Microserfs

by Douglas Coupland

  * * *

  Todd came up to me later tonight and said, "Dan, I wouldn't fuck around so much if I could meet somebody like Karla." This freaked me out and I got this awful feeling that I think is jealousy, but I can't be sure, because it was a new feeling, and nobody ever tells you what feelings are supposed to be like. But Todd saw this and said, "That's not what I meant, Dan. I'm not gonna jump her. Gimme some credit. But man, where do you find someone like her?"

  "Yeah, she's something else," I said blandly, masking my interior burn.

  "She's so smart, but not just coding-smart. She thinks like a preacher, but not a by-the-books preacher. She believes in something."

  * * *

  Watched an old documentary about NASA. Then afterward I saw this documentary about how codfish have been gill-netted into extinction in Newfoundland in Canada, so I went out to Burger King to get a Whaler fish-wich-type breaded deep-fried filet sandwich while there was still time.

  * * *

  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?

  MONDAY

  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

  TUESDAY

  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.

  "Of course," she said, "you'll have to learn all of this stuff, and you're going to have to reciprocate on me."

  "Body 101-sign me up now."

  "Daniel. . ."

  "Yes?"

  "Have you ever been held before?"

  "You always ask me these embarrassing, left-field questions. What do you mean, have I ever been held before?"

  "Exactly what I said. Have you?"

  "Why, ummm ..." I thought about it. "No."

  "I thought so."

  I realized that I envied Karla's way of just talking about whatever was on
her mind. She's fearless, exploring her theories and neuroses with the conviction that self-knowledge will bring the solutions. The more I notice this, the more I admire this.

  We did spoons for a while, and then she said, "I remember being young, in school, being told that our bodies would yield enough carbon for 2,000 pencils and enough calcium for 30 sticks of chalk, as well as enough iron for one nail. What a weird thing to tell kids. We should be told our bodies can transmutate into diamonds and wine goblets and teacups and balloons."

  "And diskettes," I added.

  * * *

  Q: If there were two of you, which one would win?

  Jeffersonian individualism

  victim

  winner

  loser

  thief

  http://www.city.palo-alto.ca/

  Lexus.cel phone.traffic.

  My body type was in last year.

  We can no longer create

  the feeling of an era . . . of time being

  particular to one spot in time.

  WEDNESDAY

  Bug ranted a bit about Lego in the afternoon while we ate Arrowroot cookies and bounced on the trampoline. The air was cold and our breath visible. We were all wearing laundry-day junk clothes and we looked like scarecrows flailing about. Why are we all so hopeless with our bodies?

  Bug said, "You know what really depresses the hell out of me? The way that kids nowadays don't have to use their imagination when they play with Lego. Say they buy a Lego car kit - in the old days you'd open the box and out tumbled sixty pieces you had to assemble to make the car. Nowadays, you open the box and a whole car, pre-fucking-built, pops out - the car itself is all one piece. Big woo. Some imagination-challenger that is. It's total cheating."

  I got to thinking of my own Lego superstitions. "When I was young, if I built a house out of Lego, the house had to be all in one color. I used to play Lego with lan Ball who lived up the street, back in Bellingham. He used to make his house out of whatever color brick he happened to grab. Can you imagine the sort of code someone like that would write?"

  "I used to build with mixed colors . . ." said Bug.