Obviously the machine had flipped a few bits the wrong way, but? With dawning horror, the family ran to fling open the oven door-it was too late. The baby had never had a chance once the Choreboy had shoved the spike of the meat thermometer into its heart.
“The Choreboy was a Seven Lucky machine, programmed by West West, or whatever they were calling themselves then,” continued Trevor. “And before the Choreboy-that was either the first or the second time, I can’t remember-these guys lost a fifty-million-dollar lawsuit to GoMotion for doing a byte-for-byte knockoff of the Iron Camel. They hadn’t even bothered to change our programmers’ names in their source code! You should hear Roger Coolidge talking about West West. He hates them.”
“Then why would he want me to work there?”
“Are you sure it was really him you talked to in cyberspace, Jerzy?”
“No, I’m not. I’m not sure at all. That’s why I want to talk to Roger in person. Where is he?”
“Roger went to Switzerland last night.” We’d turned and started walking back toward GoMotion. Trevor seemed nervous. “Roger’s the one who told Jeff Pear to fire you. And, get this, Jerzy, he had me set your access level to negative 32K on all the networks GoMotion subscribes to. You’re out beyond the pale, guy.”
Off the Net! It was like losing my driver’s license. “But, but, what did I do? Was there something wrong with my work on the Veep?”
“Jerzy, I’ll be totally frank. I don’t know what the hell is happening.” We were standing in front of the GoMotion building. Trevor squinted at me in the bright sun. “All I can say is that if I were in your position, I wouldn’t believe anyone.” He shrugged and turned to go.
“Wait, Trevor, wait. What about my computer? And my robot, Studly. GoMotion owns them. Do I have to give my computer back in?“ If losing Net privileges was like losing my driver’s license, losing my cyberdeck would be like losing my ability to walk.
“Funny you should ask. Roger Coolidge made a special point of telling Jeff Pear to let you keep your robot and your computer. Jeff already mailed you a letter about it. Roger said your machines are contaminated. Roger said that if Jerzy Rugby has any sense, he’ll smash up his machines and crush the chips with pliers. He actually said that.”
“Fuck that. The cyberspace deck is a fifty-thousand-dollar box. It’s all I’ve got.”
“You tell ‘em, Jerzy. Look out for number one.” Trevor shook my hand. “It’s been a trip working with you.”
He walked inside and I got in my Animata.
I found the West West offices ten miles south of GoMotion, on the bottom floor of a white adobe-style two- year-old office complex on Saratoga-Sunnyvale Road, right down the street from a Pollo Loco and a Burger King. The fields on both sides of Saratoga-Sunnyvale Road were filled with developments of tract homes thrown up during the Valley’s first boom. Before that, the fields had been filled with flowers and plum trees and Silicon Valley had been called “The Valley of Heart’s Delight.”
The West West suite was down a carpeted hall that smelled like Holiday Inn rug cleaner crossed with the plastic stink inside a new car on a lot in the California sun. The West West receptionist was a darling young thing, pert and real. She sat on a high stool behind a high gray plastic counter with a sign-in book. Staring at her distinctive little lips, I felt for a desperate moment as if I were staring at her sex organs. She signed me in and ushered me through a big room of workers toward the office of the General Manager of the Home Products Division.
The big room was a white-collar worker pit, a windowless, gray-carpeted space with beige walls and chest- high off-white plastic partitions that divided the space into the cubicles that young workers called “veal-fattening pens.” The noises of the pit were keyboards, computers, fluorescent lights, central air, and murmured conversation. Everyone wore ultralight earphone and mike sets, so they did not need to talk very loud, even to each other. Aurally they were in cyberspace, but visually they were a bunch of people in front of computer screens in a pit with no living plants. Was I really going to work here?
The General Manager of the Home Products Division said he’d been expecting me. He was a black-haired, sour-faced guy called Otto Gyorgyi. He was thin and he had lively eyebrows and a large, slightly crooked nose. He wore a gray suit with a white shirt and a dun tie. He had a corner office with a view of the West West parking lot and the Saratoga-Sunnyvale Road.
Otto used the occasion of our first meeting to tell me his whole life story. This was, I would learn, characteristic of Otto. He liked to talk about almost anything other than the things an employee would want to know. He was an exponent of what workers call “mushroom management,” meaning, “keep them in the dark and cover them with shit.”
Otto was born and raised in Budapest. His father was a schoolteacher who spurred his children to get every particle of available education. All five Gyorgyi kids studied engineering: Kinga, textile engineering; Arpad, drafting engineering; Tibor, fluid engineering; Erszebet, electrical engineering; and, last of all, young Otto with his chemical engineering. Otto emigrated when a vacationing German university student fell in love with him. The girl’s name was Ute Besenkamp. Ute became pregnant and brought Otto home with her.
As Otto told me all this with great raisings and lowering of his eyebrows, I could hardly believe I was hearing information that was so utterly useless and beside the point.
In Germany Otto married Ute and found a job with the Bayer chemical company. This multinational industrial titan had its huge mother plant in Leverkusen. The Gyorgyis purchased a solid house in Bayer’s terrorist-proof compound. Otto worked with a group analyzing and refining industrial processes for making rubber out of vegetable latex. Bayer sold the necessary chemicals worldwide, and would send out teams to maintain the processes on site. Otto’s specific role was to consult on safety issues, and he became something of an expert on remote handling devices.
After nine peaceful years in Leverkusen, Otto, Ute, and children (two boys, one girl) were posted to a Tokyo branch of Bayer, working with some industrial robots created by the Tsukubu Science City group. Things went well for awhile, but then Ute left Otto and took the children back to Germany. Otto “hit the skids” and next thing he knew he was out of a job. Like me, he’d moved to California on speculation, and now he was General Manager of West West’s Home Products Division.
“Which is where I come in?” I suggested.
With great reluctance, Otto came to the point. He made this part of the conversation very brief. “We want you to program for West West so we can kick GoMotion right out of the home robotics market. If you accept the job, your immediate superior will be Ben Brie. Ben is the product manager for the line of Adze robots that West West is going to start shipping in the second quarter. Ben has only two senior programmers, and they need help. You’re our man, Jerzy.”
“What would be my annual salary?”
“What were you getting at GoMotion?”
I named the figure, and Otto added thirty-three percent. The fact that Otto had been expecting me meant that the ant-brained vision I’d seen the night before had been, at least in some respects, legit. It sure seemed like a lot of people wanted me to work for West West. And GoMotion had fired me, hadn’t they? I didn’t owe them anything. West West would put me back on the Net. The thirty-three percent raise sounded very good. And best of all, West West wanted me to keep working on smart robots. I had most of the code for the Veep in my head; it would be a shame just slowly to forget it. If I took this job at West West, my role in the Great Work could continue.
“The Great Work” was a phrase that had occurred to me soon after Carol and I moved to Silicon Valley. In medieval Europe, the Great Work was the building of the cathedrals. Artisans from all over Europe would flock, say, to the Ile-de-France to work on the Notre Dame. Stonecutters, sculptors, carpenters, weavers, glassmakers, jewelers-they gathered together to work on the most wonderful project the human race could conceive of. I felt that all of us in Silicon Valley were working, in one way or another, on the Great Work of bringing truly intelligent robots into existence. Some hackers felt the Great Work was simply the striving toward a perfect human-to-human interface in cyberspace, but I thought that the real payoff had to be something more mechanical and concrete. To me, the Great Work was to create a new form of life: artificially alive robots.
Keep in mind that, although I had done a lot of creative work on the Veep, I didn’t own any copyrights on this work. When you worked as a hacker for a big company, you signed away all rights to the code you developed-your employment contract specified that the company automatically owned the copyrights to all the code you wrote for
