Alan Weiss (MIT ‘77), otherwise known to members of the computer community as Troll, was lying in bed with splints on his hands and typing painfully at a keyboard suspended on a moveable wooden rack. High above his head, like a TV in a hospital room, was his monitor. It was hard for Troll to get out of bed these days, for a number of reasons.
We found him like this on my first trip to the "Big House," the albatross reminder of everything Troll---and many others in his predicament---had loved and lost.
Marie, Troll’s live-in girlfriend, answered the door. "Alan is in bed today," she said, sighing a little. "I hope he’s expecting you, Sascha."
Marie was a chemist at one of the biotech firms. She was gaunt and morose, and wore a big beaded crucifix around her neck like a nun. She had annulled her previous marriage to marry Troll, who had then decided that he was just too old to get married after all. So Marie was stuck with most of the astronomic mortgage payments on the Big House without ever being its official co-owner, and in addition had to take Troll’s dictation when his hands gave out, and run out to the CVS and pick up his Prozac whenever he couldn’t bear to open the shades in the morning.
Sascha was privy to this information because he sometimes got sobbing calls from Marie late at night after her patience had worn down. But being a (discreet) newcomer to Sascha’s extended family, I wasn’t supposed to know about this. So I politely shook her hand and remarked on the beauty of the kitchen, which was a stunning example of mid-1980s-style architectural perfection.
The Big House, purchased in Arlington at the height of Troll’s fortune, was spectacular even by nouveau-wealth hacker standards. But it was also faintly depressing. Everything, from the exquisite white kitchen to the leather couches to the artwork and recessed lighting, had been the height of style around 1985. It hadn’t changed since. Lately, it looked like it hadn’t even been dusted.
Marie led us into the enormous, airy master bedroom suite. Comfortable chairs surrounded Troll’s bed; apparently, he received visitors there often.
Troll was fully dressed, lying on top of the covers and propped up by five or six paisley pillows. He looked precisely like his email handle. He was barely five feet tall, and his beard fell down to the middle of his chest (an affectation of the last year, Sascha told me later). He was wearing minuscule reading glasses and a black stocking cap.
Sascha shook his hand. "So how’s the lawsuit?"
Troll groaned. "Which one? Plaintiff or defense?" His voice was a surprise---melodic and booming.
"Either."
"Both still circling in heavy turbulence. It’s been years since I’ve spent a week without a call from someone’s lawyer. How come you still have so much energy, Sascha? Hasn’t the industry burnt out your guts yet? Christ, I’m on 80 mg of fluoxetine a day already, and it’s still not helping. And the folks at my insurance company are sick of the hot wax treatments and ultrasounds for my hands."
Troll’s story was familiar to people who had been hanging around the Boston/Cambridge/Rte. 128 corridor since the 1980s. For years, he had been an extremely prolific programmer and influential force in a small computer company that had, by 1980, become one of the largest on the 128 strip. But by 1988, when the Massachusetts Miracle turned out to be as dismal a prospect as a Dukakis presidency, the firm to which Troll had so fiercely devoted his creativity was forced to lay off a third of its workforce.
The company kept Troll, but he could see the future. He gathered a few followers and quit to start his own company. On his way out, he filed suit against his former employer for using his algorithm in one of their products without giving him proper credit. Unbeknownst to anybody, Troll had filed for, and been granted, a patent on the idea.
Troll’s spin-off company, AI Interactions Inc., looked good for a few years. No one had quite figured out yet that Artificial Intelligence was an impractical, cumbersome technology. Troll was the little darling of the biotech firms that wanted AI programs for their work.
The early ‘90s recession laid low many of AII’s potential customers. Simultaneously, three things happened to Troll. First, his hands, already imperiled by years of frenetic typing, finally quit on him. Incapacitated, he had to restructure his company and hire several people to do some of his day-to-day work. Second, one of the people he hired to do this work was Crystal, based on the pleading recommendations of Daphne Strathmore, whom Troll had gone to summer camp with, and whose brother, a nefarious MIT-alum and enfant terrible, he admired professionally. Crystal, unsupervised, catapulted books and administrative functions into chaos, but not before seducing Troll so thoroughly that he ended up typing love poems to her instead of following his doctor’s orders for squeeze balls and contrast baths. Third, his former employers---and erstwhile friends---brought suit against him for stealing their source code to use in his product.
Troll had a nervous breakdown. This was understandable, but AII quickly failed, lacking the all-important combination of incoming funds and Troll’s obsessive management, and he had to sell all its assets at a tremendous loss. He had now been on disability for two years.
"Something terrible is going to happen," said Sascha earnestly, leaning over Troll’s bed. "I know it. Something is going to happen to DEM. That’s why I’ve been writing this new program, called SWorld. It’s AI-based. I want you to take a look at it."
"Something terrible is always going to happen," said Troll. "And AI is on hold for the indefinite future. You know it. I know it. Everybody on what used to be AI Row knows it too. You might as well be developing a virtual reality app for all the market viability you’re going to get along with the hype." He sighed, and pulled on a little rope. Spring water from a jug tipped into a glass. Troll reached out his hairy arm and grabbed the glass and a couple of capsules.
"It’s different now," Sascha insisted. "AI is making a sneaky comeback. You might not have been watching, but it’s true. I’ll bet you don’t know that right now there are companies actually doing AI, but they’re too embarrassed to tell anyone about it. They’re calling it ‘Expert Systems’ instead."
"Of course I know about them," said Troll irritably. "What are you trying to tell me?"
Sascha jumped out of his chair and crawled onto Troll’s bed. On all fours, he drew so close to Troll’s face that their noses were almost touching. "You say you understand it," he said. "But do you have any vision? There’s a startup in Cambridge that just went public. Their stock jumped from 15 to 30 in three days. What do you think they’re doing? AI. If you’re comparing it to VR, you don’t know what you’re talking about."
Troll folded his arms. "Maybe. It’s hard to get too excited about anything these days."
"Can I have my computer, please?" Sascha asked me. I handed him his laptop. He sprung it open excitedly. "While I’m booting this, Troll, why don’t you get a floppy and download your address book for me? I want to show you how SWorld works."
"I’ve got over 2,000 entries, and it’s in an undocumented Microsoft file format," Troll said doubtfully.
"So what’s your problem? That’s the whole point of SWorld."
Troll reluctantly handed Sascha the disk. Sascha popped it into his laptop. He whistled a little and tapped his fingers against the case while the information on the disk copied onto his hard drive. Suddenly, there was Troll’s address book on the screen, done up in elegant graphics.
"Very pretty," commented Troll. "Now what else does it do?"
Sascha grinned. "Let’s look up everybody in Massachusetts." He typed "Loc: MA." A smaller, but still extensive list appeared on the screen. "How about everyone in Massachusetts who uses Deep Blue Internet as their Internet provider?" He typed "Net: Deep Blue." The list shrunk dramatically. "OK, how many of these people have home pages on the Web? And do we want to see them?" He typed some more. The Web browser came up, and a couple of minutes later, there was the home page of some hacker chick.
"Lookit that," said Sascha. "There’s Barbara! I didn’t know you knew her too. She never wanted to date me."
"Sascha, this is really good," said Troll finally. "I know I’ve said it about your programs before, but this is really brilliant, original work."
"Thank you."
"It won’t sell. But you can use it for yourself."
"Natural language recognition and abstract data management with unformatted data?" exclaimed Sascha, shocked. "This is breakthrough stuff. And it runs on stock hardware. Imagine all those people using Windows systems. Here. Can you look through the source code with me?"
He showed Troll the screenfuls of elegant-looking gibberish he had been working on more and more lately. The talk started getting pretty technical from there. Sascha and Troll sat together on the bed with their heads bent over the computer, like two kids reading comic books. I got up, and at a loss walked through the magnificently white, sterile rooms into the drawing room.
Marie was sitting morosely at the grand piano in a heavy grey cardigan that hung off her bony shoulders. She was playing something strange and lovely.
"It’s Debussy," she said, without looking up. "I really enjoy his music. It lets me be somewhere where I am not."
"I don’t want to bother you, then."
"It’s no bother. Just let me finish. Then we can chat."
Marie leaned over the piano again, and I wandered around the first floor. It looked as if some walls had been knocked out; there weren’t very many rooms and they were all gigantic.
The back wall had been turned into a single pane of glass. The glass looked out towards the small but serene back yard, now covered with a sad carpet of dead leaves, and beyond to Spyglass Pond. A couple of late-season geese rose from the pond with heavy wings. In the back yard was a little statue of a dryad, crouched over a Zen pool. I suspected that the dryad was another of Elia’s sculptures. I went out the back door into the freezing drizzle to inspect the statue’s face. Just as I thought, it was you-know-who, contemplating with her little smile something I could neither see nor understand.
Someone knocked on the glass. Marie was waving at me. "Sara, come in!" she shouted. "You’re going to get pneumonia out there!"
"I swim every day," I told her, "even in the middle of winter. I go out with wet hair. I’m never sick." I paused. "Thanks for your concern, though."
Marie looked as if she might be trying to smile. "Let me get you a towel and make you some tea, anyway."
She put some late-fall classical music on the stereo and went into the kitchen. "Please. Sit down and get warm. It’s so cold outside." She spoke as if the cold were some kind of metaphysical state that she felt acutely.
I took her blanket and sat down on the couch. I stared up at the high ceilings. This house, with all its dated cleanliness and silence and perfection, was very sad. I could tell that few, if any, children had ever been in it, and none would ever come to stay.
Marie gave me my tea and sat across from me. "Sara," she said abruptly, "are you sad? Are you lonely?"
"No, I don’t think so. I’m alone a lot, and a lot of times I feel alienated from everyone that I’m around. That’s just how I operate, I guess. Hanging around Sascha’s friends has a big advantage, though: they’re a more interesting group of people to be alienated by. Actually, I’m really grateful I got out of the world I was in. I don’t miss it at all."
"Sascha treats you well? He doesn’t hurt you?"
"No! He’s---well, you know how he is---but he adores me. I think he’d crack into little pieces if I weren’t there anymore."
Marie held tightly onto her mug with her long bony fingers. "Let me tell you something about me, Sara. Sascha probably explained to you that I work for one of the biotech firms? But I’ll bet he didn’t tell you what I do all day. I research HIV. I spend my days surrounded by vials of HIV-infected blood. The blood comes from HIV-positive patients in the Boston area. I might even know some of them. So might you. I’m part of one of those idealistic teams that’s trying to find a cure for AIDS---thus far unsuccessfully, of course.
"I’ve weakened my eyes looking through so many microscopes. I compromise my life every day by handling HIV-infected blood. I didn’t attend a top college, Sara. I didn’t have any connections. I’m even from the South. But I’m doing this because people’s lives matter to me.
"Then I come home and deal with Alan. I love him, and I’ve stayed with him through difficult times, even through a sad little affair with someone I considered to be not only a tramp, but one of the most high-risk women I’ve ever met. And yet I see him as being so spoiled. He lives in one world only, with one interest. Regardless of how much or how little money he has, or how many pills he’s taking or how much time he spends at the physical therapist’s, everyone in the world that matters to him knows who he is. ‘Alan Weiss?’ they’ll say. ‘Sure. He’s the spin-off AI guy.’ They don’t know or care who I am.
"I once thought I wanted to be a nun. Then I met my ex-husband and decided I would give up my vocation for him. We never had any children. Alan and I probably won’t have any either. I grew up thinking I was going to give my life in service to the needy and the oppressed. Now I’ve given it to the service of two men and to the well-being of society, and look what I’ve gotten from it: this sepulchre." She gestured around the room and looked down at her hands.
"What are you trying to tell me then?"
"Watch out for yourself, Sara. The hackers’ world is a terrible one for women. On the surface, it’s very seductive. It’s so now; there’s so much money flying around. People who were beaten up in junior high are millionaires. If they felt eccentric or nerdy when they were younger, there’s a whole world of bright, dynamic, successful people who had the same experiences. It’s like coming home.
"But women can lose a part of our sacredness there. We become wives, mothers, secretaries, muses, whores, for these men---if you’ve noticed, women hackers often take other women, not men, as lovers. Hackers don’t care about our feelings or interests if they don’t have to do with their everlasting machines. They laugh at what we majored in in college, tell us our education was a waste of time and money. They’ll teach us programming. But we can’t possibly teach them anything that matters."
I looked at the rain outside. What was I supposed to say? "So I guess I should have met you before I got married, so you could have warned me against it, right?"
"You did get married quickly. People were shocked that you jumped in. You and Sascha didn’t know each other at all; rather, you didn’t know him."
"Do me a favor, then. Don’t tell me any shocking stories about him. I hear enough of them already."
"I don’t know if it’s any concession to you, Sara, but the world that bred Sascha and Alan and their behavior and attitudes is in decline. It’s happening in biotech as well. Even the medium-sized firms can’t keep themselves from being bought out by the big corporations. What’s going to happen to the small ones? Truthfully, Alan was never an entrepreneur, and he couldn’t reinvent himself as one. I don’t know Sascha well enough to know how he’ll do when his time comes."
Troll is a weak person, I thought to myself, and you’re probably not helping him by not being honest. But I was prevented from having to deliver this particular blow by the appearance of Sascha, pink-cheeked and bouncing, and behind him, Troll, looking as if he hadn’t stretched out any of his muscles in a while.
"Guess what!" said Sascha, like a four-year-old. "He likes it!" He lifted me to my feet. "Let’s go home. I really want to work on this some more, before my ideas fly away. Oh, no! There goes one now! Bye bye, idea!"
Marie put her arm protectively around Troll’s shoulder. "Thanks so much for stopping by," she said. "Sara, call me if you ever want to talk. I mean it."
Troll and Marie stared dolorously out the rain-spattered French windows as we waved goodbye to them and roared the truck out of the Big House’s circular drive. "See, look, you made a friend," Sascha said. "Don’t tell me that Marie didn’t genuinely like you. You’re so afraid of being different from all of us."
"Actually, Marie spent a lot of time badmouthing you and Troll and the hacker culture in general. She’s really kind of a downer."
"What’d she say?"
"Oh, basically that women in the community are really put into difficult situations by men. Like they aren’t equals, no matter how hard they work. A lot of them are relegated to really sexist roles. Or they’re treated like imitation men."
"What does she know? She’s not a hacker."
"Actually, she didn’t say all of it. I did some extrapolating, and I’m saying some of it myself. It’s just what I’ve noticed."
"I’ve tried really hard to get all the women I’ve been involved with into computers," Sascha said defensively. "Some of them just haven’t been that interested. I’m not saying that disinterest is a character flaw or anything, but..."
"Well, I’m not uninterested, if that’s what you’re trying to imply. I just want to keep a large chunk of my personal sanctity intact. I know that part of you thinks I’m just a lazy slacker good-for-nothing who needs to be set straight. Well, Sascha, you’re just really lucky that you’re this supreme being whose talents set you above reproach.
"But since you’ve been so high-drama about this ‘bad thing’ that’s going to happen, here’s a little scenario: What if your abilities suddenly don’t mean much anymore? What if you suddenly had to live in the regular world and be a regular person? How’d you act then?"
"How do you think I’m going to act? Depressed. What’s your point?"
"I’m just asking you to respect me. Know that I’m different than you and have different interests. And know that other, perfectly fine, normal, and productive people are different from you too."
"That’s all?"
"OK. Maybe we should have sex a little more often. And when we do, maybe you should pay a little more attention to it."
"Ha! That’s something we can take care of right now."
We were pulling into Casa Deus’ driveway. Sascha dragged me out of the old black pickup’s passenger seat and gave me a long, slurpy kiss. "OK, now we’re kissing in the rain. There. That’s romantic. Even though it’s on our lawn in front of all these cars and everyone on our block." He dragged me along a little more. "Now we’ll kiss on the front porch. And if you call to the voice lock, I can even carry you over the threshold, if you’d like."
"You never did that when we got married."
"I forgot. We can pretend it’s our wedding night again. Except this time we’ll do it at home, and it’ll be better. I won’t even check my email."
Sascha carried me into the dim foyer. He was about to carry me onto the living room couch, when he tripped over the stack of mail that had fallen out of the slot, and then again over a 19" monitor in a cardboard box that someone had stupidly left for him in the doorway. I fell out of his arms, and we both pitched to the living room carpet.
"Good thing this is such a damn expensive rug," said Sascha. "Otherwise we would have both broken our necks."
"Light some sage," I giggled. "Sanctify your bachelor pad for me, Mr. Strathmore."
Sascha was on his knees in the gloom, sifting through the mail. "In a minute," he said, distracted. "Ooh, cool. Here’s some demo programs for Windows. And a new copy of Technology Today. And a new copy of Information Week. And two back copies of the Wall Street Journal. And two party invitations. And---wow!---two trial-size boxes of this new chocolate-covered cereal."
"What about your program that you were so hell-bent on working on the second you got back here?" I asked judiciously.
"Yeah. That. You’re right. You’re always right. Hand me my laptop. Forgive my momentary lapse of reason."
I lightly tossed him his multi-thousand-dollar machine. He stood up and caught it gracefully. "Hey, stay with me," he said. "Don’t turn on the lights. You can read your paper mail using the backlight on my screen."
The office phone rang. "Fuckit," murmured Sascha. "Nobody answer. Let’s sit here together and hack while Rome burns."
The next couple of hours were not sex. But the carpet was soft and Sascha was warm, and Casa Deus was quiet for us, and the new cereal was pretty damn tasty, and altogether it was better than nothing.
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