Дуглас Коупленд - Microserfs

I realized that Bug had dressed up for the night, or rather, had made an effort to coordinate his wardrobe. Also, Dusty has him signed up with a trainer at a gym, and he's not looking so much like he was assembled from the leftover bits of the Lego box as he used to. For that matter, Karla and I are both looking better assembled ourselves, these days. The gym.

"And so anyway," Bug continued, "there was this picture frame-shaped thing hanging from the ceiling – part of the club's decoration – and I thought I was looking into a mirror and so I reached up my hand to move my hair, and of course, my image on the other side was doing the same thing. And then suddenly I realized – we realized – at the same moment, that we were two different people and both went 'Whoa!"

"And?"

"And I realized that maybe it's even possible, however briefly, and without even much say in the matter, to become someone else, or to be handed another body, in a blink of an eye. Is that called 'body invasion'? Karla would know."

There was a quiet patch here – just the hums of the computers; a blink sound from someone's system receiving e-mail. Bug continued: "And so I met Jeremy."

"Well good for you."

"It's not love," he added quickly. "But we are going to see each other again. But tell me, Daniel – I mean, I knew you before you knew Karla. Did you ever think then that love was never going to happen to you?"

"Pretty much."

"And when it did happen, how did you feel?"

"Happy. And then I got afraid that it would vanish as quickly as it came. That it was accidental – that I didn't deserve it. It's like this very, very nice car crash that never ends."

"And where are you now?"

I thought: "I think the fear part's leaving. I don't know what comes next. But the love hasn't gone, no."

Bug looked perplexed and happy, but sort of sad, too. He said, "I used to care about how other people thought I led my life. But lately I've realized that most people are too preoccupied with their own lives to give anybody else even the scantiest of thoughts." He looked up at me: "Oh, not you and Karla and the rest of the crew. But people in general. My family's from Idaho. Coeur d'Alene. A beautiful place as ever there was, but believe me, Dan, it's hard to be different there."

As usually happens in our office, he began to fidget with Lego bricks. "It starts out young – you try not to be different just to survive – you try to be just like everyone else – anonymity becomes reflexive – and then one day you wake up and you've become all those other people – the others – the something you aren't. And you wonder if you can ever be what it is you really are. Or you wonder if it's too late to find out."

I had no idea what to say. So I listened, which is often the best idea. And I realized Bug had driven all the way down from San Francisco just to find a person to tell this to.

"Anyway, I never talk about myself, and you guys never ask, and I've always respected that. But there comes a time when you either speak or forfeit what comes next."

He got up. "I'm driving back up the Peninsula. Home. I just wanted to talk to somebody."

I said, "Good luck, Bug," and he winked at me.

Sassy!

Day of coding. It felt really Microsofty for some reason.

Midday, Karla went walking with Mom and Misty, and the two of them returned absolutely comatose with boredom. I have never seen two people with less chemistry. I just don't understand how I can love two people so much, yet have them be so indifferent to each other.

Oh, and Mist’s getting really F-A-T, even though Mom has her on a "slimming diet." The neighbors are feeding her scraps because she's irresistible. So Mom had to have a dog tag made up that says, "please don't feed me, i'm on A diet." Karla said Mom should have millions of the things engraved and she could make a fortune selling them all over America, to people.

But, oh, does Misty waddle now!

Smoggy day down in the Valley. Rusty orange. Depressing. Like the 1970s.

Susan told us about her first date with Emmett last night, at a Toys-R-Us superstore in San Francisco. Emmett bought himself a Star Trek Romulan Warbird. Susan bought some infamous "softer, less crumbly Play-Doh" as well as an obligatory Fun Factory, a Bug Dozer as well as a container of "Gak" – a water-based elastic goo-type play object endorsed by Nickelodeon and called by all of us, "the fourth state of matter."

Afterward they parked on the Page Mill Road and monitored cellular phone calls.

Susan’s still obsessing that Fry's doesn't sell tampons. I think Fry's had better look out.

Todd's given up on trying to be political because Dusty no longer cares about the subject and, it would appear, nor does anybody at the office. It was a fun ride while it lasted. He talks to his parents up in Port Angeles more now, too. You can imagine how his religious parents wigged out when he told them he was a Communist. They still believe in Communists.

Ethan and I went out for drinks to the BBC bar in Menlo Park after a "Trip to Europe" (ten hours of coding; so much for yesterday's leisure dictum). We both commented on a sense of unrest in the Valley. The glacial pace of the Superhighway's development is absolutely maddening to the Valley's citizens, their mouths fixed in expressions of relaxed pique amid the LensCrafters franchises, the garages, the S&L buildings, and the science parks. Nonetheless, Broderbund, Electronic Arts, and everybody else here grows and grows, so it's all still happening. Just more slowly than we'd expected.

I said, "Remember, Ethan, these are geeky, on-demand type people who suddenly have to spend their lives as if they're waiting for an Aeroflot flight out of Vladivostok – a flight that may or may never take off." Then I remembered that we're all "Russia'd out" after the political turmoil of the past few weeks and wish I'd not said that.

Ethan was glum: "CD-ROM design is beginning to feel like aloe product sales chains and pyramid schemes."

"Ethan – you're our money guy. Don't talk like that!"

"No one wants to pay for the highway's infrastructure – it's too expensive. In the old days, the government simply would have footed the bill, but they don't do much pure research any more. Unless there's a war, but then it's hard to see how Bullwinkle and Rocky interactive CD products will help us crash an enemy. Fuck. We don't even have enemies anymore."

The music was playing a comforting old Ramones song, "I Wanna Be Sedated," and we were feeling maudlin.

"Companies want to be signposts, toll booths, rest stops – anything except actual asphalt. Everyone's afraid of spending heaps of money and becoming the Betamax version of the I-way. And I don't think a war is something that would speed up development. I don't think it's that kind of technology. This thing won't be real until every house in the world has had a little ditch dug up in its front lawn, and an optical fiber installed. Until then, it's all Fantasy Island."

I guess he was remembering how long it took for him to build his own Lego freeway in the office's Lego garden.

We reordered Harvey Wallbangers (1970s night).

"It's just so strange to see this sense ... of stalematedness" Ethan continued, remembering the Atari boom era. "This was the land where all you ever asked for was all you were ever going to get – so everyone asked Big." He was getting philosophical. "This is the land where architecture becomes irrelevant even before the foundations are poured – a land of sustainable dreams that pose as unsustainable; frighteningly intelligent/depressingly rich." He twisted a cocktail napkin into a rope. "Well," he said, "the magic conies and goes." He chugged a Wallbanger. "But in the end it always returns."