Microserfs

by Douglas Coupland

  Karla and I drove down the hill to Syntex, birthplace of the birth control pill, a little bit below Mom and Dad's house, down on Hillview Avenue - a 1970s Utopian, Andromeda Strainishly empty tech complex. We sat in the grass amphitheater by the leafless birch trees, looked at the sculptures from the sculpture garden, walked over the walkways and pretended we were Susan Dey and Bobby Sherman on a date, falling through a dark cultural warp, and landing inside the technological dream that underwrote the free-wheelin', swingfest TV-lifestyle of that era.

  Syntex was the first corporation to invent the "workplace as campus." Before California high-tech parks, the most a corporation ever did for an employee was maybe supply a house, maybe a car, maybe a doctor, and maybe a place to buy groceries. Beginning in the 1970s, corporations began supplying showers for people who jogged during lunch hour and sculptures lo soothe the working soul - proactive humanism - the first full-scale integration of the corporate realm into the private. In the 1980s, corporate integration punctured the next realm of corporate life invasion at "campuses" like Microsoft and Apple - with the next level of intrusion being that the borderline between work and life blurred to the point of unrecognizability.

  Give us your entire life or we won't allow you to work on cool projects.

  In the 1990s, corporations don't even hire people anymore. People become their own corporations. It was inevitable.

  * * *

  Karla and I felt like the last couple on earth, walking through the emptiness. We felt like Adam and Eve.

  I told Karla that Ethan doesn't think biotech is such a hot investment because it's "too 9-to-5," and the workers follow non-techie time schedules, and their parking lots NEVER have cars in them on Sundays. Actually, to this day, Ethan is still trying to find a biotech firm with Sunday workers. He says that once he finds one, he'll be able to invest the farm, lie back, and retire. If only Ethan had something to invest!

  Karla picked some iceplant flowers, the semiofficial plant of the high-tech world because it stabilizes hillsides so quickly. She said it's thornlessness makes it "the Play-Doh" version of cactus.

  We were being very freestyle. We discussed whether we should go try and crash into the research institute off the 280 where Koko the gorilla lives with her kitten. Karla said that the transdermal nicotine patch was invented just over the hill, on Page Mill Road, near the Interval Research Corporation headquarters. History! Then Karla suggested we visit Interval Research's campus and see what it's like: "If Syntex was the 1970s and Apple was the 1980s, then Interval is the 1990s."

  * * *

  Interval Research's headquarters were like a middle-class honeymoon hotel in Maui circa 1976, and slightly gone to seed, with Gilligan's Island-style lagoonlets between the buildings and a lobby with a vaguely medical/dental, is-this-where-I-drop-off-my-urine-sample? feel.

  And (important) there were CARS in the parking lot, even on the Sunday after Christmas.

  Karla said she knew this girl Laura who worked there, and so we checked, and she was there. We rapped on her window, overlooking the central courtyard's lagoon, and she looked up and came out and let us in. Laura has an IQ of 800, just like Karla. She invited us inside and we played pool at their pool table. The pool table is to the 1990s what PARC's bean bag chairs were to the 1970s.

  Interval Research is so weird because nobody knows for sure what it is they really do there. They have stealth cachet. Laura does something on neural nets.

  People project onto Interval's blankness either their paranoia or their hope. People always get emotional when you mention it. Interval was the think tank-slash-company Paul Allen from Microsoft started when he learned he had something terminal. His disease left after he founded it.

  Interval's mandate is solely to generate intellectual properties, not to develop products - a heresy in Silicon Valley. If an idea is good enough, the unwritten concept is that there's an in-house VC dude in the form of Paul Allen to foot the bill. No wonder people get jealous - imagine not having to struggle for start-up money - the intellectual freedom!

  Abe is against the lack of gung-ho-ishness in pure research. He says Interval is an intellectual Watership Down. We have to remind him that since the government has pulled out of Big Science, someone has to do pure theoretical research. He grudgingly agrees.

  Laura used to be at Apple's Advanced Technology Group, but left a year ago. When she started at Apple, they had a 3-to 7-year yield time for theoretical research; a project had to pay for itself from three to seven years after its start. In the early 1990s, the yield time dropped to one year - "Not one-point-oh enough," said Laura. "Here, it's 5- to 10-years' yield time. That's good."

  We asked her what the difference was between Apple and Interval, and she said that Apple tried to change the world while Interval tries to affect the world. "We have a touchie-feelie reputation," she said, "probably because of Brenda Laurel's work in gender and intelligence, but believe me, it's heaven to be able to do pure math, theoretical software, or watch Ricki Lake if you need to." (I should add, Laura is a real pool shark. I pointed this out and she said, "Oh, it's only math.") Brenda Laurel is the woman responsible for research into how women interact with math. She's the Anti-Barbie.

  "Staff here are a bit older, too," she said, "and people mostly only get in via recommendation. There's no snatch-the-pebble-from-my-hand koan routine for prospective employees. And there's no reporting tree. It's post-grad school, sort of. Everybody's supposed to be equal, too, but of course you have sub-equal and super-equal personalities. They fall into planet/moon relationships soon enough. But for the most part, we're all start-up types, ex-academic and ex-corporate types who want to keep the one-point-oh flame alive."

  Laura cleaned up at pool. I felt goofy losing, the way you do with pool. Pool is like rollerblading: you have to pretend you're the cooly-wooliest person on earth, while you're quietly cringing inside.

  Other teenies came and went, and it felt refreshingly like a normal workday. Karla promised to fix Laura up with Anatole. Laura used to have a crush on him back at Apple. L'amour, I'amour. I was a little underwhelmed. I guess I was expecting them to be doing Tesla Coil experiments or building jets out of Mylar. Or 3,000-lb. onions being carried out of the parking lot with machine-gun totin' guards alongside the truck.

  I said that since Anatole's friends were going to help us alpha test Oop!, maybe we could get her closer to Anatole if she wanted to help test. She agreed immediately. Talk about Tom Sawyer painting a fence white!

  * * *

  When we got home, Mom and Dad were just back from a bike ride along the Foothills Expressway. They were sweating, and Misty was licking them in pursuit of sodium. After this, they watched Martha Stewart tapes and felt guilty for not orchestrating their lives more glamorously.

  Bug popped by en route to a party in San Jose. We told him about our trip to Interval and he told us that the replacement paradigm for Graphic User Interface was going to emerge from there, and that PARC's 1970s desktop metaphor work had become the "intellectual avocado-colored appliance of the computer industry."

  "My, how fickle are our allegiances," said Karla.

  "Oh come on, Bug," I said, "can't you be even a bit bitter aboat PARC

  anymore?"

  "I can foam about PARC forever," said Bug, "or I can groove on the next PARC-like think tank. I choose to groove. Where's your mom, Dan? I brought her a rock she might like."

  Bug is spending part of his off-time developing a traffic-monitoring routine for offices that allows office workers to minimize the number of times they bump into each other in the hallway. He was inspired by that cartoon character, Dilbert, who freaks out every time he has to walk down a hall with somebody else. "I mean, what's a person supposed to say, Kar? How often can a person regenerate fresh and witty banter each and every time they bump into a person? Oohhh . . . nice carpeting. Oohhh . . . what an attractive Honeywell thermostat control switch next to the photocopier. Human beings weren't designed to bump into each othe
r in hallways. I'm providing a valuable postindustrial service. Microsoft would have been heaven if my system had been operative and in place."

  SATURDAY

  New Year's Day, 1994

  Abe left for SFO Airport and then we all went for a drive in the Carp - Karla, Ethan, Todd, Bug, and I.

  We drove past the home of Thomas Watson Jr., 99 Notre Dame Avenue, San Jose, California. Watson steered IBM into the computer age - and was made prez of the company in 1952. In 1953 he developed the first commercial storage device for computers. He died on a New Year's Eve.

  * * *

  On the radio we heard that Bill got married, on Lanai in Hawaii, and we all screamed so loudly that the Carp nearly went off the road. And apparently Alice Cooper was there. So to celebrate we played old Alice Cooper tapes and purchased a "Joey Heatherton" fondue kit in a secondhand store and later on boxed it up to mail to Microsoft. They'll probably think it's a bomb.

  "Ooh, Bill - please, please feed me another bite of hot, bubbly cheese cube," Susan whispered in a little girl voice in the backseat.

  "I feel as though we're in a witness relocation program," said Todd. "You can leave Bill, but Bill will never leave you."

  * * *

  We also went to "The Garage," the Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose. We were expecting a Pirates of the Caribbean kind of exhibit, with bioanimatronic Deadheads hacking an Altair inside a re-created 1976 Sunnyvale Garage.

  Instead there was a mock clean room, a Silicon Graphics 3D protein simulator, and a chromosome map in the biotechnology section:

  Goiter: bottom of gene pair no. 8

  Epilepsy: lower half of gene pair 20

  Red hair color: middle of pair 4

  Albinism: lower 11th pair

  Karla said that a quarter of all pure white cats are deaf - that the trait of whiteness and the trait for deafness are entwined together, so that you can't have one without a possibility of the other.

  This segued into a discussion of algorithm breeding that lasted well until we arrived in Berkeley where we went to a yuppie-style party at a college friend of Karla's. Ethan drank too much and told loud jokes, and the yuppies weren't happy. We had to take him into the backyard and cool him off. He said, "What's a bar bill but a surtax on reality." We're not sure if he has a drinking problem.

  The music was Herb Alpert and Brazil 66. It could easily be your own parents' party, circa Apollo 9. Later, even though we all agreed not to, we ended up surrounding a

  Mac and oohing and aahing over a too-tantalizing piece of shareware.

  * * *

  Anecdote: We talked with Pablo and Christine, Karla's "we-have-a-life" friends who were having the party. I asked them, "Are you married?"

  "Well," said Pablo, "we went down to Thailand and a guy in a yellow silk robe waved his hands around our bodies and . . ." Pablo paused. "You know, I suppose we don't really know if we're married or not."

  "It was sort of Mick-and-Jerry," said Christine.

  Later on, Pablo was telling this deep intimate story about how he found religion in the hinterlands of Thailand, and just at the most intense, quietest moment in the storytelling, Ethan walked into the kitchen, overheard a snatch of conversation, and said, "Thailand? I love Thailand! I'm dying to build a chain of resorts all over Thailand and Bali, kind of like Club Meds but a little more nineties. I'm gonna call them 'Club Zens,' right? 'Cause of the Buddhism thing. There's all kinds of statues and monuments over there I could use to make it look authentic - like you're in a monastery, but with booze and bikinis. Now that's nirvana! As soon as I make my next million . .."

  It was a very "Ethan" moment.

  * * *

  Oh - at the Museum in San Jose there was a pile of this stuff called aerogel - solid, yet almost entirely air. It seemed like thoughts made solid. It was so lovely.

  * * *

  Another "Oh" - Susan complains that Bug stays up all night shredding paper and the whirring of the rotors is driving her nuts.

  * * *

  NEW YEAR'S RESOLUTIONS

  Me: to penetrate the Apple complex

  Karla: undisclosed (doesn't want to jinx)

  Ethan: to slow down time

  Todd: visit junkyards more often, to bench 420, and to have a relationship Susan: to hack into the DMV and to have a relationship

  Bug: to overhaul his image and to have a relationship

  * * *

  680X0

  a burning Lego Los Angeles

  880 Nimitz Freeway

  Control and the feeling of mastery

  moon

  Premium Saltine crackers

  I Robot

  The Apollo rocket designers and the NASA engineers of Houston and Sunnyvale grew up in the 1930s and 1940s dreaming of Buck Rogers and the exoterrestrial meanderings of Amazing Stories. When this aerospace generation grew old enough, they chose to make those dreams in metal.

  TUESDAY

  January 4,1994

  Woke up sick this morning - finally got the flu. I thought it might be a hangover, but no. In spite of the fact that I think I feel like death-on-a-stick, I want to write down what happened today.

  * * *

  First, Michael bounced through the sliding doors around noon in a shiny happy mood, and invited us all out to see our (game show tone of voice) . . . new office! Ethan sold his Ferrari to do the lease. "Farewell 1980s!" he said. (He drives a 1987 Honda Civic now. "I feel like I'm in high school.")

  Uncharacteristically brash, he yelled, "Convoy! Everybody . . . down to our new office. You, too, Mrs. Underwood . . . we've been liberated from the Habitrail."

  We stuffed ourselves into two cars and drove through the vine-covered suburbs and carefully mowed, Frisbee-free lawns of Palo Alto's tech parks, to Hamilton Street, a block south of University Street downtown. And it was there that we learned what Dad has actually been doing all this time.

  * * *

  As Michael opened a second-floor oak door, he said to me, in a voice intended to be heard by everybody, "I figured your father's talents as a model railroader might have translatable applications into our world here . . ."

  The wet paint smelled like cucumbers and sour cream and made me a bit pukey, but the feeling passed as I saw what lay before us . . . the most sculptured environment I've ever seen - an entire world of Lego - hundreds of 50 x 50-stud gray pads on the floors and on the walls, all held in place with tiny brass screws. Onto these pads were built skyscrapers and animals and mazes and Lego railroads, sticking out of the walls, rounding corners, passing through holes. The colors were shocking; Lego-pure. A skeleton lay down beside a platoon of robots; cubic flowers grew beside boxcars loaded with nickels that rounded the blue railroad bends. There was a Palo Alto City Hall - a '70s Wilshire modernist box - and there was a 747 and a smoking pipe . . . and . . . everything in the world! Pylons and towers of color, and dogs and chalets . . .

  "I think your father should take a bow, don't you, Daniel?"

  Dad, who was in the back tinkering with a castle, looked flustered but proud, and fidgeted with a stack of two-stud yellow bricks. This universe he had built was a Guggenheim and a Toys-R-Us squished into one. We were having seizures, all of us. Susan was livid. She said, "You spent my vested stock money on . . . Lego?" She was purple.

  Ethan looked at me: "Michael's addiction."

  I, too, was flubbered. In the magic of the moment I looked up into the corner - and I caught Mom looking, too - at a small white house in the far back corner, sprouting from a wall, with a little white picket fence around it, the occupant inside no doubt surveying all that transpired beneath its windows, and I said, "Oh, Dad, this is - the most real thing I've ever seen."

  * * *

  And I wondered then, how do we ever know what beauty lies inside of people, and the strange ways this world works to lure that beauty outward?

  * * *

  What follows I will write only because it's what happened, and I'm sick, and I don't want to lose it - I might accidentally erase th
e memory. I want a backup.

  What happened was that while everyone was oohing and ahhing over the Lego sculptures (and staking out their new work spaces) the colors in front of my eyes began to swim, and everybody's words stopped connecting in my head, and I had to go down to the street for fresh air, and I wobbled out

  the door.

  It was a hot sunny day - oh California! - and I walked at random and ended up standing on the blazing piazza of the Palo Alto City Hall, baked in white light from the suntanning cement, the civil servants around me buzzing in all directions, efficiently heading off to lunch. I heard cars go by.

  My body was losing its ability to regulate its temperature and I was going cold and hot, and I wasn't sure if I was hungry or whether the virus had deactivated my stomach, and I felt like my system was getting ready to shut down.

  I sat in this heat and light on the low-slung steps of the hall, feeling dizzy, and not quite knowing where I was, and then I realized there was somebody sitting next to me, and it was Dad. And he said, "You're not feeling very well, are you, son."

  And I said, "Nnn . . . no."

  And he said, "I was following you down the streets. I was right behind you the whole time. It's the flu, isn't it? But it's more than just the flu."

  I was silent.

  "Right?" he asked.

  "Yeah."

  "I'm a young man, Daniel, but I'm stuck inside this old sack of bones. I can't help it."

  "Dad . . ."

  "Let me finish. And so you think I'm old. You think that I don't understand things. That I never notice what goes on around me - but I do notice. And I've noticed that I'm maybe too distant with you - and that maybe I don't spend enough time with you."

  "FaceTime," I said, regretting my bad joke as the words slipped out.

  "Yes. FaceTime."

  Two secretaries walked by laughing at some joke they were telling, and a yuppie guy with a stack of documents walked past us.