Microserfs

by Douglas Coupland

  I said, "Right, Bug. As if Alaska Airlines is allowed to fly over a top secret base," and Bug replied, "Look down there, Dan - that's the place where they staged the fake moon landing back in 1969." I looked, and it did

  resemble the moon.

  So I started to torment Bug about his new 3-cylinder Geo Metro, and Amy joined in, saying, "God, Bug, you couldn't even kill someone with that thing. You could maybe nudge them to death, or something . . ." And then she pretended she was at her doctor's office and her doctor was saying, "Amy, this rash you've got . . . have you had prolonged exposure to rodents, perhaps, or small dogs, maybe 3-cylinder cars?" and Amy says, "Well, yes, actually, I have noticed a Geo following me around and nudging me considerably . . . I just assumed it was maybe a lost student driver but now that I think about it, that's where my rash is coming from!"

  Susan, Karla, and Amy have really Chyx'd out for the CES - bulletproof vests over tiny little tube tops (Susan has declared that it's her responsibility as a feminist media figure to singlehandedly revive the tube top), baggy jeans worn low on the hips, and black sunglasses. Susan continues to gain celebrity with Chyx (New York Times business section last week). All three of them decided to dress "Tough Love" because Ethan told them the fair is 99 percent male and they don't want to look "like dweeb bait."

  I, as ever, am clad in my Riot Nrrrd staple: Dockers and Gap pocket-T. Dad was in Brooks Brothers, and now that his hair's turned snow white over the last year, he makes a singularly trustworthy impression as a representative for the company. (And he also finally speaks C++.) Todd was wearing a trench coat because he'd read in the Chronicle that it was raining in Las Vegas. We told him he looked like Secret Squirrel, the old cartoon character, and the coat soon vanished. Todd also unveiled his new "hockey hairdo" on the flight: short on the top and long in the back. I guess this is because of the hockey strike. Todd bought season tickets to see the Sharks.

  Also on the plane was a company called BuildX which is doing an Oop!-like product, down in Mountain View, and there were eight of them and they had matching black sweatshirts with a futuristic BuildX logo on them and they looked like the Osmonds or the Solid Gold Dancers. We didn't talk to them the whole flight.

  * * *

  Ethan couldn't come. He's back in Palo Alto, staying with Mom while he does his chemotherapy, which appears to be going well, even though it makes him crabby. He's starting to lose a little hair, not too bad, and this is a terrible observation but his dandruff is finally clearing.

  Dusty is still in disbelief that her baby wasn't a grapefruit and is also at Mom's house for a few days while we're at CES, nursing Lindsay Ruth and keeping Ethan company. Mom is giving her a crash course in motherhood, dragging out embarrassing baby photos of me and tiny little jumpers that I had no idea she kept. Dusty sits and stares at Lindsay for hours on end, saying to anyone who'll listen, "Ten toes! Ten fingers!" Lindsay was delivered on the evening of the final round of the Iron Rose IV competition, and Todd told me on the flight down that Lindsay Ruth was named after movie-of-the-week star and Bionic Woman Lindsay Wagner, as well as for a Bible person. He hasn't really talked about the baby yet - I think it's finally sinking in that he's a father, now that he's got the physical proof.

  * * *

  Luggage lost; luggage retrieved; Vietnam veteran taxi driver; Gallagher billboards. We checked into our hotel in a daze - a creakingly old hotel called the Hacienda. (Best not discussed. It's sole redeeming feature is its location right next door to . . . the extravagant-beyond-all-belief pyramid of the LUXOR.)

  We left the hotel to register at the Convention Center, many football fields' worth of sterile white cubes, which are as attractive as the heating ducts atop a medical-dental center. The look on all the registrees' faces was great. You could tell that all they could think of was sex and blowing their money later that night. It was so transparent. Las Vegas brings out the devil in everyone.

  * * *

  Las Vegas: it's like the subconsciousness of the culture exploded and made municipal. I was so overwhelmed by it that I ended up reviving my old-style subconscious file from last year. Herewith:

  * * *

  vasectomy reversal billboard

  breakfast

  Siegfried & Roy

  Compaq

  NY Steak & Eggs $2.95

  moccasins

  Sahara

  Nokia

  47-Tek

  control.

  remote.

  keno

  social interface

  cardboard IBM box

  is it loud?

  tanked girl

  reflective surfaces

  forgotten cocktails

  name tag

  cheddar

  interactive virgin

  Flamingo

  dry ice

  Moon

  American

  Floyd

  Heywood

  cities destroyed

  win win win

  Nam-1975

  monster lab

  air lock

  Bob

  orb

  tatami

  rings

  object popping

  lemon

  fight

  morphin mighty

  VFX-1

  colonize

  thrust

  boy game

  64 bits

  pods

  Softimage

  anti alias

  BAR

  trilinear MIPmap interpolation

  Ultra 64

  gravy

  Samsung paper napkin cherry

  synthetic

  emotional

  response

  Nye County, Nevada

  traffic lights

  computer personal

  Howard Hughes Parkway

  Dept. of Energy

  White Tigerzoid

  floral carpeting

  *69

  cinderblock walls

  First Interstate

  implant

  strip

  Big Endian

  escort leaflets

  00

  beverage

  bell

  I Endian

  * * *

  When we returned to the hotel to change, Karla's and my room somehow became the party room. None of us except for Anatole, who's here to schmooze Compaq, have ever been to Las Vegas before, let alone a CES. (Amy called us "bad American citizens.") We were all giddy at the prospect of an evening's unchained fun; sleazy adventure divorced from consequences.

  Anatole and Todd brought up vodka, mixer, and ice. Our ancient queen-size bed was as concave as a satellite dish - the same mattress must have been mangling the lumbars of low-budget gamblers since the Ford Administration - so we sat clustered in its recess like kangaroo babies inside Mom's pouch. Chugging V&Ts, we surfed through the channels, high on simply being in Las Vegas, even just watching TV in a hotel room in Las Vegas.

  The TV began showing these three-minute pay-TV movie clips. ("Hey, let's watch Curly Sue!") Then one came on touting the AVN Awards, the Adult Video News awards. Susan yelled, "The Stiffies!" It's an actual Academy Awards-style show for porn people. We had to pay. It was simply too juicy not to. People were sashaying up the aisles to collect awards for things like "Best Anal Scene" and they were getting all teary and emotional making acceptance speeches. It was unbelievable. Awards for, like, "Best Group Scene."

  Dad was fortunately in his own room, talking on the phone with a friend from Hewlett-Packard he was having dinner with that evening. But really, the whooping we all made . . . we were just the sort of people you don't want staying in the room next to you.

  Anatole said, "Oh look - that actress there - she was in the booth across from my old company six years ago - and now she's won an award!" Anatole actually seemed quite proud. "In the old days, you had 12 computer game geeks and 12 porn stars all crowded into the most remote corner of some remote convention building. We were the freaks of the convention. Now we run it. Ha!"

  Am
y and Michael went into the bathroom and emerged with Kleenex boxes on their feet: "We're Howard Hughes!"

  * * *

  We phoned Mom, and she said Ethan was woozy from today's treatment. Lindsay is pleasingly, Gerberishly plump, and former bodybuilding enthusiast Dusty is eating my family out of house and home. Misty, who hasn't shed an ounce since starting her diet last year, follows the "Madonna and child" everywhere. "Dusty's a sucker for dog-begging," says Mom, "and I keep trying to tell Dusty not to feed the dog, but it's not working." Mom sounds pissed, but she has to learn that her dog is never going to be slim. So, all in all, it sounds like things are fine there.

  Mom asked, half-jokingly, but also for real, if Dad was pulling his weight as our company rep, but I said we wouldn't be able to tell until tomorrow.

  * * *

  The ten of us double-cabbed (20-minute cab wait) up the Strip (clogged) to a Sony party Todd had gotten us semi-invited to, and dropped Dad off at the MGM Grand along the way. All three Chyx in the two cars shouted in practiced tra-la-la voices, "Good night, Blake Carrington, you hulking piece of man meat!" Dad's ears turned bright red. I think the porno awards were a bad influence on them.

  At the Sony party, we all got weirded out because suddenly all of the people at the party looked like they were porn stars, even though they were just real people. It was only because all of the Stiffie Award winners and their film clips were still in our brains that we were perceiving this. And then we realized that viewed from a certain perspective, all people can look like porn stars. So for a few minutes there, humanity seemed really scary indeed. I wonder how porn people's mind-body relationships are - I can't imagine. Their bodies must be like machines to them, or products to ship, but then they're not the only ones - Olympic athletes and geeks and bodybuilders and people with eating disorders.

  But the Sony party . . . we checked out the live-action footage in the new Sony games, and the acting - it was so cheesy. It was like porn acting. This merely reinforced our collective impression that the real world is a porn movie. Talking to a Sony executive named Lisa, I asked her how they went about recruiting talent for games, without actually saying that their live action sucked. She told me that industry people aren't realizing yet just how unbelievably expensive it is to shoot any sort of game with live action. "Just say the words 'live action,' and the price goes up a million dollars," she said.

  I then wondered out loud if starring in multimedia products is going to be the modern equivalent of appearing on the Hollywood Squares. Michael and Amy lapsed into a lovebird recital of questions from an old version of the Hollywood Squares board game they both had as children:

  "Q: True or false: Frank Sinatra never wears jewelry of any kind."

  "A: False."

  "Q: True or false: The average person can hold their breath for 45 seconds."

  "A: True."

  "Q: According to Cats magazine, should you tranquilize your cat before taking it on an airline flight? " "A: No."

  The two of them irritated all the Sony people, because everyone was trying to be so smooth and Hollywoodish tonight, and not be geeky, and Michael and Amy were destroying the illusion. And then they started smooching, and this confused everybody further. Geeks smooching?

  * * *

  You could tell the LA people there - the attitude - they all looked like - minifigs, I guess. Wait . . . am I being tautological? But really, Los Angelenos are like a completely different species from Bay Area people. There really is this whole North/South dichotomy in California. They truly are two different states.

  Michael said, "Los Angelenos dress like they've been focus-grouped." We decided that in game shows in the future, contestants will win a free focus-grouping, where they spend six hours with ten demographically preselected focus-groupers commenting and criticizing all aspects of their lives. Then, they get to watch the next winner get ripped apart behind a two-way mirror. Forget year-supplies of Rice-A-Roni and bedroom sets.

  We were talking with another woman, also named Lisa (which wasn't hard to remember because every single woman we met there was named Lisa). "Last year all of the studio executives were bluffing it about multimedia," she said, "but this year they're starting to panic - they don't have a handle on what they're doing and it's starting to show, and mistakes are costing them a pile of money - trying to spooge Myst into a feature-length movie; trying to spooge movies into CD-ROMs. It's a mess. And New York still doesn't have a clue. Usually they're first, but with multimedia, they're babies and it annoys the hell out of them. The people who really do know what's going on are the people who aren't posing as visionaries."

  I thought about it and she's right - the geeks aren't flying down to LA to take studio executives out to schmooze dinners at Spago. Spago has to come to the geeks. Spago must hate that.

  Amy suddenly piped up and said to the Lisa-unit, "Exactly. I'm working on the Tetris property for Castle Rock, and I can't believe how many bozos are calling the shots in a medium they have no expertise in! They're all faking it!"

  The Lisa believed her - hook, line, and sinker! She obviously had never even seen Tetris. This was fun.

  Amy continued, "In the history of games-into-movies, I think only Tron has begun to scratch the surface of what can be done . . . and that came out in '82. Just because a game has characters doesn't mean it can tell a story . . . Take Super Mario Brothers. Whoever okayed the $45 million budget for that lemon must have had a lot of explaining to do."

  Lisa nodded and asked, "So what's your budget?"

  Amy smiled and said, "The live action sequences are really going to add up - I think we're shooting for around 30 mil."

  Lisa, "Do you have a card? Let me give you mine . . ."

  Across the room, Anatole was busy chatting up a Lisa-unit, misguidedly trying to impress her with his "extreme knowledge" of Sony products.

  "The good thing about Sony products," said Anatole, "is that they always say exactly what they are right on the front of them. For example, the CFD-758 CD-radio cassette recorder, or the TMR-IF310 stereo transmitter, or the 9-band ICF-SW15 FM/MW/SW receiver."

  But evidently his Frainch accent made the above conversation sound alluring, and he and his Lisa were pair-bonded for the evening. Karla said, "Ever notice how when Anatole's around girls, his accent thickens?"

  Susan was chatting with a male Lisa-unit solely to torment Emmett, but he's used to it by now. Susan was a real cachet addition to our party. She's become such a cult figure with Chyx. It was like Jim Morrison had entered the room, and she was swamped with admirers.

  Then Amy said in a loud and unbelievably embarrassing voice, "What the fuck is with this place? Every single chick here is named Lisa."

  Michael swam in to smooth things over: "She's from Canada."

  "Michael, you promised we'd have martinis and lose a hundred dollars at roulette. And the food here stinks and you know it."

  "And right you are."

  And the two of them vamoosed off to the MGM Grand.

  Karla and I and a few Lisas tried to guess what the charades hand signal would be for "interactive multimedia product." A movie is where you turn a camera reel; a song is where you hold your hands up to your lips; a book is two palms simulating open flaps. All we could come up with for multimedia was two hands going fidgety-fidgety in space. A definitive interface is certainly needed, if only to make charades an easier game to play five years from now.

  * * *

  After we left the Sony party, we wandered around the grounds of the yuppie hotel, and I never realized it, but Todd's a mean drunk. Maybe his new haircut is bringing out "The Asshole Within." He went around the pathways kicking muffins into the hot tubs and sticking pilfered beta versions of Sony CD ROMs down the hotel's miniature fake rivers, and screamed at all of us, calling us geeks. Hellooooo . . . like, this is some big surprise, or something? I suspect that becoming a father and spending the last two months (as did we all, Dusty included, barely able to reach her keyboard over her watermelon stomac
h) pulling trip after trip to Kuwait while tweaking code for the Oop! beta version for Las Vegas - it all got to him and he's releasing the pressure. We all feel it. Tomorrow and Sunday we find out if Oop! (and Interiority Co.) have a strong future.

  Todd was wearing his Secret Squirrel trench coat, but we dared not mock it. And then he vanished, probably to pick a fight at a sports bar.

  * * *

  We checked out the burning lava water show in front of the Mirage and the people in the city began weirding me out. Las Vegas must be the only place left where it's politically correct to wear a fur coat. They were just the sorts of people who would have gone to Las Vegas, not Boulder, in The Stand, and here they were.

  We were standing next to this huge sculpture of post-human white lion tamers Siegfried and Roy not far from the lava, and then Bug and Sig got into this discussion about how Henry Ford made Model Ts for ten straight years without one change, and then GM came along with something spiffy, and Henry laid everybody off, retooled, came out with the Model A, and then built that without a change for another five years, and then Plymouth came out with something spiffy and Ford finally had to accept the notion of competition and styling.

  We tried to imagine making a product without any changes for five years, but we couldn't. Then we noticed that all the cars on the Strip look the same: Chryslers and Tauruses and Toyotas . . . they all have "bubble-butts" that look like they came from the same mold. So by default we're right back to Henry Ford again. We figured that tail fins would come back in, simply because people are going to have a consumer revolt against how boring and blob-like cars are becoming.

  At the mall in Caesar's Palace we bumped into the BuildX team at the Warner Brothers store. We bought our Marvin the Martian coffee' mugs and house slippers, glared at the BuildX team, and left.