Microserfs

by Douglas Coupland

  "I wanted to go to a place where loyalty wasn't an issue. Ha! I wanted to not have a life because life back East sucked big time. So I made the choice to come here - we all made the choice to come here. Nobody was holding a carbine up to our temples. So us crabbing about our zero-life factors isn't up for debate, really. Yet do you remember, Dan - do you remember ever having a life? Ever? What is a life? I think I once had one - or at least dreamed of having one - and now with going to Oop!, I kind of feel like I have a hope of life again."

  I said I remembered having a life, back with Jed and being a kid, and Susan said being a kid counted as life only sort of. "It's what you do after you're a kid when life counts for real."

  I said, "I think I have a life now. With Karla, I mean. "

  She said, "You guys really like each other, don't you?"

  And I said - no, I whispered-"I love her."

  I've never told anyone that yet - except Karla. It felt like I jumped off a steep cliff into deep blue water. And then I wanted to tell everybody.

  * * *

  More body talk: Karla believes that human beings remember everything. "All stimulation generates a memory - and these memories have to go somewhere. Our bodies are essentially diskettes," she says. "You were right."

  "Lucky for me" I reply," my own memories tend to get stored in my neck and shoulder blades. My body has never felt so . . . alive - I wasn't even aware I had one until you woke it up today. Life's too good."

  * * *

  Sometimes I think my subconscious has bad days, and I can't believe how mundane the stuff that I write into the file is. But isn't that the deal with a person's subconscious . . . that it stores all the things you aren't noticing visibly?

  * * *

  I'm driving up Interstate 5. It is raining and I remember I have to pick up paper towels and decaffeinated coffee at Costco.

  And how did you feel about that?

  Mom. . .

  Dad . . .

  I'm okay. I am not being starved, or beaten, or unnecessarily frightened.

  Dropshadow lettering

  Granite backgrounds

  Hand

  Held

  Game

  This is the end of the Age of Authenticity.

  Oracle

  NeXT

  Ampex

  Electronic Arts

  SATURDAY

  Garage sale day.

  It was a real "Zen-o-thon" - we decided the time had arrived to shake ourselves of all our worldly crap and become minimalists - or at least try starting from scratch again - more psychic pioneering.

  "This is so 'Zenny,' " Bug said happily, as some poor cretin purchased his used electric razor (ugh!) as well as his collection of Elle MacPherson merchandise.

  Also for sale:

  • Japan Airlines inflatable 747

  • official Hulk Hogan WWF focus-free 110 signature camera

  • antique Ghostbuster squeeze toys

  • Nick the Greek professional gambling home board game

  • Ping-Pong table

  • shoe box full of squirt guns

  • blenders (2)

  • vegetable juicer

  • dehumidifier

  • unopened cans of aerosolized cheese food products

  • M. C. Escher pop-up books

  • far too many Dilophosaurus figurines

  • huge Sony box full of collected Styrofoam packing peanuts and packing chunks from untold assorted consumer electronics

  The big surprise? Everyone sold everything - everything - even the box of Styrofoam. Bug's right: We're one sick species.

  * * *

  And my car sold, too - in a flash, to the first person who came around to look at it. Wayne's World did wonders for the secondary market of AMC products.

  Actually, the Hornet was such a bucket I was surprised it sold at all. I was worried I'd have to drive it south. Or abandon it somewhere.

  Now I am virtually possessionless. Having nothing feels liberating.

  * * *

  National Enquirer:

  "Loni's Diary Rips Burt Apart"

  He threatened her with a gun in jealous rage

  He locked her out of her honeymoon suite

  He hid vodka in water bottles

  PLUS: Burt: "I wanted to ditch her at the altar."

  Exclusive interview on his tell-all book

  I do not want this to be me.

  SUNDAY

  Today we left for California and Karla did her first major flip-out on me. I suppose I was being insensitive, but I think she overreacted by far. In packing her Microbus, she buried all of the cassettes we were going to be using for the trip deep inside the bowels of luggage. I said, "God, how could you be so stupid!"

  Then she went crazy and threw a toaster oven at me and said things like, "Don't you ever call me stupid," and "I am not stupid," and she piled into the van and drove off. Todd was standing nearby and just shrugged and went back to bungeeing his Soloflex on top of his Supra. I had to take off in the Acura and catch up with her down by the Safeway, and we made up.

  * * *

  Karla said good-bye to her old geek house's cat, Lentil, named as such because that's how big its brain is. Nerds tend to have cats, not dogs. I think this is because if you have to go to Boston or to a COMDEX or something, cats can take care of themselves for a few days, and when you return, they'll probably remember you. Low maintenance.,

  * * *

  Bug was like a little kid, all excited about our "convoy" down to California and was romanticizing the trip already, before we'd even left. The worst part was, he had his ghetto blaster on and was playing that old '70s song, "Convoy," and so the song was stuck in our heads all day.

  Cars for the trip:

  Me: Michael's Acura

  Karla: her Microbus

  Todd: his Supra

  Susan and Bug: their Tauri with U-Haul trailers

  Todd said that our "car architecture" for our journey is "scalable and integrated - and fully modular - just like Apple products!"

  * * *

  Somewhere near Olympia, Bug's car rounded a bend and it was so weird - gravity pulled me into an exit off-ramp. And then everyone else trickled in, too. Served him right for lodging the virus of that dopey song in our heads. It was like in third grade, when you ditch someone. It just happens. Humans are horrible.

  Then we all felt really horrible for ditching Bug, and we went out chasing him, but we couldn't find him and I got a speeding ticket. Karma.

  I-5 is a radar hell.

  * * *

  During a roadside break I asked Karla why she didn't want to go visit her parents in McMinnville, but she said it was because they were psychotic, and so I didn't press the matter.

  The Microbus is covered in gray bondo with orange bondo spots all over it. We call it The Carp.

  * * *

  We found Bug south of Eugene. He didn't even know about the ditch, so now all of us have a dark secret between us.

  * * *

  Along I-5, just outside a suburb of Eugene, Oregon, there were all of these houses for sale next to the freeway, and they were putting these desperate signs up to flog them: if you lived here, you would be home right now. Karla honked the horn, waved out the window of the Microbus and pointed at the sign. Convoy humor.

  We made this rule that we had to honk every time we spotted road kill, and we nearly burned out our horns.

  * * *

  On a diner TV set we saw that in Arizona, the eight men and women of Biosphere 2 emerged into the real world after spending two years in a hermetically sealed, self-referential, self-sufficient environment. I certainly empathized with them. And their uniforms were like Star Trek.

  * * *

  We switched vehicles and I drove Karla's Microbus for a while, but the Panasonic rice cooker in the rear filled with rattling cassette tapes drove me nuts. It was buried too deeply inside the mounds o' stuff to move, so around Klamath Falls we switched vehicles again.

  * * *


  We crossed the California border and had dinner in a cafe. We talked about society's accelerating rate of change. Karla said, "We live in an era of no historical precedents - this is to say, history is no longer useful as a tool in helping us understand current changes. You can't look at, say, the War of 1709 (I made this date up, although no doubt there probably was a War of 1709) and draw parallels between then and now. They didn't have Federal Express, SkyTel paging, 1-800 numbers, or hip replacement surgery in 1709 - or a picture of the entire planet inside their heads."

  She glurped a milkshake. "The cards are being shuffled; new games are being invented. And we're actually driving to the actual card factory."

  * * *

  Psychosis! We were discussing Susan's new image at dinner, when I told Karla about this really neat thing Susan's mother did when Susan was young. Susan's mother told Susan that she had an enormous IQ so that Susan could never try and pretend she was dumb when she got older. So because of this, Susan never did feign stupidity - she never had any fear of science or math. Maybe this is the roots of her whole Riot Grrrl transformation.

  On hearing this news, Karla went nuts. It turns out that Karla's parents always told her that she was stupid. Everything in life Karla had ever achieved - her degrees and her ability to work with numbers and code, had always been against a gradient of her parents saying, "Now why'd you want to go filling your head with that kind of thing - that's for your brother Karl to do."

  "Karl's nice, and we like each other," Karla said, "but he's a total 100-center of the bell curve and no way around it. My parents drove him crazy expecting him to be a particle physicist. All Karl wants to do is manage a Lucky Mart and watch football. They've always refused to see us as we are."

  Karla was off and running:

  "Here's an example - once I went home to visit and the phone was broken, so I began fixing it, and Dad took it away and said, 'Karl should give that a try,' and Karl just wanted to watch TV and couldn't fix a phone if it spat on him and so I was screaming at my Dad, Karl was screaming at my Dad, and my Mom came in and tried to discuss 'women's things' and drag me into the kitchen. Meatloaffuckingrecipes."

  Karla was just fuming. She can't bring herself to forgive her parents for trying to brainwash her into thinking she was dumb all her life.

  * * *

  Later, we got too bagged to drive, so we pulled into a Days Inn in Yreka. During a pre-bedtime shiatsu break we started talking about Spy vs. Spy, that old comic in Mad magazine, and how the very first time you read it, you arbitrarily chose either the black Spy or the white Spy and you voted for your color choice unflinchingly for the remaining period of your Mad magazine-reading phase.

  I always voted for the black Spy; Karla voted for the white. Silly, but for a moment we had a note of genuine tension.

  Karla broke the tension. She said, "Well, it's at least binary, right?" And I said, "Yes," and she said, "Are we geeks, or what?"

  (Insert one more foot massage here.)

  * * *

  Even later on, Karla spoke to me again. "There's more, Dan. About the stupid business. About the sunstroke."

  I wasn't surprised to hear this. "I figured as much. So . . . you want to tell me?"

  The stars outside the window were sort of creamy, and I couldn't tell if I was seeing clouds or the Milky Way.

  "There was a reason I was back at the house a few years ago . . . the time I had the sunstroke episode."

  "Yeah?"

  "Let me put this another way. Remember back up at Microsoft when you brought me the cucumber roll. . . just out of the blue like that?"

  "I remember."

  "Well -" (she kissed my eyebrow) "- it's the first time I can remember ever wanting to really eat, in like ten years." I was quiet. She continued talking: "Back when I had my sunstroke episode, I hadn't eaten in so long and I weighed about as much as a Franklin Mint figurine. My body was starting to die inside and my parents were worried that I'd gone too far, and I think I even scared myself. You think I'm small now, Buster, you'd better see . . . well you won't because I destroyed all photos . . . pictures of myself taken during my 'phase' as my parents call it."

  She was fetal and I had my left hand underneath her feet and my right on top of her head. I cupped her closer and pressed her against my stomach and said, "You're my baby now: you're a thousand diamonds - a handful of lovers' rings - chalk for a million hopscotch games."

  "I didn't want to do what I was doing, Dan - it just happened. My body was the only way I could get my message across and it was such a bad message. I crashed myself. In the end, it was work that saved my life. But then work became my life - I was technically living but without a life. And I was so scared. I thought that work was all there was ever going to be. And oh, God, I was so mean to everybody. But I was just running so scared. My parents. They just won't accept what was going on with me. I see them and I want to starve. I can't let myself see them."

  I put my forearm in the crook of her knees and pulled her as tightly together as she could go. Her neck rested on my other arm. I pulled the blankets over us, and her breath was hot and tiny, in little bursts like NutraSweet packets.

  "There's just so much I want to forget, Dan. I thought I was going to be a READ ONLY file. I never thought I'd be . . . interactive."

  I said, "Don't worry about it, Karla. Because in the end we forget everything, anyway. We're human; we're amnesia machines."

  * * *

  It's late and Karla's asleep and blue by the light of the PowerBook.

  I'm thinking of her as I input these words, my poor little girl who grew up in a small town with a family that did nothing to encourage her to use her miraculous brain, that thwarted her attempts at intelligence - this frail thing who reached out to the world in the only way she knew, through numbers and lines of code in the hope that from there she would find sensation and expression. I felt this jolt of energy and this sense of honor to be allowed entrance into her world - to be with a soul so hungry and powerful and needful to go forth into the universe. I want to feed her.

  I . . .

  * * *

  There's this term used in computers, where you try and squish something into another operating system holus-bolus, and the results are not always effective. The term is called "spooging." An example might be, "Consumers don't know it, yet, but Microsoft is going to spooge a lot of the interface of Word for Windows into the Word for Mac 6.0 version, and rumor has it the new Mac version will operate slow as a glacier, too, because of it - it's too nonintuitive for the Mac-user."

  I say this because I think I'm about to spooge here, but I can't think of any other way to express what I feel.

  For starters, it was funny, but after Karla told me about her and her family some more, about her eating problems, now a thing of the past, we got into a discussion of what may be the ultimate question: Is our universe ultimately digital or analog?

  After this, as I said, Karla fell asleep, but I couldn't sleep myself. What else is new?

  I remembered something Antonella from Nintendo once told me about her job at a day-care center, about storytelling to kids - about how the stories the children liked the best were the ones in which the characters fled their old planets amid great explosions, leaving everything behind them to start a new world.

  And then I remembered this book-writing program my mom told me about from someone in her library. The big deal in book writing is to quickly establish at the very beginning what it is that the characters want.

  But I think that the books I really enjoy are the ones in which the characters realize, only in the end, what it was that they secretly wanted all along, but never even knew. And maybe this is what life is really like.

  * * *

  Anyway, I have spooged. Good night little PowerBook - my world will shortly end for today, as will the universe, whether digital or analog - with sleep.

  * * *

  Personal

  Computer

  Stars

  d
rinking glasses

  wrapped in tissue paper

  burnt arborite

  dial telephones

  [Formatter's note - 2 pages (104 - 105) of nothing but 0's and 1's were deleted here]

  3

  Interiority

  SATURDAY

  (Several weeks later)

  We took a few hours off to attend a Halloween barbecue at the chic San Carlos home of Oop!'s president and CEO, Ethan, Mr. "Let's-Ship-Units!"

  Also in attendance were a crew of Apple workers Ethan is scanning for "hireability."

  * * *

  The evening was a typical geek get-together, and conversation stayed along conventional lines: the Menendez brothers, consumer and military aviation, and hiring/firing gossip. But the mood was also tinged with an atypical moroseness: Crunchy Frog jokes blended with tales of fiscal woe. Apple people are all trying to get laid off so they can get the layoff financial package - so everybody's trying to be as useless as possible. It's a shock, let me tell you. And they're all frightened the PowerPC's going to bomb and they're worried about the Newton - and they're frightened they might merge with Motorola or IBM and lose their identity, and - gosh, they have a lot to worry about, it seems.

  "It's all so . . . anti-coding" said Todd, dressed as Atlas. (Speedo swim-suit and a globe tied to his shoulder. Show-off.) "It's the total opposite of Microsoft. It's not the way, you know, we've been raised to think about Apple."

  "Hey, Pal - just goes to show you what happens without a Bill to whip

  people into shape," said Ethan, dressed as "Money" - his face painted green underneath a green George Washington wig that was actually a rented Marilyn Monroe wig misted with green hair spray. "Without a charismatic at the helm, you're history."

  Apple is kind of depressing, we agreed dispiritedly. Not at all what we expected, but we bravely try and Keep the Faith. We're trying to find somebody to give us an Apple campus tour.