Microserfs

nowhere and then, BAM!, two years later you’re wearing Tommy Hilfiger windbreakers surrounded by eleven women with seventy-inch breasts in Las Vegas, Nevada, with the whole United States of America wondering if your dick works.”

The real world is a porno movie. I’m convinced.

I got to thinking about sin, or badness, or whatever you want to call it, and I realized that just as there are a limited number of consumer electronics we create as a species, there are also a limited number of sins we can commit, too. So maybe that’s why people are so interested in computer “hackers”

—because they invented a new sin.

McDonald’s: “Paying homage to Ronald,” said Amy, pulling into the driveway beneath the golden arches.

Everybody tried to remember the last time they ate a real vegetable.

“Pickles or iceberg lettuce don’t count.”

We were all stumped.

This McDonald’s was offering a free 16-oz. soft drink if a student brings in a report card with an A. If they have two As, they get a drink and a small fries — three As, and they toss in a cheeseburger to boot. Amy said, “Look out, Japan!” But then she realized, “Las Vegas doesn’t have schoolchildren, does it?”

Halfway through the meal, Michael said, over his Filet-o-Fish, “Las Vegas is perhaps about the constant attempt of humans to decomplexify complex systems.”

“Huh?”

“Las Vegas was once seedy, but it has now evolved into a Disney version of itself — which is probably less fun, but certainly more lucrative, and certainly necessary for the city to survive as an entity in the 1990s. Disneyland presupposes a universe of noncompetitive species — food chains hypersimplified into sterility by a middle-class fear of entropy: animals who will not eat each other and who irrationally enjoy human company; plant life consisting of lawns sprinkled on the fringes with colorful, sterile flowers.”

“Oh.”

“Nonetheless, chaos will ultimately prevail, just as one day, all of this will be dust, rubble, and sagebrush once more.”

“Oh.”

“But you know, the good chaos.”

I felt like my IQ had shrunk to one digit.

Amy and Michael began making out right there next to the McDonald’s-world play station.

Oop!, I might add, is going to be a hit. I think this has been lost on everybody in the Las Vegan blur, but it would appear that we’re all still employed, and that our risk has become solid equity, but you know what? All I care about is that we’re all still together as friends, that we’re not enemies, and that we can continue to do cool stuff together. I thought the money would mean something, but it doesn’t. It’s there, but it’s not emotional. It’s simply there.

After dark Karla revealed to me that she, too, was fascinated by the laser beam, so we told everybody we were returning to the Hacienda next door, and instead drove our rented Altima sedan northeastward on Highway 15, to see how far away we could drive and still see the pyramid’s laser beam. I had heard that air pilots reported seeing it from LAX. I wondered if astronauts could see the beam from outer space.

It was an overcast night. We drove and drove, and at forty miles out we realized that we hadn’t been paying attention, and the laser beam was gone. We stopped in at a diner for hamburgers and video poker, and we won $2.25, so we were “a cheeseburger ahead for the evening.”

We then got back into the car and drove back toward Las Vegas, and around twenty-six miles outside of Las Vegas we were able to see the Luxor’s beam of light up in the sky again. We pulled the car over onto the highway shoulder and gazed at it. It was awe-inspiring and romantic.

I felt so close to her.

Later, back at the hotel, I was PowerBooking my journal entry and I could feel Karla watching me, and I got a little self-concious. I said, “I guess it’s sort of futile trying to keep a backup file of my personal memories …”

She said, “Not at all … because we use so many machines, it’s not surprising we should store memories there, as well as in our bodies. The one thing that differentiates human beings from all other creatures on Earth is the externalization of subjective memory — first through notches in trees, then through cave paintings, then through the written word and now, through databases of almost otherworldly storage and retrieval power.”

Karla said that as our memory multiplies itself seemingly logarithmically, history’s pace feels faster, it is “accelerating” at an oddly distorted rate, and will only continue to do so faster and faster. “Soon enough all human knowledge will be squished into small nubbins the size of pencil erasers that you can pea-shoot at the stars.”

I asked, “And … what then — when the entire memory of the species is as cheap and easily available as pebbles at the beach?”

She said that this is not a frightening question. “It is a question full of awe and wonder and respect. And people being people, they will probably, I imagine, use these new memory pebbles to build new paths.”

Like I said … it was romantic.

SUNDAY

What happened was this: I was looking out the window and Todd was fighting with his parents out on the Strip, down below the Hacienda’s sign. How long was this going to go on? I decided I had to help Todd and so I went down to see if I could “Stop the Insanity!” Just as I joined them, Karla came running out. We all turned, and I saw her coming, and I could tell something was very, very wrong.

She collected her breath and said, “Dan, I’m really sorry to have to tell you this, but there’s been an accident.”

I said, “An accident?”

She said that she had just spoken with Ethan in Palo Alto. Mom had had a stroke at her swim class, that she was paralyzed, and no one knew what would happen next.

Right there and then, Todd and his parents fell down on their knees and prayed on the Strip, and I wondered if they had scraped their knees in their fall, and I wondered what it was to pray, because it was something I have never learned to do, and all I remember is falling, something I have talked about, and something I was now doing. plane window green squares towers lights telephone lines baggage

The New World dream

The extended arm

The caravan traversing a million miles of prairie Cross the uncrossable

Make that journey and build the road along the way.

You succeeded at memory-creation beyond all wildest dreams.

Two Weeks Later TUESDAY, JANUARY 17, 1995

Hanshin Expressway

Stephen Hawking walking through quiet rooms pointing out things you’ve never seen