Microserfs (36 page)

Todd got sullen because Susan and Karla kept on discussing Fabio's pectoral muscles . . . "They're like beef throw cushions . . . they're like fifty pound flank-steak Chiclets . . . they're like . . ." and Todd would say, "Enough already."

Went to about seventeen meetings altogether. At CES, everybody name-drops their hotel all the time. Hotelmanship is a big CES status issue - people kept on asking us during the day where we were staying. They'd say, "So, uh" (charged moment) "where are you staying?"

And we would casually reply, "Oh, the Luxor."

Las Vegas hotels are similar to video games - games and hotels both plunder extinct or mythical cultures in pursuit of a franchisable myth with graphic potential: Egypt - Camelot - the Jolly Roger. We found ourselves feeling a little sorry for hotels that couldn't afford to lavishly re-create mythical archetypes, or were simply too stupid to realize that the lack of a theme made them indistinguishable. It was as if the boring hotels couldn't figure out what was going on in the bigger scheme of Western culture. Hotels in Las Vegas need special effects, rides, simulators, morphings . . . today's hotel must have fantasy systems in place, or it will perish.

Todd went to see Siegfried and Roy, and afterward made this big deal of showing Karla and me his program when we were standing in line waiting to go on the virtual reality theme ride. We were underwhelmed to say the most. Todd was quite impressed, however, with Siegfried and Roy themselves as proud examples of science and surgery combining in the name of entertainment and tanlines. He seemed wistful for his bodybuilding days of not even a year ago. "Siegfried and Roy are very obviously at the extreme end of some exciting new paradigm for the human body," said Todd. " 'See Tomorrow's Face, Today.' "

But then the big drama du jour was when Todd caught his parents gambling . . . right there on the main floor of the Luxor! They were at the quarter-slot video poker machines, and talk about weird. They were glued to their machines, really scary, like those mean old pensioners who smoke long brown cigarettes and scream at you if they think you might be contaminating their machine's winnability karma. Todd ran up and "busted" them, and it was really embarrassing, but also too good to miss. I mean, they were all screaming at each other. Todd was truly freaked out to see his parents so obviously engaging in the "secular" world. And wouldn't you just know it, his parents are at the Hacienda, too, and it really seemed like one of those foreign movies that you rent and return half-wound because they're too contrived to be believed, and then real-life happens, and you wonder if the Europeans understood everything all along.

Todd came to our room and ranted for a while about what hypocrites his parents were, and it took all my restraint not to remind him that he had "sinned" himself with a Lisa-from-Sony just the previous evening. Karla took him out on the Strip for a walk and I had some peace for the first time all day.

I called Mom from the hotel during this period of peace. I'd turned out all of the lights and closed the curtains in pursuit of sensory deprivation. It was black and sensationless. All there was in the room was my voice and Mom's voice trickling out of the phone's earpiece, and this feeling passed through me, this feeling of what a gift it is that people are able to speak to each other while they're alive. These casual conversations, this familiar voice heard through a Las Vegas hotel room telephone. It was strange to realize that, in one sense, all we are is our voice.

BILL was in town launching a new product, and it was so bizarre, seeing his face and hearing his voice over the remote screens inside the convention floor. It was like being teleported back to eleventh-grade chem class. Like a distant dream. Like a dream of a dream. And people were riveted to his every gesture. I mean riveted, looking at his picture, trying to articulate the charisma, and it was so odd, seeing all of these people, looking at Bill's image, not listening to what he was saying but instead trying to figure out what was his . . . secret.

But his secret is, I think, that he shows nothing. A poker face doesn't mean showing coolness like James Bond. It means expressing nothingess. This is maybe the core of the nerd dream: the core of power and money that lies at the center of the storm of technology, that doesn't have to express emotion or charisma, because emotion can't be converted into lines of code.

Yet.

I kind of lost focus after a while, and I wandered around and picked up a copy of the New York Times lying next to an SGI unit blasting out a flight simulation. There, on the third page of the business section, not even the first, was a story about how Apple shares were going up in value as a result of rumors of an impending three-way buyout by Panasonic (Holland), Oracle (USA), and Matsushita (Japan). My, how things change. That's all I can think. Apple used to be the King of the Valley, and now they're getting prospected like a start-up. Time frames are so extreme in the tech industry. Life happens at fifty times the normal pace. I mean, if someone in Palo Alto says to you, "They never called back," what they really mean is, "They never called back within one week." A week means never in the Silicon Valley.

Todd was off all day having ordeals with his parents, and Bug, Sig, Emmett, and Susan walked around hoping they'd "accidentally" bump into Todd in order to eavesdrop a little, but to no avail.

MacCarran Airport is right next to downtown Las Vegas, and a plane flies over the city every eleven seconds. Karla and I were walking between pavilions and we saw Barry Diller in a gray wool suit (and no name tag). We sat down on a riser near the piled-up plywood freight boxes to rest our feet, and watched the planes fly by. We were both over stimulated.

Karla was fiddling with the Samsung shoelace holding her badge, and she looked up at a plane in the sky and said, "Dan, what does all this stuff tell us about ourselves as humans? What have we gained by externalizing our essence through these consumable electronic units of luxury, comfort, and freedom?"

It's a good question, I thought. I mentioned how weird it was that everybody keeps on asking, "Have you seen anything new? Have you seen anything new?" It's like the mantra of the CES.

Karla pointed out that there's really not that many types of things a person can have in their house in the end. "You can have a stereo and a microwave and a cordless phone . . . and the list goes on a bit from there . . . but after a certain point you run out of things to need. You can get more powerful and expensive things, but not really new things. I guess the number of types of things we build defines the limits of ourselves as a species."

Nintendo's Virtual Boy seemed the most advanced thing we'd seen here. SEGA won the Noisiest Booth award, and that's saying a lot at CES.

Bug, Sig, and Karla were all a bit annoyed by how "family-oriented" the city had become, and we yearned for traces of its proud history of sleaze and corruption. I mean, if you can't get lost in Las Vegas, then what's the point of Las Vegas?

During a 90-minute between-meeting lull, we decided to go to the Sahara to check out the porn component of the show, a highly secured second-floor salon room chockablock with the latest in, errr . . . cyber stimulation.

There were no empty cabs to be found so we ended up sharing a stray Yellow Cab with the worst transvestite on the planet, Darleena: great big hairy knuckles and five o'clock shadow like Fred Flintstone. Darleena kept on talking about the day last year when she met Pamela Anderson of Baywatch at the Hefner Playboy mansion. For half a mile she discussed breast augmentation with Sig (the doctor).

As a joke I told Darleena that Karla sometimes likes to dress up like a small Edwardian boy, and Darleena got all interested. It was a fun ride.

The porn pavilion itself was creepy. This weird porn energy and lots of women with breasts like basketballs. It sounds so great in that bachelor fantasy way, but then you see it, and you freak out. Actually, pornography really just makes sex look unappealing.

After about thirty minutes we'd reached our limit, and were heading toward the door when we saw the crowd surge in the direction of one particular booth, and we looked, and there was John Wayne Bobbit, dressed in Tommy Hilfiger, like a Microsoft employee, standing amid all of these silconized inhabitants of the planet Temptron 5.

Bug said, "Here it is, one day you're just a nothing buttwipe who cheats on his wife living in the middle of nowhere and then, BAM!, two years later you're wearing Tommy Hilfiger windbreakers surrounded by eleven women with seventy-inch breasts in Las Vegas, Nevada, with the whole United States of America wondering if your dick works."

The real world is a porno movie. I'm convinced.

I got to thinking about sin, or badness, or whatever you want to call it, and I realized that just as there are a limited number of consumer electronics we create as a species, there are also a limited number of sins we can commit, too. So maybe that's why people are so interested in computer "hackers" - because they invented a new sin.

McDonald's: "Paying homage to Ronald," said Amy, pulling into the driveway beneath the golden arches.

Everybody tried to remember the last time they ate a real vegetable.

"Pickles or iceberg lettuce don't count."

We were all stumped.

This McDonald's was offering a free 16-oz. soft drink if a student brings in a report card with an A. If they have two As, they get a drink and a small fries - three As, and they toss in a cheeseburger to boot. Amy said, "Look out, Japan!" But then she realized, "Las Vegas doesn't have schoolchildren, does it?"

Halfway through the meal, Michael said, over his Filet-o-Fish, "Las Vegas is perhaps about the constant attempt of humans to decomplexify complex systems."

"Huh?"

"Las Vegas was once seedy, but it has now evolved into a Disney version of itself - which is probably less fun, but certainly more lucrative, and certainly necessary for the city to survive as an entity in the 1990s. Disneyland presupposes a universe of noncompetitive species - food chains hypersimplified into sterility by a middle-class fear of entropy: animals who will not eat each other and who irrationally enjoy human company; plant life consisting of lawns sprinkled on the fringes with colorful, sterile flowers."

"Oh."

"Nonetheless, chaos will ultimately prevail, just as one day, all of this will be dust, rubble, and sagebrush once more."

"Oh."

"But you know, the good chaos."

I felt like my IQ had shrunk to one digit.

Amy and Michael began making out right there next to the McDonald's-world play station.

Oop!, I might add, is going to be a hit. I think this has been lost on everybody in the Las Vegan blur, but it would appear that we're all still employed, and that our risk has become solid equity, but you know what? All I care about is that we're all still together as friends, that we're not enemies, and that we can continue to do cool stuff together. I thought the money would mean something, but it doesn't. It's there, but it's not emotional. It's simply there.

After dark Karla revealed to me that she, too, was fascinated by the laser beam, so we told everybody we were returning to the Hacienda next door, and instead drove our rented Altima sedan northeastward on Highway 15, to see how far away we could drive and still see the pyramid's laser beam. I had heard that air pilots reported seeing it from LAX. I wondered if astronauts could see the beam from outer space.

It was an overcast night. We drove and drove, and at forty miles out we realized that we hadn't been paying attention, and the laser beam was gone. We stopped in at a diner for hamburgers and video poker, and we won $2.25, so we were "a cheeseburger ahead for the evening."

We then got back into the car and drove back toward Las Vegas, and around twenty-six miles outside of Las Vegas we were able to see the

Luxor's beam of light up in the sky again. We pulled the car over onto the highway shoulder and gazed at it. It was awe-inspiring and romantic.

I felt so close to her.

Later, back at the hotel, I was PowerBooking my journal entry and I could feel Karla watching me, and I got a little self-concious. I said, "I guess it's sort of futile trying to keep a backup file of my personal memories . . ."

She said, "Not at all . . . because we use so many machines, it's not surprising we should store memories there, as well as in our bodies. The one thing that differentiates human beings from all other creatures on Earth is the externalization of subjective memory - first through notches in trees, then through cave paintings, then through the written word and now, through databases of almost otherworldly storage and retrieval power."

Karla said that as our memory multiplies itself seemingly logarithmically, history's pace feels faster, it is "accelerating" at an oddly distorted rate, and will only continue to do so faster and faster. "Soon enough all human knowledge will be squished into small nubbins the size of pencil erasers that you can pea-shoot at the stars."

I asked, "And . . . what then - when the entire memory of the species is as cheap and easily available as pebbles at the beach?"

She said that this is not a frightening question. "It is a question full of awe and wonder and respect. And people being people, they will probably, I imagine, use these new memory pebbles to build new paths." Like I said . . . it was romantic.

What happened was this: I was looking out the window and Todd was fighting with his parents out on the Strip, down below the Hacienda's sign. How long was this going to go on? I decided I had to help Todd and so I went down to see if I could '"Stop the Insanity!" Just as I joined them, Karla came running out. We all turned, and I saw her coming, and I could tell something was very, very wrong.