Microserfs

converting all human bones into Oop! bricks, which are in turn linked, like bones in the human body. But she’s also having other animal skeletons digitized, and she’s designing her program so that users can build new species. Flesh comes next.

Ethan is even developing a game — one where players train dolphins for the Department of Defense and he’s designing Oop! weaponry and boats and submarines.

Karla’s designing a vegetable factory in which small chipmunks trapped inside must run for their lives or end up diced (“God bless Warner Brothers”); Bug is designing a castle with dungeon, and I must say, it’s good. He’s come up with “torture nodes.”

Michael wants Oop! users to be able to play Doom-like chase games throughout whatever we build, and is working to form an allegiance with a company up-Bay in San Francisco that provides a multiline server so that nerds in different area codes can game together.

Michael was on a rant, quite justified, I thought, about all of this media-hype generation nonsense going on at the moment. Apparently we’re all “slackers.” “Daniel, who thinks up these things?”

Michael pointed out that humans are the only animals to have generations. “Bears, for example, certainly don’t have generations. Mom and Dad bears don’t expect their offspring to eat different kinds of berries and hibernate to a different beat. The belief that tomorrow is a different place from today is certainly a unique hallmark of our species.”

Michael’s theory is that technology creates and molds generations. When technology accelerates to a critical point, as it has now, generations become irrelevant. Each of us as individuals becomes our own individual diskette with our own personal “version.” Much more logical.

Mom couldn’t get the garage door opener to work, so I fixed it for her. We took Misty for a walk along La Cresta. The stop sign at the corner of Arastradero was completely covered with Scotch tape, pieces of ribbon, and empty balloons from where people mark off birthday parties. It was funny.

Ethan’s freeway is taking far longer to build than he anticipated and it “eats bricks like crazy.”

I asked Dusty if she grew up with Barbie dolls and she said, “No, but indeed I rilly, rilly lusted after them in my heart. Hippie parents, you know. Rill crunchy. I had a Raggedy Ann doll made in, like, Sierra Leone. And all I rilly desired was a Barbie Corvette — more than life itself.”

*sigh*

“So instead I played with numbers and equations. Some trade-off. The only store-bought toy I was ever allowed was a Spirograph, and I had to beg to receive it as a May Day present. And I had to pretend I wanted it because it was mathematical — so clean and solvable. But my parents were suspicious of mathematics because math isn’t political. They’re like, freaks.”

Dusty’s forearms resemble Fopeye’s. And they have pulsing veins that look like a meandering river. Ethan and I were talking, when he shouted across the room, “Jesus Christ, Dusty — I can take your pulse from over here.”

I asked Karla if she grew up with Barbie dolls and she said (not looking up from her keyboard), “This is so embarrassing, but not only did I play with Barbies, but I played with them up until an embarrassingly late age — ninth grade.” She then looked over at me, expecting reproach.

This did come as some surprise; I suppose it revealed itself on my face. She began typing again, and speaking over the clack of her fingers on the keyboard.

“But before you go and think I’m a lost cause, you should know that I gave my Barbie admirable pursuits — I took apart my brother’s Hot Wheels and made a Barbie Toyota Assembly Plant, giving Barbie white overalls, a clipboard, and I provided jobs for many otherwise unemployed Americans.” She paused and looked up from her keyboard. “God, no wonder my parents refused to believe I was intelligent.”

MONDAY

This afternoon while visiting Todd and Dusty’s cottage in Redwood City, I tried to find a snack in their fridge.

Bad idea.

Pills, lotions, capsules, powders … anything except what normal human beings might call “food.” There was a Rubbermaid container of popcorn. There was Turbo Tea, Amino mass, pure Creatine, Mus-L-Blast 2000+, raw chickens, Super Infiniti 3000, and chromium supplements as well as small bottles I thought it more polite not to inquire about.

I really have to wonder if Todd’s doing steroids. I mean, he’s just not physically normal. We’re all going to have to face this.

Dusty was out at the Lucky mart buying bananas and kelp. I asked Todd, “Shit, Todd — what is it exactly you want your body to do for you? What is it your body’s not doing for you now that it’s going to do for you at some future date?” Not really Todd’s sort of question.

“I think I want to have sex using a new body which allows me to not have to remember my ultrareligious family.” Todd mulled this over. We looked around the apartment, strewn with hex dumbells and rubber flooring mats. “My body was just something I could believe in because there was nothing else around.”

Susan was sulking about her dating architecture here in the Valley. Her fling with Mr. Intel ended long ago — she says Intel’s culture is too macho to accept macho women. Phil the PDA was history eons ago. She kept talking about that Mary Tyler Moore episode where Mary tabulates the number of dates she’s had over the span of her dating career and gets depressed. And then there was a big debate as we tried to remember if that was the episode where she began dating Lou.

Susan only seems to meet techies. (“Well, Sooz,” says Karla, “you do spend almost all of your time in the Valley …”)

“It’s not just the techiness, Kar — it’s that the number of flings I’ve had in my life now outnumbers the number of relationships. I’ve crossed a line.”

Tonight she has a date with a Marina District tattoo artist, so we’re all expecting her to show up tomorrow with a Pentium chip etched into her shoulder.

The thing about Susan is that she’s making the leap into self-reconstruction so late in life. Her new dominant attitude comes from a genuine need, but it’s so twisted by years of — I don’t know exactly what. I don’t know as much about Susan as I ought, I suppose. Her IBM upbringing and all of that. But the subject … how to broach it?

Ethan seems to have forgotten his partially completed freeway. We’ve nicknamed it the “Information Superhighway.”

Susan reformatted and zinged-up Dad’s resume on Quark. He used a (oh God …) dot-matrix printer to do his old resume. Mom’s Selectric would have even been cooler.

This afternoon I mistakenly said Palo Alto was in the “Silicone Valley,” and Ethan snapped at me, “Silicone is what they put inside of tits, Dan-O. It’s Silikawn …”

Boom! Dusty began telling us about her first breast implants at age 19, its subsequent failure, her litigation and her support groups — tales of black goo seeping from nipples, “… immunosuppressive globules of silicone gel migrating through my blood system, triggering this never-ending yuppie flu. It was awful. That’s how I got into body manipulation and extreme health … because of the globules.”

Yet again, the Dustmistress had us all riveted. Karla and Susan are now totally obsessed with Dusty’s arms, which are like leather-sheathed steel cables from the Bay Bridge, all digitally animated like Spielberg dinosaurs. When she flexes her arms, you feel queasy — like you’re going to be eaten. She says that because she has long arms, she has to work “harder to the power of three” to make them appear as proportioned as they would on a shorter woman. She’s a calculus whiz.

The cattiness with Dusty ended quickly. Now they all like each other. Actually, I think it goes deeper than “like”—but where or how, I don’t know.