Microserfs (8 page)

I think I'm going to keep my diary more regularly now. Karla got me to thinking that we really do inhabit an odd little nook of time and space here, and that odd or strange as this little nook may be, it's where I live - it's where I am.

I used to always think I had to have a reason to record my observations of the day, or even my emotions, but now I think simply being alive is more than enough reason. Unshackled!

UV rays

. . . arms armor ammo health

Brillo

Chicken Marsala

WW3

backlit Plexiglas

N x S x T

Tetris

Tonopah, Nevada

locate the source of urges

cat food

System Seven

Woodside

Los Altos Hills

San Jose

Space Cruiser

8

17

32

487

Superstar

Fear Uncertainty Doubt

Crashed in a cornfield

COBOL

Steak house

Calorie factory

Format?

Reject?

Melrose Place night tonight. We double-clicked onto the "BRAIN CANDY" mode. We're all addicts.

We like to pretend our geek house is actually Melrose Place.

Tonight Abe said, "I wonder what would happen if we all started randomly going nonlinear like the show's characters. What would happen if our personalities became divorced from cause and effect?"

"We could take turns going psycho," said Bug.

Susan, writing the words D-U-R-A-N/D-U-R-A-N on the proximal phalanges of her fingers, said, "You already are psycho, Bug. That doesn't count."

Susan read aloud bits from the Handbook of Highway Engineering:

" 'Improperly installed or unwarranted signals can result in the following conditions:

-Excessive delay

-Disobedience of the signal indications

-Use of less adequate routes to avoid the signal

-Increase of accident frequency . . .' "

She paused and looked at the fire for a while. "I wonder if this guy is alive and if he's married?"

I called to see if Mom was feeling better, and she was. She's signed up for swimming classes at the local pool. But the big news occurred when Dad got on the extension line and shouted at me, "I'm employed!"

"Way to go, Dad. I told you something would come up. What are you going to be doing?"

"Oh - this and that. Michael is certainly one bright young fellow. Odd. But bright."

"You're working for Michael?''

"I certainly am."

"At Microsoft?"

"No, he's starting something else, a new company."

"He IS? What are you working on there?" (*Shock*)

"And he's living in one of the spare bedrooms - can you believe it?"

(Good God!) "Yes, I can. And your job description?"

"Here, your mother wants to speak to you . . ."

Mom chatted about being relieved with Dad's salary plus rent money flowing in. But the job description never arrived. Nor any clue about this mysterious new company.

We have a new word for vaporware: Sea Monkeys, as in, "ScriptX is really Sea Monkeys!"

Susan said, "Remember when you were a kid and sent away for that little nuclear family with Ddd wearing a crown and everything, and instead all you got was . . . brine shrimp ?"

Reading a book about viruses. Went into Boeing Surplus again. It was Monday, so all the new magazines were in.

Karla and I were here in my room, lying on my bed - bare legs akimbo - and we made this really embarrassing observation that neither of us have tan lines - that we spent all summer in the crunch mode to meet shipping deadline.

Karla began talking all Star Trekky again - the best thing about her.

She said, "I don't believe human beings store memory in our brains exclusively - there simply aren't enough storage slots or interconnective possibilities. And so if not in the brain, then where? I concluded that another viewpoint on memory was to see our bodies as 'peripheral memory storage devices.'"

Hence, *bliss*, shiatsu.

"You know yourself, Dan, that every sitcom ever broadcast is stored in

your brain - that's terabits of terabits of memory - as well as the details of Burt and Loni's divorce. Brains just don't have enough space to handle all these bits. And so I decided to learn shiatsu massage - as a means of thawing memory frozen inside the body."

I thought about this. The concept of body as hard drive seemed very plausible to me.

I couldn't believe we had been enemies for so long. Trek on, woman!

So Dad's working - for Michael. Michael is hiring people. That is so random. The world is indeed chaotic.

Space Needle

1962

Mattel

C+++++++++++

silver lens sunglasses

Redmond

Schaumberg, III.

Interstate 80/287, NJ

Dallas Galleria/LBJ Fwy.

Torrey Pines/UTC Sorrento Valley, Ca.

Metroplex/lrvine, Ca.

King of Prussia/Route 202

Tandy Corp., Fort Worth, Texas 76107

relentless . . .

crispy . . .

fluids . . .

200 years from now

Ebola Reston

Marburg

Hepatitis non-A/non-B

Ebola Zaire

Sabia

Michelangelo

Machupo

Rift Valley

Hanta

A FedEx pack arrived today with letters for everybody: Roommates®Geek House followed by our postal address. Talk about news. Michael's offering all of us jobs at a start-up company he's assembled down in Silicon Valley.

Excerpts from Michael's letter:

. . . People our age are abandoning the tech megacultures in droves, starting up their own companies, or joining small, content-based start-ups. There's a recruiting frenzy going on . . . multimedia craziness . . . and the big companies that aren't minting money are hemorrhaging brains. It's intellectual Darwinism.

. . . The five of you are rudderless at the moment. Is now not the time to take a risk and jump into the future?

. . . Some say that the world is visibly cleaving into a race of information Haves, and a race of information Have-Nots. Whatever. Let me simply say that history is happening, it's happening now and it is happening here, in Silicon Valley and in San Francisco.

. . . Tell me, are you seriously going to be at Microsoft 20 years from now? 15? 10? 5? Or even 2 years? At what point do you decide that you have to take your own life into your own hands?

. . . At the very least, you'll make an okay salary if you work with me; at best, you'll gain equity in something that might become very valuable; I have an idea for a product that I think will be very popular. And wouldn't it be amusing for all of us to be together again!

. . . I must have your decisions immediately. Do call.

Most definitely yours,

Michael

Michael has designed this amazing code and the scary part is completed already - the proprietary work that could only have sprouted from Michael's brain - Object Oriented Programming from another galaxy. And he's been doing it in his spare time - as a game called Oop!. He offered me a job coding, as opposed to just testing . . . who knows how long it'll take me to move up to coding at Microsoft?

He sent us a rough draft of a product description he's written plus ERS - Engineering Requirements Specifications. Herewith:

Oop!

Oop! is a virtual construction box - a bottomless box of 3D Lego-type bricks that runs on IBM or Mac platforms with CD-ROM drives. If a typical Lego-type brick has eight "bumps"; an Oop! brick can have from eight to 8,000 bumps, depending on the precision demanded by the user.

Oop! users can virtually fly in and out of their creations, or they can print them out on a laser printer. Oop! users can build their ideas on a "pad" or they can build their ideas in 3D space, a revolving space station; running ostriches . . . whatever. Oop! allows users to clone structures, and add these clones onto each other, permitting easy megaconstructions that use little memory. Customized Oop! blocks can be created and saved. The ratios and proportions of Oop! bricks can also be customized by the user in much the same way typefaces are scaled.

Imagine:

"Oopenstein" - flesh-like Oop! bricks or cells, each with ascribed

biological functions that allow users to create complex life forms

using combinations of single and cloned cell structures. Create

life!

"Mount Oopmore" - a function that allows users to take a scanned

photo, texture map that photo, and convert it into a 3D visualized

Oop! object.

"Oop-Mahal" - famous buildings, preconstructed in Oop!, that the

user can then modify as desired.

"Frank Lloyd Oop" - architectural Oop! for adults.

As Oop! users won't have the actual plastic blocks in their hands, Oop! generates new experiences to compensate for this lost tactility: feedback loops . . . hidden messages . . . or "rewards" for properly completing a kit; i.e., King Kong will climb up and down your Empire State Building and install the flag if you finish. Oop! comes equipped with "starter modules" such as houses, cat shapes, cars, buildings, and so forth that can be added on to or modified or finished in an unlimited number of colors or surfaces: slate, leopardskin, woodgrain, and so forth. Oop! structures can grow hair or plant life. Oop! structures can be distorted, stretched, morphed, or "Jell-O'd." Oop! users can dissolve the connection lines between bricks to create "solid" structures.

Oop! constructions can be saved in memory or they can be "destroyed" by:

"Los Angeles" (earthquake simulator)

"Pyro" (fire and melting)

"Ruins" (decay simulator: x-numbers of years of decomposition can be selected and simulated. Imagine your ranch house rotted into fragments and covered in kudzu or a variety of choking vines. Another idea: "Flood")

"Big Foot" (elder sibling emulator: kicks constructions into bits)

"Terror!" (a bomb explodes either inside or outside the structure)

As the Lego Generation ages (and as the Oop! product invariably grows more sophisticated), Oop! becomes a powerful real-world modeling tool usable by scientists, animators, contractors, and architects. Object-Oriented Programming design allows great flexibility for licensees to develop cross-platform software add-ons.

Build every possible universe with . . .

Oop!

We felt surreal from Michael's offer.

At sundown, we congregated in the living room, turned off the ESPN, cracked open two Safeway fire logs, and chewed over Michael's data, while Mishka chewed up a Windows NT box. We felt like a Magritte painting.

We talked some more, but the basic idea was clear. As Abe said, "It's virtual Lego - a 3-D modeling system with almost unlimited future potential."

"Oop! sounds too fun to resist - like that pile of FREE BIRD SEED in the old Road Runner cartoons," said Bug.

Susan said, "Maybe Oop! is Sea Monkeys. Maybe it seems unbelievably fun, but in the end winds up as a cruel, bitter letdown upon arrival."

"I doubt it," said Abe. "Michael's a genius. We all know that. And the ERS looked great."

"Just think," said Karla, "Lego can be rendered into anything, in 2 or 3 dimensions. This product has the possibility for becoming the universal standard for 3-dimensional modeling."

We silently nodded.

And we didn't talk much. We just looked into the flames and thought.

Mom called. She's learning the butterfly stroke - at 60!

Karla kept on talking about bodies, her obsession, tonight, about an hour ago before she fell asleep and I, as ever, remained wide-eyed and awake.

"When I was younger," she said, "I went through a phase where I wanted to be a machine. I think this is one of the normal phases that young people go through now - like The Lord of the Rings phase, the Ayn Rand phase - I honestly didn't want to be flesh; I wanted to be 'precision technology' - like a Los Angeles person; I listened to Kraftwerk and 'Cars' by Gary Numan."

(A concerned pause.) "Oh ... is your foot twitching, Dan? Let me fix it for you . . .

(Insert foot massage here.)

"That was a decade ago, and years have passed since I had had that particular dream of wanting to become a machine.

"Then four summers ago when I was visiting my parents down in McMinnville, I accidentally fell back into the body/machine dream.

"It was a summer day - too bright out - and I was walking amid the family's apple orchards and developed a brain-splitting, wasp's sting of a headache and became nauseous. I walked into the house and went into the basement to be cool, but I threw up on the cement floor next to the washer and dryer. I lost control of my left arm and then I passed out on top of a stack of laundry for three hours. Dad freaked out over the paralysis and drove me into the city and we did a brain scan to check for stroke damage and clots and stuff.

"They injected all sorts of isotopes into me and I found myself part of a literal body/machine system - being bodily radioactive - and inserted like a fuel rod into a body-scanning machine. I remember saying, to myself, 'So this is the feeling of being a machine.' I felt more curious about death than I felt afraid; I felt glad to be no longer human for a few brief minutes."

"Was there a blood clot?" I asked.

"No. Simple sunstroke. And the feeling of my being a machine evaporated quickly, too. But the whole incident made me decide to discover my body, pronto. Here," she said, scratching my tender inner forearms lightly with her fingernails, sending me into paroxysms of delight. "How does that feel?"

"Glrmmph."

"Just as I thought. People who do repetitive work on keyboards tend lo have highly erogenous forearms and shoulder cuffs. Now, you scratch me."

I did, and then we scratched forearms together, and I felt like the two of us were in a nature documentary on mating African veld animals.