Charles Bock - Alice & Oliver

The constant raped-cat shrieking of the phone line connected with the external modem. Seas of glowing text endlessly surfed along, with backgrounds fluorescent enough to scar the retina; untold manifestly botched hyperlinks; that same goddamn graphic of a seal spinning that same rotating ball on its nose. Each new bulletin board devoted to Star Trek: The Next Generation may have been mundane, but it allowed them to push onward, to the next page bemoaning the cancellation of Mystery Science Theater 3000, the same audio outtakes of the famed radio host spitting curses during American Top Forty. And toward quality stuff, too. The best Telenet and FTP sites. Encyclopedic reference resources nobody even would have known existed. Most mind-boggling of all, in less time than it took to microwave popcorn, pixilated pictures came into focus. Naked women. All as easy as hitting F4.

Alice popped in every so often: dressed to kill in chic power garb; her belly huge and exotic; hauling in the various portfolio folders she’d needed for her meeting with that East Village shopkeeper who sold her own clothes but needed sewing help; sloppy but glowing in loose maternity sweats, having come back from some sort of mommy-preparation-Buddhisty-new-age-yoga-crystal-tantric thing. “My happy band of Orcs,” she’d say. “What useless effluvium have you uncovered today?” And would be answered with a RealPlayer audio clip of a gay man in San Francisco screaming at his roommate, I will crush you, little man. The looks she bestowed upon Oliver were at once bemused and patronizing, and, more and more, toward the end, aghast. This is how the man I love chooses to spend his life instead of preparing to be a dad.

Jaundiced faces went scraggly and oily. Scraggly hair turned oily and tangled. An odd gray stink cloud formed around the workstation. By then, Alice was occupied by her newborn; what did she care if those idiots had molded like fungus onto the furniture, if a stack of pizza boxes had formed an installation art piece in the loft’s far corner?

They’d visited somewhere like two hundred thousand pages when, out of nowhere, Ruggles brought back up a dilemma they’d had during sophomore year. That their loose circle of science-focused and business-heavy underclassmen could survive their requisite English and comp classes with a minimum of actual work, they’d wanted to read, compare, pool, and copy one another’s essays. “Should have been simple,” Ruggles remembered. When he paused to suck some stray potato chip flavoring dust from his fingers, he and Oliver recalled the writing programs they’d used way back when: Oliver loyal to WordStar, Ruggles swearing by WordPerfect, the Brow with that piece-of-shit off brand, EditOre. None of which, they’d also remembered, had allowed you to load or share files from the other programs. When you shoved your hard square little disc into someone else’s desktop, it wouldn’t open, or the text came out as gibberish. No, the only way to get an essay that your friend had written on a different platform onto your computer would have been to install both software programs onto each desktop — although installing any of these programs would have required five different hard discs, one inserted immediately after another, in a specific ordered sequence, which was all but impossible: some of those discs always got corrupted, or had been lost, or their little metal clip-edge thingies had come loose.

When Ruggles or Jonathan stopped by to veg out and commandeer a terminal shift, the discussion continued. Soon enough, their bull session had turned serious. Soon enough, Oliver and even the Brow were taking breaks from their time-wasting, attention-suck of a Web-quest-thing. They were listing what functions a new program might need. Ruggles jumped on top of cost-benefit analyses. The result was pragmatic, somewhat optimistic, and fairly well thought through, replete with marketing, viability, and programming plans. All of them centered on a semigeneric text field that would act as an amnesty zone. A writing program that would accept alphabet, number, and formatting systems from any and all other writing software.

—

They’d just moved on to coding the thing when, miracle of miracles, that prodigal impossible quest, their original slacker dream, came to fruition. Only four months, seven days, and nine hours later, but still: the evidence was undeniable. Any page they visited, they’d seen before. Just south of one million websites. They’d visited the entire Net. The celebration was underwhelming, all things considered: exhausted head nods, numb smiles, a sense of Thank God that’s finally over. Can that really be all there is? At any moment more sites were being created, they knew as much. However, in this fixed time frame, in this moment, their journey was comprehensive. We did something, but what?

Before the group had agreed upon any kind of answer, they were back inside their programming project, taking care of its attendant affairs, for instance, settling on both the company’s and the software’s name, each one the same word: Generii, coming from the Latin, sui generis. In a nice little inside joke, this translated into original or of its own . (The second i, Ruggles explained, makes it ours.) Oliver threw in what scratch he’d managed from his other part-time job; Ruggles put the squeeze on some of his junior trader brethren to chip in a few nickels; Jonathan — unwilling to see his cousin take an absolute bath on this — also ponied up. There still wasn’t quite enough to finance software development and pay licensing fees to the companies whose writing programs Generii was ripping off, so the official company line was Fuck ’em. Don’t pay one shiny dime. Once Generii showed the coding was theirs and original, as opposed to just stolen from the other writing programs, once the software was up and running and didn’t have any more problems with line breaks and format glitches and bugs and viruses, once they’d properly carpet-bombed the taste influencers of Manhattan with CD-Rs as if their program were America Online’s sign-up discs, their product would get firmly ensconced on every important desktop in the midtown and downtown area. And when that happened, any cease and desist orders would be immaterial. The thing would be in the world.

—

Another foregone conclusion: her baby would be born naturally. No way Alice would consent to an epidural. And since she was the one carrying the little, ahem, blessing, seeing how the whole infant thing, basically, had been her deal, Oliver knew better than to do anything on this front besides tallyho: he’d followed Alice’s lead ( as he should, he could hear her saying).

Another shocker: she hadn’t wanted to know the sex of the child beforehand. Once again, he’d acquiesced ( as he should have, he could hear her, once again, this time getting impatient), agreeing it was better this way, more natural, they were going to love their child, what really mattered was their baby would be healthy, absolutely. For a few seconds, Alice held that little crimson bundle: no knowledge of gender, no knowledge of anything, just her baby, its physical presence, its cries of health, her baby her baby, and the waterworks had started, and she’d finally demanded, what is it, and had cried even harder, because the awful truth was, they didn’t have anything for a boy, why, the two of them still had been discussing possible boy names while hoping to induce labor, slowly walking laps around the halls of St. Vincent’s obstetrics ward, Alice’s arm around his shoulder and Oliver’s arm around her waist, Alice insisting on something Eastern or new-agey or fashionable, Oliver responding with a choice inspired by Blade Runner . For a boy’s name they had uncertainty, a theoretical love but not a settled name. For a girl, however, porcelain perfection — or, rather, one of those self-serious and self-important and pretentious names, the kind that drew attention to how smart and open and giving and knowing the parents were, although, at the same time, this one had a purity to it, a lovely grace, just what Alice wanted — a little perfect lovely graceful Doe. As for Oliver, after eighteen hours of labor, he’d been exhausted — just the witness and supportive partner, he understood now why it was called labor.