Sascha’s "acutely sensitive hearing" ordinarily precluded the use of electric guitars in the Deus Ex Machina business offices during regular hours. But now that the new product was out and the Deus Exers had a little down time, relatively speaking, after the 30-hour days and the frantic last-minute bug fixes, neither Sascha nor anyone else could really complain about the music. Or the juggling apparatus. Or the ferrets.
Most of the extraneous equipment was provided by Drexler, who couldn’t stand even a few days without having a good time. Not that work wasn’t great, I guessed, but programming with a little lubricant was better. So one day, Drexler would bring Pixy Stix for everyone; the next, some sort of fancy confectionery his girlfriend Shanna had made; the next, water pistols in the shape of little Uzis (under no circumstances to be tried out around the computers). Like any good class clown, Drex wanted to be loved. And when people weren’t totally pissed off at him for secretly uploading his freeware "Star Trek: The Next Generation" screen savers onto their machines, they did.
This particular day I was wandering around the office, wondering how I had ever allowed my husband to conscript me as a PR person for a product I didn’t especially understand, and an apologist for a bunch of technonerds I understood even less. I sat down at my gigantic new Unix workstation, with ExCommunicate 3.0 on the screen just begging for me to use it. Then I jumped up again, dreading to play around with the app, or worse yet, use the phone to contact the press.
My new "office" was scrunched into a dark three-sided closet that had probably been a butler’s pantry. There was barely enough room for me, my desk, and the Machine. Instead of a window, I got a real-time feed of the outdoors on my screen---the same view of MIT from the top of Building 54 that Jonathan had on his home page. Somebody might have at least asked me if I wanted a real-time view of the Charles or something.
But happily, I was by myself. Most people in the company were spread out across Casa Deus’ second floor, generally in the open. This setup facilitated better communication between the programmers, and they liked it that way.
Sascha had his own office, a former lady’s dressing room, where he could hack, deal, and fume in peace. Most of the time, though, he was out on a workstation in the programmers’ space, pulling his hair and talking loudly to himself.
I have, perhaps, implied to you that I spent a lot of time with Sascha. This is not correct. Sascha spent most of his numerous waking hours programming, which is to say he spent most of his time oblivious to the outside, physical world. When a good programmer is at work, nothing matters but the code on the screen---not food, sleep, digestive functions, personal hygiene, phone calls, sex, or other demands of the body. The hacker in a heightened state of consciousness is a priest in religious ecstasy. No one understands his or her extended mystical circumstances but his co-religionists, who look at him with respect and understanding as the hacker staggers through the hall towards the bathrooms or vending machines at one or two in the morning, gazing at the ceiling and whispering arcana at no one.
Shifted consciousness is an intimate thing. Programmers who have sat up together for a day, a night, and another morning in a computer cluster working on a shared project may just have well all have had sex together or seen a religious apparition. This bonding facilitates the creation of the hacker priesthood, with its shared language, mythos, iconography, and culture. But to become one of the elect, you must have been born with the Gift in the first place. Otherwise, no one takes you seriously, and you end up as a systems administrator for a paper manufacturer in Tennessee. Good enough money, in other words, but no prestige.
Drexler’s ferret’s name was Odin, and arrived at work in his smelly white magnificence on Drexler’s shoulder. Odin was not a great favorite of anyone at DEM, but who could deny Drexler his little joys?
The guitar was a less frequent office guest than the ferret, but better preferred. Everyone---even silent, testy Frick, who could blast out a damn good blues riff, actually---took turns standing on chairs and cranking out things resembling tunes through the hacked amps.
All this post-production activity was taking place while I was lurched in my little closet, trying to set up an appointment with Peter Greer, the reporter from the hot new trade rag, Technology Today. Things were disturbingly noisy in the office. But every time I’d look up, guitars, livestock, tech toys, and video games had been put away, the tai ch’i had ended abruptly, and everyone would be plugging away like mad on their machines.
The relationship between the computer industry and the trade press is tight and sometimes nebulous. Computer magazines, of course, would not exist without the products to support them. Less often but not uncommonly, the existence of a hardware, software, or online service company depends on a magazine’s good graces. Positive press can sometimes make a product the top-seller in its class before it even gets out of beta.
Companies want to send trade journalists directly to the marketing or PR people to encourage that positive coverage; journalists will do their utmost to bypass the official happy-talkers and their canned product shots and get right to the developers, who might tell the truth about their wares. Good programmers care about the quality of the work, not the hype surrounding it. A responsible coder without a PR machine breathing down his or her neck will say to a journalist, "We’ve worked hard on the program and it’s still not that good. Plus it’s late. Don’t waste your time writing about it---I don’t think it’s worth signing my key to it right now."
So industry and press circle warily around one another, pretending to work in each other’s best interests. In fact, this supposedly allied relationship is filled with holes and subversive counterattacks.
"Hi Peter, this is Sara from Deus Ex Machina Software."
It was probably not past dawn on the West Coast, and I clearly had Peter’s home number; his languid, preppy voice sounded as if it were still under the sheets. "Oh, sure," he yawned.
I tried to make myself sound extra perky, as if I were not reciting from a memorized script, which I was. "I understand that your magazine is interested in doing a profile of our company. This is a great time to do it. As you know, we’ve just come out with Version 3.0 of our ExCommunicate product, and we’ve developed a lot more user-friendly features."
"Actually," said Peter Greer, still sleepy, "I’m also interested in covering your company from a corporate culture perspective. For-the-hackers–by-the-hackers companies are getting to be a bit of a rarity these days. And yet Deus Ex Machina seems to be holding its own in an unfriendly market. I understand that your president is a rather, well, dynamic fellow, and he makes good copy. As do the rest of the folks there. MIT grads, they all are?"
More of this "corporate culture" shit. Had this guy heard some other things about Sascha and his gang? Or was he extrapolating? Or just naïve?
"Well, we think ExCommunicate speaks for itself, so to speak, ha ha. Our people are much more concerned with standing behind the product than talking about their philosophies, which should be self-evident, anyway---YOW!"
Peter Greer sounded like he had just sat upright in bed. "Sara? What was that? Are you OK?"
"It’s nothing," I said weakly. Something white was bumping up against my leg and gnawing on the cuff of my jeans. Generally, I like small furry things, but I had to restrain myself from kicking this particular one across the room. "Can you hold on for just a minute?"
I put the reporter on hold. "Drexler!" I shouted out of my dark little box. "Please get your ferret the fuck out of here this instant!"
"Aw, shit," came Drexler’s voice. "What’s Odin doing now? Did he chew through an Ethernet cord again?" Drexler’s big bony hands with the heavy-metal-looking rings, and the tip of his bushy beard, poked into my office. He swooped up the squeaking ferret and took it back to his desk with maternal little coos.
"Just a little excitement," I said apologetically. "So, do you want to get together at MultiMediaWorld in San Francisco in January? That’ll be the first time we demonstrate 3.0 to the general public."
"That’s an awfully long time from now. Besides, I thought I conveyed to you that I’m planning on this being a very extensive article. One set of interviews during a trade show won’t be enough. I’d like to come live with your company, practically---see how you operate behind as well as in front of the computers."
I felt a funny little twinge of suspicion. Peter Greer’s confident, bored voice was demanding what I found outrageous things. "I don’t know what Sascha will say about this. After all, the article you have planned doesn’t sound standard for a trade magazine. Rolling Stone or something I could see, but---"
"Ha ha," laughed Peter Greer. "What an unusual idea. But let’s face it---Sara? Sara. We’re both being pleasant here, because it’s our jobs. But, at the risk of sounding like a Mafiosi, we need each other. I think you know what that means. Let me meet you at MultiMediaWorld. We’ll see how everyone gets along. We’ll go from there. I’ll even grab an apartment in Cambridge if I need to. Let’s keep in touch. Let me know if anything comes up."
Feeling used, I got up to look for Sascha. I dodged past Wendy and Ariadne slapping paychecks on everybody’s desk. I nearly tripped over Ian, who was settled on the floor, not quite under his desk, in the lotus position with a closed-off serene smile on his face. Jonathan nearly whapped me with his ponytail in passing. He was testing out the infra-red connectivity on his personal digital assistant by pacing through Casa Deus, holding the little computer up in the air above his head or at floor level. Like the others, he didn’t even see me.
At last I made it to Sascha’s office. I knocked, got no response, and came in. Sascha was as oblivious to me as everyone else had been. He was talking on the phone to someone, a wireless headset mashing down his hair. He was also doing chin-ups on a foam-covered metal bar suspended a few feet from the ceiling.
"Get me a---Unngh!---two-gig external drive for the workstation and another 20 megs of RAM for the laptop," he was saying. "And what do you mean the new version of the PowerPlot spreadsheet doesn’t run on Unix? I depend on that app! It’s---Whoof!---appalling that PowerPlot is putting all its resources into products for Windows NT." He let himself down from the bar. "No, I’m not blaming you. You’re a woman working a phone line for seven dollars an hour or some other atrocious sum. I bet you don’t even look like those happy people in my catalogue. You tell your manager that you’re going to lose me as a customer if you don’t continue to sell a wide range of Unix products. No, I’m not being unnecessarily harsh with you. Yes, you have my Fedex number. Yes, please use Fedex and not any other overnight delivery services. They all suck, but Fedex sucks the least. Goodbye."
Sascha drained the last of a cold latté that was sitting on his desk and wiped the sweat from his pink face. "Hi," he said finally. "Whaddya want?"
"I talked to that reporter from Technology Today," I said unenthusiastically.
"The one who’s going to save our asses from PR implosion? How’d he sound?"
"That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. He really makes me suspicious. His whole M.O. is off-base. Like he thinks he’s writing for Esquire and not a trade magazine or something."
"What’s wrong with aspiring a little?"
"Maybe I’m not explaining myself clearly enough. He wants the piece to be about the whole company---like everything about it, if you get what I’m saying. He’s even planning a move to Cambridge while he’s working on the article. I mean, this could take months if we let him. It’s an---invasion of privacy, or something."
"Privacy? What’s privacy? Privacy isn’t what we need right now. We need selective publicity. We’ll get him to do a terms of agreement for the interviews, if you want. But this could actually be a very profitable relationship."
I shrugged doubtfully. "OK, if you think so..."
Sascha sat down at his machine. Text scrolled down the screen, and he had stopped looking at me. "When is this piece supposed to run?"
"Sometime next year. Maybe in the summer."
"Hmm. We should really have an alpha or even a beta version of ExCom 3.1 out by then. Plus a working prototype of SWorld."
"You’re working on 3.1 already? But 3.0 is barely out."
"Yeah...what do you think we’re getting paychecks for in the meantime, playing video games and baking brownies? Also, we need to develop some long-range strategic planning for Versions 4.0 and 5.0. We’re being pressured into doing a free-software version of ExCom. And we need to figure out what we’re going to be doing five years from now. Provided that there is a company five years from now. Which as you know I’m starting to doubt more and more."
Sascha’s workstation beeped. The screen split in half and a ferrety face poked into ours. "Lord Odin requests your presence in the machine room," said Drexler’s portentous but canned-sounding voice.
"I’ll see you there, Drex," said Sascha. "Get your smelly rodent out of my sight, though. I don’t want to lay eyes on it when I get out there."
Drexler’s hairy hand made the ferret wave goodbye. "Hear that, Odin? He’s insulting us!"
"So I should trust your opinion on this Technology Today thing?" I asked finally, with my arms folded.
Sascha was gathering up a notebook and some floppies. "I don’t see why you’re making such a big deal about this," he said irritably. "I guess you don’t know much about being in the public spotlight. Call the guy back and tell him I said we’re happy to do it. After all, even bad publicity is better than no publicity at all."
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