Microserfs

by Douglas Coupland

  Susan showed me a dozen boxes of "Glitter Hair refill packs" she'd bought from the Barbie aisle at Toys-R-Us. It was so creepy - this dead fake hair inside a pink box. All Chyx are receiving an Official Chyx Wristband made of Pentium-grade knotted, liberated Barbie hair garnished with a small sliver of silicon lattice ingot made by a friend of Emmett's down in Sunnyvale. "Cool or what?" Susan already has over 3,500 Chyx "happening" on-line. So it looks as if Chyx is real. CNN really changed her world.

  * * *

  Time warp: it's been months since I've arrived here. How long have I been here? I can't tell. I leave for Waterloo in three days.

  TUESDAY

  I was with Mom in the car somewhere in Menlo Park and suddenly we were surrounded by, like, nine Porsches. It was just ridiculous. And Mom said, "When your father and I first moved here back in ' 86, and I saw all these cars, I said to myself, 'My, there's a lot of drug dealers here in this area.' "

  "Mom, did you buy drugs for Dad's IBM parties?"

  It's fun teasing Mom. She smiled, "Oh, you know . . . I clip news clippings."

  This quick chat served to remind me that while car status here is different than at Microsoft, it is no less hierarchical and fetishistic.

  * * *

  Ethan knows nothing of my matchmaking mission. He thinks I'm going to Waterloo to haggle over purchasing some subroutines and possibly to hire a new recruit. He came over to the house to tell me that he'll be accompanying me to Ontario - he has to speak with the people at CorelDraw in Ottawa. They're paying for him to go, so it's a different gig entirely.

  I said that this was a truly random coincidence, except Ethan said I was not only being redundant ("random coincidence"), but that he didn't believe in randomness, which is, I imagine, a tacit admission of religiousness.

  Ethan.

  Odd.

  He said he'd prove it tonight.

  We then got into a discussion of Nerd Schools and the end of the era of "single-dose" education - and of course this led to a listing of schools that had the best nerd reputations.

  • Cal-Tec (Extreme nerds; the Jet Propulsion Lab is just up the hill and around the corner. The big rumor is that they had to institute pass-or-fail grading because there were too many GPA-related suicides.)

  •CMU

  •MIT

  • Stanford

  • Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (for undergrads)

  • Waterloo

  • UC Berkeley

  • Dartmouth

  • Brown - "Hipster nerd school with a good undergrad comp-sci program."

  * * *

  We drove up to Redwood City and played electronic darts at a bodega there . . . Karla, Ethan, and I. Ethan and I grew up in suburbia, and we're both pretty good dart players (those nutty rumpus rooms). Karla's never played darts before tonight.

  Anyway, it was three darts per person, per round. Ethan put in four quarters and selected a four-player round. We asked him why, and he said, "You'll see."

  Karla went first, me second, Ethan third, and then for the fourth round we had what Ethan called, the "Random Round" where instead of any of us trying, we'd each huck a dart standing on one foot, gulping a beer, throw it backwards . . . as silly as possible. Ministry of Silly Walks.

  Needless to say, the Random Round won every single game, and always by a minimum of 100 points. It was scary.

  Ethan said randomness is a useful shorthand for describing a pattern that's bigger than anything we can hold in our minds. "Letting go of randomness is one of the hardest decisions a person can make."

  Ethan!

  * * *

  Identity. I go by the Tootsie theory: that if you concoct a convincing on-line meta-personality on the Net, then that personality really IS you. With so few things around nowadays to loan a person identity, the palette of identities you create for yourself in the vacuum of the Net - your menu of alternative "you's" - actually IS you. Or an isotope of you. Or a photocopy of you.

  Kinko's again - photocopy yourself!

  Karla noted that when photocopy machines first started to come out, people photocopied their bums. "Now, with computers, we photocopy our very being."

  THURSDAY

  Ethan was in business class and I was in coach. If it was Oop! paying, he'd be in the hold with all of the sedated pets.

  Ethan vanished at the airport gate, and once in flight, the blue curtain came down and Ethan was gone until we arrived in Canada. I PowerBooked some code on ThinkC and so was able to remain productive. Batteries - the weight! They suck up gravity. They fellate the planet.

  I got to thinking that nerds really like anything that smacks of teleportation: freeways; airport first-class lounges; hotel rooms with voice mail . . . anything that erases distance and makes travel invisible. Why don't airlines pick up on this?

  Upon landing, standing in line at immigration in Toronto, Ethan asked me, "So, pal, how was life in the Egg Farm?" (referring to the chokingly full, cramped, and miserable realm of coach class; we can thank computers for perennially cramped planes). I said ''Lovely, thank you, Ethan. I took complimentary salt-and-pepper packets as souvenirs. I'll trade them for your Reuben Kincaid sleep goggles."

  "Get real, pal."

  At immigration, Ethan pulled out his passport and a whole whack of Iraqi banknotes tumbled onto the carpet in a dervish of cash - Susan had bought them at a San Francisco stamp store and stashed them in his passport as a prank. It was great; it was delayed reaction for the time two months ago that Ethan left an inflatable hemorrhoid doughnut on Susan's chair while some Motorola guy Susan had a crush on was visiting. Ethan looked at the doughnut, then at Mr. Motorola and said, "Oh - poor Susan. Such pain - you really can't imagine."

  Back in Canada, Ethan was promptly whisked off to the cavity search room as I toddled off to catch my teensy connector flight to Waterloo. I had to pretend I didn't know him because I didn't want to visit THE ROOM either, thank you.

  * * *

  I was looking at the in-flight magazine, and at the end they had this map showing where the airline flies and it looked like a science-fiction map of how a virus transmits from one place to another. All these parabolic arches from city to city to city to city. If the Marburg virus ever does mutate and go airborne, we're DOOMED!

  * * *

  Canada: such a cold, cold country. In the plane I saw below me the blue moon's light on white snow; towers, poles, and lights and blinkings; a wide land that must be shouted across with electrons. And I got to thinking, towers are going to be obsolete, soon. All of these towers, dreaming of their own demise.

  * * *

  Out the hotel window, it was just miserable and there were these Zamboni scraping piles of the past winters' snows, all stacked up. It reminded me of those Antarctic ice-pack core samples where they drill into the ice and date the gases and pollens trapped back in time. Except outside my window there were two layers of soot, one of dog poo, another layer of soot, another layer of dog poo. God, winter is gross. I can't believe Eskimos just don't set themselves adrift on ice floes for the boredom of it all. Or move to Florida.

  * * *

  Karla sent me a fax saying IF YOU LIVED HERE YOU'D BE HOME RIGHT NOW. And I was so homesick.

  Watched CNN. Coded Oop!.

  * * *

  Thought: one day the word "gigabits" is going to seem as small as the word "dozen."

  SATURDAY

  Michael arranged for me to meet BarCode at a student union pub.

  BarCode, given the possibility of making a flesh-to-flesh connection, admitted on-line that . . . it was, as Michael guessed, a student - so at least the 48-year-old-man-in-spaghetti-strap-diapers scenario was averted.

  "Don't be so sure, Daniel," said Michael on the phone from California with not a touch of worry in his voice. "Mature students, you know. Well - we can only hope not. . ."

  Waterloo's student pub is better than others I've seen. "The Bomb Shelter," with an all-black inside, a large bomb painted on the wall, big screen TV, video
games, pool, and air hockey.

  The outdoor temperature was about minus 272 degrees and the students wore thick, gender-disguising outfits to ward off the gales of liquid helium sweeping down from Hudson's Bay. I thought of how in-character it was of Michael to fall for someone's insides and not even know their outsides. I sat there in a seat next to the wall, drinking a few beers, wondering if whoever came by could be . . . it.

  I was getting all mushy and lonely and missing Karla when suddenly a hand grabbed my throat from behind and yanked me toward the wall, like an alien from Aliens. Fuck! Talk about terror. It was a small hand, but God, it was like steel, and a voice whispered to me, a girl's voice: "Talk to me, baby. I know who you aren't. So speak - gimme a sign, send me a code - let me know that you're you."

  Oh man, I was meeting Catwoman . . . with an Official Chyx Wristband!

  My head blanked. Only one word came into my head, Michael's code word for our meeting: "Cheese slices," I squeaked out from my snared vocal cords.

  The hand loosened. I saw a bare arm. I saw a bar code tattoo below the vaccination bump. And then I saw BarCode, revealed at last, as she let go of her grip and climbed down off the railing and into my view: smaller than Karla, more muscular than Dusty, and dressed so tough that Susan looked like a southern belle in comparison: filthy down vest on top of an oily halter top; hot pants; gas station attendant's boots; haircut with a blunt Swiss Army knife; both eyes dripping with smudged mascara and melting snow . . . all underneath an ancient hand-knitted Canadian-type jacket with trout knitted into the front and back. She was small and tight and the natural embodiment that everything Karla, Dusty, and Susan self-consciously were trying to turn themselves into. She was the most aggressive female I'd ever seen and so young - and man, she was so IN CHARGE.

  She looked both ways. She looked me in the eyes. She said. "You're Kraft singles's friend?" She narrowed her gaze. "You're here to interview me? Why didn't Kraft come himself/herself?"

  "It's, uh . . . himself. . . and I'll be honest with you right now - I'm here because he didn't think you'd like him if you saw him."

  She smashed a bottle on the ground and scared the wits out of me. "Man, what sort of pussy does he think I am? . . . that I give a shit whatthefuck he looks like?" But then her demeanor changed. She got sweet for a second: "He's a he! He cares what I think about him?"

  " 'Kraft singles,' as you call him, is stubborn. You should know that."

  She relaxed a bit. "You're telling me. Kraft is one stubborn motherfucking entity."

  She giggled. "She." Pause. "He . . ."

  "You mean," suddenly I was beginning to understand, "you didn't know who he was . . . what he was? I mean, sorry for being blunt, but you didn't know, either!"

  "Don't make me feel like a wuss." She picked up an empty 7-Up can, crushed it flat on her knee and then got sweet again. "Is Kraft, ummm . . . like . . . married or anything?"

  "No."

  I could tell she was relieved and it was beginning to dawn on me that Michael wasn't the only one who had fallen for an entity.

  "Do you want to see a picture, BarCode . . . do you have another name?"

  "Amy."

  "Do you want to see a picture of Michael, Amy?"

  Quietly: "You have one?"

  "Yeah."

  "His name is Michael?"

  "Yeah."

  "What's your name?"

  "Dan."

  "Can I see a picture, Dan?"

  "Here." She greedily snatched the group picture taken at a barbecue at Mom and Dad's earlier on in the year. Nine of us were in the photo, but she spotted Michael right away. I think I had just transacted the most bizarre matchmaking transaction in the history of love.

  "That's him. . . there."

  "Yup."

  "Dan, you're gonna think I'm an asshole, but I had a dream, and I knew that's what he looked like. I put a diskette under my pillow for weeks waiting for a sign, and it came to me, and here he is. I'm taking the photo."

  "It's yours."

  She looked at Michael's image. She was tentative and girly. "How old is he?" Her voice up-inflected at the end.

  I was slightly drunk, and I laughed and I said, "He's in love with you, if that's what you want to know."

  She got all cocky again.

  She grabbed my right hand and shouted, "Arm wrestle!" and after a two-minute tussle (thank heavens for the gym), broken up only because a group of drunk engineers lollygagged up to our table and one of them barfed one table over, cutting the moment short, did we speak again. "It's a draw," she told me, "but remember, I'm younger than you and I'm only getting stronger. So tell me about . . . Michael." She paused to think this over - the name. "Yes. Tell me about Michael."

  The waiter brought us both beers. She clinked mine so hard I thought it would shatter and she said, "Tell me again, what does Michael feel? You know - about. . . me?"

  "He's in love."

  "Say it again."

  "He's in love. Love. L-O-V-E. Love, he loves you. He's going to go insane if he doesn't meet you."

  She was as happy as I've ever seen another human being. It made me feel good to be able to say this with a clear heart.

  "Go on," she said.

  "He doesn't care who you are. He only knew your insides. He's smart.

  He's kind and he's always been a good friend to me. There is nobody like him on earth, and he says that you're the only reason he stays tethered here to the planet." And then I told her the diaper-and-spaghetti-straps scenario.

  She leaped backward into her seat.

  "I'm gonna fuckin' explode! Dan! I'm gonna tell you, I'm in love, and I'm in love like an atomic bomb detonating over industrialized Ontario, so watch out world!"

  I realized that Michael was BarCode's first love, and I realized that I was seeing something special here, as if all of the flowers in the world had agreed to bloom just for me, and just for once, and I said, "Well, I think it's mutual. Now could you relax just a bit more, Amy, because you're frankly scaring the daylights out of me, and I don't think my right arm can deal with another wrestle."

  She gushed a bit, flush with happiness. She sat and smiled at the under-grads who, it seemed, regarded her with a no small tinge of fear. She surely must be some sort of campus legend.

  "You're the bearer of hot news, and I'll always remember you for that, Dan," and she kissed me on the cheek and I thought of Karla, and my heart felt so happy yet faraway from her.

  "Man, I'm so happy I could crap," she said, "Hey - over there-that table of engineers - let's go trash 'em!"

  SATURDAY

  (one week later)

  Michael and BarCode - excuse me - Amy - are now engaged. Amy and Michael have been having a John-and-Yoko lovefest at the Residence Inn Suites down in Mountain View. Karla and I went to visit them, and their suite was all a-rummage with pizza boxes, diet Coke cans, dirty laundry, unread newspapers and gum wrappers. Michael has transformed from a lonely machine into a love machine.

  People!

  Amy, 20, is going to finish her degree in computer engineering, and is going to come work for us starting in May. We're all in love and awe and terror of her. She and Michael together are like the next inevitable progression of humanity. And the two of them are so happy together - seeing them together is like seeing the future.

  * * *

  Oh - here's something I forgot to write last week. At the bar, I asked Amy what it was - or rather, how it was that two people could not know each other and fall in love and all of that. She told me that all her life people had only ever treated her like a body or a girl - or both. And interfacing with Michael over the Net was the only way she could ever really know that he was talking to her, not with his concept of her. "Reveal your gender on the Net, and you're toast." She considered her situation: "It's an update of the rich man who poses as a pauper and finds the princess. But fuck that princess shit - we're both kings."

  We both got drunker and she said to me, "This is it, Dan. This is the way I wanted
to always feel. This is it."

  "What?"

  "Love. Heaven is being in love, and the love never stops. And the feeling of intimacy never stops. Heaven means feeling intimate forever." And I can't really say I disagree.

  * * *

  Later on tonight, Michael stomped into the office in a way he never has before, clapped his hands, and shouted, "Troops, let's make these machines do something they've never done before. Let's make them sing."

  * * *

  Melrose

  Voyager

  Melrose

  Voyager

  "Press pound now..."

  7

  Transhumanity

  EIGHT MONTHS LATER

  Las Vegas, Nevada

  Thursday, January 5,1995

  The Alaska Airlines captain said, "Ladies and gentlemen, the city of Las Vegas is below us to your right. You will be able to see the pyramid of the Luxor Hotel . . . "

  The 737 lurched sideways as its human cargo chugged like Muppets to view a Sim City game gone horribly wrong: the Luxor Hotel's obsidian black glassy pyramid, and beside it, the Excalibur's antiseptic, Lego-pure, obscenely off-scale Arthurian fantasy. Farther up the Strip was the MGM's jade glass box with 3,500 slot machines and 150 gaming tables representing the largest single concentration of cash points on earth - "the Detroit of the postindustrial economy," Michael declared.

  It was pleasing for me to see so many of the faces of the people in my life, lit by the glow of the cabin windows - Karla, Dad, Susan, Emmett, Michael, Amy, Todd, Abe, Bug, and Bug's friend, Sig - their faces almost fetally blank and uncomprehending at the newness of the world below into which we would shortly dip.

  Sig is an ophthalmologist from Millbrae who convinced Bug that he wasn't stereogramatically blind. He's a vast improvement over Jeremy, and Bug is suddenly so much more himself, relaxed and joking and just . . . glad. Back at SFO Airport Sig and Bug adopted a J. Crew fashion thing: instead of vogueing, they "Crew." When we shout the word "Crew!" they'd freeze into a rehearsed series of maniacally-smiling dorky male model poses. It was good for laughs the whole flight down. Also, Bug almost got whiplash from craning his neck halfway through the flight trying to catch a glimpse of the ultrasecret Groom Lake military facility. He told me, "They have UFOs and aliens cryogenically frozen there."