Microserfs

note,” she said, speaking into an imaginary Dictaphone machine, “Fry’s sells men’s but not women’s hygiene products.”

Shortly after, over near the model train mock-up of the Wild West “Canyon City” was when I suddenly saw this kid who looked just like my dear departed brother Jed. And that’s when I, well, freaked out.

I stood frozen, and Karla was saying, “Dan, are you okay?” Then Todd walked by, and looked over toward where I was staring, and blurted out, “Hey, Dan — that kid looks just like the kid in the pictures in your Dad’s den.”

Karla then understood, and moved to stand in front of me, and Todd said, “Uh oh …” and headed off to the CD player aisle. Karla said, “Dan, come on. Let’s go.”

But I said, “That’s him, Karla. I’m okay. But look at him. That’s what he looked like.”

We followed this doppel-Jed around, but it felt too weird stalking someone, so we stopped ourselves. I forgot my EPROMs, and we went and sat on a parking island outside.

Todd came out and said, “Sorry about that.”

I said it didn’t matter, but you know what Todd said? He said, “I think it does matter. And I do care. So can you please tell me? Sometimes I think you underestimate me, Underwood. So just give me a chance, okay?”

So we went to The Good Earth for turkey burgers and Smoothies (Todd’s gym food) and I explained Jed to Todd. I think I do underestimate people. I don’t know why I keep these things cramped up inside me. And I think Todd is a friend to call me on it.

Afterward I quietly went into Dad’s den, closed the door behind me, and looked at Jed’s old photo, in an oval frame, lost amid Dad’s knicks and knacks. There he was as he always will be, slightly yellowed, forever twelve and forever smarter than me.

I guess I feel dumb in the same way Karla feels dumb. Except Karla really is smart compared to her family, and I really am dumb — compared to Jed. He wrote such lovely things when he was here — stories about air pilots working with scientists fighting to protect Earth from being stolen. Imaginative.

You just can’t compete with the dead. It would be easier if I had another brother or a sister, but I was born after the Pill.

Anyway, this is all to say I went into the worst head space all afternoon, as though I’d taken eleven of those cold tablets containing both an upper and a downer to cancel out the mutual side effects. So I merely felt buzzed. Just like after too much coding.

Abe’s e-mail is getting more frequent and more personal. I think he’s losing it up at Microsoft. He doesn’t like his new roommates and would seem to be missing us.

The 2 new roomates are both engaged to partner units and don’t want to hang out. They’re NEVER here.

I suppose there’s nothing wrong with my not having a life. So many people no longer have Hues that you raeally have to wonder if some new mode of existence is being created which is going to become so huge that it is no longer on the moral scale - simply the way people ARE. Myabe thinking you’re supposed to “have a life” is a stupid way of buying into an untenable 1950s narrative of what life *supposed* to be.

How do we know that all of these people with “no lives” aren’t really on the new frontier of human sentience and perceptions?

I only need 2 hours of people a day. I can; get by on that amount. 2 hours of FaceTime.

I replied:

2 hours of FaceTime is not good enough Abe.

YOU are not a productmanager, and life is not a product … though wouldn’t it be SO MUCH CLEANER AND EASIER were that so.

Nonetheless, this line of thinking reminds me of the URBRN LEGEND of a Japanese exchange student who thought he was sauing money by eating nothing but Top Ramen noodles every day for a year, but he died of malnutrition before he graduatd.

After sundown, Karla and I went out to the garage to see Dad’s model train world. Mom says he hasn’t been in there at all since he began working with Michael — after returning from “his episode” up in Redmond. I guess this is a good sign — that he’s stopped obsessing and is out in the world and doing new things.

Todd and Michael had plonked down two monitors right in the middle of the landscape directly atop a farm. They had arranged the small animals in small herds atop the monitors, which are coaxial’ed into the Habitrail. The monitors were displaying some Gouraud-shaded Oop! bricks, rotating them in 3D space. Oop! is looking really good, by the way. It looks fresh and modern, as if the future is being squeezed out of the monitor screens like meat from a hamburger grinder. Todd taped a note to one monitor saying, PLEASE GOD, LET RENDERING TIME GET CHEAPER AND FASTER.

Karla had brought along a feather duster and she dusted off the mountains and the village and the little white house Dad built where Jed is supposed to live. I turned on the trains, and we watched them drive around, through the towns, over the mountains, past the rotating building blocks, and then we turned the trains off, and turned the lights out and left. Dad doesn’t seem to mind “us kids” stealing his world.

We call the two systems in the garage “Cabernet” and “Chardonnay.”

Three other system units (two Quadras and a Pentium) are called “Ogre,” “Hobgoblin,” and “Kestrel.” Two file servers are called “Tootie” and “Blair.”

Our two printers are called “Siegfried” and “Roy,” because they’re all shiny and plastic.

Our SGI Iris workstation running an old version of Vertigo software is named, of course, “HAL.”

I’m trying to end this day on an up note, but it’s hard.

THURSDAY

Mom was cleaning out the spice rack in the kitchen. I watered her philodendron plant. She was really funny. She said she eats ripple chips for breakfast now. She says it’s a bad habit and she’s trying to break it and she blames “us kids”! She always says, “You kids.” We like it, even though I think I stopped thinking of myself as a kid about four years ago. I don’t mind responsibility. I guess that’s why I don’t mind the repetitive nature of computer work.

Boy did I get a response to my Net question about the organisms that lurk inside the human body. My Pig Pen theory was indeed confirmed: the average human body contains 1 ? 10¹³ cells, yet hosts 1 ? 10¹⁴ bacterial cells. Long, scary names:

Escherichia coli

Candida albicans

S. aureus

Klebsiella

Actinomyces

Staphylococcus

It really makes you take seriously all these articles in the news about old diseases becoming new diseases. I took so many antibiotics and sulfas for zits in my teens that I’m going to be felled by the first postmodern virus to walk down Camino Real. Doomed.

I mentioned all these microbes to Susan and I think she’s going to become germ phobic. I could see it in her eyes. Fear.

Karla asked me what I thought of modern yuppie parents who smother their kids with attention and affection — those households where the kid rules and everything in the universe revolves around making sure they get touched enough by their parents.