Microserfs (35 page)

I thought about it and she's right - the geeks aren't flying down to LA to take studio executives out to schmooze dinners at Spago. Spago has to come to the geeks. Spago must hate that.

Amy suddenly piped up and said to the Lisa-unit, "Exactly. I'm working on the Tetris property for Castle Rock, and I can't believe how many bozos are calling the shots in a medium they have no expertise in! They're all faking it!"

The Lisa believed her - hook, line, and sinker! She obviously had never even seen Tetris. This was fun.

Amy continued, "In the history of games-into-movies, I think only Tron has begun to scratch the surface of what can be done . . . and that came out in '82. Just because a game has characters doesn't mean it can tell a story . . . Take Super Mario Brothers. Whoever okayed the $45 million budget for that lemon must have had a lot of explaining to do."

Lisa nodded and asked, "So what's your budget?"

Amy smiled and said, "The live action sequences are really going to add up - I think we're shooting for around 30 mil."

Lisa, "Do you have a card? Let me give you mine . . ."

Across the room, Anatole was busy chatting up a Lisa-unit, misguidedly trying to impress her with his "extreme knowledge" of Sony products.

"The good thing about Sony products," said Anatole, "is that they always say exactly what they are right on the front of them. For example, the CFD-758 CD-radio cassette recorder, or the TMR-IF310 stereo transmitter, or the 9-band ICF-SW15 FM/MW/SW receiver."

But evidently his Frainch accent made the above conversation sound alluring, and he and his Lisa were pair-bonded for the evening. Karla said, "Ever notice how when Anatole's around girls, his accent thickens?"

Susan was chatting with a male Lisa-unit solely to torment Emmett, but he's used to it by now. Susan was a real cachet addition to our party. She's become such a cult figure with Chyx. It was like Jim Morrison had entered the room, and she was swamped with admirers.

Then Amy said in a loud and unbelievably embarrassing voice, "What the fuck is with this place? Every single chick here is named Lisa."

Michael swam in to smooth things over: "She's from Canada."

"Michael, you promised we'd have martinis and lose a hundred dollars at roulette. And the food here stinks and you know it."

"And right you are."

And the two of them vamoosed off to the MGM Grand.

Karla and I and a few Lisas tried to guess what the charades hand signal would be for "interactive multimedia product." A movie is where you turn a camera reel; a song is where you hold your hands up to your lips; a book is two palms simulating open flaps. All we could come up with for multimedia was two hands going fidgety-fidgety in space. A definitive interface is certainly needed, if only to make charades an easier game to play five years from now.

After we left the Sony party, we wandered around the grounds of the yuppie hotel, and I never realized it, but Todd's a mean drunk. Maybe his new haircut is bringing out "The Asshole Within." He went around the pathways kicking muffins into the hot tubs and sticking pilfered beta versions of Sony CD ROMs down the hotel's miniature fake rivers, and screamed at all of us, calling us geeks. Hellooooo . . . like, this is some big surprise, or something? I suspect that becoming a father and spending the last two months (as did we all, Dusty included, barely able to reach her keyboard over her watermelon stomach) pulling trip after trip to Kuwait while tweaking code for the Oop! beta version for Las Vegas - it all got to him and he's releasing the pressure. We all feel it. Tomorrow and Sunday we find out if Oop! (and Interiority Co.) have a strong future.

Todd was wearing his Secret Squirrel trench coat, but we dared not mock it. And then he vanished, probably to pick a fight at a sports bar.

We checked out the burning lava water show in front of the Mirage and the people in the city began weirding me out. Las Vegas must be the only place left where it's politically correct to wear a fur coat. They were just the sorts of people who would have gone to Las Vegas, not Boulder, in The Stand, and here they were.

We were standing next to this huge sculpture of post-human white lion tamers Siegfried and Roy not far from the lava, and then Bug and Sig got into this discussion about how Henry Ford made Model Ts for ten straight years without one change, and then GM came along with something spiffy, and Henry laid everybody off, retooled, came out with the Model A, and then built that without a change for another five years, and then Plymouth came out with something spiffy and Ford finally had to accept the notion of competition and styling.

We tried to imagine making a product without any changes for five years, but we couldn't. Then we noticed that all the cars on the Strip look the same: Chryslers and Tauruses and Toyotas . . . they all have "bubble-butts" that look like they came from the same mold. So by default we're right back to Henry Ford again. We figured that tail fins would come back in, simply because people are going to have a consumer revolt against how boring and blob-like cars are becoming.

At the mall in Caesar's Palace we bumped into the BuildX team at the Warner Brothers store. We bought our Marvin the Martian coffee' mugs and house slippers, glared at the BuildX team, and left.

I wonder if Bill ever runs into John Sculley or Steve Jobs at a 7-Eleven.

We all wanted to go to the Luxor and play the games and do the rides there, inside the pyramid's interior. Emmett informed us that SEGA has its only showcase arcade there, where you can play the brand-new-almost-beta games. It's a brilliant marketing idea because normally arcade games don't enjoy the same kind of brand recognition and loyalty that home games do, but after visiting the SEGA arcade, the logo is burned into your brain permanently. It's like allowing a McDonald's orange drink machine at your child's birthday party. Later, we ran into Dad and we were gamed-out, so we all went to the Tut's Hut. We were starved.

The Tut's Hut kitchen was closed and we were begging for food - any sort of food - and the waitress brought over a plastic cup full of garnishes: pineapple wedges, maraschino cherries, and strawberries. I made a joke to her, that my Dad was an alcoholic barfly, and that growing up I ate garnishes as meals almost every night - but then the waitress got all weird, and Karla reminded me that people often move to Las Vegas to forget things, and she stopped coming to our table, and Dad, sitting two seats over, was embarrassed because he's not used to this kind of joke.

The Luxor has a laser beam of pure white light that shoots up from the tip of its pyramid and I'd never seen anything so tall, and never knew this beam of light existed. Pure and clean, and seen from the ground, it's so powerful that it really appears to puncture the atmosphere. I started rambling on about the laser, but everyone thought I'd gone loony and Abe told me to be quiet.

Ethan would have liked the light beam because the whole Luxor pyramid thing is sort of like the pyramid on the dollar bill, so I sent him a postcard. Instead of having a faux Egyptian theme, the Luxor should get to the point and have a U.S. Mint theme.

Todd was in the lobby of the Hacienda when we walked in, at around 2:30 a.m. He had a plastic container full of Kennedy dollars and was drunk on free drinks, but his meanness was gone. The casino noise was horrendous. It put Palo Alto's gas-fired leaf blowers to shame. As Karla and I were walking to the elevator bank, Todd came with us and did his impression of the machines: "Dollar slots go koonk-koonk-koonk-koonk-koonk; quarter slots go kathunka-thunka-thunka-thunka; dime slots go nink-nink-nink-nink-nink." He did a really good job as a machine. I think he bonded with the slots. We commended him on his performance and sent him wonkily tottering back onto the floor to lose his remaining coinage. He said, "It's an upperbody night!" and flexed his bicep at us.

Karla fell asleep quickly, but as ever, sleep eluded me, and I went downstairs to the casino and half-assedly played the slots until my $20 in quarters was gone.

Sands

stolen watches

abandoned wedding rings

buried cinderblocks full of $100 bills.

You want to surrender.

Subjected to the random, you acknowledge your inability to comprehend logic and linear systems.

royal flush

barbecue sauce

garage door openers

antenna

La Quinta

21

three lemons

plastic bucket

woofer

touch-tone

calling card

We generate stories for you because you don't save the ones that are yours.

Todd made out last night with a Lisa-unit from the Sony party, which he returned to after screaming at us. This morning he burst into Karla's and my room and confessed, teary eyed, and carrying a basket of croissants. It was a bad start to a weird day. He was sick with remorse.

Anatole was in the bathroom borrowing Karla's blowdryer, so he heard everything through the door. Todd made me, Anatole, and Karla swear on a stack of Bibles that we would never say anything to Dusty. Anatole launched into one of his "een my couwntree . . ." tirades about how French men all had mistresses, but he stopped when he saw how sad Todd looked.

Todd was morose and silent all day. I thought about Dusty and Lindsay Ruth at home, and was glad he felt miserable, but he'd been in such denial over his new family unit that he was bound to explode. At least he didn't SLEEP with a Lisa.

Also, it was raining outside. Raining. It was so odd to think of Las Vegas having weather, like it was a real place. But since everyone's always indoors in the casinos, I guess it doesn't really matter.

There was once a Twilight Zone episode where adults were prisoners of the whims of a ten-year-old boy, Anthony, who could change the world simply by thinking the change into existence - he could make snow fall on crops - he could erase people - he forced everybody to watch TV that showed nothing but dinosaurs and cartoons. And all anybody could say, to prevent themselves from being erased themselves, was "That's good, Anthony, that's good." A focus group of one.

The CES is a trade show like all other trade shows: thousands and thousands of men, for the most part, wearing wool suits with badges saying things like: Doug Duncan, Product Developer, MATTEL . . . or NASA, SIEMENS-NIXDORF, OGILVY & MATHER, and UCLA, and so on. Everyone loads up on free promo merchandise like software samplers, buttons, mugs, pins, and water bottles as they dash from meeting to meeting. The booths are all staffed by thousands of those guys in high school who were good-looking but who got C+'s; they're stereo salesmen now and have to suck up to the nerds they tormented in high school.

We Oop!sters were in and out of meetings all day, mostly earnest affairs held in little rooms above the convention floor. They look the same in every hotel: chrome & glass rental furniture, extension telephones, and a water cooler. All these people meeting inside, wearing the first good suit in their life, turning old right before your eyes.

We were really just there to schmooze and do PR, since our distribution's taken care of, and to approach people to develop Oop! starter modules. Standard stuff. We also did "seed plants" . . . who you give your hardware to prerelease is a high status issue.

But I must say, there's something timeless about the false sincerity and synthetic goodwill of meetings, the calculated jocularity and the simian dominant-male/subordinate-male body language. At least the presence of Karla, Susan, and Amy saved us from the inevitable stripper jokes. Karla pointed out how in marketing meetings at Microsoft, everybody was trying to be fake-perky, and trying to fake having ideas, while at CES, everybody's trying to be fake-sincere and trying to fake not looking desperate.

Also, later, during rare, quiet moments, I'd look through the windows at other people's meetings, and they looked like Dutch Master cigar box people, but modernized. Old, but new . . . like a cordless phone resting beside a bowl of apples.

We had a "hunch lunch" in the hallway outside the Intel theater to compare notes on how the meetings were going. The Convention Center has the worst food on earth, served in the most humiliating, chair-free, low-dignity manner possible. People looked like dogs, hobbled over, eating high-sodium, by-product enriched, grease-lathered guck. Convention Center food in your stomach is like having fifty chest X rays, it's so toxic. In fact for the rest of the day, the "chest X ray" became our official standard of measurement for something that is probably very bad for you, which shortens your life, but which won't take its toll until much later on. If we met someone really horrible, we said they were like "ten chest X rays," and we'll probably die three days earlier than if we had never met that person.

After lunch, we went to see the Pentium movie at the theater Intel put up in the main lobby. It was about how interactivity was going to make your life better in the future, and we couldn't stop giggling because of all the Pentium jokes about decimal points being spammed around the Internet. You knew that every single person watching the show was, too.

"0.999999985621," I whispered, setting everybody off into spasms again, and finally we had to leave because we were annoying too many people with our giggling.

I guess if you find jokes about decimal places interesting, then you truly are a geek.

In the afternoon, in between meetings, Susan spent most of her time in the SEGA-Nintendo building, and reconnoitered with her fellow Chyx at the Virgin Interactive mini-bar. There was a rumor that supermodel Fabio was signing autographs in another building, so Susan and Karla dashed over to check it out. Sure enough, His Hairness himself was signing calendars and paperbacks among the booming car stereos. Susan and Karla stood in line for an hour and finally they each got their "magic moment": a few snatches of intimate conversation, sealed with a kiss and, more important, a Polaroid. Susan's going to post hers on the Net. I asked Karla what he said to her and she said, "Stereos are my passion . . . but only after you." Gag.