bloc nations — so we went for a drive in the Microbus up through Stanford, up to the linear particle accelerator that passes underneath the 280 by the Sand Hill Road exit.

It was the core team from the old Redmond geek house: Karla, Michael, Todd, Bug, and Susan — as well as Ethan. Dusty didn’t come because everything makes her sick these days. She’s set her workstation up by the bathroom door. She craves instant “Mr. Noodles,” and is constantly sending Todd out for food runs to Burger King. Michael gave her his collection of international airline sickness bags as a “fertilization present.”

Emmett left early, no doubt to groom himself. Anatole came by, but left. We’re mad at him because he still hasn’t organized an Apple tour for us, and he said he would, weeks ago.

Anyway, Bug and Susan and Todd and Ethan got in this arcane discussion on the relative merits of QWERTY versus Dvorak keyboards and it got U-G-L-Y. They were screaming, and I swear, the four of them were going to strangle each other with seat belts and burn each other’s eyes out with the cigarette lighter and drag each other raw on the pavement, making sick red smudges along the neat and clean California State white lines.

Finally I booted them out at Pasteur and Sand Hill Drive, then drove a quarter mile up, letting them feel stupid and walk it off. I screamed out the window, “Stop the madness!”

Anyway, after “our coders” had their little walk, they were much better behaved. Then Todd yelled “Shogun,” not “shotgun,” to claim the front passenger seat, but then Susan said only the word “shotgun“ counted, and it turned all Itchy & Scratchy again, and Bug ended up nabbing the shotgun seat.

We drove to the Sand Hill Road exit (location of the dreaded venture capital mall) west off the 280, into the paddocks and oaks and horsey area, parked the bus, and walked across a Christmas tree farm to a Cyclone fence surrounding the Stanford Linear Accelerator, a structure that resembles a mile-long rear side of a 7-Eleven — sandstone-tinted aluminum siding with tasteful landscaping. Not much to look at, but let me say, extremity of shape certainly does imply extremity of function. And whenever you see no windows, there’s something scary or beguiling going on inside. No humans. Stepford.

Needless to say, there were FUCK OFF AND DIE warning signs from the Department of Energy bolted onto the wire fencing around the accelerator’s perimeter. Ethan said, “Why is it that everything I’m truly interested in has the words ‘Warning: U.S. Department of Energy’ stamped all over it?”

Today was one of those anything’s-possible days: blue skies and fluffy clouds; smooth-flowing freeways; all plant life on 24-hour chlorophyll shift after three days of rain. So alive! Two red-tailed hawks circled in the winds above, wings immobile for ten minutes on end (we timed, of course) hunting mice and gophers and squirrels. Serene.

And then we went into the mountains, into the greenery, so dense, with the sun dappling through, walking across a small wooden bridge and we had to remind ourselves we weren’t dead and not in heaven. We came away from it feeling that life really is good, and with our circadian rhythms somewhat restored to Pacific Standard Time.

On the way back we drove past Xerox PARC on Coyote Hill Road, and Bug swooned only mildly. He now no longer foams when he imagines how Xerox could be the biggest company on Earth if they’d only understood what they had back in the 1970s.

After that, we pulled into the Stanford Shopping Center mall to cool off and shop for short pants. Amid the Neiman Marcus, the Williams and Sonoma, the NordicTrack, and the Crabtree & Evelyn franchises we discussed subatomic particles. At Stanford Laboratory they’re hunting down the magic particles that hold together the universe. There’s one particle that’s still unfound. I asked the carload if anyone knew what it was.

“The Top Quark,” answered Michael.

“Duct tape,” answered Susan, scowling at Todd.

Stanford is so weird. They have bumper stickers like:

“I ♥ ANTARCTICA,” “I ♥ Cellos,” and “Calligraphy ♥ for letter or verse.”

The day taught us one thing: We all agreed we need to take a bit more time out for personal development and simple rest. Even Ethan conceded this necessity, albeit by asking us if we could take shifts to do it. We had to tell him that leisure, like intelligence, doesn’t scale.

Everyone immediately bailed out of work, but I headed to the office to play with Oop! for a while to work on my space station. Karla drove up to San Francisco to help Laura from Interval paint her apartment the same color yellow as Mary Tyler Moore’s Mustang convertible. Bug was going to go help, too.

Around 1:30 A.M. the door opened and I thought it was Karla, but it was Bug, saying Karla and Laura had gone out for a stag night after they ran out of paint.

Bug came in and sat down in the chair next to me and we had a conversation. The lights were low — Just a few monitors and a light by the coffee machine. Bug said — not even to me, I think, but to himself, “I was just in this nightclub downtown, Dan. I felt awkward. I’m not used to nightclubs and I don’t like cigarette smoke or the way people pose and get phony in clubs.”

I realized that Bug had dressed up for the night, or rather, had made an effort to coordinate his wardrobe. Also, Dusty has him signed up with a trainer at a gym, and he’s not looking so much like he was assembled from the leftover bits of the Lego box as he used to. For that matter, Karla and I are both looking better assembled ourselves, these days. The gym.

“And so anyway,” Bug continued, “there was this picture frame-shaped thing hanging from the ceiling — part of the club’s decoration — and I thought I was looking into a mirror and so I reached up my hand to move my hair, and of course, my image on the other side was doing the same thing. And then suddenly I realized—we realized — at the same moment, that we were two different people and both went ‘Whoa!”

“And?”

“And I realized that maybe it’s even possible, however briefly, and without even much say in the matter, to become someone else, or to be handed another body, in a blink of an eye. Is that called ‘body invasion’? Karla would know.”

There was a quiet patch here — just the hums of the computers; a blink sound from someone’s system receiving e-mail. Bug continued: “And so I met Jeremy.”

“Well good for you.”

“It’s not love,” he added quickly. “But we are going to see each other again. But tell me, Daniel — I mean, I knew you before you knew Karla. Did you ever think then that love was never going to happen to you?”

“Pretty much.”

“And when it did happen, how did you feel?”

“Happy. And then I got afraid that it would vanish as quickly as it came. That it was accidental — that I didn’t deserve it. It’s like this very, very nice car crash that never ends.”

“And where are you now?”

I thought: “I think the fear part’s leaving. I don’t know what comes next. But the love hasn’t gone, no.”

Bug looked perplexed and happy, but sort of sad, too.

He said, “I used to care about how other people thought I led my life. But lately I’ve realized that most people are too preoccupied with their own lives to give anybody else even the scantiest of thoughts.” He looked up at me: “Oh, not you and Karla and the rest of the crew. But people in general. My family’s from Idaho. Coeur d’Alene. A beautiful place as ever there was, but believe me, Dan, it’s hard to be different there.”

As usually happens in our office, he began to fidget with Lego bricks.

“It starts out young — you try not to be different just to survive — you try to be just like everyone else — anonymity becomes reflexive — and then one day you wake up and you’ve become all those other people — the others—the something you aren’t. And you wonder if you can ever be what it is you really are. Or you wonder if it’s too late to find out.”

I had no idea what to say. So I listened, which is often the best idea. And I realized Bug had driven all the way down from San Francisco just to find a person to tell this to.

“Anyway, I never talk about myself, and you guys never ask, and I’ve always respected that. But there comes a time when you either speak or forfeit what comes next.”

He got up. “I’m driving back up the Peninsula. Home. I just wanted to talk to somebody.”

I said, “Good luck, Bug,” and he winked at me.

Sassy!

TUESDAY

Day of coding. It felt really Microsofty for some reason.

Midday, Karla went walking with Mom and Misty, and the two of them returned absolutely comatose with boredom. I have never seen two people with less chemistry. I just don’t understand how I can love two people so much, yet have them be so indifferent to each other.

Oh, and Misty’s getting really F-A-T, even though Mom has her on a “slimming diet.” The neighbors are feeding her scraps because she’s irresistible. So Mom had to have a dog tag made up that says, “PLEASE DON’T FEED ME, I’M ON A DIET.” Karla said Mom should have millions of the things engraved and she could make a fortune selling them all over America, to people.

But, oh, does Misty waddle now!

Smoggy day down in the Valley. Rusty orange. Depressing. Like the 1970s.

Susan told us about her first date with Emmett last night, at a Toys-R-Us superstore in San Francisco. Emmett bought himself a Star Trek Romulan Warbird. Susan bought some infamous “softer, less crumbly Play-Doh” as well as an obligatory Fun Factory, a Bug Dozer as well as a container of “Gak”—a water-based elastic goo-type play object endorsed by Nickelodeon and called by all of us, “the fourth state of matter.”

Afterward they parked on the Page Mill Road and monitored cellular phone calls.

Susan’s still obsessing that Fry’s doesn’t sell tampons. I think Fry’s had better look out.

Todd’s given up on trying to be political because Dusty no longer cares about the subject and, it would appear, nor does anybody at the office. It was a fun ride while it lasted. He talks to his parents up in Port Angeles more now, too. You can imagine how his religious parents wigged out when he told them he was a Communist. They still believe in Communists.

Ethan and I went out for drinks to the BBC bar in Menlo Park after a “Trip to Europe” (ten hours of coding; so much for yesterday’s leisure dictum). We both commented on a sense of unrest in the Valley. The glacial pace of the Superhighway’s development is absolutely maddening to the Valley’s citizens, their mouths fixed in expressions of relaxed pique amid the LensCrafters franchises, the garages, the S&L buildings, and the science parks. Nonetheless, Broderbund, Electronic Arts, and everybody else here grows and grows, so it’s all still happening. Just more slowly than we’d expected.

I said, “Remember, Ethan, these are geeky, on-demand type people who suddenly have to spend their lives as if they’re waiting for an Aeroflot flight out of Vladivostok — a flight that may or may never take off.” Then I remembered that we’re all “Russia’d out” after the political turmoil of the past few weeks and wish I’d not said that.

Ethan was glum: “CD ROM design is beginning to feel like aloe product sales chains and pyramid schemes.”

“Ethan — you’re our money guy. Don’t talk like that!”

“No one wants to pay for the highway’s infrastructure — it’s too expensive. In the old days, the government simply would have footed the bill, but they don’t do much pure research any more. Unless there’s a war, but then it’s hard to see how Bullwinkle and Rocky interactive CD products will help us crush an enemy. Fuck. We don’t even have enemies anymore.”

The music was playing a comforting old Ramones song, “I Wanna Be Sedated,” and we were feeling maudlin.

“Companies want to be signposts, toll booths, rest stops — anything except actual asphalt. Everyone’s afraid of spending heaps of money and becoming the Betamax version of the I-way. And I don’t think a war is something that would speed up development. I don’t think it’s that kind of technology. This thing won’t be real until every house in the world has had a little ditch dug up in its front lawn, and an optical fiber installed. Until then, it’s all Fantasy Island.”

I guess he was remembering how long it took for him to build his own Lego freeway in the office’s Lego garden.

We reordered Harvey Wallbangers (1970s night).

“It’s just so strange to see this sense … of stalematedness,” Ethan continued, remembering the Atari boom era. “This was the land where all you ever asked for was all you were ever going to get — so everyone asked Big.” He was getting philosophical. “This is the land where architecture becomes irrelevant even before the foundations are poured — a land of sustainable dreams that pose as unsustainable; frighteningly intelligent/depressingly rich.” He twisted a cocktail napkin into a rope. “Well,” he said, “the magic comes and goes.” He chugged a Wallbanger. “But in the end it always returns.”

Later on Ethan then became excited and pulled a crumpled sheet of thermal fax paper from his pocket. It was his list of “Interactive Hiring Guidelines” he had laser-printed and faxed throughout the Valley, like one of those “Thank God It’s Friday” posters, and was returned to him, about 17th generation. He felt proud to have entered the realm of apocrypha and urban legendary.

The Eight Laws of Multimedia Hiring:

1)

Always ask a person, “What have you shipped in the last two years?” That’s all you should really ask. If they haven’t shipped anything in the last two years, ask, “So what’s your excuse?”

2)

The “job-as-life phase” lasts for maybe ten years. Nab ‘em when they’re young, and make sure they never grow old.

3)

You can’t trust a dog that’s bitten you. You wouldn’t want to employ someone who you could steal away from another company in the middle of a project.

4)

The industry is made up of either gifted techies or smart generalists — the people who were bored with high school — the sort of people the teacher was always telling, “Now, Abe, you could get As if you really wanted to. Why don’t you just apply yourself?” Look for these people — the talented generalists. They’re good as project and product managers. They’re the same people who would have gone into advertising in 1973.

5)

One psycho for every nine stable people in the company is a good ratio. Too many maniacally-driven people can backfire on you. Balanced people are better for the long-term stability of the company.

6)

Start-up companies beware: kids fresh out of school invariably bail out after a few years and join the big tech monocultures in search of stability.

7)

People are most ripe for pilfering from tech monocultures in their mid-to late 20s.

8)

The upper age limit of people with instincts for this business is about 40. People who were over 30 at the beginning of the late 1970s PC revolution missed the boat; anyone older is like a Delco AM car radio.

I suggested he plug the text into the Net in comp. hiring. slavery, and see what other laws get tacked on, but he got offended and said that because he had the paper version that these were “THE LAWS,” and I realized there was no fighting either it or him.

“Ethan,” I said, “thermal paper, I mean, how 1991.”

Another super-long day. It’s 6:00 A.M. I think I see the sky pinking up. Oh God—dawn.

WEDNESDAY

Susan is tormenting poor Emmett now by ignoring him. Poor Emmett is feeling “pumped and dumped.”

Susan’s switched off her instant mail, and whenever moonstruck Mr. Couch visits her workstation she rations out her words, saying that she’s too busy coding and/or too busy working on her Chyx ‘zine, called “Duh …,” to speak with him.

Susan set up a Chyx Internet address and forecasts at least a hundred Chyx signed up on the Net by next week. She wants to set up forums about Fry’s not selling tampons being a metaphor for men’s fear of women, new product ideas, Barbie cults, and so forth. She’s obsessively into it.

“I could structure the forums and bulletin boards like an issue of Sassy … there’d be comments, and a place to ask other women for advice … what’s that column called?”

“Zits and stuff,” Karla promptly replies.

“Oh yeah. Well, I wouldn’t call it that, but something like personal narratives: ‘IT HAPPENED TO ME’.”

“I was the best programmer in my division and that jerk Tony got a promotion!”

“It happened to me: I dated a marketing manager and he turned out to be an asshole!”

“It happened to me: I was the only girl in Silicon Valley and still couldn’t get a date!” (Susan).

“It happened to me — I wrote a Melrose Place scriptwriting program that generated vibrant, nonlinear, marginally controversial plot lines and made a fortune!”

Susan’s on a crusade. Or a rampage.

Karla printed out the following letters and posted them all on her cubicle. They’re HAL 9000’s letters from 2001:

ATMLIFCOMHISFLXNUCMEMCNTVEH

Ethan flamed some of Bug’s code this afternoon. “Jesus, Bug — what are you making here — hot dogs? You’ve put in everything including the snout … everything but the squeal.”

Bug told him to piss off, and who does he think he is … Bill? The old Bug would have held a local McDonald’s hostage with a sawed-off carbine. Good for Bug.

We were discussing computer-aided animation and we realized that it would have taken every computer in the world then in existence to morph Elizabeth Montgomery’s nose into a twinkle-twinkle on Bewitched—“ENIACS and all that,” said Karla. “You could do it on a Mac now. In two minutes.”

Jeremy came over this afternoon, and he’s Bug’s double. Twinsville.

He showed up at the front door of the office and all seven of us stampeded foyer-ward like 101 Dalmatians to gawk out the front window as he and Bug walked away to Jeremy’s Honda.

Karla said the relationship had to be somewhat serious because “you know how hard it is to lure anybody down here from San Francisco.” She’s right. You could offer San Franciscans a free Infiniti J30 and they’d still have some excuse not to drive 25 measly miles down to Silicon Valley.

Actually, there’s a slight back-and-forth snobbery between the Valley and the City. The Valley thinks the City is snobby and decadent, and the City thinks the Valley is techishly boring and uncreative. But I can see these impressions starting to blur. This all sounds like that old Joan Baez song, “One Tin Soldier.”

While taking Misty on a walk with Mom through the Stanford Arboretum, Mom was telling me about this conversation she heard between two people with Alzheimer’s down at the seniors home where she volunteers:

“A: How you doin’?

B: Pretty good. You?

A: How you doin’?

B: I’m okay.

A: So you’re doing okay?

B: How you doin’?”

I laughed, and she asked me why, and I said, “It reminds me of America Online chat rooms!” She demanded an example, so I gave her one:

“A: Hey there.

B: Hi, A.

A: Hi, B

C: Hi

B: Look, C’s here.

A: Hi, C!

B: CCCCCCCCCC

C: A+B=A+B

A: Gotta go

B: Bye, A

C: Bye, A

B: Poo

C: Poo poo

“This,” I said, “is the much touted, transglobal, paradigm-shifting, epoch-defining dialogue to which every magazine on earth is devoting acres of print.”

Oh — Misty’s fur was covered in burrs, and it took us fifteen minutes to remove them.

Mom really has all of this new energy now that she swims every day. And her confidence has swelled enormously since winning the swim meet. She’s been restacking her rock pile with extra vigor.

THURSDAY

Astounding gossip meltdown: Susan and poor, meek little Emmett Couch, our manga-phobic storyboarder, went nuclear. It was SO embarrassing — right in the middle of the office Emmett started bellowing, “You just think of me as a piece of meat, Susan — I’m not sure I like that.”

And Susan said back, “I don’t call you a piece of meat. I call you my fuck toy.”

(Susan surveys room for rebuttal, we all sit there, pretending to work, our eyes like sad-eyed velvet painting waifs, staring at our keyboards.)

“Well, I’m not sure I like that,” Emmett says.

“Well, what do you want — to take it further? You want a relationship?”

“Well …”

“Stop sniveling. I thought the deal was, we just have sex and leave it at that. Don’t annoy me. I have to get back to work.”

So Emmett went back to work. We, of course, were silent, but the instant-mail was flying on each other’s screens. Blink blink blink. We were riveted. Poor Emmett’s in love, and Susan doesn’t want that. Or maybe she likes this type of relationship. People always get what they need. She’s truly earned her stud medal on this one.

I went to Price-Costco. My weekly job is to purchase in-office snacks, all set up in an IKEA shelf unit in the kitchen. Everything costs 75$.

Mr. Noodles (for Dusty)

Pop-Tarts hot chocolate mix

Cup•A•Soup granola bars

Chee•tos

Famous Amos cookies

Fig Newtons

microwave popcorn

BBQ potato chips

Karla, Bug, and I went on a tour of “Multi-Media Gulch” later in the afternoon. What a joke. There’s nothing there! Or rather, there’s lots of stuff around the north end of the Bay Bridge, in around the warehousey neighborhood — many companies doing cool things — but there’s no public interface, so you might as well be in any warehouse district anywhere. No T-shirt stands.

We met up with Jeremy, who, as it turns out, is highly into body manipulation: tattoos, piercings, and (scary) branding. He’s really political and he talks about queer-this and queer-that and the whole thing reminds me of our office’s recent fling with Marxism, and I try and pretend it’s fascinating, but my mind does wander off. Like when someone starts describing their stereo.

I couldn’t help thinking, though, that it was a good thing Bug moved to San Francisco — being gay is such a nonissue here. You could be an ultrapolitical gay activist or a gay Republican; there’s no overriding clique dominating. And fortunately for Bug, there seems to be a bigger dating pool to draw from than in Coeur d’Alene or Seattle.

Anyway, Bug, Jeremy, Karla, and I stopped by Body Manipulations on Fillmore Street. The guy in front of us was waiting to get a “Gigue”—a pierce inserted onto the strip of skin between the scrotum and the anus.

“But your body is your hard drive!” said Karla, to embarrassing withering stares of everybody in the store.

Karla, Bug, and I blanched and Bug asked Jeremy if his earring could wait. Jeremy was furious and stormed out. So the piercing’s on hold, at least temporarily, and Bug is in the doghouse with Jeremy. Bug said, “I think there’s a lot about this new culture I don’t quite understand yet. I’m coming to it pretty late.”

Whenever Abe e-mails me, he uses a fast-food-related tag line. I’ve compiled a list. Herewith:

Ample Parking

Ask Your Manager about Unionizing … No, Don’t

Batter-fried Batter: Yum

Backlit Plexiglas Signs: Excellent BB Gun Targets

Cat Food: The Next Level

Customers Are Taking too Many Free Napkins

e coli. 157 Bacteria Colonizes Undercooked Patties

Elderly Employees Easier to Bully

Everybody Fears Clowns

Fishwich … Real word … Yes or No?

Focus Grouping Deems Lamb-burgers Unpopular

Garish Color Schemes Discourage Loitering

Gift Certificates Make Shitty Presents

Hairnets

Hard to Envision Ronald McDonald Dating

More Orange Drink Machines at Birthday Parties

Muzak Discourages Loitering Teen Thugs

Pictures Instead of words on Cash Register Buttons

Pseudo-randomly Shaped Beef Patties

Shamrock Burgers Unlikely

Swan Nuggets Tempt Yuppies

28 Dead in Random Sniping Bloodbath

Unhappy Meals-And That’s Okay

Uniforms Must Affirm Asexuality

Younger Staff Exhibiting Insolence

FRIDAY

Susan and Emmett have made up, but Karla says that it’s going to be tempestuous between them. Susan likes bullying, and Emmett likes to be bullied. They were down in the parking lot earlier on filling up partially rotted green bell peppers with red marine alkyd enamel paint which they will then hurl at sexually exploitative billboards later tonight. Emmett wears the same expression on his face that Misty wears whenever Dusty twirls her around like a Maypole. He’s just frighteningly in love. I mean, I love Karla, but Emmett seems, what is the word … enslaved.

*UH OH*.

But then, Susan’s the obsessive type, too. So they’re a pair.

Mom and I took Misty for a morning walk today and Mom was chattier than usual. Her work at the seniors home has her thinking quite a bit, it seems. Between the seniors home, swimming, the library, and Dad, she’s so busy nowadays.

In order to keep up with “us kids,” Mom’s been reading (and clipping) yet more articles about this @$&*%!! Information Superhighway. The enormity of her clipping enthusiasm seems to have made the issue penetrate her consciousness. She was asking me about brains and memories.

I wasn’t about to go into Karla’s theories of the body and memory storage because discussing my body with my mother is something I’m simply unable to do. But I did say, “There’s one thing computing teaches you, and that’s that there’s no point to remembering every thing. Being able to find things is what’s important.”

“What about if you don’t use a memory often enough, then. If a memory isn’t used enough, does it become irretrievable?”

“Well — aside from proton decay and cosmic rays eliminating connections, I think memories are always there. They just get … unfindable. Think of memory loss as a forest fire. It’s natural. You shouldn’t really be afraid. Think of the flowers that grow where the land had just been destroyed.”

“Your grandfather had Alzheimer’s. Did you know that? Maybe I shouldn’t be telling you this.”

“I already knew. Dad told me about it years ago. Was it fast?”

“Worse — slow.”

Misty became instant friends with a passing jogger who had been taking her pulse. Dogs have it so easy.

Mom said, “I’ve been wondering if maybe our time here on earth has been protracted out for too long — by science — and wondering if maybe it’s not a bad thing to expire before our government-waranteed 71.5 years have elapsed.”

“Mom, this isn’t one of those ‘I-have-cancer’ talks, is it?”

“God, no. It’s just that seeing all those old people at work, so lonely and forgetful and all — it makes me have some dark thoughts. That’s all. Oh listen to me natter. How selfish.”

Mom was always taught that other people’s problems were more important than her own.

“Anything else …?” I asked.

“And now I’m wondering. That’s all.”

“Wondering what?”

“I seem to feel myself losing … myself This sounds so bored-housewife. But I’m not bored. But I have problems, too.” I asked her what they were, but she said that problems were best not spoken of, and this is, perhaps, my family’s main problem. “I’m joining a metaphysical discussion group.”

“That’s it?”

“You don’t think I’m nutty?” (I have never heard anybody use the word “nutty” unironically before, and there was a satellite-link pause before I could say, “God no!” Karla and I have a metaphysical discussion group between ourselves almost every night.)

“Of course not.”

Spent the latter part of the day set on “WANDER,” cruising this glorious Bay with Karla. The freeways — they’re so gorgeous — the 280 cresting the big hill going north, past all the Pacifica and Daly City exits; the Highway 92 cloverleaf to Hayward and Half Moon Bay off the 101. So sensual, so infinite, so full of promise.

Walking through the paddocks — we did the running-across-the-field-in-slow-motion-toward-each-other thing; we toyed with the bioanimatronic singing vegetable booth at Molly Stone’s on California Street. Then we looked for an Italian restaurant so we could reenact the classic Lady and the Tramp spaghetti noodle/kiss scene.

During dinner we discussed encryption. I got to wondering what a paragraph with no vowels would look like, remembering that when Ethan first met Michael, at the Chili’s restaurant, Michael was busy deleting vowels on the menu. So later on I’m going to experiment with this.

Abe:

It stopped raining today, so I wnet out and bounced around on the trampoline. But it wansn’t the same without Bug standing on the sidelines outlining quadripoligeia in exquisite detail.

I wonder if maybe I don’t talk to enough humans in a given day … I have a few casual interactions, but nothing really. And people I’m technically close with, like my family … I don’t discuss deep things with them, either.

Anyways, it seeems okay for us to talk abuout things. I’ve never really done this before. And sometimes I feel kind of lost. There-I’ve revealed too much. I’m going to send you this before I can stop myself.

Barbecue dinner tonight chez Mom and Dad.

We were discussing the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) held every January in Las Vegas and every July in Chicago, and Mom asked us why CES is so important, and Ethan, disdaining food, plucking a grapefruit from a tree beside the wisteria vine, replied pronto. He’s so nice to my mother. They get along so well. But he’s not Eddie Haskell nice. He’s just nice nice. He’s also an information leaf blower:

“The CES began as an annual Las Vegas car speaker and pornography trade show. It only incidentally began showcasing video games in the early 1980s. Games were considered a sideline novelty and have only recently been revealed as the passageway for the future of the human race. Editorials aside, in Las Vegas at CES you have what’s called the ‘Demo Derby.’ Companies like us have to have a working demo of our products to show the outlets — Toys-R-Us, Blockbuster, and Target — as well as business plans and market research. As well you have what are called ‘product sneaks’—you show the press your product so you can attract potential licensee software developers as well as drum up new business. I’ve been to eighteen CES shows. They make or break you.”

After this, Susan said, “You’d think I was at Sea World and had asked Ethan about Shamu’s feeding habits. How does he remember this stuff? He just reels it off.”

Bug has broken up with Jeremy, who he says is too politicized and too extreme. He was fairly open about it with Karla and me.

“Jeremy wanted me to be just like him, which wouldn’t be so bad, except he’s just like all of his friends. It’s like Coeur d’Alene all over again — except with pasta and better defined pectorals. And it doesn’t annoy me that Jeremy wants me to be just like him. That’s actually kind of nice. But what bothers me is that Jeremy is just essentially not like me, and we’re too disparate to ever be in sync. I thought, you know, dating would be a bit easier. It’s not. And what’s truly freaky is realizing I’m vulnerable to identity changes because I’m so desperate to find a niche. I feel like Crystal Pepsi.”

In the middle of all this, Dad was putzing around in the background. He’s building my space station I’m designing in real space and real time. He asked me where the box with 8-stud beams was. (“Over there by the bowl of plastic eyeballs.” “Oh right — there they are.”)

Bug continued, “I know I’m sort of a nerd and I don’t dress nicely and I grouch out at times, but I still want to be me. I want to find somebody else, sure, but I also don’t want to end up harder at the end of all of this.” He went back to work.

Ethan sauntered through. “Milestones? Are we meeting our milestones, O content delivery system of mine?”

Susan, Emmett, Dusty, and about a dozen Chyx organized together over the Net, and decided to picket Fry’s for fostering female de-intelligence by not selling tampons. The San Jose Mercury News interviewed them, took their picture, and left soon enough. Victory!

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SATURDAY

Michael and Ethan broke down and told everyone the news — we have NO money. They made sure Dad wasn’t around for the news, which was nice. We’d more or less suspected this all along, so in the end it came as no surprise.

Suddenly Microsoft doesn’t look so bad. How could we have been so stupid to leave? Microsoft is a business first and only — not a social welfare state for 13,000 people who lucked in at the right moment.

Michael is petrified we might have to sell his Lego. “It’s so pretty — it would be murder … a sin … to take it all apart. And last week ID magazine came in to take its picture.”

The thing is, we agree about the Lego. It is too pretty to sell. Somewhere a few weeks ago, like a piece of DNA with just the right number of proteins added, it became alive. We can’t kill it.

Suddenly it occurred to me that Ethan could sell his Patek Phillipe watch. That’s 35 million yen right there. I said, “Ethan, sell your watch,” and he said, “I can’t believe you thought this was genuine,” and dropped it into the coffee pot saying, “Six dollars. Kowloon. 1991.”

We got nothing done in the afternoon. In fact we got drunk. We have no idea what we’re going to do. Work some more, I suppose.

Abe looks like he’s all set to go nonlinear. His e-mail is becoming telltale to an amazing degree:

At 21, you make this Faustian pact with yourself-that your company is allowed to soak up 7 to 10 years of your life-but then at 38 you have to abandon the company, or else there’s something WRONG with you.

The tech system feeds on bright, asocial kids from diveorced backgrounds who had pro-education parents. We ARE in a new industry; there aren’t really many older poeple in it. We are on the vanguard of adoldescence protraction.

As is common with Microsoft people I worked like a mental case throughout my 20s, and then hit this wall at thiry and went *SPLRT*.

But just think about the way high tech cultures purposefully protract out the adolescence of their employees well into their late 20s, if not their early 30s,. I mean, all those NERF TOUYS and FREE BEVERAGES! And the way tech firms won’t even call work “The office:, but instead, “the campus”.

It’s sick and evil. At least down in California YOU’RE not working on a campus.

With youre 30s begins “the closing” … you realize that it’ not going to be forever … the game becomes a lot more serious. People get more involved in their work.

Conundrum: I can’t imagine not giving myself fully to a job … 100% of me … but if I DO, I’d neuer “haue a life” (whateuer that means.) The problem is, who’d WANT to haue a job that couldn’t absorb you 100%??

SEE?

Back at the office, drunk, Susan demonstrated for us the Official Chyx handshake — all Chyx members greet each other by emulating the world-famous Farrah Fawcett simultaneous hair-flip-and-aim gesture, touching fingertips in mock gun-firing pose at the end of the gesture’s completion. Dusty, Karla, Michael, and Susan were in the Lego garden practicing, and it was like boot camp:

“Make it fluid, kids — remember, you’re sweeping twelve pounds of Texan corn-fed hair out of your eyes and readying a loaded Colt .45 almost simultaneously. There’s a slight flip of the neck involved, and the left gun-holding hand must reach horizontal position at exactly the same moment the hair-flipping finger has swept the hair and is ready to pull the trigger. Michael — a bit more grace. Dusty, what would Kelly, Jill, and Sabrina say about that jerkiness between the hair and the trigger? Take aim, Chyx. You are the world. Free your mind. Unplug. Plug in.”

Thought: all PC-style consumer electronics are the same oyster-gray color of Macintoshes. The guy who makes the gray pigment must be one rich pigment maker. And all TV-style things are black. What will be the color when TVs and PCs merge?

SUNDAY

Abe has defected! Susan was on CNN! What a day! Exclamation marks!

First of all, Abe arrived with a U-Haul filled with 10,000 plastic drinking straws, Jif, a bed, and, hopefully, a Scrooge McDuck-like heap of money. He entered our Hamilton Street office around noon wearing his Starship Enterprise T-shirt. I said to him, “Hi, Abe, welcome home,” and he said, “Hello, Daniel. I’m having my trampoline shipped down — even though it would probably be cheaper to buy one here.”

He paused here and looked about the Lego garden. “It would be a shame not to bring the trampster with me, you know—such a useful metaphor for labor in the 1990s.” He scanned the room further, seemingly unfazed by its colorful shock value, and pulled a plump-looking Costco bag out from underneath his armpit. “Oh, hello, Michael … I brought you some cheese slices to help us through those all-nighters. Now please tell me, just where is my space going to be?”

Abe had a brief meeting with Michael and Ethan ran out shouting, “We’re liquid! We’re liquid! We really are the liquid engineers. Daniel … how do you spell relief? Spell it, C-A-P-I-T-A-L.”

Indeed, Abe is becoming an equity partner. He’s going to help Michael out as a “senior” engineer and finish some core low-level code for him. Not only that but, in the interim until he finds a place to live, Abe is also moving in with Ethan up at the Dirty Harry house, and Ethan’s overjoyed at the prospect of cash. Ethan was like that old cartoon dog character who, every time he received a bone, his ears would twirl up like a helicopter, his body would rise into the sky, and then he would float down to the earth in limp abandon.

Abe said, “People without lives like to hang out with other people who don’t have lives. Thus they form lives.” Even better, he’ll have company.

CNN: we bootlegged a coaxial cable line in from the next office over and had it blasting on the monitor all day, watching “our Susan” every hour on the hour until around six o’clock, demonstrating for 137 countries around the world the Official Chyx handshake, discussing gender-blindness in the tech world, and, best of all, sneaking in her Net address.

It was very “TV.” After 6:00, her segment was replaced by a segment on toilet training your cat.

Susan never even told us she did a CNN interview. But she came across so well. She’s a star! And already her Chyx mailbox on our little Oop! node is jammed with responses. Susan, wearing a T-shirt portraying gender intelligence researcher Brenda Laurel that she had custom-made at Kinko’s, was radiantly happy — not just at seeing her equity in Oop! saved at the last minute by Abe’s money bin, but in seeing Chyx explode internationally. “Quelle plug for Chyx,” she said, obviously thrilled. “And that Chyx handshake looked so good on TV. Best idea I ever had.”

We celebrated all of the day’s news with sundown drinks at the Empire Tap Room, and people were coming up to Susan and saying, “You’re the smart one!” and Susan admitted that she, indeed, identified with Kate Jackson on Charlie’s Angels.

Michael mixed Robitussin with his Calistoga water. We asked him if the drink had a name and he said, “I hereby christen this drink ‘the Justine Bateman’ after the lovely and talented sister character, Mallory, of TV’s beloved mid-eighties sitcom, Family Ties.”

Abe felt left out and wanted to invent a drink, too, so he put two Redoxon vitamin tablets into his diet Coke and rum and christened it a “Tina Yothers,” “the smart, sassy younger sister of the above-mentioned TV sitcom.”

We then tormented the staff by demanding those European layered drinks with all of the various liqueurs of varying specific gravities in tall, thin glasses. Dusty called the drinks “metaphor for the class system,” and we were all weirded-out because we remembered she used to be so political and now she just changes the subject whenever it comes up.

Then, because so many people in the Bay Area have tattoos, we lapsed into a discussion of the subject. In the end, we all basically decided, “Yuck,” all except for Bug who is still considering a lifetime of body mutilation with an earring appointment he has next week. Bug was actually being a bit mopey — the breakup, I suppose.

Anyway, we concluded that if we were forced at gunpoint to have a tattoo put onto us, the only acceptable tattoo we could think of was a bar code symbol.

We then tried to decide which bar codes would be coolest, and we decided the best ones would be products with high brand-name recognition: Kraft dinner, Kotex, Marlboro, Coca-Cola, and so forth.

And then we figured that bar codes will be obsolete soon enough, and having one on your shoulder or forehead would be like having a Betamax tattooed on your shoulder or forehead.

So in the end we couldn’t decide on a tattoo.

There was this weird moment at the end of the night when everybody was pixelated. Ethan was carrying two flaming Sambucas, and tripped over a Planet of the Apes lunchbox somebody left on the floor next to a backpack, and the drinks sloshed all over the back of Susan’s T-shirt, and she was on fire, like the “Flame On!” guy from the Fantastic Four.

Emmett leapt over to her from behind and smothered her flames with his body and Susan, who was so drunk she didn’t even know about the Sambuca, said, “I forgive you, my love,” and Emmett kissed her on the neck and then he whispered to Karla and me, “She’s on fire and she doesn’t even know it. Poor baby.”

After the Tap Room, we were all far too drunk to drive — even the intake-conscious pregnant Dusty — so we wobbled back to the office (piss tanks, all of us) and we turned the lights down low, so that only the dimmer lights were glowing on our Lego garden, as though it were sunset. We were all just lolling about on the floor, feeling childish because we weren’t coding for another few hours. Dusty and Karla were making hair accessories out of Lego bricks (“Ooh, it’s a Topsy Tail!“) and Ethan, Emmett, and Michael were having a half-hearted (make that quarter-hearted) game of Nerf Wars across the Lego garden. Todd was lying on his stomach staring at Dusty’s stomach (no visible baby yet) and Bug was taking apart and rebuilding a small house my father had built, and seemed lost in some other world.

Susan was building a striped, Dr. Seuss-like radio tower, and asked Bug what was on his mind, and Bug said, “1978.”

Susan said, “Not the best year for music.”

Bug said, “That was the year I fell in love. The year I got my heart broken.”

Drunk or not, all ears, visibly or surreptitiously, turned to Bug.

“I wasn’t supposed to fall in love. I didn’t even know it was love. I didn’t even know that love was some sort of option. All I knew was that I couldn’t take my eyes off him. I wasn’t even looking around, but somehow this guy drew my attention magnetically, and I was bewitched.”

Unsolicited confession: woah!

“This guy … he worked at the SeaFirst on Sherman Avenue in Coeur d’Alene. I’m not saying his name — as if it matters now. No. I will say his name. His name was Allan. So I’ve said his name. I’ve never done that before.” A pause. “Allan.”

Bug removed the roof completely from the house and plucked out, brick by brick, the interior.

“I came in one day around lunch hour — just before lunch hour — and I asked if he was into a quick bite nearby. He said yes. We went to a Sizzler, and it was such a loser lunch. Anonymous food, but it didn’t matter. Allan was acknowledging the fact I existed, and I was half crazy for him. Hell, I was totally crazy for him.”

Bug asked Susan if she had some extra six-stud white beams, and she gave him some.

“I asked Allan what he did on Friday nights. He said he went to this one bar. I don’t even think it had a name. A dive. Truck stop with grease burgers and piss beer. I went there three weekends in a row, and on the third weekend, he showed up, and I tried to be so casual. And we talked, and we got really deep really quickly — that scary kind of deep you experience when someone has you entranced.

“And he asked me to go for a drive with him. And so ask me, did I go?”

“Did you go?” asked Michael.

“Oh yeah. We drove around for an hour in his pickup and we talked and drank Bud Light, and I kept waiting for it to go somewhere, but my problem was I didn’t know what it was, or where it was supposed to go … where there was.

He’d swig and wipe his mouth and wipe his hand on the upholstery and nothing seemed to happen. Finally we returned to the bar. Back there, at the bar, he said he had to go, back to his … girlfriend. But before he went he held my hand and he stroked it, and I thought I’d die of excitement.”

Bug sighed.

“What happened next?” asked Susan.

“Me? I hounded him. Oh fuck, what a loser I was. I made all these needless deposits and withdrawals at the bank. $20. $50. $10. The manager finally came over and pointedly showed me the ATM machine. Allan always managed to elude me, so I never talked to him again.

“Around the same time, I got a job offer at Microsoft and I took it — talk about escape hatch! And so there was never any closure with Allan. He’s probably married now, and has 44 kids. I’ve been avoiding people ever since.

“But there was one final incident, though. The weekend before I left for Microsoft, I went back to the dive, and there was Allan. I felt something swell in my heart, that maybe I’d have a second chance after all to really find out what it was that I wanted to happen, and I bought two beers and was carrying them over when I saw him go out to the parking lot with some other guy, taking some other guy out for a drive, and my heart fell like a bowl of goldfish smashing onto a cathedral floor. I guess it’s his gig — little drives that go nowhere, with lonely boys. Whatta sleazebag.”

Total silence had fallen over our office, save for a few machines purring. Bug picked up his Lego house and held it and smelled it.

“Sure, I know I’m a geek, and I know that predisposes me to introversion. And Microsoft did allow me to feed the introversion. But as you’re all noticing for yourselves, you can’t retreat like that here in the Valley. There’s no excuse anymore to introvert. You can’t use tech culture as an excuse not to confront personal issues for astounding periods of time. It’s like outer space, where the vacuum makes your body explode unless you locate sanctuary.”

Ethan said, “You mean to say you haven’t … done anything since the mid-1980s?”

Susan said, “What do you mean, done, Ethan?”

“You know—made whoopee, for Christ’s sake.”

Bug said, “More like ever, Eeth … I had my hand held once. Woo-ee! I’d be a lousy contestant on The Newly wed Game”

Michael had gone to the bathroom when this subject came up.

Susan asked, “Well, Bug, what about now?”

Bug said, “Now? I don’t know if it’s because I was afraid of being gay or because I was afraid of being rejected, but all I know is that now feels like the first chance at having some sort of go at being in love with someone else. I was so busy geeking out that I never had to examine my feelings about anything. I jumped into one of those little cartoon holes they use in old Merry Melodies, and I just came out the other side, and the other side is here. Didn’t you ever wonder where the other side was?”

This was actually a pretty good question, and I got to remembering that I did sort of used to wonder where the cartoon holes would take you if you hopped into them.

Bug got quiet and put his head on Susan’s legs. “You know, Sooz, I would have come here for nothing. I never had to get paid.” Bug looked up. “Oh God, Ethan, you didn’t hear that.” He relaxed. “Well you know what I mean. I just wanted to leave the old me behind and start all over again. It’s not the money. It’s never been the money. It rarely ever is. It wasn’t with any of us — was it? Ever?”

I don’t think it ever was. We lay around and were silent while Bug pulled himself together. I put on an old Bessie Smith CD and we sat, alcohol scrambling our codes, our thoughts, our lives, if only for the remaining darkness, until work made its claim upon us once more.

MONDAY

Today was one of those days where I was snapped awake by a bad dream and a hangover. Beware of those layered Eurodrinks — they’re made with scary, bee-sting-filled liqueurs!

All of us received an e-mail from Bug:

Hi kids. Me here.

Remember back in high school, there were always those peple who were in relationhips starting in eighth grade, and they’re still in relationships today? They know all the logical sequnce of the way things are supposed to happen. Like in the third week, they have a spat, and they say, “Oh, well this is just the Third Week Spat,” and it passes. Never having had a relationship, I don’t know how all the steps in a relationship are suppossed to go. I have to learn all the steps, decades later. But I’ll do it.

Sorry I lost it last night. I’m off to a B&B in Napa for a few days to think things through. Leisure and all of that. Freaky but necessary. Live and love. Bye kids.

It appears we might be getting a publishing deal lined up — with Maxis, the Sim City people. Apparently the fish are biting at the bait: Broderbund, Adobe, and Alias have also shown a bit of interest, too. So I guess we’re doing something worthwhile, or more to the point, possibly profitable. Uh oh! Am I losing my integrity, my One-Point-Oh sensibility?

I drove with Abe and Ethan to Electronic Arts up the 101 in San Mateo, on Fashion Island Boulevard — a geek party friend of ours was going to let us beta-play a new game — and we got to drive the Highway 92-101 cloverleaf I like so much.

Like most Silicon Valley buildings, EA’s headquarters, the Century Two complex, are sleek and clean, a Sony-based aesthetic, where a sleek, machine-shaped object contains magic components on the inside that do cool shit. Susan says it’s a “male” aesthetic. “If men could have their way, every building on earth would resemble a Trinitron.”

EA’s parking lot was so odd — entirely composed of brand-new cars. I felt like I was in the lot at Alamo. In the fountain out front there was a big plaza sculpture plus a bunch of rubber float toys in water crested with Joy dishwashing liquid bubbles.

“I smell nerds,” said Abe.

The lobby had a vitrine containing a football signed by John Madden and a basketball signed by Michael Jordan, game licensees, both.

Played their new game all afternoon. It was almost completely bug-free and they’ll be shipping within weeks.

Fashion Island, BTW, is really great — it’s all these huge dead department stores that got marooned by new freeway ramp construction.

After we drove back down the 101 from San Mateo, I checked my answering machine at the office. Michael left a message to phone him, so I did — even though he was sitting in his own office just a spit away. No matter. I got his machine’s message, cobbled together from old Learn how to speak Japanese tapes:

[Resonant Berlitzian voice:]

Japanese at a glance

[Befuddled U.S. tourist:]

I can’t find my luggage

[Japanese bimbette voice:]

Nimotsu ga mitsukarimasen

[Candice Bergen-type female:]

My luggage is here

[Studly Toho Studios leading male voice:]

Nimotsu wa, koko desu

[Game show host voice:]

Is there a good disco nearby?

[Japanese nerdy male voice:]

Chikaku ni, ii disco ga arimasu ka?

[Game show host:]

I have cramps

[Candice:]

I have diarrhea

[Studly male:]

There’s something wrong with this camera

[Bimbette:]

Cauliflower

[Game show host]

Eggplant

[Candice:]

Prosciutto with melon

[Studly guy:]

Shrimp cocktail

BEEP …

I told Todd to dial Michael’s number and he did, and we had to agree that Michael’s messages always indeed rocked the Free World.

Todd, I should add, like many 1990s people, equates his self-worth with the number of messages on his phone answering machine. If the red light’s not blinking … YOU ARE A LOSER. Todd’s almost cybernetic relationship with his answering machine (who am I fooling — this goes for all of us) seems a precursor of some not-too-distant future where human beings are appended by nozzles, diodes, buzzers, thwumpers, and dingles that inform us of the time and temperature in the Kerguelen Archipelago and whether Fergie is, or is not, sipping tea at that exact moment.

Todd says that at least with e-mail you have a “loser backup system” so if you didn’t get a phone message, you can at least have text.

Anyway, three minutes later my phone rang and it was Michael, asking if he could take me out for a late afternoon snack, but his voice was so hesitant in an un-Michael-ish way. He was stuttering and I began to freak out, the way you do when you pass a customs guard at a border, even though you’re not hiding anything. I said yes and braced myself for what seemed could only be terrible news.

We drove up the 101 to Burlingame, driving and driving and driving and driving and driving and I realized that in the Valley, the formula really is, NO CAR = NO LIFE. We arrived at the SFO Airport Hyatt Regency of all places, and I asked him why on earth we were there.

“Daniel, I love this building. It resembles the world’s most piss-elegant nuclear power plant — look at the copper-oxide-colored roof, turret-like center structures, and the delightful Bayside location providing cooling waters for all those toasty transuranic fuel rods.” His expression never changed during this ode.

We talked about the games at Electronic Arts, but in the back of my mind, I was trying to remember if I was pulling my weight with Oop!. Everybody’s been doing such amazing work lately — the freedom and freefloat of intellectual Darwinism is bringing out the best in all of us — and maybe Michael doesn’t think my work is as amazing as everybody else’s. But I think it is. I mean, not only am I doing some really hot Object Oriented Programming, but I think my space station is going to be truly killer. The injustice of it all — especially after Abe made us liquid.

Michael was trimming his finger nails and nudging the keratoid crescents into his shirt pocket, and I was getting so PaRAnOld.

We arrived and were sitting in the Swift Water Cafe, and Michael ordered a decidedly non-two-dimensional piece of apple pie, flaunting in my face his betrayal of his Flatlander eating code. He seems to be abandoning it of late. It’s like an alcoholic going off the wagon. He’s changing.

And then, from nowhere, he asked me, “Daniel, do I seem alive?” I was so taken aback. I think this is the oddest question anybody’s ever asked me.

I said, “What a silly question. I mean — of course you do — a bit machine-like at times, but …”

He said, “I am alive, you know. I may not have a life, but at least I’m alive.”

“You sound like Abe.”

“I always used to wonder, do machines ever feel lonely? You and I talked about machines once, and I never really said everything I had to say. I remember I used to get so mad when I read about car factories in Japan where they turned out the lights to allow the robots to work in darkness.” He ate his apple pie, asked the waitress for a single-malt scotch, and said, “But I think, yes, I do feel lonely. So alone. Yes. Alone.”

I said nothing.

“Or I did.”

Did … “Did? Until when?” I asked.

“I’m—”

“What.”

“I’m in love, Daniel.” Oh man, talk about a gossip bomb. (And thank God I’m not fired.)

“But that’s great, Michael. Congratulations. With who?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you mean you don’t know who.”

“Well, I do and I don’t. I’m in love with an entity called ‘BarCode.’ And I don’t know who he-slash-she is, how old or anything. But I’m in love with … it. The BarCode entity lives in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. I think it’s a student. That’s all I know.”

“So let me be sure I understand this. You’ve fallen in love with a person, but you have no idea who the person is.”

“Correct. Last night you were all talking about getting bar code tattoos, and you kept saying the word ‘bar code’ over and over, and I thought I was going to go berserk with love. It was all I could do to contain myself. And then Bug was so open and honest I thought I would die, and I realized things can’t go on as they have been going.”

Michael’s scotch arrived. He rolled the ice around and gulped — he’s shifted from Robitussin into the hard stuff.

“BarCode eats flat food, too. And she-slash-he’s written a Flatlander Oop!-style product with immense game potential. BarCode is my soulmate. There is only one person for me out there, and I have found it. BarCode’s my ally in this world and …”

He paused and looked across the restaurant.

“Sometimes when I’m loneliest, life looks the most dreadful and I don’t want to be here. On earth, I mean. I want to be … out there.” He pointed to the sun coming in a window, a beam coming down, and the sky over the Bay. “The thought of BarCode is the only thing that keeps me tethered to earth.”

“So what are you going to do about it, Michael?”

He sighed and looked at the other businessmen in the restaurant.

“But what are you going to do about it?” I asked again. He looked up at me. “Is that why I’m here, Michael? Am I getting involved in this?”

“Can you do me a favor, Daniel?”

I knew it. “What.”

“Look at me.”

“I’m looking.”

“No, look.”

Michael put himself under the microscope lens: pudgy; eyeglassed; ill-clad; short-sleeve shirt the color of yellow invoice paper; pale complexion; Weedwacker hairdo — the nerd stereotype that almost doesn’t even really exist anymore — a Lockheed junior draftsman circa the McCarthy era. But for his almost Cerenkovian glow of intelligence, he might be mistaken for a halfwit or, as Ethan would say, a fuck-wit. I said, “Is there something I should be seeing?”

“Look at me, Daniel — how could anyone be in love with me?”

“That’s ridiculous, Michael. Love has almost nothing to do with looks. It’s about two people’s insides mixing together.”

“Nothing to do with looks? That’s easy for all of you to say. I have to work everyday inside our body-freak world of an Aaron Spelling production. You think I don’t notice?”

“Point being …? From what I can see, if one person is feeling something, there’s usually a pretty good chance the other is feeling the same thing, too. So looks are moot.”

“But then they see me — my body—and it’s over.”

In a way I was losing my patience, but then who am I to be an expert in love? “I think you’re perfectly lovable. Our office is a freak show and no indication of the world at large.”

“You say that like a father whose son just got braces and headgear.”

“What do you want me to do, Michael.”

He paused and looked both ways and then to me: “I want you to visit Waterloo for me. Meet BarCode. Offer … it … a job. BarCode’s the smartest programmer I’ve ever conversed with.”

“Why don’t you go, Michael?”

He looked down at himself and clamped his arms around his chest and said. “I can’t. I’ll be … rejected.”

Well, if there’s one thing I know, it’s Michael and his unbudgeability. “Michael, if I were to do this, under no circumstances would I be willing to pretend, even for one microsecond, that I were you.”

“No! You wouldn’t have to! Just say that I couldn’t make it and you came in my stead.”

“What if BarCode turns out to be a 48-year-old man wearing a diaper — a diaper with spaghetti straps?”

“Such is love — though I hope that wouldn’t be the case.”

“How long have you and BarCode been e-mailing each other?”

“Almost a year.”

“Does BarCode know who you are? What you are?”

“No. You know the joke: On the Internet nobody knows you’re a dog.”

“Oh God.”

“You’ll do it!”

“BarCode could be anybody, Michael.”

“I love their insides already, Daniel. We’ve already blended. I’ll take what fate throws me.”

“But tell me one thing — how can you talk to somebody for over a year and not even know their age or sex?”

“Oh, Daniel — that’s part of the thrill.”

Back at the office I went on a walk with Karla and told her about it right away and she said it was the most romantic thing she’s ever heard of and she smooched me right there in the middle of a downtown street. “Michael is so brave to love so blindly.”

When I told her that it was private and that Michael would prefer Dusty and Susan didn’t know, her face expressed slight peevedness, but she understood. They can be merciless.

Susan showed me a dozen boxes of “Glitter Hair refill packs” she’d bought from the Barbie aisle at Toys-R-Us. It was so creepy — this dead fake hair inside a pink box. All Chyx are receiving an Official Chyx Wristband made of Pentium-grade knotted, liberated Barbie hair garnished with a small sliver of silicon lattice ingot made by a friend of Emmett’s down in Sunnyvale. “Cool or what?” Susan already has over 3,500 Chyx “happening” on-line. So it looks as if Chyx is real. CNN really changed her world.

Time warp: it’s been months since I’ve arrived here. How long have I been here? I can’t tell. I leave for Waterloo in three days.

TUESDAY

I was with Mom in the car somewhere in Menlo Park and suddenly we were surrounded by, like, nine Porsches. It was just ridiculous. And Mom said, “When your father and I first moved here back in ‘86, and I saw all these cars, I said to myself, ‘My, there’s a lot of drug dealers here in this area.’”

“Mom, did you buy drugs for Dad’s IBM parties?”

It’s fun teasing Mom. She smiled, “Oh, you know … I clip news clippings.”

This quick chat served to remind me that while car status here is different than at Microsoft, it is no less hierarchical and fetishistic.

Ethan knows nothing of my matchmaking mission. He thinks I’m going to Waterloo to haggle over purchasing some subroutines and possibly to hire a new recruit. He came over to the house to tell me that he’ll be accompanying me to Ontario — he has to speak with the people at CorelDraw in Ottawa. They’re paying for him to go, so it’s a different gig entirely.

I said that this was a truly random coincidence, except Ethan said I was not only being redundant (“random coincidence”), but that he didn’t believe in randomness, which is, I imagine, a tacit admission of religiousness.

Ethan.

Odd.

He said he’d prove it tonight.

We then got into a discussion of Nerd Schools and the end of the era of “single-dose” education — and of course this led to a listing of schools that had the best nerd reputations.

• Cal-Tec (Extreme nerds; the Jet Propulsion Lab is just up the hill and around the corner. The big rumor is that they had to institute pass-or-fail grading because there were too many GPA-related suicides.)

• CMU

• MIT

• Stanford

• Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (for undergrads)

• Waterloo

• UC Berkeley

• Dartmouth

• Brown—“Hipster nerd school with a good undergrad comp-sci program.”

We drove up to Redwood City and played electronic darts at a bodega there … Karla, Ethan, and I. Ethan and I grew up in suburbia, and we’re both pretty good dart players (those nutty rumpus rooms). Karla’s never played darts before tonight.

Anyway, it was three darts per person, per round. Ethan put in four quarters and selected a four-player round. We asked him why, and he said, “You’ll see.”

Karla went first, me second, Ethan third, and then for the fourth round we had what Ethan called, the “Random Round” where instead of any of us trying, we’d each huck a dart standing on one foot, gulping a beer, throw it backwards … as silly as possible. Ministry of Silly Walks.

Needless to say, the Random Round won every single game, and always by a minimum of 100 points. It was scary.

Ethan said randomness is a useful shorthand for describing a pattern that’s bigger than anything we can hold in our minds. “Letting go of randomness is one of the hardest decisions a person can make.”

Ethan!

Identity. I go by the Tootsie theory: that if you concoct a convincing on-line meta-personality on the Net, then that personality really IS you. With so few things around nowadays to loan a person identity, the palette of identities you create for yourself in the vacuum of the Net — your menu of alternative “you’s”—actually IS you. Or an isotope of you. Or a photocopy of you.

Kinko’s again — photocopy yourself!

Karla noted that when photocopy machines first started to come out, people photocopied their bums. “Now, with computers, we photocopy our very being.”

THURSDAY

Ethan was in business class and I was in coach. If it was Oop! paying, he’d be in the hold with all of the sedated pets.

Ethan vanished at the airport gate, and once in flight, the blue curtain came down and Ethan was gone until we arrived in Canada. I PowerBooked some code on ThinkC and so was able to remain productive. Batteries — the weight! They suck up gravity. They fellate the planet.

I got to thinking that nerds really like anything that smacks of teleportation: freeways; airport first-class lounges; hotel rooms with voice mail … anything that erases distance and makes travel invisible. Why don’t airlines pick up on this?

Upon landing, standing in line at immigration in Toronto, Ethan asked me, “So, pal, how was life in the Egg Farm?” (referring to the chokingly full, cramped, and miserable realm of coach class; we can thank computers for perennially cramped planes). I said “Lovely, thank you, Ethan. I took complimentary salt-and-pepper packets as souvenirs. I’ll trade them for your Reuben Kincaid sleep goggles.”

“Get real, pal.”

At immigration, Ethan pulled out his passport and a whole whack of Iraqi banknotes tumbled onto the carpet in a dervish of cash — Susan had bought them at a San Francisco stamp store and stashed them in his passport as a prank. It was great; it was delayed reaction for the time two months ago that Ethan left an inflatable hemorrhoid doughnut on Susan’s chair while some Motorola guy Susan had a crush on was visiting. Ethan looked at the doughnut, then at Mr. Motorola and said, “Oh — poor Susan. Such pain — you really can’t imagine.”

Back in Canada, Ethan was promptly whisked off to the cavity search room as I toddled off to catch my teensy connector flight to Waterloo. I had to pretend I didn’t know him because I didn’t want to visit THE ROOM either, thank you.

I was looking at the in-flight magazine, and at the end they had this map showing where the airline flies and it looked like a science-fiction map of how a virus transmits from one place to another. All these parabolic arches from city to city to city to city. If the Marburg virus ever does mutate and go airborne, we’re DOOMED!

Canada: such a cold, cold country. In the plane I saw below me the blue moon’s light on white snow; towers, poles, and lights and blinkings; a wide land that must be shouted across with electrons. And I got to thinking, towers are going to be obsolete, soon. All of these towers. dreaming of their own demise.

Out the hotel window, it was just miserable and there were these Zamboni scraping piles of the past winters’ snows, all stacked up. It reminded me of those Antarctic ice-pack core samples where they drill into the ice and date. the gases and pollens trapped back in time. Except outside my window there were two layers of soot, one of dog poo, another layer of soot, another layer of dog poo. God, winter is gross. I can’t believe Eskimos just don’t set themselves adrift on ice floes for the boredom of it all. Or move to Florida.

Karla sent me a fax saying IF YOU LIVED HERE YOU’D BE HOME RIGHT NOW. And I was so homesick.

Watched CNN. Coded Oop!.

Thought: one day the word “gigabits” is going to seem as small as the word “dozen.”

SATURDAY

Michael arranged for me to meet BarCode at a student union pub.

BarCode, given the possibility of making a flesh-to-flesh connection, admitted on-line that … it was, as Michael guessed, a student — so at least the 48-year-old-man-in-spaghetti-strap-diapers scenario was averted.

“Don’t be so sure, Daniel,” said Michael on the phone from California with not a touch of worry in his voice. “Mature students, you know. Well — we can only hope not …”

Waterloo’s student pub is better than others I’ve seen. “The Bomb Shelter,” with an all-black inside, a large bomb painted on the wall, big screen TV, video games, pool, and air hockey.

The outdoor temperature was about minus 272 degrees and the students wore thick, gender-disguising outfits to ward off the gales of liquid helium sweeping down from Hudson’s Bay. I thought of how in-character it was of Michael to fall for someone’s insides and not even know their outsides. I sat there in a seat next to the wall, drinking a few beers, wondering if whoever came by could be … it.

I was getting all mushy and lonely and missing Karla when suddenly a hand grabbed my throat from behind and yanked me toward the wall, like an alien from Aliens. Fuck! Talk about terror. It was a small hand, but God, it was like steel, and a voice whispered to me, a girl’s voice: “Talk to me, baby. I know who you aren’t. So speak — gimme a sign, send me a code — let me know that you’re you.”

Oh man, I was meeting Catwoman … with an Official Chyx Wristband!

My head blanked. Only one word came into my head, Michael’s code word for our meeting: “Cheese slices,” I squeaked out from my snared vocal cords.

The hand loosened. I saw a bare arm. I saw a bar code tattoo below the vaccination bump. And then I saw BarCode, revealed at last, as she let go of her grip and climbed down off the railing and into my view: smaller than Karla, more muscular than Dusty, and dressed so tough that Susan looked like a southern belle in comparison: filthy down vest on top of an oily halter top; hot pants; gas station attendant’s boots; haircut with a blunt Swiss Army knife; both eyes dripping with smudged mascara and melting snow … all underneath an ancient hand-knitted Canadian-type jacket with trout knitted into the front and back. She was small and tight and the natural embodiment that everything Karla, Dusty, and Susan self-consciously were trying to turn themselves into. She was the most aggressive female I’d ever seen and so young — and man, she was so IN CHARGE.

She looked both ways. She looked me in the eyes. She said. “You’re Kraft singles’s friend?” She narrowed her gaze. “You’re here to interview me? Why didn’t Kraft come himself/herself?”

“It’s, uh … himself … and I’ll be honest with you right now — I’m here because he didn’t think you’d like him if you saw him.”

She smashed a bottle on the ground and scared the wits out of me. “Man, what sort of pussy does he think I am? … that I give a shit whatthe-fuck he looks like?” But then her demeanor changed. She got sweet for a second: “He’s a he? He cares what I think about him?”

“’Kraft singles,’ as you call him, is stubborn. You should know that.”

She relaxed a bit. “You’re telling me. Kraft is one stubborn motherfucking entity.”

She giggled. “She.” Pause. “He …”

“You mean,” suddenly I was beginning to understand, “you didn’t know who he was … what he was? I mean, sorry for being blunt, but you didn’t know, either?”

“Don’t make me feel like a wuss.” She picked up an empty 7-Up can, crushed it flat on her knee and then got sweet again. “Is Kraft, ummm … like … married or anything?”

“No.”

I could tell she was relieved and it was beginning to dawn on me that Michael wasn’t the only one who had fallen for an entity.

“Do you want to see a picture, BarCode … do you have another name?”

“Amy.”

“Do you want to see a picture of Michael, Amy?”

Quietly: “You have one?”

“Yeah.”

“His name is Michael?”

“Yeah.”

“What’s your name?”

“Dan.”

“Can I see a picture, Dan?”

“Here.” She greedily snatched the group picture taken at a barbecue at Mom and Dad’s earlier on in the year. Nine of us were in the photo, but she spotted Michael right away. I think I had just transacted the most bizarre matchmaking transaction in the history of love.

“That’s him … there.”

“Yup.”

“Dan, you’re gonna think I’m an asshole, but I had a dream, and I knew that’s what he looked like. I put a diskette under my pillow for weeks waiting for a sign, and it came to me, and here he is. I’m taking the photo.”

“It’s yours.”

She looked at Michael’s image. She was tentative and girly. “How old is he?” Her voice up-inflected at the end.

I was slightly drunk, and I laughed and I said, “He’s in love with you, if that’s what you want to know.”

She got all cocky again.

She grabbed my right hand and shouted, “Arm wrestle!” and after a two-minute tussle (thank heavens for the gym), broken up only because a group of drunk engineers lollygagged up to our table and one of them barfed one table over, cutting the moment short, did we speak again. “It’s a draw,” she told me, “but remember, I’m younger than you and I’m only getting stronger. So tell me about … Michael.” She paused to think this over — the name. “Yes. Tell me about Michael.”

The waiter brought us both beers. She clinked mine so hard I thought it would shatter and she said, “Tell me again, what does Michael feel? You know — about … me?”

“He’s in love.”

“Say it again.”

“He’s in love. Love. L-O-V-E. Love, he loves you. He’s going to go insane if he doesn’t meet you.”

She was as happy as I’ve ever seen another human being. It made me feel good to be able to say this with a clear heart.

“Go on,” she said.

“He doesn’t care who you are. He only knew your insides. He’s smart. He’s kind and he’s always been a good friend to me. There is nobody like him on earth, and he says that you’re the only reason he stays tethered here to the planet.” And then I told her the diaper-and-spaghetti-straps scenario.

She leaped backward into her seat.

“I’m gonna fuckin’ explode! Dan! I’m gonna tell you, I’m in love, and I’m in love like an atomic bomb detonating over industrialized Ontario, so watch out world!”

I realized that Michael was BarCode’s first love, and I realized that I was seeing something special here, as if all of the flowers in the world had agreed to bloom just for me, and just for once, and I said, “Well, I think it’s mutual. Now could you relax just a bit more, Amy, because you’re frankly scaring the daylights out of me, and I don’t think my right arm can deal with another wrestle.”

She gushed a bit, flush with happiness. She sat and smiled at the undergrads who, it seemed, regarded her with a no small tinge of fear. She surely must be some sort of campus legend.

“You’re the bearer of hot news, and I’ll always remember you for that, Dan,” and she kissed me on the cheek and I thought of Karla, and my heart felt so happy yet faraway from her.

“Man, I’m so happy I could crap,” she said, “Hey — over there — that table of engineers — let’s go trash ‘em!”

SATURDAY (one week later)

Michael and BarCode — excuse me—Amy—are now engaged. Amy and Michael have been having a John-and-Yoko lovefest at the Residence Inn Suites down in Mountain View. Karla and I went to visit them, and their suite was all a-rummage with pizza boxes, diet Coke cans, dirty laundry, unread newspapers and gum wrappers. Michael has transformed from a lonely machine into a love machine.

People!

Amy, 20, is going to finish her degree in computer engineering, and is going to come work for us starting in May. We’re all in love and awe and terror of her. She and Michael together are like the next inevitable progression of humanity. And the two of them are so happy together — seeing them together is like seeing the future.

Oh — here’s something I forgot to write last week. At the bar, I asked Amy what it was — or rather, how it was that two people could not know each other and fall in love and all of that. She told me that all her life people had only ever treated her like a body or a girl — or both. And interfacing with Michael over the Net was the only way she could ever really know that he was talking to her, not with his concept of her. “Reveal your gender on the Net, and you’re toast.” She considered her situation: “It’s an update of the rich man who poses as a pauper and finds the princess. But fuck that princess shit — we’re both kings.”

We both got drunker and she said to me, “This is it, Dan. This is the way I wanted to always feel. This is it.”

“What?”

“Love. Heaven is being in love, and the love never stops. And the feeling of intimacy never stops. Heaven means feeling intimate forever.” And I can’t really say I disagree.

Later on tonight, Michael stomped into the office in a way he never has before, clapped his hands, and shouted, “Troops, let’s make these machines do something they’ve never done before. Let’s make them sing”

SATURDAY

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