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I really have to wonder if Todd's doing steroids. I mean, he's just not physically normal. We're all going to have to face this.

Dusty was out at the Lucky Mart buying bananas and kelp. I asked Todd, "Shit, Todd – what is it exactly you want your body to do for you? What is it your body's not doing for you now that it's going to do for you at some future date?" Not really Todd's sort of question.

"I think I want to have sex using a new body which allows me to not have to remember my ultrareligious family." Todd mulled this over. We looked around the apartment, strewn with hex dumbbells and rubber flooring mats. "My body was just something I could believe in because there was nothing else around."

Susan was sulking about her dating architecture here in the Valley. Her fling with Mr. Intel ended long ago – she says Intel's culture is too macho to accept macho women. Phil the PDA was history eons ago. She kept talking about that Mary Tyler Moore episode where Mary tabulates the number of dates she's had over the span of her dating career and gets depressed. And then there was a big debate as we tried to remember if that was the episode where she began dating Lou.

Susan only seems to meet techies. ("Well, Sooz," says Karla, "you do spend almost all of your time in the Valley ...")

"It's not just the techiness, Kar – it's that the number of flings I've had in my life now outnumbers the number of relationships. I've crossed a line."

Tonight she has a date with a Marina District tattoo artist, so we're all expecting her to show up tomorrow with a Pentium chip etched into her shoulder.

The thing about Susan is that she's making the leap into self-reconstruction so late in life. Her new dominant attitude comes from a genuine need, but it's so twisted by years of – I don't know exactly what. I don't know as much about Susan as I ought, I suppose. Her IBM upbringing and all of that. But the subject ... how to broach it?

Ethan seems to have forgotten his partially completed freeway. We've nicknamed it the "Information Superhighway."

Susan reformatted and zinged-up Dad's resume on Quark. He used a (oh God ...) dot-matrix printer to do his old resume. Mom's Selectric would have even been cooler.

This afternoon I mistakenly said Palo Alto was in the "Silicone Valley," and Ethan snapped at me, "Silicone is what they put inside of tits, Dan-O. It's Silikawn .. ."

Boom! Dusty began telling us about her first breast implants at age I 9, its subsequent failure, her litigation and her support groups-tales of black goo seeping from nipples, "... immunosuppressive globules of silicone gel migrating through my blood system, triggering this never-ending yuppie flu. It was awful. That's how I got into body manipulation and extreme health ... because of the globules."

Yet again, the Dustmistress had us all riveted. Karla and Susan are now totally obsessed with Dusty's arms, which are like leather-sheathed steel cables from the Bay Bridge, all digitally animated like Spielberg dinosaurs. When she flexes her arms, you feel queasy – like you're going to be eaten. She says that because she has long arms, she has to work "harder to the power of three" to make them appear as proportioned as they would on a shorter woman. She's a calculus whiz.

The cattiness with Dusty ended quickly. Now they all like each other. Actually, I think it goes deeper than "like" – but where or how, I don't know.

Dusty's older than Todd by about five years. During a carbo-loading break later in the day, she started telling me and Karla all this personal stuff. It doesn't take much with Dusty. The distinction between herself and the public is muzzy.

"I made the switch and started liking younger guys about two years ago. The older ones kept getting all serious ... and wanting to discuss marriage. The young kids are puppy dogs and when I want to get rid of them, I just start talking babies and before you know it they start giving me reasons why they have to hang out at their friends', and why they can't come over."

She found a piece of skin on her chicken breast and picked it off.

"I think that once I start having babies, I'm going to forget my body. But tell that to Toddy and you're dead meat. I think he's 'a keeper.' Remember – I can crush you into cat food with my thumb and index finger alone."

And she could!

Karla says that Dusty's freaked out that any baby she might have will be a freak because of the fantastic quantities of scary digestibles she's eaten over the years, on top of her implants and her flirtations with bulimia and extreme diets.

"She's done it all," says Karla, "steroids, uppers, downers, coke, poppers, Pritikin, Oprah ..."

Went with Karla up to Mom and Dad's and helped them sort things out for recycling. When nobody was looking, I hucked some fallen tangerines at the Valotas' house down below ours. Mr. Valota is this Gladys-Kravitz-from- Bewitched type guy who somehow taps into all of the misinformation, apocrypha, and bad memes floating about the Valley and feeds them back to Mom in the aisles of Draeger's in Menlo Park. He's always saying discouraging things about Oop! to Mom. Gee thanks, Mr. Valota.

I liked hearing the tangerines go thunk as they hit the cedar shingles of his lanai. It's never the Mr. Valotas of this world whose houses burn down.

I was breathing really hard as I was carrying the Rubbermaid Roughneck containers to the end of the driveway. I hope nobody noticed that I'm way out of shape.

Abe's list of things to do on how to get a life:

1) Move out of a group house

2) Get involved in non-computer-related activities

3) Treat yourself to a bubble bath (I couldn't think of anything else)

Dusty's twin sister, Michelle, came to visit. She's a collagen sales rep for a biotech firm near San Diego and like a plumper, less turbo-charged Dusty.

She ambled around the Lego garden for a while, watched us code, then yawned pointedly. After further multiple theatrical yawns, she then pulled two Simpsons dubs on VHS out of her purse and started watching them on the VCR, and one by one we melted away from our workstations and began watching along with her.

Michael arrived with Dad, found us recumbent and laughing, freaked out, and sent us back to work, sending Michelle packing on the CalTrain. Michael is now Bill!

Dusty said Ciao, and resumed tweaking her algorithms. Dusty's poor parents – all they wanted was a nice pair of folk-singing, shawl-knitting Leslie Van Houtens and Patricia Krenwinkels. Instead they got two lighter-complexioned Grace Jones replicants morphed together with a Malibu Barbie.

Date update: Susan is without a tattoo.

It turns out Dusty's an expert on, of all things, the Austro-Hungarian Empire (UC Santa Cruz undergrad). Talk about pure randomness. She did this to please her Leftoid hippie freak parents. ("It was an accelerated program that only took two years," she says. "Subjectivity is so much faster to scale.")

Discovering that Dusty was well informed about some calcified aspect of European history was like discovering – I don't know – like discovering that the happy face on the Kool-Aid pitcher is a cross-dresser. It's so random.

I mention this because tonight Todd and Dusty had dinner with a crew of moping ex-Marxist buddies of her parents over in Berkeley – all of theme feeling left behind by the tide of history, singing freedom songs with a 5-stringed guitar; facial hair. That kind of stuff. There were probably lots of candles.

I think the religious feeling made Todd homesick for his religion-frenzied parents in Port Angeles. He returned to the office, brooded, and then he started to cry, then he went out on the lawn and didn't return for an hour.