The Cloud

Introduction

Twelve Years Ago

Before it was chips in Silicon Valley, it was fruit. Orchards dominated the landscape here, a tapestry of cherries, apricots and plums, eventually giving way, acre by acre, to semiconductors and their spawn.

Manufacturing, labs, suburban offices, open-air Eichler homes and their knock-offs added enough concrete and density to cause a modest rise in the average temperature. It was sufficient to make the climate less than perfect for farming. But, no matter, the conditions remained plenty hospitable for the entrepreneurs, investors and engineers who combined forces to make magical electronics the region’s chief export.

On this lazy March afternoon, a fruity fragrance carries on the light wind, a throwback to more pastoral times. Two girls frolic in the front yard of the Menlo Park house with the white picket fence. Without warning, the brown-haired one with the scrawny arms and purple blouse seems struck with an idea, and suddenly bolts.

She opens the white gate, seeing something, hearing something, something otherwise unseen, and runs into the street, like a fawn or an impulsive child half her age. She never sees the Volvo, nor its driver.

“An inexplicable catastrophe,” the Palo Alto Daily News bemoans the next day. “It is the likes of which our cozy and insulated part of the world has been so often, thankfully, spared.”

“What, we may ask ourselves over and over without ever getting a satisfactory answer, can possibly explain this tragedy?”

Roiling change, the complex swirl of progress, a future seductive and foreboding. What can possibly explain this tragedy?

THE CLOUD