Microserfs:Transhumanity

By Douglas Coupland


"Microserfs" started out as an acclaimed short story in Wired about the life of young coders at Microsoft. The full story including this excerpt is now a novel, just released by HarperCollins. Stay tuned for the upcoming Fox TV show.


The cover story for the January 1994 issue of Wired spun the tale of seven Microsoft employees - Todd, Bug, Abe, Michael, Karla, Susan, and the narrator, Daniel - searching for purpose while grinding code for the all-knowing Bill. That story has become the first chapter of Coupland's recently released book, Microserfs (HarperCollins). In this excerpt, the original crew has grown in number and found the courage to leave the mother ship, move to Silicon Valley, and pursue the ultimate goal: starting up a company and building a product of their own creation. In 18 months of coding madness, they created Oop!, a cross between Legos and an erector set, with the smarts of AutoCAD built in.

Michael, who in the first installment had left Seattle on a secret mission for Bill in Cupertino, became the catalyst for the company. Once he tasted Silicon Valley and realized its potential, he never came back. Michael asked the original Microserfs to come down and help him form Interiority Co.; they were joined by a number of new recruits, among them Ethan, a perpetually dandruff-laden venture capitalist (who later contracted skin cancer), and Dusty, a female bodybuilder and accomplished coder (whom Todd found at Gold's Gym and later got pregnant).

The crew set up shop in Daniel's home in Palo Alto, and Daniel's father, who in the last excerpt was drunk and despondent after losing his job at IBM, is now merrily working for Interiority doing "alliance building." Bug has come out of the closet, Susan has found her calling as the leader of a Net-based women's movement called Chyx, and Karla and Daniel have fallen in love. Karla, it turns out, is an expert at shiatsu massage.

Through Daniel's anal-retentive PowerBook diaries, readers enter the money-starved, deadline-wracked, product-choked, nerd-dense, reward-based realm of American computing circa 1995. In this excerpt, the Serfs visit the Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show, where Oop! will either be made or destroyed.


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 representing with 3,505 slot machines and 65 gaming tables 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. He 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."

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 they staged the fake moon landing back in 1969." I looked, and it did resemble the moon.

Susan, Karla, and Amy have really Chyxed out for 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 (The New York Timesbusiness 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."

Also on the plane was a company called BuildX which is doing an Oop!-like product, down in Mountain View. There were eight of them, and they wore matching black sweat shirts with futuristic BuildX logos 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 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. Its 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. 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, has ever been to Las Vegas before, let alone 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.

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

The 10 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 Underwood, 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 the Stiffie Award winners and their film clips were still in our brains - suddenly all of the people at the party looked like they were porn stars, even though they were just real people. 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 is going to be the modern equivalent of appearing on Hollywood Squares.

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.

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.

Karla and I and a few Lisas tried to guess what the charades hand signal would be for an 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 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 stomach) tweaking code for the Oop! beta version for Las Vegas has 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.

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

I wonder if Bill ever runs into Larry Ellison or Steve Jobs at a 7-Eleven.

We all wanted to go to the Luxor and play the games and do the rides there, inside the pyramid's interior. Emmett informed us that Sega has its only showcase arcade there, where you can play the brand-new-almost-beta games. It's a brilliant marketing idea because normally, arcade games don't enjoy the same kind of brand recognition and loyalty that home games do, but after visiting the Sega arcade, the logo is burned into your brain permanently. It's like allowing a McDonald's orange drink machine at your child's birthday party.

The Luxor has a laser beam of pure white light that shoots up from the tip of its pyramid; I'd never seen anything so tall, and never knew this beam of light existed. Pure and clean and seen from the ground, it's so powerful that it really appears to puncture the atmosphere. I started rambling on about the laser, but everyone thought I'd gone loony, and Abe told me to be quiet.

Friday

Todd made out last night with a Lisa-unit from the Sony party. This morning he burst into Karla's and my room and confessed, teary-eyed and carrying a basket of croissants. It was a bad start to a weird day. He was sick with remorse.

Anatole was in the bathroom borrowing Karla's blow-dryer, so he heard everything through the door. Todd made me, Anatole, and Karla swear on a stack of Bibles that we would never say anything to Dusty. Anatole launched into one of his "Een my couwntree..." tirades about how French men all have mistresses, but he stopped when he saw how sad Todd looked.

Todd was morose and silent all day. I thought about Dusty and Lindsay Ruth at home and was glad he felt miserable, but he'd been in such denial over his new family unit that he was bound to explode. At least he didn't sleep with a Lisa.

Also, it was raining outside. Raining. It was so odd to think of Las Vegas having weather, like it was a real place. But since everyone's always indoors in the casinos, I guess it doesn't really matter.

CES is a trade show like all other trade shows: thousands and thousands of men, for the most part, wearing wool suits with badges saying things like: Doug Duncan, Product Developer, MATTEL ... or NASA, SIEMENS NIXDORF, OGILVY & MATHER, and UCLA, and so on. Everyone loads up on free promo merchandise like software samplers, buttons, mugs, pins, and water bottles as they dash from meeting to meeting. The booths are all staffed by thousands of those guys in high school who were good-looking but who got C pluses; they're stereo salesmen now and have to suck up to the nerds they tormented in high school.

We Oopsters were in and out of meetings all day, mostly earnest affairs held in little rooms above the convention floor. They look the same in every hotel: chrome and glass rental furniture, extension telephones, and a water cooler. All these people meeting inside, wearing the first good suit in their lives, turning old right before your eyes.

We were really just there to schmooze and do PR, since our distribution's taken care of, and to approach people to develop Oop! starter modules. Standard stuff. We also did "seed plants" ... who you give your software to in prerelease is a high status issue.

But I must say, there's something timeless about the false sincerity and synthetic goodwill of meetings, the calculated jocularity, and the simian dominant-male/subordinate-male body language. At least the presence of Karla, Susan, and Amy saved us from the inevitable stripper jokes. Karla pointed out how in marketing meetings at Microsoft, everybody was trying to be fake-perky, and trying to fake having ideas, while at CES, everybody's trying to be fake-sincere and trying to fake not looking desperate.

Also, later, during rare, quiet moments, I'd look through the windows at other people's meetings, and they looked like Dutch Master cigar box people, but modernized. Old, but new ... like a cordless phone resting beside a bowl of apples.

Went to about 17 meetings altogether. At CES, everybody name-drops his or her hotel all the time. Hotelmanship is a big CES status issue - people kept on asking us during the day where we were staying. They'd say, "So, uh" (charged moment) "where are you staying?"

And we'd casually reply, "Oh, the ... Luxor."

Las Vegas hotels are similar to videogames - games and hotels both plunder extinct or mythical cultures in pursuit of a franchisable myth with graphic potential: Egypt, Camelot, the Jolly Roger. We found ourselves feeling a little sorry for hotels that couldn't afford to lavishly re-create mythical archetypes or were simply too stupid to realize that the lack of a theme made them indistinguishable. It was as if the boring hotels couldn't figure out what was going on in the bigger scheme of Western culture. Hotels in Las Vegas need special effects, rides, simulators, morphings ... today's hotel must have fantasy systems in place, or it will perish.

The big drama du jour was when Todd caught his Christian fundamentalist parents, who had snuck away to Vegas unaware that their son was here as well, gambling ... right there on the main floor of the Luxor! They were at the quarter-slot video poker machines, and talk about weird. They were glued to their machines, really scary, like those mean old pensioners who smoke long brown cigarettes and scream at you if they think you might be contaminating their machine's winability karma. Todd ran up and "busted" them, and it was really embarrassing, but also too good to miss. I mean, they were all screaming at each other. Todd was truly freaked out to see his parents so obviously engaging in the "secular" world. And wouldn't you just know it, his parents are staying at our hotel, too; it really seemed like one of those foreign movies that you rent and return half-wound because they're too contrived to be believed, and then real life happens, and you wonder if the Europeans understood everything all along.

Todd came to our room and ranted for a while about what hypocrites his parents were, and it took all my restraint not to remind him that he had "sinned" himself with a Lisa-from-Sony just the previous evening. Karla took him out on the Strip for a walk and I had some peace for the first time all day.

I called Mom from the hotel during this period of peace. I'd turned out all of the lights and closed the curtains in pursuit of sensory deprivation. It was black and sensationless. All there was in the room was my voice and Mom's voice trickling out of the phone's earpiece, and this feeling passed through me - a feeling of what a gift it is that people are able to speak to each other while they're alive. These casual conversations, this familiar voice heard through a Las Vegas hotel room telephone. It was strange to realize that, in one sense, all we are is our voice.

Saturday

BILL was in town launching a new product, and it was so bizarre, seeing his face and hearing his voice over the remote screens inside the convention floor. It was like being teleported back to eleventh-grade chem class. Like a distant dream. Like a dream of a dream. And people were riveted to his every gesture. I mean riveted, looking at his picture, trying to articulate the charisma, and it was so odd, seeing all of these people, looking at Bill's image, not listening to what he was saying but instead trying to figure out what was his ... secret.

But his secret is, I think, that he shows nothing. A poker face doesn't mean showing coolness like James Bond. It means expressing nothingness. This is maybe the core of the nerd dream: the core of power and money that lies at the center of the storm of technology, that doesn't have to express emotion or charisma, because emotion can't be converted into lines of code.

Yet.

I kind of lost focus after a while, and I wandered around and picked up a copy of The New York Times lying next to an SGI unit blasting out a flight simulation. There, on the third page of the business section, not even the first, was a story about how Apple shares were going up in value as a result of rumors of an impending three-way buyout by Philips (Holland), Oracle (USA), and Matsushita (Japan). My, how things change. That's all I can think. Apple used to be King of the Valley, and now it's getting prospected like a start-up. Time frames are so extreme in the tech industry. Life happens at 50 times the normal pace.

Todd was off all day having ordeals with his parents, and Bug, Sig, Emmett, and Susan walked around hoping they'd "accidentally" bump into Todd in order to eavesdrop a little, but to no avail.

McCarran Airport is right next to the Strip in Las Vegas, and a plane flies over the city every 11 seconds. Karla and I were walking between pavilions, and we saw Barry Diller in a gray wool suit (and no name tag). We sat down on a riser near the piled-up plywood freight boxes to rest our feet and watched the planes fly by. We were both overstimulated.

Karla was fiddling with the Samsung shoelace that held her badge, and she looked up at a plane in the sky and said, "Dan, what does all this stuff tell us about ourselves as humans? What have we gained by externalizing our essence through these consumable electronic units of luxury, comfort, and freedom?"

It's a good question, I thought. I mentioned how weird it was that everybody keeps on asking, "Have you seen anything new? Have you seen anything new?" It's like the mantra of CES.

Oop!, I might add, is going to be a hit. I think this has been lost on everybody in the Las Vegan blur, but it would appear that we're all still employed, and that our risk has become solid equity. But you know what? All I care about is that we're all still together as friends, that we're not enemies, and that we can continue to do cool stuff together. I thought the money would mean something, but it doesn't. It's there, but it's not emotional. It's simply there.

After dark, Karla revealed to me that she, too, was fascinated by the pyramid's laser beam, so we told everybody we were returning to the hotel next door, and instead drove our rented Altima sedan northeast on Interstate 15, to see how far away we could drive and still see the beam. I had heard that air pilots reported seeing it from LAX. I wondered if astronauts could see the beam from outer space.

It was an overcast night. We drove and drove, and 40 miles out, we realized that we hadn't been paying attention, and the laser beam was gone. We stopped in at a diner for hamburgers and video poker, and we won $2.25, so we were "a cheeseburger ahead for the evening."

We then got back into the car and drove back toward Las Vegas, and around 26 miles outside of Las Vegas, we were able to see the Luxor's beam of light up in the sky again. We pulled the car over onto the shoulder and gazed at it. It was awe-inspiring and romantic.

I felt so close to her.

Later, back at the hotel I was PowerBooking my journal entry; I could feel Karla watching me and I got a little self-conscious. I said, "I guess it's sort of futile trying to keep a backup file of my personal memories...."

She said, "Not at all ... because we use so many machines, it's not surprising we should store memories there, as well as in our bodies. The one thing that differentiates human beings from all other creatures on Earth is the externalization of subjective memory - first through notches in trees, then through cave paintings, then through the written word and now through databases of almost otherworldly storage and retrieval power."

Karla said that as our memory multiplies itself seemingly logarithmically, history's pace feels faster, it is "accelerating" at an oddly distorted rate, and will only continue to do so faster and faster. "Soon enough, all human knowledge will be squished into small nubbins the size of pencil erasers that you can pea-shoot at the stars."

I asked, "And ... what then - when the entire memory of the species is as cheap and easily available as pebbles at the beach?"

She said that this is not a frightening question. "It is a question full of awe and wonder and respect. And people being people, they will probably, I imagine, use these new memory pebbles to build new paths."

Like I said ... it was romantic.

Sunday

What happened was this: I was looking out the window, and Todd was fighting with his parents out on the Strip, down below the Hacienda's sign. How long was this going to go on? I decided I had to help Todd, and so I went down to see if I could "Stop the Insanity!" Just as I joined them, Karla came running out. We all turned, and I saw her coming, and I could tell something was very, very wrong.

She collected her breath and said, "Dan, I'm really sorry to have to tell you this, but there's been an accident."

I said, "An accident?"

She said that she had just spoken with Ethan in Palo Alto. Mom had had a stroke at her swim class, she was paralyzed, and no one knew what would happen next.

Right there and then, Todd and his parents fell down on their knees and prayed on the Strip. I wondered if they had scraped their knees in their fall, and I wondered what it was to pray, because it was something I have never learned to do, and all I remember is falling, something I have talked about and something I was now doing.

Tuesday, January 17, 1995

This is the day of days, and so the telling begins.

Karla massaged Mom's back in Mom's new room beside the kitchen, a room that we filled with her rocks and photos and potpourri and our dog Misty. Misty, buffered by dumbness, unaware of the traffic jams in the blood flow of her master's brain: carbon freeways of cracked cement and flattened Camrys and Isuzus and F-100s; neural survivors as well as those neural victims, all as yet unretrieved from within the overpasses of her Self. Mom's brain is crashed and inert, her limbs as stationary as lemon tree branches on an August afternoon, occasionally twitching, appended by a wedding ring and a Chyx wristband from Amy. Images of a crashed Japan on every channel, the newscaster's voice floating in the background. At least Japan can be rebuilt.

Karla spent the morning massaging the lax folds of Mom's skin. I wonder, is she there? It is what I ... we have lived with for over a week, we who look into Mom's eyes and say, Hello in there, thinking, We are here. Where are you, Mom? Where did you go? How did you disappear? How did the world steal you? How did you vanish?

Karla was the first to cross the frontier between words and skin, speech and flesh.

Karla invaded Mom's body. Last week, Karla removed her Nikes, took a plastic squeeze bottle of mineral oil from the bathroom, cut it with sesame oil, and crawled atop Mom's prone form on the foldaway rental bed. She told Dad to watch, told him that he was next, and so Dad watched.

Karla dug and sculpted into my mom's body, stretching it as only she knows how, willing sensation into her flesh, into her rhomboids, her triceps, her rotor cuffs, and spaces where probing generated no reaction; Karla, laser-beaming her faith into the body of this woman.

Last week was the beginning, the Confusion, when everything seemed lost, the image of Mom lying frozen and starved of oxygen in the Palo Alto Municipal Swimming Pool haunting us. Ethan meeting us at the hospital, his own skin the color of white fatty bacon embedded with an IV drip; Dusty and Lindsay, Dusty sucking in her breath with fear, turning her head from ours, then returning her gaze and offering us Lindsay as consolation.

There had been discussions, a prognosis, pamphlets and counselors, workshops and experts. Mom's functions may one day be complete and may one day be partial, but as of today there's nothing but the twitches and the knowledge that fear is locked inside the body. Her eyes can be opened and closed, but not enough to semaphore messages. She's all Wired up and gizmoed; her outside looks like the inside of a Bell switchbox.

What is her side of the story? The password has been deleted.

Karla would take Dad's hand over the last week and make it touch Mom, saying, "She is there and she has never left."

And it was Karla who started us talking to Mom; Mom's eyes fishy, blank, lost and found, requiring an act of faith to presuppose vivid interior dimensions still intact. Karla who made me stare into those faraway eyes and say, Speak to her, Dan: she can hear you and how can you not look into these eyes that once loved you when you were a baby, and not tell her of your day? Talk to her, Dan: tell her ... today was a day like any other day. We worked. We coded. Our product is doing well, and isn't that just fine?

And so I told Mom these things.

And so every day, I hold the hand that once held me, so long ago.

And Karla gently guided Dad up onto the foldaway, saying, Mr. Underwood, roll up your sleeves. Mr. Underwood, your wife is still here, and she has never needed you more.

And there's Bug, reading Sunday's color comics to Mom, trying hard to make "The Lockhorns" sound funny, then saying to his unresponsive audience, "Oh, Mrs. Underwood, I understand your reaction completely. It's like I'm reading 1970s cocktail napkins out loud to you. I must admit, I've never liked this strip," and then discussing the politics of syndication and which comic strips he finds unfunny: "The Family Circus," "Peanuts," "Ziggy," "Garfield," and "Sally Forth." He's actually more animated than he is in conversations with us.

There is the image of Amy telling rude jokes to Mom and Michael trying to curb the ribaldry but being swept away by the filth, and Michael responding with Pentium jokes.

There is Susan, washing and cutting my mom's hair, saying, "You'll look just like Mary Tyler Moore, Mrs. U. You'll be a doll," and discussing new postings on the Chyx page.

There is Ethan, Ethan on the brink of erasure himself, saying, "Well, Mrs. U, who'd have thought that I'd be the one to monitor you? Don't tell me it isn't funny. Because it is, and you know it. I'd change your bandages for you, but you don't have any, and that's a big issue here."

There are Dusty and Todd, demonstrating leg-stretching exercises, discussing physiotherapy and how to keep Mom's muscles in tone for the day they again receive their commands.

And there is Abe, who brought in a tub of money, a tub full of coins, and said, "Time to sort some change, Mrs. U. Not much fun for you, but I'll try and be talkative while I sort ... oh look ... it's a peso. Woo!"

Last week there was a jolt. Last week Karla said, "You have to go further, Dan, you have to hold her body."

I looked at Mom's body - so long in not holding - and I thought of families who have had to watch a member die slowly and who have said all that can possibly be said to each other and so all that remains is for them to sit and lie there and nitpick over trivialities or talk about what's on TV. So, I held Mom's body, and told her how my day had gone. I talked about stoplights on Camino Real, line-ups at Fry's, rude telephone operators, traffic on 101, the price of cheese singles at Costco.

This afternoon, this afternoon of the day of days.

I, in this mood where the earthly kingdom was beautiful in spite of life's cruel bite, left home for some hours and took CalTrain and BART over to Oakland just to thwart cabin fever. Sometimes we all forget that the world itself is paradise, and there has been much of late to encourage that amnesia.

Along a roadside I saw an unwound cassette tape, its brown lines shimmying in the sun - sound converted to light. I felt a warm wind's gust on the Oakland BART platform. I suddenly wanted to be home, to be with my family, my friends.

When I got back I was met by Michael, who opened the front door of the house. He told me about a story he had once seen on the news, a story about a boy with cerebral palsy who had been hooked up to a computer, and the first thing he said, when they asked him what he would like to do, was "to be a pilot."

Michael said to me, "It got me thinking that maybe your mother could be linked into a computer, too, and maybe the touch of her fingers could be connected to a keypad. So, then she could speak to us." And then he saw my face and said, "She could speak to you, Dan. I've been doing some reading on the subject. It's called facilitated communication, and it sometimes works."

We entered the kitchen, where Bug and Amy were discussing an idea of Bug's, that "humans don't exist as actual individual selves - rather, there is only the probability of you being you at any given moment. While you're alive and healthy, the probability remains pretty high, but when you're sick or when you're old, the probability of you being yourself shrinks. The chance of your 'being all there' becomes less and less. When you die, the probability of being 'you' drops to zero."

Amy saw me and said, "Close your eyes right now, this very instant. Try to remember the shirt you're wearing."

I tried, and couldn't remember.

She said it would probably take me a lot longer than I'd think. "It's a cruel trick of nature that personal memory seems to be the first to go. You'll remember Alka-Seltzer long past the point where you've forgotten your own children."

She then said to me, "Try not thinking of peeling an orange. Try not imagining the juice running down your fingers, the soft inner part of the peel. The smell. Try and you can't. The brain doesn't process negatives."

I walked onto the back patio and looked over Silicon Valley, clear, but vanishing into a late afternoon fog, unexpected, fanning in from the west. Karla was wearing a sweater, and her breath was like the swimming pool's wafting heat, there in the coolness. I told her that it was always in the fall, when the crops were in, that the wars were called.

She said to me, "We all fall down some day. We all fall down. You've fallen and we'll all pick each other up."

In the distance I saw the Walpert Ridge, and its silhouette was blurred as I confused the mountains for clouds, and Karla dried my eyes with fallen leaves and her sweater's hem. I told Karla about a Lego TV commercial I saw 20 years ago ... a yellow castle and the camera went higher and higher and higher and the castle never ended. She said she had seen it, too.

Dad came by with Misty, and we all went for a walk. Down La Cresta we went, and Dad had brought along the electric garage-door opener, and we pushed its red ridged button, randomly trying to open strangers' doors.

When we returned to the house, my friends were gathered around Mom, in front of a monitor, their faces lit sky blue; they had forgotten to turn on the lights in the kitchen. Mom's body was upheld by Bug and Abe inside a kitchen chair, with Michael clasping her arms. On the screen of the Mac Classic, in 36-point Helvetica were written the words:

i am here

Dad caressed Mom's forehead and said, "We're here, too, honey." He said, "Michael, can she speak...."

Michael put his arms over Mom's arms, his fingers upon her fingers and assisted her hands above the keyboard. Dad said, "Honey, can you hear us?"

yes

He said, "How are you? How do you feel?"

;=)

Michael broke in. He said, "Mr. Underwood, ask your wife a question that only she and you would know the answer to. Make me sure that this isn't me doing the talking."

Dad asked, "Honey, what was your name for me, when we went on our honeymoon on Mt. Hood. Can you remember?"

There was a pause and a word emerged:

reindeer

Dad collapsed and cried and fell to his knees at Mom's feet, and Michael said, "Let's push the caps-lock button. Capitals make easier words; consider license plates. You're a California vanity license plate now, Mrs. U."

The caps were locked and the point size lowered. The fingers tapped:

BEEP BEEP

Dad said, "Tell us how you feel ... tell us what we can do...." The fingers tapped:

I FEEL U

I cut through the crowd. I said, "Mom, Mom ... tell me it's you. Tell me something I never liked in my lunch bag at school...."

The fingers tapped:

PNUT BUTR

Oh, to speak with the lost! Karla broke in and said, "Mrs. U., our massage ... is it OK? Is it helping you?" The fingers tapped:

GR8

I LK MY BDY

Karla looked at the words and, hesitating a second, declared, "I like my body now, too, Mrs. U." Mom's assisted hands tapped out:

MY DOTTR

Karla lost it then, and then, well I lost it, and then, well everybody started losing it, and at the center of it all was Mom, part woman/part machine, emanating a living blue Macintosh light.


Douglas Coupland was born and lives in Vancouver, British Columbia. He is also the author of Generation X, Shampoo Planet, and Life after God.


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