Microserfs

Susan’s own efforts did get me to do a brief cleanup of my own hard drive. I thought of Karla’s equation of the body with the computer and memory storage and all of that, and I realized that human beings are loaded with germs and viruses, just like a highly packed Quadra — each of us are bipedal terrariums containing untold millions of organisms in various states of symbiosis, pathogenisis, mutualism, commensualism, opportunism, dormancy, and parasitism. We’re like Pig Pen from Charlie Brown, enclosed in a perpetual probabilistic muzz of biology.

I posted a question on the Net, asking bioheads out there what lurks inside the human hard drive.

Michael and Dad were out in the backyard later on watching R2D2 clean out the pool. There was a fair amount of soot because of the fire.

Around midnight I was in the reflective mode and walked around the streets by myself. I felt as though I was walking around the neighborhood on Bewitched. “Look—it’s Larry Tate driving a big, ugly mattress of a car! One great big honking machine.”

I thought about the word “machine.” Funny, but the word itself seems almost quaint, now. Say it over a few times: machine, machine, machine—it’s so … so … ten-years- ago. Obsolete. Replaced by post-machines. A good piece of technology dreams of the day when it will be replaced by a newer piece of technology. This is one definition of progress.

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WEDNESDAY

This morning I was sitting by the pool with Michael, watching him watch the R2D2 pool cleaner. I mentioned last night’s machine/progress notion. He was eating a Snickers leftover from Halloween trick-or-treating, and said, “If you can conceive of humans developing a consciousness more complex than their own, then BINGO, you believe in progress whether or not you even think so.”

So I guess I believe in progress.

Michael was staring into the clean blue fluid, an anti-Narcissus, and he twiddled his index finger in it. He said, “You know, Daniel, I wonder if, after all these years, I have been subliminally modeling my personality after machines — because machines never have to worry about human things — because if they don’t get touched or feel things, then they don’t know the difference. I think this is a common thing. What do you think?”

I said, “I think nerds secretly dream of speaking to machines — of asking them, ‘What do you think and feel — do you feel like me?”’

Michael asked me, “Do you think humanoids—people—will ever design a machine that can pray? Do we pray to machines or through them? How do we use machines to achieve our deepest needs?”

I said I hope we do. He wondered out loud, “What would R2D2 say to me if R2D2 could speak?”

My brain is built of paths and slides and ladders and lasers and I have invited all of you to enter its pavilion. My brain, as you enter, will smell of tangerines and brand-new running shoes.

HELLO

My name is:

UNIX

Friend

or

Foe?

I went out shopping for memory this afternoon with Todd and Karla. I had to get a strip of 27512 EPROMs — at Fry’s, the nerd superstore on El Camino Real near Page Mill Road. I had to grovel to Ethan for the petty cash; so degrading.

The Fry’s chain completely taps into MSE: Male Shopping Energy. This is to say that most guys have about 73 calories of shopping energy, and once these calories are gone, they’re gone for the day — if not the week — and can’t be regenerated simply by having an Orange Julius at the Food Fair. Therefore, to get guys to shop, a store has to eat up all of their MSE calories in one crack-like burst. Thus, Fry’s concentrates only on male-specific consumables inside their cavernous shopping arena, aisles replete with dandruff, bad outfits, and nerdacious mutterings full of buried Hobbit references.

Near the EPROM shelves, Karla, Todd, and I were marveling at the pyramids of Hostess products, the miles of computing magazines, the cascade of nerdiana lifestyle accessories: telecom wiring supplies, clips, pornography, razors, Doritos, chemicals for etching boards, and all the components of the intangible Rube Goldberg machines that lie just beneath the Stealth black plastic exterior of the latest $1,299.99 gizmo. The only thing they don’t have is backrubs. Karla tried to find tampons and failed. “Make mental