Microserfs (4 page)

I asked him what it was and he told me it was something he had designed himself. It was a game about a beautiful kingdom on the edge of the world that saw time coming to an end.

However, the kingdom had found a way to trick God. It did this by converting its world into code - into bits of light and electricity that would keep pace with time as it raced away from them. And thus the kingdom would live forever, after time had come to an end.

Michael said the citizens of the kingdom were allowed to do this because they had made it to the end of history without ever having had the blood of war spill on their soil. He said it would have been an affront to all good souls who had worked for a better world over the millennia not to engineer a system for preserving finer thoughts after the millennium arrived and all ideologies died and people became animals once more.

"Well," I said after he finished, "how about those Mariners!"

Oh - Abe bought a trampoline. He went to Costco to stock up on Jif, and he ended up buying a trampoline - 14-x-14-foot, 196 square feet of bouncy aerobic fun. Since when do grocery stores sell trampolines? What a screwy decade. I guess that's what it's like to be a millionaire.

The delivery guys dropped it off and around midnight we set it up in the front yard, over the crop circles, chaining one of the legs to the front railing. Bug Barbecue is already printing up a release he's going to make Abe have all the neighbors with kids sign, absolving Abe of any blame in the event of an accident.

Woke up super early today, after only four hours' sleep, to a watery light outside. High overcast clouds. Through my window I saw a plane fly over the house, headed into SeaTac, and it made me remember when 747s first came out. Boeing had a PR photo of a kid building a house of cards in the lounge up in the bubble. God, I wanted to be that kid. Then I got to wondering, Why am I bothering to get up? What is the essential idea that gets me out of bed and through the day? What is it that gets anybody out of bed? I figure I still want to be that kid building a house of cards in a 747.

I sandpapered the roof of my mouth with three bowls of Cap'n Crunch - had raw gobbets of mouth-beef dangling onto my tongue all day. It hurt like crazy, and it made me talk with a Cindy Brady lisp until late afternoon.

Spent two hours in the morning trapped in a room with the Pol Pots from Marketing. God, they never stop - like we don't have anything better to do eight days before shipping. Even the bug testers. Like, we're supposed to see a box of free Dove Bars and say, "Oh - it's okay then - please, please waste my time."

I think everyone hates and dreads Marketing's meetings because of how these meetings alter your personality. At meetings you have to explain what you've accomplished, so naturally you fluff up your work a bit, like pillows on a couch. You end up becoming this perky, gung-ho version of yourself that you know is just revolting. I have noticed that everybody looks down upon the gung-ho type people at Microsoft, but nobody considers themselves gung-ho. They should just see themselves at these meetings, all frat boy and chipper. Fortunately, gung-ho-ishness seems confined exclusively to marketing meetings. Otherwise I think the Campus is utterly casual.

Oh, and sometimes you get flame meetings. They're fun, too - when everyone flames everyone else.

Today's meeting was about niggly little shipping details and was numbingly dull. And then, near the end, a Motorola pager owned by Kent, one of the Marketing guys, went off on top of the table. It buzzed like a hornet and shimmied and twitched across the table in a dance of death. It was mesmerizing, like watching a tarantula scamper across the table. It killed all conversation dead. Killed it right on the spot.

My smiling-muscles hurt as a result of the meeting. On top of my Cap'n Crunch mouth. A bad mouth day.

I called Mom right after the meeting and Dad answered the phone. I heard Oprah on in the background, and I didn't think that was a good omen. Dad sounded upbeat, but isn't that a part of the process? Denial? I asked him if he was watching Oprah and he said he had only come into the house for a snack.

Mom came on the phone on the extension, and once Dad was off the line, she confided that he barely slept the night before, and when he did, he made haunted moaning noises. And then this morning he dressed, as though headed to the office, and sat watching TV, being eerily chipper, refusing to talk about what his plans were. Then he went out into the garage to work on his model train world.

I learned a new word today: "trepanation" - drilling a hole in the skull to relieve pressure on the brain.

Karla came into my office this morning - a first - just as I was logging onto my e-mail for the morning. She was holding a big cardboard box full of acrylic Windows coffee mugs from the company store in Building Fourteen. "Guess what everyone in the Karla universe is getting for Christmas this year?" she asked cheerfully. "They're on sale." There was a pause. "You want one, Dan?"

I said that I drink too much coffee and colas, and that I'm a colon cancer statistic just waiting to happen. I said I'd love one. She handed it to me and there was a pause as she looked around my office: an NEC MultiSync monitor; a Compaq workhorse monitor; a framed Jazz poster; a "Mac Hugger" bumper sticker on my ceiling and my black-and-white photo shrine to Microsoft VP Steve Ballmer. "The shrine started as a joke," I said, "but it's sort of taking on a life of its own now. It's getting scary. Shall we worship?"

It was then that she asked me, in a lowered tone, "Who's Jed?"

She had seen me keyboard in my password - like HAL from 2001.

And so I closed the door and told her about Jed, and you know, I was glad I was able to tell someone at last.

Mid-afternoon, Bug, Todd, Michael, and I grabbed some road-Snapples in the kitchen and headed over to pick up some manuals at the library, out behind the Administration building. It was more of a fresh-air jaunt than anything else.

It was raining quite heavily, but Bug pulled his usual stunt. He made us all walk through the Campus's forest undergrowth instead of simply taking the pleasant winding path that meanders through the Campus trees - the Microsoft path that speaks of Wookiees and Smurfs amid the salal, ornamental plums, rhododendrons, Japanese maple, arbutus, huckleberry, hemlock, cedars, and firs.

Bug believes that Bill sits at his window in the Admin Building and watches how staffers walk across the Campus. Bug believes that Bill keeps note of who avoids the paths and uses the fastest routes to get from A to B, and that Bill rewards these devil-may-care trailblazers with promotions and stock, in the belief that their code will be just as innovative and dashing.

We all ended up soaking wet, with Oregon Grape stains on our Dockers by the time we got to the library, and on the way back we read the Riot Act and said that Bug had to stop geeking out and learn to enculturate, and that for his own good he should take the path - and he agreed. But we could see that it was killing Bug - literally killing him - to have to walk along the path past where Bill's office is supposed to be.

Todd toyed with Bug and got him going on the subject of Xerox PARC, thus getting Bug all bitter and foaming. Bug is still in a sort of perpetual grief that Xerox PARC dropped the football on so many projects.

And then Michael, who had been silent up to now, said, "Hey - if you cut over this berm, it's a little faster," and he cut off the path, and Bug's eyes just about popped out of his head, and Michael found a not bad shortcut. Right outside the Admin Building.

I realize I haven't seen a movie in six months. I think the last one was Curly Sue on the flight to Macworld Expo, and that hardly counted. I really need a life, bad.

It turns out Abe has entrepreneurial aspirations. We had dinner in the down stairs cafeteria together (Indonesian Bamay with frozen yogurt and double espresso). He's thinking of quitting and becoming a pixelation broker - going around to museums and buying the right to digitize their paintings. It's a very "Rich Microsoft" thing to do. Microsoft's millionaires are the first generation of North American nerd wealth.

Once Microsofters' ships come in, they travel all over: Scotland and Patagonia and Thailand . . . Conde Nast Traveler-ish places. They buy Shaker furniture, Saabs, koi, Pilchuk glass, native art, and 401(K)s to the max. The ultrarichies build fantasy homes on the Samamish Plateau loaded with electronic toys.

It's all low-key spending, mostly, and fresh and fun. Nobody's buying crypts, I notice - though when the time comes that they do, said crypts will no doubt be emerald and purple colored, and lined with Velcro and Gore-Tex.

Abe, like most people here, is a fiscal Republican, but otherwise, pretty empty-file in the ideology department. Vesting turns most people into fiscal Republicans, I've noticed.

The day went quickly. The rain is back again, which is nice. The summer was too hot and too dry for a Washington boy like me.

I am going to bring in some Japanese UFO-brand yaki soba tomorrow and see if Karla is into lunch. She needs carbs. Skittles and aspartame is no diet for a coder.

Well, actually, it is.

A thought: Sometimes the clouds and sunlight will form in a way you've never seen them do before, and your city will feel as if it's another city altogether. On the Campus today at sunset, people were stopping on the grass watching the sun turn stove-filament orange through the rain clouds.

It's just something I noticed. It made me realize that the sun is really built of fire. It made me feel like an animal, not a human.

Worked until 1:30 a.m. When I got in, Abe was down in his microbrewery in the garage, puttering amid the stacks of furniture handed down by parents - stuff too ugly to meet even the minimal taste standards of the upstairs rooms, the piles of golf clubs, the mountain bikes, and a line of suitcases, perched like greyhounds awaiting the word GO!

Bug was locked behind his door, but by the smell I could tell he was eating a microwaved Dinty Moore product.

Susan was in the living room asleep in front of a taped Seinfeld episode.

Todd was obsessively folding his shirts in his room.

Michael was rereading The Chronicles of Narnia for the 87th time.

A nice average night.

I went into my room, which, like all six of the bedrooms here, is filled up almost completely with a bed, with walls lined with IKEA "Billy" bookshelves and stereo equipment, jazz posters and Sierra Club calendars. On my desk sits a Sudafed box and a pile of stones from a beach in Oregon. My PC is hooked up by modem to the Campus.

Had a Tab (a Bill favorite) and some microwave popcorn and did some unfinished work.

Well, it would seem that Bug Barbecue's theory might be correct after all. Michael got invited to lunch today with (oh God, I can barely input the letters . . .) B-B-B-B-B-I-L-L!

The news traveled around Building Seven like lightning just around 11:30. Needless to say, we tumbled into Bug's office like puppies within seconds of getting word, tripping over his piles of soldering guns, wires, R-Kive boxes, and empty CD jewel boxes. Of course, he went mad with grief. We totally needled him:

"You know, Bug, the deciding factor must have been Michael's walking over that berm and making that incredible shortcut. I tell you, Bill saw Michael make that call of genius and now I bet he's going to give Michael his own product group. You shouldn't have listened to us, man. We're losers. We're going nowhere. Now, Michael - he's a winner."

Actually, the invitation probably had more to do with the code Michael wrote during the bunkering last Friday, but we didn't tell Bug this.

During the two hours Michael was away, time ticked by slowly. The curiosity was unbearable and we were all giddy and restless. We emerged from our offices into corridors of caged whimsy, amid our Far Side cartoons taped to windows, Pepsi-can sculptures taped to the walls, and inflatable sharks hanging from the ceilings, all lit by full-spectrum, complexion-flattering lighting.

We lapsed into one of our weekly-ish communal stress-relieving frenzies - we swiped sheets of bubble-pak from the supply rooms and rolled over them with our office chairs, popping hundreds of plastic zits at a go. We punished plastic troll dolls with 5-irons, blasting them down the hallway, putting yet more divots in the particle board walls and the ceiling panels. We drank Tabs and idly slagged interactive CD technology (Todd: "I used the Philips GDI system-it's like trying to read a coffee table book with all of the pages glued together.").

Finally Michael came back and walked past everybody, oblivious to the sensation of his presence, and entered his office. I walked over to his door.

"Hi, Michael." Pause. "Soooooo . . . ?"

"Hello, Daniel. I have to fly to Cupertino tonight. Some kind of Macintosh assignment they're putting me on."

"What was, well - he - like?"

"Oh, you know . . . efficient. People forget that he is medically, biologically, a genius. Not one ummm or ahhhh from his mouth all lunch; no wasted brain energy. Truly an inspiration for us all. I told him about my Flatlander flat-foods-only concept, and we then got into a discussion of beverages, which, as you know, tend to be consumed with a straw in a linear, one-dimensional (and hence not two-dimensional) mode. Beverages are a real problem to my new Flatlander dining lifestyle, Daniel, let me tell you.

"But then Bill -" (first name basis!) "- pointed out that one-dimensionality is perfectly allowable within a two-dimensional universe. So obvious, yet I hadn't seen it! Good thing he's in charge. Oh - Daniel, can I borrow your suitcase? Mine has all my old Habitrail gerbil mazes in it, and I don’t want to take them out and then have to repack them all when I return."