Microserfs (6 page)

And this got me thinking. I looked around and noticed that if you took all of the living things on the Microsoft Campus, separated them into piles, and analyzed the biomass, it would come out to:

• 38% Kentucky bluegrass

• 19% human beings

• .003% Bill

• 8% Douglas and balsam fir

• 7% Western red cedar

• 5% hemlock

• 23% other: crows, birch, insects, worms, microbes, nerd aquarium fish, decorator plants in the lobbies . .

.

Went home early at 5:30 and nobody was there. Susan had two card tables unfolded in the otherwise empty dining room area, awaiting their snacks. Abe had loaned Susan his sacred Dolby THX sound system for the party plus his two Adirondack chairs made from old skis. The place still looked a bit bare.

It was like The Day Without People.

Around dark, things started hopping. Abe returned from sailing and cranked up old Human League tunes, to which he sang along from the shower. Susan returned with bags of food from the caterers that I helped her carry in and set up: pasta puttanesca, Thai noodles, calzones, Chee-tos, and gherkins. Bug and some of his bitter, nutcase friends arrived with a wide selection of beer, and they were in good moods, sitting around playing peanut gallery to Hard Copy and A Current Affair, being amusing and eating half of Susan's party food while she was dressing.

By 8:00, other guests began arriving, bringing bottles of wine, and by 9:00, the house, which not two hours previously had been a pit of gloom, was brimming with good cheer and U2.

Around 9:30, Susan was talking with her friends, telling them that she'd vested just in the nick of time - "I've been switching from a right-lobe person to a left-lobe person over the past 18 months, and I couldn't have gone on coding much longer. Anyway, I think the era of vesting is coming to a close." The phone in my room rang just then. (We have nine lines into our house. Pacific Bell either loves us or hates us.) I excused myself to answer it.

It was Mom.

Apparently Dad had just flown up to Seattle from Palo Alto on impulse. She'd just gotten in from her library job and had found the note on the door. I asked what time his flight landed and she told me he was arriving at the airport as we spoke.

So I went and sat on the curb outside the house. It was a bit chilly and I was wearing my old basketball varsity coat. Karla walked up the hill from her place, said hello, and sat down beside me, carrying a twelve-pack of beer that seemed enormously large for her small arms. From my body language she knew that everything wasn't okay, and she didn't ask me anything. I simply said, "My Dad's just flown up here - he's come unglued. I think he'll be arriving shortly." We sat and looked at the treetops and heard the wind rustle.

"I heard you were in a marketing discussion all day with Kent," I said to

her.

"Yeah. It was unproductive. Pretty numbing. He's a creep."

"You know, I've been going through the whole day wanting to bludgeon

him."

"Really?" She said. She looked at me sideways.

"Yeah. Really."

"Well now, that's not too logical, is it?"

"No."

She then held my hand, and we sat there, together. We drank some of the beer she had brought and we said hello to Mishka the Dog, who cruised by to visit then went for a nap under the trampoline. And we watched the cars that pulled up to the house, one by one, waiting for the one car that would contain my father.

He arrived not too long afterward, in a rental car, piss drunk (not sure how he swung that), looking tired and scared, with big bags under his eyes, and a bit deranged.

He parked with a lurch right across the street from us. We sat and watched as he sucked in a breath and leaned back on the seat, his head slumped forward. He then turned his head toward us and through the open window said, a bit bashfully, "Hi."

"Hi, Dad."

He looked back down at his lap.

"Dad, this is Karla," I said, still seated.

He looked at us again. "Hello, Karla."

"Hi."

We sat on our opposite sides of the road. Behind us, the house had become a thumping shadow box of festivity. Dad didn't look up from his lap, so Karla and I stood up and walked over to him, and as we did, we saw that Dad was clutching something tight in his lap, and as we approached, he clutched it tighter. It seemed as though he was afraid we might take away whatever it was, and as we neared, I realized he was holding Jed's old football helmet, a little boy's helmet, in gold and green, the old school colors.

"Danny," he said to me, not to my face, but into the helmet which he polished with his old man's hands, "I still miss Jeddie. I can't get him out of my mind."

"I miss Jed, too, Daddy," I said. "I think about him every day."

He held the helmet tighter to his chest.

"Come on, Daddy - let's get out of the car. Come on into the house. We can talk in there."

"I can't pretend I don't think about him anymore. I think it's killing me."

"I feel the same way, too, Daddy. You know what? I feel as if he's alive still, and that he's always walking three steps ahead of me, just like a king."

I opened the door and Karla and I both supported Dad on either side as he clutched the helmet to his chest, and we walked into the house, his appearance generating little interest in the overall crowd. We went into Michael's room, where we placed him on the bed.

He was ranting a bit: "Funny how all those things you thought would never end turned out to be the first to vanish - IBM, the Reagans, Eastern bloc communism. As you get older, the bottom line becomes to survive as best you can."

"We don't know about that yet, Daddy."

I pulled off his shoes, and for some time Karla and I sat beside him on two office chairs. Michael's machines hummed around us and our only light source was a small bedside lamp. We sat and watched Dad filter in and out of consciousness.

He said to me, "You are my treasure, son. You are my first born. When the doctors removed their hands from your mother and lifted you up to the sky, it was as though they removed a trove of pearls and diamonds and rubies all covered in sticky blood."

I said, "Daddy, don't talk like that. Get some rest. You'll find a job. I'll always support you. Don't feel bad. There'll be lots of stuff available. You'll see."

"It's your world now," he said, his breathing deepening, as he turned to stare at the wall that thumped with music and shrieks of party-goers. "It's yours."

And shortly after that, he fell asleep on the bed - on Michael's bed in Michael's room.

And before we left the room, we turned out the light and we took one last look at the warm black form of my father lying on the bed, lit only by the constellation of red, yellow, and green LEDs from Michael's sleeping, dreaming machines

Rained all day (32mm according to Bug). Read a volume of Inside Mac. Drove over to Boeing Surplus and bought some zinc and some laminated air-safety cards.

Went into the office and played Doom for an hour. Deleted some e-mail.

Morris from Word is in Amsterdam so I asked him to try out the vegetarian burger at a McDonald's there.

There were soggy maple leaves all over the Hornet Sportabout this afternoon. The orange colors were dizzying and I must have looked like such a space case staring at the car for fifteen minutes. But it felt so relaxing.

Susan was talking about art today, about that surrealist guy who painted little businessmen floating through the sky and apples that fill up entire rooms - Magritte. She said that if Surrealism was around today, "It'd last ten minutes and be stolen by ad agencies to sell long-distance calls and aerosol cheese products." Probably true.

Then Susan went on to say that Surrealism was exciting back whenever it happened, because society had just discovered the subconscious, and this was the first visual way people had found to express the way the human subconscious works.

Susan then said that the BIG issue nowadays is that on TV and in magazines, the images we see, while they appear surreal, "really aren't surrealistic, because they're just random, and there's no subconsciousness underneath to generate the images."

So this got me to thinking . . . what if machines do have a subconscious of their own? What if machines right now are like human babies, which have brains but no way of expressing themselves except screaming (crashing)? What would a machine's subconscious look like? How does it feed off what we give it? If machines could talk to us, what would they say?

So I stare at my MultiSync and my PowerBook and wonder . . . "What's going through their heads?"

To this end, I'm creating a file of random words that pop into my head, and am feeding these words into a desktop file labeled SUBCONSCIOUS.

Cleaned out the kitchen cupboards. Read the phone book for a while. Read a Wall Street Journal. Listened to the radio.

Karla's been living here three weeks and I'm not sure I'm not going to screw things up. It's all so new. She's heaven. Imagine losing heaven!

Personal Computer

I am your personal computer

Hello

Stop

Being

Carbon

CNN

LensCrafters

magnetic ID card

instant noodles

dodecahedron

666

airbag

employee number

birth

ATM

Lawry's Garlic Salt

808 Honolulu

503 Klamath Falls

604 Victoria

702 Las Vegas

206 Tacoma

916 Shasta

oatmeal

cherry flavored antacids

holodeck

Sierra

NCC-1701

Schroder Wagg/London

laxatives

Rubbermaid

Courtyard Marriott

Big Gulp

liquid money

Rank Xerox

Todd and I tied our "Ship-It" awards to a rope behind my AMC Hornet Sportabout hatchback wagon and dragged them for an hour around the suburbs of Bellevue and Redmond.

Net result: a few little nicks and scratches. They are awesomely indestructible.

I try to imagine someone or some new species in fifty million years, unearthing one of these profoundly unbiodegradable little gems and trying to deduce something meaningful about the species and culture that created it.

"Surely they lived not for the moment but for some distant time - obviously a time far, far beyond their own era, to have created such an astounding artifact that would not decay."

"Yes, Yeltar, and they inscribed profound, meaningful, and transcendent text inside this miraculously preserved clear block, but alas, its message remains forever cryptic:"

EVERY TIME A PRODUCT SHIPS,

IT TAKES US ONE STEP CLOSER TO THE VISION:

A COMPUTER ON EVERY DESK AND IN EVERY HOME.

Dad phoned to ask me how to hook up a modem. He's joining the Net now.

For three days last month he ended up on the green velveteen living room couch, sleeping endlessly. Or else he'd come sit with me in my office while we finished debugging for shipping. He seemed to like that. But he was so fragile, and when Karla and I drove him out to SeaTac airport he sat in the backseat, rattling like a stack of Franklin Mint souvenir plates.

Mom keeps sending me clippings about the information superhighway and interactive multimedia. She clips things out of the San Jose Mercury News (her librarian's heart). This highway - is it a joke? You hear so much about it, but really, what is it . . . slide shows with music? Suddenly it's all over the place. EVERYWHERE.

Morris e'd me back from Amsterdam:

> l tried one and they're not very good, so don't romanticize them. They have a curry taste, and they're full of frozen *peas* (of all things). More importantly, by eating "burgers," aren't you just still buying into the "meat concept." Tofu hot dogs are merely an isotope of meat.

> lf you yourself are a vegetarian, but still dream of burgers, then all you really are is a cryptocarnivore.

Went to Nordstrom's. Watched Wings on A&E.

Bug sulks in his room all day, listening to Chet Baker, restoring his antique Radio Shack Science Fair 65-In-One electronic project kit, and memorizing C++ syntax. Susan house hunts. Todd lives at the Pro Club gym. Abe has been reassigned to a subgroup in charge of designing a toolbar interface. Whooo-ee!

I think Abe's being punished for going sailing that day with his friends during the week we were all in crunch mode. We don't see him much - he's back in Microsoft time/space again. He gets home late, feeds his neon tetras sprinkles of ground-up, freeze-dried poor people, chides us all for not exhibiting more enterprise, and then sleeps.

2:45 A.M. Drove into Seattle tonight with Todd in separate cars. Todd scored at The Crocodile and at the moment he and his "date," Tabitha from Tukwilla, are in his room getting acquainted.

Bug is here in the living room watching "Casper the Friendly Ghost" cartoons on the VCR, "looking for subtext." I can't believe it, but I'm getting into it, too. ("Wait, Bug - rewind that back a few seconds - wasn't that a Masonic compass?") Karla was asleep ages ago. She stayed home and watched The Thornbirds on the VCR with Susan. ("It's a girl thing. Scram.") Karla has an unsuspected fathomless capacity for sleep of which I am most envious.

Continued adding to my computer's subconscious files.

Welcome to Macintosh

Carl's Jr.

Gore-Tex®

gray metallic Saabs

Barry Diller

KISS

mini-bars

ads for pearls

outer space

frequent flyer points

Oscar de la Renta

minimum wage

manufacture

dungeons

magazine scent strips

Bell Atlantic

phone jacks

F-16

Calvin Klein

bourgeois decay images

Upload

Sparkletts

flame broiled

switchbox

the DMV

MiG-29

Han Solo

Download

Drive

Tori Spelling

Advil

Kotex

Rosslyn

You jerk

Langley

Lee Press-ons

I went to the library and looked up books on freeway construction - the asphalt and cement kind - Dewey Decimal number 625.79 - and there haven't been any published on the subject for two decades! It's bizarre - like a murder mystery. It's as if the notion of freeway construction simply vanished in 1975. Sizzler titles include:

Bituminous Materials in Road Construction

Surface Texture Versus Skidding

Engineering Study: Alaska Highway

Better Concrete Pavement Serviceability

Vehicle Redirection Effectiveness of Median Berms and Circles

Actually, there weren't all too many books on freeways ever published in the first place. You'd think we'd have whole stadiums devoted to the worship of freeways for the amount of importance they play in our culture, but no. Zip. I guess we're overcompensating for this past shortcoming by our current overhyping of the InfoBahn - the I-way. It's emerged from nowhere into this big important thing we Have to Know About.

I have borrowed, among others, the seminal work on the subject: Handbook of Highway Engineering (1975), by Robert F. Baker, editor; Van Nostrand and Reinhold Company. It'll help melt away my lax days before I join a new product group.

We ripped away some wallpaper in the kitchen by the fridge and found that underneath the various stratum of paper (daisies; Peel n' Stick pepper-mills), in condition just as fresh as the day they were written, the words:

one mellow day

June 6, 1974

I'm long gone but my idea of peace now remains with you

d.b.

Hippie stuff, but I lost my breath when I read the words. And I felt like for a moment that maybe an idea is more important than simply being alive, because an idea lives a long time after you're gone. And then the feeling passed. And we found all of these old, early 1970s Seattle newspapers behind a wallboard. The prices back then . . . cheap!

At the Bellevue Starbucks, Karla and I discussed the unprecedented success of Campbell's Cream of Broccoli Soup. On a napkin we listed ideas for new Campbell's soup flavors:

Creamy Dolphin

Lagoon

Beak

Pond

Crack

Note: I think Starbucks has patented a new configuration of the water molecule, like in a Kurt Vonnegut novel, or something. This molecule allows their coffee to remain liquid at temperatures over 212° Fahrenheit. How do they get their coffee so hot! It takes hours to cool off - it's so hot it's undrinkable - and by the time it's cool, you're sick of waiting for it to cool and that "coffee moment" has passed. At least Starbucks doesn't stink like sweet coffee-flavoring chemicals . . . like the way you'd expect a Barbie doll's house to smell.

Saw a documentary about the commodities market. Read some books that were lying around. Watched some old 1970s TV shows later. I remembered an old Nova episode in which German hackers published a secret document, and some Ph.D. hippie geek from UC Berkeley tracked them down with a baited document. Was this hippie geek tricked into trapping one of his own kind by the NSA or some other such organization? Ethics.

Then I started to think about those old Time-Life books with such all-embracing names like, "The Elements," and "The Ocean," and of how the information in them never really goes out of date, whereas the computer series books date within minutes: "Most 'personal computers' now contain devices called 'hard drives' capable of storing the equivalent, in some cases, of up to three college textbooks."

Felt a bit random.

Capture

specific

functions

Microsoft

Navajo

NASA

Flesh-eating bacteria

Arthur Miller

Kristy McNichol

Lance Kerwin

skateboard

trail mix

PERL

Job description

toner cartridge

very

really

a lot

ummm . . .

Martin-Marietta

Susan and Karla came into the living room when I was reading the Handbook of Highway Engineering, and they both flipped out. They totally grokked on it. We kept on oohing and ahhhing over the book's beautiful, car-free on-ramps, off-ramps, and overpasses - "So clean and pure and undriven."

Karla noted that freeway engineers had their own techie code words, just as dull and impenetrable as geek talk. "Examples: subgrades, partial clover-leaf interchanges, cutslopes, and TBMs (Tunnel Boring Machines) . . ."

"They even abused three-letter acronyms," said Karla, who also decreed that Rhoda Morgenstern would have dated a freeway engineer back in the 1970s. "His name would have been Rex and he would have looked like Jackson Browne and would have known the compressive strength range of Shale, Dolomite, and Quartzite to the nearest p.s.i. x 10^3."

I am really terrible at remembering three-letter acronyms. It's a real dead zone in my brain. I still barely can tell you what RAM is. Wherever this part of the brain is located, it's the same place where I misfile the names and faces of people I meet at parties. I'm so bad at names. I'm realizing that three-letter acronyms are actually words now, and no longer simply acronyms: ram, rom, scuzzy, gooey, see-pee-you. . . . Words have to start somewhere.

Karla told me about when she was young. About how she remembered trying to make - no, not make, engineer - Campbell's Vegetable Soup from scratch - chopping up the carrots and potatoes to resemble machine-cut cubes - getting the exact number of lima beans per can (4).

"I grew up with assembly lines, remember. My favorite cartoon was always the one with the little chipmunks stuck inside the vegetable canning factory. I used to guess at the spices, too. But in the end it never worked because I didn't use beef stock or MSG."

Random day. Fed on magazines for a while. Radio. Phone call from Mom, and she talked about traffic.

Industrial Light & Magic

jump

hit

We're just friends

run

multi-user dungeon

Ziggy Stardust

Sky Tel paging

FORTRAN

IKEA

Wells Fargo

Safeway

hummingbird

I am an empath

4x4

Kung Fu