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salon.com
[ Chapter 54 ]
Kiki and Barry
reunited by Iridium
-- silence at $40 a
minute
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Thomas Scoville
Sept. 18, 1999 | Kiki had
tried to contact Barry for days.
It shouldn't have been that
hard; Barry had one of those
Iridium superphones, the kind
that worked anywhere on the planet. The real difficulty was in
convincing anyone at TeraMemory that Barry had a wife.
Apparently, it was a detail he hadn't shared very widely.
She had been reduced to faxing the marriage license to
TeraMemory's public relations department. That had gotten their
attention, convincing them Kiki wasn't just another in a long line of
jilted paramours and unhinged she-stalkers. They agreed to patch
her through to the Captain of the Singularity.
The biggest bandwidth bottleneck would be a psychological one.
He answered on the sixth ring in his curt, signature baritone:
"Dominic."
"Barry? Is that you? It's Kiki."
"Why are you calling me, Kiki?" he said gruffly. "Didn't we agree
it would be better to limit your contact to my attorney?"
"The lawyers can't help with this one, Barry."
She told him about Gretchen.
Barry didn't speak for a long time. The line made a steady, gentle
hissing, punctuated only by the sound of hiccuping satellites.
Forty dollars a minute, and no words to say: Barry and Kiki
stood on opposite sides of the earth, speechless, joined only by
an evanescent strand of radio waves and electrons. They were as
ghosts to each other, disembodied phantoms unable to extend
any real connection across the ether of some desolate digital
afterlife. It was worse than being alone. It was exactly like their
marriage.
"How?" Barry finally asked, his voice higher, a thin trace of
forlorn.
She told him about Last Chance, the mountainous Santa Cruz
backcountry, with its narrow, shoulderless roads and pitch-black
nights.
"Thank you for notifying me. I appreciate your call," he
responded with corporate coldness. He was walling it off the only
way he knew how: by treating it as a business call.
"Barry, where are you?"
"Tasmania."
"I don't mean geographically -- I mean personally. Where have
you been all these years? I've missed you."
Silence. More soft hissing and geosynchronous chatter.
"I know you're back there," she continued, "somewhere behind all
the anger and the ambition. Couldn't you at least come out for a
moment? I'd like to talk to that man one more time. Even just to
say goodbye."
His tone began to harden. "I don't know what you're talking
about."
"I think you do. Where is he? Where's my old 'Tejinder
Coffeepot'?"
Barry spoke. "I ... I ..."
Another long silence, then a pop and a moment of high-pitched
chirping.
Dial tone.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
You could spot them a mile away: Silicon Valley technocrats,
critically oppressed by the vagaries and uncertainties of the chase,
would come to wrestle their doubts in the monastic calm of the
valley's only true ivory tower. The airy stone arches and broad
lawns were a potent antidote to the relentless commercial
whiplash of the valley.
The undergrads, sheltered as they were from many of the valley's
harsher economic and vocational realities, surveyed these
interlopers with some curiosity. Certainly they didn't belong on the
Stanford campus; it was plain to see from their weirdly conformist
"computer casual" dress and tightly wound demeanors. They
were neither students nor faculty, neither fish nor fowl, entirely
lacking the easy manner and unhurried rhythm of academia. They
were oddities, stress refugees, indigenous tourists attempting to
decompress and imagine life beyond the next round of funding or
book-to-bill ratio.
Thus the two men strolling by Memorial Chapel made an unlikely
pair. Steve, in his sandals, cut-off jeans and Nine Inch Nails
T-shirt, could easily have passed for a graduate student. Paul, on
the other hand, had the mark of the Machine upon him. He wore
the official uniform of the company town: khakis, virgin Nike
cross-trainers, a crisply pressed denim button-down shirt with
corporate technology logo embroidered on the breast. Gang
colors for geeks.
"Let's go for a long, thoughtful walk around the
quad," Steve had puckishly suggested when
Paul called to explain his incipient career
blowout. "That's what all the guys do when
they burn out working for the Man. You can
see 'em shuffling around, hands in their
pockets, talking to themselves. Except for
you," he had quipped. "I'll save you the
embarrassment. You can talk to yourself to
me."
And talk he did. More than a little. Paul talked
so much he scared himself, tapping into a
heretofore unknown, repressed pocket of
resentment and frustration at his core.
"Oh, I dunno ..." Paul ruminated with a sigh,
hands in pockets, as predicted. "It's getting
harder and harder to see any point these days.
I feel like I spend my time running a hundred
miles an hour, working late every night and
forsaking any semblance of a real life just for somebody else's
technical pipe-dream that'll probably never happen in a million
years.
"I mean, the other day I took inventory: Of the seven companies
I've worked for in the last six years, four no longer exist. And
most of the stuff I worked on is already obsolete. Hardly any of it
ever saw an actual customer.
"It was perfectly good code. But computational fashions seems to
change so fast these days. It's hard to feel like you're making any
sort of significant contribution at all when all the rules are in
constant flux, and history gets rewritten every six months."
Steve knew where Paul's lament was leading, but decided to play
devil's advocate just for the fun of it. "Well, hey, you're a big boy
-- and you're getting paid by the hour, anyway, right?"
"Yeah, but it's the futility, you know? You spend every day in the
stocks, sweating and spinning a compiler, and you just know that
in six months they'll cancel the project or start from scratch so
they can chase the latest info-craze. After a while, not even the
money can make you feel good about it. I'd rather be slinging
burgers than feeling so burned out and hopeless at the end of
each day."
Steve put his hands together, prayer-like, a hacker Buddhist. "In
your despair is the beginning of wisdom, grasshopper. What you
do to get somewhere becomes who you are once you arrive."
He dropped the Zen pretense and laid his hands on his chest.
"Look at your old friend Steve: I ain't making the big bucks. Hell,
I'm barely making any bucks -- but at least I love my work. And
I don't have to worry about having my karma shafted by some
wise-ass, business-school dickhead with a Ferrari and a pile of
venture capital.
"That's the whole hacker thing, man. It's 'Live Free or Die.' It's art
for art's sake. Haven't I taught you anything? It always shakes out
the same way, age after age, scene after scene: You can have the
love, or you can have the money. If you ever do happen to get
them both at the same time, you just gotta remember it's a
temporary anomaly, a violation of cosmic law, and it can't last.
That's the tragedy of the market: Whenever anybody does
something beautiful and pure, the Man hunts it down and kills it.
Money hates beauty."
"Why?" Paul asked, dumbly.
Steve sighed and looked at his friend a moment, the lowering sun
reflecting in his eyes. "Just jealousy, I guess."
salon.com | Sept. 18, 1999
Coming Wednesday
Chapter 55: Barry's Singularity: Ship without a captain
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Silicon Follies
+ About Silicon Follies -- with links to all
chapters to date
+ Read the serial from the start.
About the writer
Thomas Scoville is a programmer, writer,
consultant and 16-year veteran of various
Silicon Valley infotech wars.
Copyright ¸ 1999 Salon.com All rights reserved. |
