Microserfs

… Some say that the world is visibly cleaving into a race of information Haves, and a race of information Have-Nots. Whatever. Let me simply say that history is happening, it’s happening now and it is happening here, in Silicon Valley and in San Francisco.

… Tell me, are you seriously going to be at Microsoft 20 years from now? 15? 10? 5? Or even 2 years? At what point do you decide that you have to take your own life into your own hands?

… At the very least, you’ll make an okay salary if you work with me; at best, you’ll gain equity in something that might become very valuable; I have an idea for a product that I think will be very popular. And wouldn’t it be amusing for all of us to be together again!

… I must have your decisions immediately. Do call.

Most definitely yours, Michael

Michael has designed this amazing code and the scary part is completed already — the proprietary work that could only have sprouted from Michael’s brain — Object Oriented Programming from another galaxy. And he’s been doing it in his spare time — as a game called Oop!. He offered me a job coding, as opposed to just testing … who knows how long it’ll take me to move up to coding at Microsoft?

He sent us a rough draft of a product description he’s written plus ERS — Engineering Requirements Specifications. Herewith:

Oop!

Oop! is a virtual construction box — a bottomless box of 3D Lego-type bricks that runs on IBM or Mac platforms with CD-ROM drives. If a typical Lego-type brick has eight “bumps’ an Oop! brick can have from eight to 8,000 bumps, depending on the precision demanded by the user.

Oop! users can virtually fly in and out of their creations, or they can print them out on a laser printer. Oop! users can build their ideas on a “pad” or they can build their ideas in 3D space, a revolving space station; running ostriches … whatever. Oop! allows users to clone structures, and add these clones onto each other, permitting easy megaconstructions that use little memory. Customized Oop! blocks can be created and saved. The ratios and proportions of Oop! bricks can also be customized by the user in much the same way typefaces are scaled.

Imagine:

“Oopenstein”—flesh-like Oop! bricks or cells, each with ascribed biological functions that allow users to create complex life forms using combinations of single and cloned cell structures. Create life!

“Mount Oopmore”—a function that allows users to take a scanned photo, texture map that photo, and convert it into a 3D visualized Oop! object.

“Oop-Mahal”—famous buildings, preconstructed in Oop! that the user can then modify as desired.

“Frank Lloyd Oop”—architectural Oop! for adults.

As Oop! users won’t have the actual plastic blocks in their hands, Oop! generates new experiences to compensate for this lost tactility: feedback loops … hidden messages … or “rewards” for properly completing a kit; i.e., King Kong will climb up and down your Empire State Building and install the flag if you finish. Oop! comes equipped with “starter modules” such as houses, cat shapes, cars, buildings, and so forth that can be added on to or modified or finished in an unlimited number of colors or surfaces: slate, leopardskin, woodgrain, and so forth. Oop! structures can grow hair or plant life. Oop! structures can be distorted, stretched, morphed, or “Jell-O’d.” Oop! users can dissolve the connection lines between bricks to create “solid” structures.

Oop! constructions can be saved in memory or they can be “destroyed” by:

“Los Angeles” (earthquake simulator)

“Pyro” (fire and melting)

“Ruins” (decay simulator: x-numbers of years of decomposition can be selected and simulated. Imagine your ranch house rotted into fragments and covered in kudzu or a variety of choking vines. Another idea: “Flood”)

“Big Foot” (elder sibling emulator: kicks constructions into bits)

“Terror!” (a bomb explodes either inside or outside the structure)

As the Lego Generation ages (and as the Oop! product invariably grows more sophisticated), Oop! becomes a powerful real-world modeling tool usable by scientists, animators, contractors, and architects. Object-Oriented Programming design allows great flexibility for licensees to develop cross-platform software add-ons.

Build every possible universe with …

Oop!

We felt surreal from Michael’s offer.

At sundown, we congregated in the living room, turned off the ESPN₂, cracked open two Safeway fire logs, and chewed over Michael’s data, while Mishka chewed up a Windows NT box. We felt like a Magritte painting.

We talked some more, but the basic idea was clear. As Abe said, “It’s virtual Lego — a 3-D modeling system with almost unlimited future potential.”

“Oop! sounds too fun to resist — like that pile of FREE BIRD SEED in the old Road Runner cartoons,” said Bug.

Susan said, “Maybe Oop! is Sea Monkeys. Maybe it seems unbelievably fun, but in the end winds up as a cruel, bitter letdown upon arrival.”

“I doubt it,” said Abe. “Michael’s a genius. We all know that. And the ERS looked great.”

“Just think,” said Karla, “Lego can be rendered into anything, in 2 or 3 dimensions. This product has the possibility for becoming the universal standard for 3-dimensional modeling.”

We silently nodded.

And we didn’t talk much. We just looked into the flames and thought.

Mom called. She’s learning the butterfly stroke — at 60!

Karla kept on talking about bodies, her obsession, tonight, about an hour ago before she fell asleep and I, as ever, remained wide-eyed and awake.

“When I was younger,” she said, “I went through a phase where I wanted to be a machine. I think this is one of the normal phases that young people go through now — like The Lord of the Rings phase, the Ayn Rand phase — I honestly didn’t want to be flesh; I wanted to be ‘precision technology’—like a Los Angeles person; I listened to Kraftwerk and ‘Cars’ by Gary Numan.”

(A concerned pause.) “Oh … is your foot twitching, Dan? Let me fix it for you ….

(Insert foot massage here.)

“That was a decade ago, and years have passed since I had had that particular dream of wanting to become a machine.

“Then four summers ago when I was visiting my parents down in McMinnville, I accidentally fell back into the body/machine dream.

“It was a summer day — too bright out — and I was walking amid the family’s apple orchards and developed a brain-splitting, wasp’s sting of a headache and became nauseous. I walked into the house and went into the basement to be cool, but I threw up on the cement floor next to the washer and dryer. I lost control of my left arm and then I passed out on top of a stack of laundry for three hours. Dad freaked out over the paralysis and drove me