Microserfs

"I feel as though we're in a witness relocation program," said Todd. "You can leave Bill, but Bill will never leave you."

* * *

We also went to "The Garage," the Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose. We were expecting a Pirates of the Caribbean kind of exhibit, with bioanimatronic Deadheads hacking an Altair inside a re-created 1976 Sunnyvale Garage.

Instead there was a mock clean room, a Silicon Graphics 3D protein simulator, and a chromosome map in the biotechnology section:

Goiter: bottom of gene pair no. 8

Epilepsy: lower half of gene pair 20

Red hair color: middle of pair 4

Albinism: lower 11th pair

Karla said that a quarter of all pure white cats are deaf - that the trait of whiteness and the trait for deafness are entwined together, so that you can't have one without a possibility of the other.

This segued into a discussion of algorithm breeding that lasted well until we arrived in Berkeley where we went to a yuppie-style party at a college friend of Karla's. Ethan drank too much and told loud jokes, and the yuppies weren't happy. We had to take him into the backyard and cool him off. He said, "What's a bar bill but a surtax on reality." We're not sure if he has a drinking problem.

The music was Herb Alpert and Brazil 66. It could easily be your own parents' party, circa Apollo 9. Later, even though we all agreed not to, we ended up surrounding a

Mac and oohing and aahing over a too-tantalizing piece of shareware.

* * *

Anecdote: We talked with Pablo and Christine, Karla's "we-have-a-life" friends who were having the party. I asked them, "Are you married?"

"Well," said Pablo, "we went down to Thailand and a guy in a yellow silk robe waved his hands around our bodies and . . ." Pablo paused. "You know, I suppose we don't really know if we're married or not."

"It was sort of Mick-and-Jerry," said Christine.

Later on, Pablo was telling this deep intimate story about how he found religion in the hinterlands of Thailand, and just at the most intense, quietest moment in the storytelling, Ethan walked into the kitchen, overheard a snatch of conversation, and said, "Thailand? I love Thailand! I'm dying to build a chain of resorts all over Thailand and Bali, kind of like Club Meds but a little more nineties. I'm gonna call them 'Club Zens,' right? 'Cause of the Buddhism thing. There's all kinds of statues and monuments over there I could use to make it look authentic - like you're in a monastery, but with booze and bikinis. Now that's nirvana! As soon as I make my next million . .."

It was a very "Ethan" moment.

* * *

Oh - at the Museum in San Jose there was a pile of this stuff called aerogel - solid, yet almost entirely air. It seemed like thoughts made solid. It was so lovely.

* * *

Another "Oh" - Susan complains that Bug stays up all night shredding paper and the whirring of the rotors is driving her nuts.

* * *

NEW YEAR'S RESOLUTIONS

Me: to penetrate the Apple complex

Karla: undisclosed (doesn't want to jinx)

Ethan: to slow down time

Todd: visit junkyards more often, to bench 420, and to have a relationship Susan: to hack into the DMV and to have a relationship

Bug: to overhaul his image and to have a relationship

* * *

680X0

a burning Lego Los Angeles

880 Nimitz Freeway

Control and the feeling of mastery

moon

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I Robot

The Apollo rocket designers and the NASA engineers of Houston and Sunnyvale grew up in the 1930s and 1940s dreaming of Buck Rogers and the exoterrestrial meanderings of Amazing Stories. When this aerospace generation grew old enough, they chose to make those dreams in metal.

TUESDAY

January 4,1994

Woke up sick this morning - finally got the flu. I thought it might be a hangover, but no. In spite of the fact that I think I feel like death-on-a-stick, I want to write down what happened today.

* * *

First, Michael bounced through the sliding doors around noon in a shiny happy mood, and invited us all out to see our (game show tone of voice) . . . new office! Ethan sold his Ferrari to do the lease. "Farewell 1980s!" he said. (He drives a 1987 Honda Civic now. "I feel like I'm in high school.")

Uncharacteristically brash, he yelled, "Convoy! Everybody . . . down to our new office. You, too, Mrs. Underwood . . . we've been liberated from the Habitrail."

We stuffed ourselves into two cars and drove through the vine-covered suburbs and carefully mowed, Frisbee-free lawns of Palo Alto's tech parks, to Hamilton Street, a block south of University Street downtown. And it was there that we learned what Dad has actually been doing all this time.

* * *

As Michael opened a second-floor oak door, he said to me, in a voice intended to be heard by everybody, "I figured your father's talents as a model railroader might have translatable applications into our world here . . ."