Microserfs (24 page)

Anyway, to remedy the house's sterility we're doing what Ethan did with his photo of the collapsed freeway overpass, and we're making photocopy blowups of cool images. We've made blowups of Barry Diller (inventor of the Movie of the Week back in 1973 - in an office inside the ABC Entertainment Complex, Century City, Los Angeles, California) as well as a blowup of the ABC Entertainment Complex's twin towers.

I also enlarged an elegant undamaged California freeway cloverleaf from the seminal Handbook of Highway Engineering. And needless to say we did a double portrait of BILL. One right-side up - another upside down.

Ethan delivered to us a bottle of 1977 Cabernet as a housewarming present and said he felt jealous of our posters - the highest compliment, coming from him.

Todd and Dusty seem to have found soulmates in each other. They spend their precious few hours of post-code time discussing the vagaries of the New Human Body - in the office and at gym, deciding which mini-muscle needs alteration, discussing steroids as though they were Pez, and figuring out the mechanics of cosmetic surgery. They want to become "post-human" - to make their bodies like the Bionic Woman's and the Six Million Dollar Man's - to go to the next level of bodyhood.

Todd was in a chatting mode today - love's first sweep, and I know what it is - and he told me of how happy Dusty makes him feel, of how pretty he thinks she is, of how she seems to believe in something and to believe more than Todd believes. "It's as if all those one-night stands never mattered. Because all I care about is Dusty crushing my body (Have you ever done that Daniel . . . been crushed? God, is it sexy) and having her speak to me. Nobody's ever spoken to me before. I mean, not to me. I was always just a soul to be harvested or a human unit. But with Dusty I'm me, and I don't have to fake normality."

"That's how I feel with Karla," I said.

Todd said, "She pumps me. Love is just this great big pump."

Todd, on top of his coding work, is designing an Oop! Muscleman starter kit that will fold and mutate like a GoBot or a protein molecule into bulldozers, tanks, satellite stations, and Kalashnikovs. Michael thinks it'll be a big hit.

Michael is making each of us design an Oop! starter module so that we can utilize all segments of our brain aside from the cattle-blindered coding part of our brain. Michael is really such a slave driver. He squishes everything he can out of us. It's very Bill, so we can relate to it. I'm doing a space station.

Susan, among her many tasks - the main one of which is designing the Oop! user interface - is designing a dancing skeletons program. She has a burned-out Stanford medical grad student converting all human bones into Oop! bricks, which are in turn linked, like bones in the human body. But she's also having other animal skeletons digitized, and she's designing her program so that users can build new species. Flesh comes next.

Ethan is even developing a game - one where players train dolphins for the Department of Defense and he's designing Oop! weaponry and boats and submarines.

Karla's designing a vegetable factory in which small chipmunks trapped inside must run for their lives or end up diced ("God bless Warner Brothers"); Bug is designing a castle with dungeon, and I must say, it's good. He's come up with "torture nodes."

Michael wants Oop! users to be able to play Doom-like chase games throughout whatever we build, and is working to form an allegiance with a company up-Bay in San Francisco that provides a multiline server so that nerds in different area codes can game together.

Michael was on a rant, quite justified, I thought, about all of this media-hype generation nonsense going on at the moment. Apparently we're all "slackers." "Daniel, who thinks up these things?"

Michael pointed out that humans are the only animals to have generations. "Bears, for example, certainly don't have generations. Mom and Dad bears don't expect their offspring to eat different kinds of berries and hibernate to a different beat. The belief that tomorrow is a different place from today is certainly a unique hallmark of our species."

Michael's theory is that technology creates and molds generations. When technology accelerates to a critical point, as it has now, generations become irrelevant. Each of us as individuals becomes our own individual diskette with our own personal "version." Much more logical.

Mom couldn't get the garage door opener to work, so I fixed it for her. We took Misty for a walk along La Cresta. The stop sign at the corner of Arastradero was completely covered with Scotch tape, pieces of ribbon, and empty balloons from where people mark off birthday parties. It was funny.

Ethan's freeway is taking far longer to build than he anticipated and it "eats bricks like crazy."

I asked Dusty if she grew up with Barbie dolls and she said, "No, but indeed I rilly, rilly lusted after them in my heart. Hippie parents, you know. Rill crunchy. I had a Raggedy Ann doll made in, like, Sierra Leone. And all I rilly desired was a Barbie Corvette - more than life itself."

*sigh*

"So instead I played with numbers and equations. Some trade-off. The only store-bought toy I was ever allowed was a Spirograph, and I had to beg to receive it as a May Day present. And I had to pretend I wanted it because it was mathematical - so clean and solvable. But my parents were suspicious of mathematics because math isn't political. They're like, freaks."

Dusty's forearms resemble Popeye's. And they have pulsing veins that look like a meandering river. Ethan and I were talking, when he shouted across the room, "Jesus Christ, Dusty - I can take your pulse from over here."

I asked Karla if she grew up with Barbie dolls and she said (not looking up from her keyboard), "This is so embarrassing, but not only did I play with Barbies, but I played with them up until an embarrassingly late age - ninth grade." She then looked over at me, expecting reproach.

This did come as some surprise; I suppose it revealed itself on my face. She began typing again, and speaking over the clack of her fingers on the keyboard.

"But before you go and think I'm a lost cause, you should know that I gave my Barbie admirable pursuits - I took apart my brother's Hot Wheels and made a Barbie Toyota Assembly Plant, giving Barbie white overalls, a clipboard, and I provided jobs for many otherwise unemployed Americans." She paused and looked up from her keyboard. "God, no wonder my parents refused to believe I was intelligent."

This afternoon while visiting Todd and Dusty's cottage in Redwood City, I tried to find a snack in their fridge.

Bad idea.

Pills, lotions, capsules, powders . . . anything except what normal human beings might call "food." There was a Rubbermaid container of popcorn. There was Turbo Tea, Amino mass, pure Creatine, Mus-L-Blast 2000+, raw chickens, Super Infiniti 3000, and chromium supplements as well as small bottles I thought it more polite not to inquire about.

I really have to wonder if Todd's doing steroids. I mean, he's just not physically normal. We're all going to have to face this.

Dusty was out at the Lucky Mart buying bananas and kelp. I asked Todd, "Shit, Todd - what is it exactly you want your body to do for you? What is it your body's not doing for you now that it's going to do for you at some future date?" Not really Todd's sort of question.

"I think I want to have sex using a new body which allows me to not have to remember my ultrareligious family." Todd mulled this over. We looked around the apartment, strewn with hex dumbbells and rubber flooring mats. "My body was just something I could believe in because there was nothing else around."

Susan was sulking about her dating architecture here in the Valley. Her fling with Mr. Intel ended long ago - she says Intel's culture is too macho to accept macho women. Phil the PDA was history eons ago. She kept talking about that Mary Tyler Moore episode where Mary tabulates the number of dates she's had over the span of her dating career and gets depressed. And then there was a big debate as we tried to remember if that was the episode where she began dating Lou.

Susan only seems to meet techies. ("Well, Sooz," says Karla, "you do spend almost all of your time in the Valley . . .")

"It's not just the techiness, Kar - it's that the number of flings I've had in my life now outnumbers the number of relationships. I've crossed a line."

Tonight she has a date with a Marina District tattoo artist, so we're all expecting her to show up tomorrow with a Pentium chip etched into her shoulder.

The thing about Susan is that she's making the leap into self-reconstruction so late in life. Her new dominant attitude comes from a genuine need, but it's so twisted by years of - I don't know exactly what. I don't know as much about Susan as I ought, I suppose. Her IBM upbringing and all of that. But the subject. . . how to broach it?

Ethan seems to have forgotten his partially completed freeway. We've nicknamed it the "Information Superhighway."

Susan reformatted and zinged-up Dad's resume on Quark. He used a (oh God . . .) dot-matrix printer to do his old resume. Mom's Selectric would have even been cooler.

This afternoon I mistakenly said Palo Alto was in the "Silicone Valley," and Ethan snapped at me, "Silicone is what they put inside of tits, Dan-O. It's Silikawn . . ."

Boom! Dusty began telling us about her first breast implants at age I 9, its subsequent failure, her litigation and her support groups - tales of black goo seeping from nipples, ". . . immunosuppressive globules of silicone gel migrating through my blood system, triggering this never-ending yuppie flu. It was awful. That's how I got into body manipulation and extreme health . . . because of the globules."

Yet again, the Dustmistress had us all riveted. Karla and Susan are now totally obsessed with Dusty's arms, which are like leather-sheathed steel cables from the Bay Bridge, all digitally animated like Spielberg dinosaurs. When she flexes her arms, you feel queasy - like you're going to be eaten. She says that because she has long arms, she has to work "harder to the power of three" to make them appear as proportioned as they would on a shorter woman. She's a calculus whiz.

The cattiness with Dusty ended quickly. Now they all like each other. Actually, I think it goes deeper than "like " - but where or how, I don't know.

Dusty's older than Todd by about five years. During a carbo-loading break later in the day, she started telling me and Karla all this personal stuff. It doesn't take much with Dusty. The distinction between herself and the public is muzzy.

"I made the switch and started liking younger guys about two years ago. The older ones kept getting all serious . . . and wanting to discuss marriage. The young kids are puppy dogs and when I want to get rid of them, I just start talking babies and before you know it they start giving me reasons why they have to hang out at their friends', and why they can't come over."

She found a piece of skin on her chicken breast and picked it off.

"I think that once I start having babies, I'm going to forget my body. But tell that to Toddy and you're dead meat. I think he's 'a keeper.' Remember - I can crush you into cat food with my thumb and index finger alone."

And she could!

Karla says that Dusty's freaked out that any baby she might have will be a freak because of the fantastic quantities of scary digestibles she's eaten over the years, on top of her implants and her flirtations with bulimia and extreme diets.

"She's done it all," says Karla, "steroids, uppers, downers, coke, poppers, Pritikin, Oprah .. ."

Went with Karla up to Mom and Dad's and helped them sort things out for recycling. When nobody was looking, I hucked some fallen tangerines at the Valotas' house down below ours. Mr. Valota is this Gladys-Kravitz-from-Bewitched type guy who somehow taps into all of the misinformation, apocrypha, and bad memes floating about the Valley and feeds them back to Mom in the aisles of Draeger's in Menlo Park. He's always saying discouraging things about Oop! to Mom. Gee thanks, Mr. Valota.

I liked hearing the tangerines go thunk as they hit the cedar shingles of his lanai. It's never the Mr. Valotas of this world whose houses burn down.

I was breathing really hard as I was carrying the Rubbermaid Roughneck containers to the end of the driveway. I hope nobody noticed that I'm way out of shape.

Abe's list of things to do on how to get a life:

1) Move out of a group house

2) Get involved in non-computer-related activities

3) Treat yourself to a bubble bath (I couldn't think of anything else)

Dusty's twin sister, Michelle, came to visit. She's a collagen sales rep for a biotech firm near San Diego and like a plumper, less turbo-charged Dusty.

She ambled around the Lego garden for a while, watched us code, then yawned pointedly. After further multiple theatrical yawns, she then pulled two Simpsons dubs on VHS out of her purse and started watching them on the VCR, and one by one we melted away from our workstations and began watching along with her.

Michael arrived with Dad, found us recumbent and laughing, freaked out, and sent us back to work, sending Michelle packing on the CalTrain. Michael is now Bill!

Dusty said Ciao, and resumed tweaking her algorithms. Dusty's poor parents - all they wanted was a nice pair of folk-singing, shawl-knitting Leslie Van Houtens and Patricia Krenwinkels. Instead they got two lighter-complexioned Grace Jones replicants morphed together with a Malibu Barbie.

Date update: Susan is without a tattoo.

It turns out Dusty's an expert on, of all things, the Austro-Hungarian Empire (UC Santa Cruz undergrad). Talk about pure randomness. She did this to please her Leftoid hippie freak parents. ("It was an accelerated program that only took two years," she says. "Subjectivity is so much faster to scale.")