Microserfs (32 page)

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 PaRAnOId.

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.

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