Chapter 1

When I married Sascha Strathmore, president of Deus Ex Machina Software Inc., I didn’t just marry him. I married his business partners, his hacker friends, all his ex-girlfriends and various lovers, his excessive Cambridge Victorian home-turned-company-headquarters, the Unix computer operating system, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the philosophy it imparted to its students in the 1980s, the entire small-business software industry, and the rise and spectacular decline of a whole subculture that is at this minute leaving our world and passing into some kind of digitized, mechanized, ego-driven, long-haired, psychedelic, Goddess-worshipping Elysian Fields.

People who knew me from my old life are always surprised at how much I’ve changed. Frankly, I’m surprised too. I would have been one of the last people to believe that I, Sara Abrams, bitchy slacker English-major jockette, would not only marry a millionaire boy computer-genius but also, in the space of a year, come to ardently adopt his lifestyle and world view. But one thing I’ve learned from Sascha and his crew is that ambitious projects undertaken for fun often turn into your life’s work before you know it.

I had none of this philosophizing on my mind when I attended my first of many Deus Ex Machina party-to-end-all-parties. I was to marry Sascha Strathmore in two days, after an embarrassingly brief and reckless courtship. Sascha had opened up his grand home office, nicknamed Casa Deus, to Deus Ex initiates and to the generally debauched technoweenies of Cambridge and vicinity. He was fêting the coincident shipping of Version 3.0 of ExCommunicate, Deus Ex Machina’s multimedia groupware product, our impending nuptials, and his 30th birthday. In this way, he could get a triple ego-blast, and still be able to write the whole thing off as a corporate tax deduction.

Most of what I experienced at that party---long-haired hackers leaping on furniture and coupling on the Oriental rugs, hallucinatory computer-generated images projected onto blank walls, computer terminals set up for guests to relieve boredom or try out chemically induced flashes of inspiration, vegan, wheat-free munchies on one table and Doritos and Jolt on the other, 24-CD jukebox stacked with Nine Inch Nails and Pink Floyd---was viewed from underneath the living room couch amidst a pungent cloud of smoke.

I was sharing a big joint with Wendy Marshall, a major character in the Deus Ex Machina theatre. Wendy played the multiple roles of company accountant, Sascha’s partner’s wife (and formerly Sascha’s long-suffering girlfriend), and mother of a one-year-old daughter whose biological father probably, although not definitely, was not my fiancé.

"Pretty tame crowd tonight," Wendy said between tokes. I tried to nod, but kept bumping my head on the couch slats. Wendy suddenly thrust out her long, darkly haired leg, and playfully tripped some staggering guy who was wearing his backpack on both shoulders as if it were a congenital deformity. "Hey Munch!" she giggled. "How did you like the party at Amethyst’s last weekend? What were you guys doing down in the basement?"

Munch hobbled away with a weak smile. "Geek. He lost his virginity to me," Wendy said matter-of-factly. "But here comes the main course anyway."

I stuck my head out from underneath the couch to watch my husband-to-be make his appearance. And what an appearance it was: Dressed in black leather pants, Cavalier white ruffled shirt, and New Age jewelry, angelic blond curls flying, Sascha made a running dash from the kitchen and dove head first onto the bare dining room table. After skidding to the exact middle, he gracefully drew himself to his full five feet six-and-one-half inches, and raised his hands in the air like a conductor before an orchestra. Someone cut off the stereo.

"Thanks to all of you for coming tonight," he said in his clear, persuasive voice. "Tonight is a great night for me and for Deus Ex Machina Software. We’re celebrating the prerelease of ExCommunicate 3.0---if you don’t know about this, please leave---" (here the crowd tittered appreciatively) "and also reveling in my upcoming wedding to a wonderful woman named Sara Abrams."

"Hi Sara!" yelled the guests. I lifted my head a little from the carpet and waved a feeble hand. How inglorious of me, I thought. I know less about computers than most of these people’s cats.

"But tonight," Sascha continued excitedly, stalking atop the table, "I want you to take home a message about ‘enough.’ Right now, I feel like I have so much---a successful product, a wonderful fiancée, a great community, money, publicity, creativity---but it’s not enough. That’s why I’m successful. Never be satisfied with enough. Enough is for people who can’t handle more than enough. Those people are never successful---you know it, I know it. So when you feel like you’ve done enough, do more. When you feel like you’ve had enough, have more. Enough is for losers."

Suddenly, probably on cue, a piece of string with something attached to it fell from the ceiling to dangle above Sascha’s head. People gasped, then laughed. Anchoring the string was something that looked like a postage stamp. Sascha smiled at it.

"Remember," he said, "if you want to stay young, rich, and full of ideas forever, never settle for enough. Instead, let this be your mantra: Excess is power."

He lifted his head and snapped off the hanging tab of acid with his teeth. The music returned with an industrial bang, and the phalanx of hackers moved together in an orgy of algorithmic grace, shedding glasses, backpacks, and awkwardness as they went.

*

This story is about the end of an era. By the time you finish reading it, yet another small Unix software company or two will have closed its doors and sold off its workstations, suffocated under the weight of hubris and bad timing. The weak of character have adopted their conquerors’ tools, donning suits and learning to program for Microsoft Windows. The strong look for employers who will accept their anachronisms and eccentricities, or vow to build another software empire, in fond memory of their glory days.

Ten years ago these folks---filled with a recent good education, boundless faith in the cyberrealm, and even more boundless ego---ran your world by controlling most of the computerized things in it. They called themselves "hackers," grew their hair long, and got paid $100/hour to set up networks. They put banks, schools, and major catalogue companies on the Internet. But you’re a lot more comfortable with computers now then you were then. So are the people who run computer systems. The world’s administrators and layfolk now do for themselves what they used to pay arrogant, long-haired kids to do.

Computer jocking---hacking---is no longer a sanctified priesthood. The "gods," as they used to call themselves, are facing their own mortality. And Gotterdamerüng is never pretty.