JPod

by Douglas Coupland

  M1, M2, M3 . . . ∞

  E3

  SANFORD No. 81803

  EXPO

  WHITEBOARD CLEANER

  8fl. oz.(237mL)

  bezierkurv

  chunky lover53

  darksi de of aplanet

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  Kill the wabbit

  •A 1-terabyte disk for

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  . . .

  Meeting time:

  Steve, the guy who turned Toblerone around in two years, tries to be one of the people. He's always hanging around with the cool crowd on a project, and he socializes with them off-hours, so he can say, "Hey, I'm hands-on in the trenches with my team!" of which there are now fifty-six members. As production speeds up, dozens more will pile on as senior management weighs in with all kinds of random, last-minute features. Steve is the only suit in the room and, thanks to Bree's mastery of Google, all of us know it's a $2,200 suit.

  "Be the turde!" Steve said.

  Nervous titters.

  "Think like a turde."

  Nervous titters.

  "My friends, you are the turde."

  Fake contemplative silence peppered with ironic gasps.

  "You, over there—" Steve pointed to a world-object texture map artist named Marty Choy, who I worked with two games ago. "When you think turtle, what do you think of?"

  Silence. Marty couldn't believe that he, of all people in the room, had been chosen. "Reptile . . ." he said.

  "Exactly!"

  "Really?"

  "Yes, really. Now, you, over there—" Steve pointed to a guy who I think was in either an AI-SE or a Tools SE on hockey titles. "When you think of turtles, what do you think of?"

  "Konami's arcade and console games based on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise?"

  Steve looked gratified, but then a serious expression came over his face. We were all hoping that the random selection of audience members was over.

  "Everybody, I must say before we go any further, that the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles characters®, including Raphael®, Michelangelo®, Leonardo®, Donatello®, and April O'Neil® are all registered trademarks of Mirage Studios, and anything we say or do is in no way based on or disparaging of this fine intellectual property."

  Dead silence.

  "Come on, team—let's talk turtle here. I can't take unless you give."

  Someone I couldn't see on the other side of the room volunteered, "Turtle shells don't require many polygons to render. So it won't slow gameplay much."

  Another voice said, "That's like Keanu Reeves's black dress/cloak thingy in The Matrix."

  A different voice yet: "Really?"

  "Computers were way slower back then. They used the black cloak to shorten render times."

  "Let's get back on track," Steve said.

  Kaitlin, going for broke, asked, "Steve, we're at milestone five, and you want to dump a charismatic turtle into an action-sports game? How can you wreck a third-person skateboard game like this? Who's going to play it, Teletubbies?"

  Then everyone began to cluster-dump on the turtle idea. Steve remained serene through it all, then held up his hand for silence. "This is all well and good. I encourage vigorous debate and the exchange of ideas—who wouldn't? It's what democracy is based on. I like the fact that all of you are so vocal here this afternoon. But the point of this meeting is that my son Carter loves the turtle character in Sim Quest4, and if Carter likes turtles, every kid in the world is going to like turtles. So the fact is, a charismatic turtle character is going to be in the game—that's been decided at the upper levels—so today we take the first steps as a group to flesh out our turtle."

  Silence.

  "On a constructive front, the game has also been renamed BoardX."

  Evil Mark turned purple and shot up his hand. "Why?"

  "X says to the world, hip and daring—punk and funk. It tells the world we're not just some average game."

  Just then there was a gentle knock on the door. What sort of chowderhead would risk management's ire by intruding in the middle of a grok? The door opened, and in walked Mom.

  "Can I help you?" Steve's voice was pleasant.

  "Why, yes, I'm looking for my son, Ethan." She spotted me. "Oh hi, dear."

  "Mom—?"

  Everybody began chanting Ethan Ethan Ethan and Mama's Boy. I'd have been legally entitled to have a stroke at that point, but I figured, high school was over a decade ago. I stood up and went over to her. How did she get through security? Why wasn't she accompanied by a guard, or wearing a laminated security pass?

  Steve said, "Is everything okay, Mrs.—"

  "Jarlewski. Carol Jarlewski. Yes, and thank you for asking. I was at home this morning, and I realized that I don't really know much about where Ethan works or what he does. I thought I'd see for myself. Sorry for interrupting your meeting . . ."

  "Steve. Steve Lefkowitz."

  They shook hands. Mom showed not a twinge of uneasiness at standing before a group of fifty-six geeks. "My! Look at all of you clever young people. What are you doing today?"

  Everybody giggled, and Steve, a master of timing, said, "Carol Jarlewski, what do you think of when you think of turtles?"

  "Turtles? Well, I think that turtles have to be intelligent creatures, because in evolutionary terms they go back farther than just about every other animal. They're good at surviving. And they're cute, too. Sort of cheeky. My sister and I found one in the pond back when we were kids, and it winked at me. Saucy little things."

  Steve looked at all of us. "And you thought turtles weren't hip."

  This was now out of my hands—not that it was ever in them.

  "Everybody, let's have Carol sit in on the meeting," Steve announced. "Her outsider perspective might add something valuable to our quest." People actually clapped.

  And thus Mom took her seat near Steve's podium and spent the next two hours beaming at me and offering the occasional idea, some of which were good. "Those skateboard monsters are always spray-painting everything, including the Edgemont Village Super Valu's walls, and in my opinion they all deserve a few months in jail. But why not make your turtle's shell a surface on which players spray-paint clues? The turtle can't see what's on his back, so one of his goals is to locate reflective surfaces throughout the game, while his competition is trying to wreck those surfaces."

  John Doe also lobbed out an idea that stuck. He suggested that a universally appreciated buddy-type personality was that of Jeff Probst—"charismatic host of TV's still-sizzling long-running reality show Survivor." I'm not sure if John Doe was kidding, but everybody clapped, and suddenly Steve said, "Hey—this sounds like an idea with legs."

  At the end, when I asked Mom if she wanted me to take her on a tour, she said, "That's okay, Ethan. Young Steven here is taking me."

  Steve didn't even look at me. His eyes were all on Mom.

  I schlumped my way back to the pod.

  . . .

  Random note from today's meeting:

  Fresh New Lucky Charms Marshmallow Shapes . . .

  . . . Masonic emblems

  . . . witch-dunking stools . . . stepmothers

  . . . PayPal logos

  . . . anal beads.

  God is an Xkb state indicator

  God is a Window Maker docked application

  God is a multi-platform Z80cross-assembler

  God is a lightweight XML encoding library for Java

  God is a programmatic APIwritten in C++

  God is Oracle's OCI8 and OCI9 APIs

  God is a configuration backup utility

  God is Web-based group ware and collaboration software

  God is a graphical editor for drawing finite state machines

  . . .

  Kaitlin was on the phone again, trying to extract herself from jPod. Cowboy was over by a ventilation unit, having a smoke. One of jPod's quirks is an air intake duct in front of which you can puff away on anything. Hell, you could let off an Exocet mi
ssile, and it'd suck everything up and away in a jiffy.

  "If that had been my mother who showed up today, she'd have made a big deal of telling people she doesn't shave her armpits," said John Doe.

  Bree said, "If that was my mother up there, she'd be asking every guy in the place what his salary was, and what his career prospects were."

  Evil Mark said, "If that was my mother up there, she'd be drunk."

  Kaitlin slammed down the phone in disgust. She looked over at us and put her face down on her desk.

  As we'd all gone through the same responses when we were put into jPod, we felt sorry for Kaitlin. She needed a bit of quiet time.

  Respecting her need, we entered work mode. The mood grew nice and quiet as we checked to see what was falling down the Chute. After maybe fifteen minutes, Cowboy piped up, 'You know, I'm so sick of cigarette smoking's negative image problems."

  There was a chorus of jPod agreement.

  He continued, "I have a suggestion. Let's take a minute-long break and blithely pimp for the tobacco industry."

  "Okay," Bree said. "But first I could sure use the smooth clear taste of a Marlboro Light."

  "Me? I prefer Virginia tobacco. Mmm—nothing like a Rothmans to make the afternoon sweeter."

  "But you know," said Mark, "I think there's nothing like menthol for a fresh smoking experience."

  I asked, "What's the deal with menthol cigarettes? What sort of person smokes regular cigarettes for years and then suddenly says, Gee, this isn't satisfying enough. I need something more from my tobacco}"

  Bree said, "My mother quit smoking in the 1980s, and then three months later they test-marketed lemon-flavoured cigarettes and she couldn't resist. She's two packs a day now."

  I added that if Big Tobacco came up with orange-flavoured cigarettes, I'd probably start smoking.

  Bree said, "Chocolate for me."

  "I'd like roast beef-flavoured smokes," said John. "Nothing like a touch of cow to perk up a dragging day."

  Evil Mark said, "Me, I find that the toasted tobacco flavour of a 100-millimetre-long More helps me to think better."

  Bree asked, "More? Are those the skinny brown cigarettes?"

  "Yup."

  Cowboy said, "Me? I'd like to try one of those lady's cigarettes."

  Bree added, "What kind of woman would look at a cigarette and say, Finally, someone out there is addressing my feminine tobacco needs}"

  "Actually, I did just that last week."

  "Cowboy, you're a guy."

  "But I wanted to see, you know, what a woman's cigarette might be like."

  "How did it taste, then?"

  "It made me feel, you know . . .fresh."

  . . .

  As I walked past Evil Mark's cubicle, he moved quickly to get something off his screen.

  "Porn?"

  "Ha ha. Yeah. Uh. Don't tell anyone."

  "That wasn't porn you were looking at. It was something else."

  "Ethan, it's none of your business."

  "Porn degrades everybody, Mark."

  Evil Mark snorted.

  "Okay, I was just trying to PC you into coughing up the truth. So what was it you were looking at?"

  "Nothing."

  "If it was nothing, you wouldn't be overreacting like this."

  "I'm not overreacting."

  Behind his cubicle wall, John Doe said, "I think he's overreacting."

  "Evil Mark, are you into terrorism or something? Stock scams, maybe? Industrial espionage—passing along confidential in-house documents?"

  "Leave me alone, okay?"

  "Evil Mark, we're on to you now. We know you're up to something."

  John Doe added, "We will crush you like a bug when we find out what."

  "It was nothing! Just go and feed yourselves on a wide array of products containing high-fructose corn sugar. Zheesh."

  "That wasn't funny, Evil Mark. It sounded fake and hollow. You're terrible at being ironic, and you've been rehearsing that line, haven't you?"

  "I am not evil."

  "People don't get nicknames for nothing, Mark."

  Mark was beginning to lose it for real. "Bree arbitrarily chose 'evil' out of nowhere."

  "Was it really so arbitrary, Mark?" Bree asked.

  'You people are nuts."

  "Let's look at the facts: a) boring email name; b) chose the black spy over the white spy in 'Spy vs. Spy'; c) could easily have confessed to having porn on his monitor, but instead chose to pretend it was nothing, meaning, it wasn't porn, but something too shameful to let his compassionate pod members in on."

  Kaitlin put her head above her wall. "You people are totally fuck­ing crazy. How can you live like this?"

  "Like what, Kaitlin?" I asked.

  "Like people damned forever to a shady armpit of an entertainment empire too cold and indifferent to even try to rescue people from a clerical spreadsheet error that assigns employee seating."

  This stopped everything dead.

  "Kaitlin"— and you have to remember, this was me, someone with an embryonic crush on her—"I don't think you quite understand the ramifications of being in jPod."

  "What's with this whacko jPod shit?"

  From all of us: "Oooooooohhhhhhhh . . ."

  "She really doesn't get it, does she?"

  "Poor girl."

  "She still thinks there's hope."

  "Just tell me this: How did I end up here, huh?" Kaitlin asked. "Because if I'm here, it means somebody else had to leave."

  She'd crossed the line. "We can't talk about that," I said.

  "What do you mean, you can't talk about that?"

  I headed to the snack machines as the others scampered back to their chairs.

  "Augh!" Kaitlin screamed, jumping up onto her desktop, sending her Aeron chair into her hard drive, giving it a good bang. "Stop right now, all you assholes, and tell me what's going on here!"

  Bree said, "This is so Pulp Fiction."

  Cowboy said, "They didn't tell you, huh?"

  "No! As far as I can see, nobody tells anyone about anything in this place."

  "Well, you're right about that."

  Silence.

  Kaitlin said, "What? Tell me something. Anythingl"

  "It was helium."

  "Excuse me?"

  "It was helium. Marc Jacobsen used to have your cubicle."

  "You've lost me here."

  This was going to be difficult. I said, "Marc was a really nice guy. He was actually a world builder for Xbox games."

  "What does he or helium have to do with anything?"

  Even Evil Mark had been here long enough to know that this was delicate.

  "This isn't the best time and place to be telling you this," I said.

  "Telling me WHAT?"

  Bree stepped in. "Marc was really sweet, and totally into the games, and really wanted to make people's lives better. And he was the only staffer who was never guilted into coming in on weekends during crunch times, so that shows you how good he was, and how much clout he had."

  "Helium? Everybody—helium}"

  I took over. "Marc was at his sister's birthday party, and he was in charge of party tricks, and so he rented a helium canister from a novelty supply company. He was at the party making twisted balloon animals when he decided to suck back some helium so he could speak in a Donald Duck Munchkin voice."

  "And?"

  "So there were maybe a dozen kids there—eight-year-olds—really easy to entertain. He put his lips onto the helium canister's nozzle and sucked in about a gallon of helium . . ."

  "And?"

  Silence.

  "And?"

  "Let Google help us here," said John Doe. "'If the concentration of oxygen falls below eighteen percent in the body, symptoms and signs of asphyxia occur. Helium gas can entirely displace available oxygen. If this continues for even a few seconds, asphyxia and death can occur.' Sure, we all want to sound like Donald Duck—but is it worth the price?"

  Kaitlin said, "Uh-oh."


  "Exactly. In front of all these kids, Marc keels over, turns blue and dies."

  "Oh God. When did this happen?"

  "A few months ago."

  "And his desk has been empty all this time?"

  "That's life. One moment you're mimicking Munchkins, the next, birthday cake is digging its way into your nostrils."

  Kaitlin said, "What about Evil Mark? He arrived here only a little while before me. Why didn't he get this Marc guy's old cubicle?"

  "Evil Mark? They just came in here one day and installed another cubicle, and then he showed up."

  The look on Kaitlin's face said it all. For the first time, it was sinking in that jPod was real, and that she was a part of it, and that there was no escaping her destiny. "I think I'll just sit down now and see what's coming down the Chute," she said.

  And with that, jPod fell silent.

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