Microserfs

by Douglas Coupland

  * * *

  I am Bill's machine

  I may be the largest machine that will ever be built.

  I may be the richest machine that will ever be built.

  I may be the most powerful machine that will ever be built.

  Raised with Cheerios and station wagons.

  Diagonal-slotted parking stalls of the Northgate mall.

  As a child I once drove in a sedan's backseat along Interstate 5 and looking out the windows I saw my city beside the sea, dreaming in airplanes and wood; metal and rock ballads . . . better ways of living. Golden sun falling on this city that wanted for more; sailboats atop the golden water.

  Pocket calculators

  sneakers

  cheeseburgers

  Datsun

  The challenge of newness

  Saturday morning cartoons recycling programs crying Indians.

  You think you can live without me, but just try.

  You desire images of a better tomorrow; I feed you these images.

  You dream of a world in which your ego will not dissolve.

  I am the architect of the arena.

  Reconsider your notions of what you think will rescue you from a future sterilized of progress.

  4

  FaceTime

  MONDAY

  Everybody's decided what title to put on the business cards Susan designed.

  Bug: "Information Leafblower"

  Todd: "Personal Trainer"

  Karla: "Who can turn the world on with a smile?"

  Susan: "Her name is Rio."

  Me: "Crew Chief"

  Ethan: "Liquid Engineer"

  Michael: "You're Soaking In It"

  We got in this discussion about the word "nerd." "Geek" is now, of course, a compliment, but we're not sure about "nerd." Mom asked me, "What, exactly, is the difference between a nerd and a geek?"

  I replied, "It's tougher than it seems. It's subtle. Instinctual. I think geek implies hireability, whereas nerd doesn't necessarily mean your skills are 100 percent sellable. Geek implies wealth."

  Susan said that geeks were usually losers in high school who didn't have a life, and then not having a life became a status symbol. "People like them never used to be rewarded by society. Now all the stuff that made people want to kick your butt at fifteen becomes fashionable when fused with cash. You can listen to Rush on the Ferrari stereo on your way to get a good seat at II Fornaio - and wear Dockers doing it!"

  Todd, not surprisingly, added, "Right now is the final end-stage when

  God said the meek shall inherit the earth. Is it a coincidence that geek

  rhymes with meek? I think not. A dipthongal accident."

  Mom said, "Oh you kids! I guess I'm just not in the loop."

  Being "in the loop" is this year's big expression. Only three more weeks remain before the phrase becomes obsolete, like an Apple Lisa computer.

  Language is such a technology.

  * * *

  All day Michael kept on humming a refrain from the Talking Heads song "Road to Nowhere." I asked him to sing something a bit more uplifting. The flu epidemic has left us all at low ebb. Or does Michael know something about E&M Software that we don't? I dare not ask.

  * * *

  Pi fight! Late afternoon:

  It turns out that Ethan knows pi up to 10,000 digits, just like Michael, so the two of them sat there in the Habitrail and banged off strands of numbers, like a Gregorian chant. In stereo - it felt religious. Work stopped dead and we sat there listening.

  "Four." "Four."

  "Seven." "Seven."

  "Zero." "Zero."

  "One." "One"

  "Eight." "Eight."

  "Three." "Three."

  "Eight." "Eight."

  "Nine." "Nine."

  "Zero." "Zero."

  "Three." "Three."

  "Four." "Four."

  "One." "One."

  Ethan has risen in our collective estimation considerably as a result.

  * * *

  I must add that Dad visits the Habitrail every single night, recharging Michael's Tang and bringing him serial volleys of snacks. "Some fruit leather, Michael? - oh look - there's one blueberry strip remaining." I'll say, "Hi, Dad," and he sort of turns around and stumbles for words and grunts, "Hi, Dan."

  But then I suppose I ought to be grateful. Dad looks 1,000 percent better than he did up in Redmond - so long ago, it now seems. His hair's going white, though.

  Also, Michael is using Jed's desk and lamp in his bedroom down the hall from my room. Mom and Dad moved all of Jed's things to Palo Alto when they moved, as though he was just away at school. I'm not even using my old lamp. Everyone else uses IKEA and lawn furniture.

  I recognize that I'm avoiding something here: Michael using Jed's lamp. Dad hasn't mentioned Jed once since Michael moved in. Maybe that's what's bothering me. I'm in denial.

  TUESDAY

  The house down the hill from us burned down around two in the afternoon. Fwoosh! We all went out on the verandah and watched, drinking coffee and sitting on an old pool slide turned onto its side. Mom was loading up the car, but Dad said it was no big deal because the vegetation wasn't dry enough for "you know, another open-hills thing."

  A pair of hawks nesting nearby were diving into the smoke plume. I guess there were mice and things running away. Like a buffet table for birds.

  The first time I ever saw a house burn down was the first time I heard the English Beat version of "Tears of a Clown" on the radio, and the two memories are toasted onto each other in my head like an EPROM.

  Memory!

  * * *

  Later, Michael and Dad and I were buying AAA batteries at the Lucky Mart down on Alma Street, a main corridor through Palo Alto, and then out in the parking lot Michael and Dad began waving at the CalTrain that was screaming northward up the tracks, headed into the Palo Alto station. Once it had passed I asked Michael, just by way of conversation, why it is that people wave at trains.

  He said, "We wave at people in trains because their lives - their cores - are so intensely and powerfully reflected in the inexorable, unstoppable roaring dreams of motion and voyage and discovery, which trains embody. One can't help but admire the power and brutality and singularity of decision a moving train implies. Wouldn't you agree, Mr. Underwood?"

  Does Michael practice these things? Where does he get them from? And wouldn't you just know Michael's a train nut like my dad.

  * * *

  I say "Ummm . . ." a lot. I mentioned this to Karla and she says it's a CPU word. "It means you're assembling data in your head - spooling."

  I also say the word "like" too much, and Karla said there was no useful

  explanation for people saying this word. Her best guess was that saying "like" is the unused 97 percent of your brain trying to make its presence known. Not too flattering.

  I think I'm going to try and do mental Find-and-Replace on myself to eliminate these two pesky words altogether. I'm trying to debug myself.

  * * *

  Karla is changing herself, too. She's becoming a womanly woman. She's growing her hair and trying to look like an adult. Right now she looks in between, as do most techies. Her skin certainly looks better. Actually, we all have better skin . . . except maybe for Ethan. California sunshine and an attempt to at least slightly cut the crap food seems to have positive epidermal results.

  Smoother skin in seven days.

  Karla drinks Ovaltine instead of coffee. She drinks it from her high school reunion mug. Her reunion actually had custom mugs, and this is so weird. Susan looked at the mug last week and asked, "Your high school reunion had horizontally cross-marketed merchandise tie-ins? Where'd you go to high school . . . Starbucks?"

  Apparently there's some company in Texas that helps you market your reunion.

  Beware of the corporate invasion of private memory.

  * * *

  Misty busted into my work space after all the fire engines and everything left, and pawed and sl
obbered all over me. She smelled like roses and top soil, so I guess she was down in her special grotto in the lower yard.

  Ethan came into the office shortly afterward trying to lug Misty out, but instead Misty barraged him with dirty fur and mouth goo, and I know Ethan enjoyed it. He said to her, "Quite often I feel like pawing and slobbering over people I like, too, but I never, of course, actually do it."

  I told Ethan that I speak in an unrestricted manner to animals - things like, aren't you just the cutest little kitty . . . that kind of thing, which I wouldn't dream of doing to humans. Then I realized I wish I could.

  Misty really would have made a terrible seeing-eye dog. She'd bound into traffic to greet truck drivers. Ethan lured Misty outside with a Cocoa Puffs promotional Frisbee, and then stood, wearing his sunglasses, beneath the balcony's shade and played with her a while. He didn't seem to mind the muck all over his Dolce & Gabbana three-piece.

  Ethan just wants some company. He's spending far more time around the Habitrail these days since The Hug. We all hug Ethan a lot now because suddenly he's human and Karla held a small meeting the day after the bandage-removal episode and told us all we had to be extra kind to Ethan. I haven't mentioned it at all to Ethan though - too weird. Susan was in shock.

  After a while Ethan and I went down to look at the rubble of the house below. Gone. Fwoosh!

  * * *

  Ethan said something provocative and left me dangling. He muttered something about "Michael's expensive little addiction," and I said "Robitussin? It's cheap," and

  Ethan said "Robitussin?" so I said, "Well, what did you mean then?" and he said, "Nothing." I hate it when people only open the floodgates a little bit, and then close it up again.

  * * *

  Oh - Ethan is trying to wean himself off cel phones. Good luck!

  * * *

  I heard a lovely expression today about brains - an ad for smart drugs touting thicker, bushier dendrites.

  Moist little tumbleweeds blooming inside one's skull.

  * * *

  Susan was doing her biannual hard-drive cleanup, which is half chore/half fun - going on a deleting frenzy, removing all those letters that once seemed so urgent, that now seem pointless, the shareware that infected your files with mystery viruses and those applications that seemed groovy at the time.

  Susan's own efforts did get me to do a brief cleanup of my own hard drive. I thought of Karla's equation of the body with the computer and memory storage and all of that, and I realized that human beings are loaded with germs and viruses, just like a highly packed Quadra - each of us are bipedal terrariums containing untold millions of organisms in various states of symbiosis, pathogenesis, mutualism, commensualism, opportunism, dormancy, and parasitism. We're like Pig Pen from Charlie Brown, enclosed in a perpetual probabilistic muzz of biology.

  I posted a question on the Net, asking bioheads out there what lurks inside the human hard drive.

  * * *

  Michael and Dad were out in the backyard later on watching R2D2 clean out the pool. There was a fair amount of soot because of the fire.

  * * *

  Around midnight I was in the reflective mode and walked around the streets by myself. I felt as though I was walking around the neighborhood on Bewitched. "Look - it's Larry Tate driving a big, ugly mattress of a car! One great big honking machine."

  I thought about the word "machine." Funny, but the word itself seems almost quaint, now. Say it over a few times: machine, machine, machine - it's so . . . so . . . ten-years-ago. Obsolete. Replaced by post-machines. A good piece of technology dreams of the day when it will be replaced by a newer piece of technology. This is one definition of progress.

  machine machine machine machine machine machine machine machine machine machine machine machine machine machine machine machine machine machine machine machine machine machine machine machine machine machine machine machine machine machine machine machine machine machine machine machine machine machine machine machine machine machine machine machine

  [Formatter's note: Pages 180 - 181 have nothing but the word "machine" on them.]

  Windows

  Win7ows

  cQndo#s

  2ind5ws

  &_s4Zaa

  5@sFAz

  cozrPa

  Pzraoc

  zocPar

  aPzroc

  WEDNESDAY

  This morning I was sitting by the pool with Michael, watching him watch the R2D2 pool cleaner. I mentioned last night's machine/progress notion. He was eating a Snickers leftover from Halloween trick-or-treating, and said, "If you can conceive of humans developing a consciousness more complex than their own, then BINGO, you believe in progress whether or not you even think so."

  So I guess I believe in progress.

  Michael was staring into the clean blue fluid, an anti-Narcissus, and he twiddled his index finger in it. He said, "You know, Daniel, I wonder if, after all these years, I have been subliminally modeling my personality after machines - because machines never have to worry about human things - because if they don't get touched or feel things, then they don't know the difference. I think this is a common thing. What do you think?"

  I said, "I think nerds secretly dream of speaking to machines - of asking them, 'What do you think and feel - do you feel like me ?'"

  Michael asked me, "Do you think humanoids - people - will ever design a machine that can pray? Do we pray to machines or through them? How do we use machines to achieve our deepest needs?"

  I said I hope we do. He wondered out loud, "What would R2D2 say to me if R2D2 could speak?"

  * * *

  My brain is built of paths and slides and ladders and lasers and I have invited all of you to enter its pavilion. My brain, as you enter, will smell of tangerines and brand-new running shoes.

  HELLO

  My name is:

  UNIX

  Friend

  or

  Foe?

  * * *

  I went out shopping for memory this afternoon with Todd and Karla. I had to get a strip of 27512 EPROMs - at Fry's, the nerd superstore on El Camino Real near Page Mill Road. I had to grovel to Ethan for the petty cash; so degrading.

  The Fry's chain completely taps into MSE: Male Shopping Energy. This is to say that most guys have about 73 calories of shopping energy, and once these calories are gone, they're gone for the day - if not the week - and can't be regenerated simply by having an Orange Julius at the Food Fair. Therefore, to get guys to shop, a store has to eat up all of their MSE calories in one crack-like burst. Thus, Fry's concentrates only on male-specific consumables inside their cavernous shopping arena, aisles replete with dandruff, bad outfits, and nerdacious mutterings full of buried Hobbit references.

  * * *

  Near the EPROM shelves, Karla, Todd, and I were marveling at the pyramids of Hostess products, the miles of computing magazines, the cascade of nerdiana lifestyle accessories: telecom wiring supplies, clips, pornography, razors, Doritos, chemicals for etching boards, and all the components of the intangible Rube Goldberg machines that lie just beneath the Stealth black plastic exterior of the latest $1,299.99 gizmo. The only thing they don't have is backrubs. Karla tried to find tampons and failed. "Make mental note," she said, speaking into an imaginary Dictaphone machine, "Fry's sells men's but not women's hygiene products."

  Shortly after, over near the model train mock-up of the Wild West "Canyon City" was when I suddenly saw this kid who looked just like my dear departed brother Jed. And that's when I, well, freaked out.

  I stood frozen, and Karla was saying, "Dan, are you okay?" Then Todd walked by, and looked over toward where I was staring, and blurted out, "Hey, Dan - that kid looks just like the kid in the pictures in your Dad's den."

  Karla then understood, and moved to stand in front of me, and Todd said, "Uh oh . . ." and headed off to the CD player aisle. Karla said, "Dan, come on. Let's go."

  But I said, "That's him, Karla. I'm okay. But look at him. That's what he looked li
ke."

  We followed this doppel-Jed around, but it felt too weird stalking some one, so we stopped ourselves. I forgot my EPROMs, and we went and sat on a parking island outside.

  Todd came out and said, "Sorry about that."

  I said it didn't matter, but you know what Todd said? He said, "I think it does matter. And I do care. So can you please tell me? Sometimes I think you underestimate me, Underwood. So just give me a chance, okay?"

  So we went to The Good Earth for turkey burgers and Smoothies (Todd's gym food) and I explained Jed to Todd. I think I do underestimate people. I don't know why I keep these things cramped up inside me. And I think Todd is a friend to call me on it.

  * * *

  Afterward I quietly went into Dad's den, closed the door behind me, and looked at Jed's old photo, in an oval frame, lost amid Dad's knicks and knacks. There he was as he always will be, slightly yellowed, forever twelve and forever smarter than me.

  I guess I feel dumb in the same way Karla feels dumb. Except Karla really is smart compared to her family, and I really am dumb - compared to Jed. He wrote such lovely things when he was here - stories about air pilots working with scientists fighting to protect Earth from being stolen.

  Imaginative.

  You just can't compete with the dead. It would be easier if I had another brother or a sister, but I was born after the Pill.

  Anyway, this is all to say I went into the worst head space all afternoon, as though I'd taken eleven of those cold tablets containing both an upper and a downer to cancel out the mutual side effects. So I merely felt buzzed. Just like after too much coding.

  * * *

  Abe's e-mail is getting more frequent and more personal. I think he's losing it up at Microsoft. He doesn't like his new roommates and would seem to be missing us.

  The 2 new roomates are both engaged to partner units and don't want to hang out. They're NEVER here.

  I suppose there's nothing wrong with my not having a life. So many people no longer have lives that you raeally have to wonder if some new mode of existence is being created which is going to become so huge that it is no longer on the moral scale - simply the way people ARE.