Jonathan and Wendy’s son, Llewellyn Skye Marshall, was named in a Pagan ceremony the same day that the issue of Rolling Stone came out. Naturally, poor old Llewellyn didn’t get the attention he deserved. Everyone came to the naming with a copy of the magazine, and laughed and shrieked and pointed at everything they saw, which unfortunately didn’t include the baby.
On one of those eternally hip white-backgrounded RS covers were Sascha, Jonathan, Ian, Drexler, and Catfood. The art director had dressed them in all in black, and they crouched around their carefully placed workstations, staring fearsomely at the camera as only tortured geniuses can. And there was the headline that Peter Greer had threatened us with: "Death of a Startup: The High Times and Hard Fall of Deus Ex Machina Software."
How exquisite is the torture brought about by the intermingling of mortification and absolute ego gratification. People point you out on the street and say, "Hey, there are the people who fucked up! They were on the cover of Rolling Stone!" And if I were in a certain self-destructive kind of mood, I’d point out the small inset photograph of me in my black cashmere, looking boreder than bored. The caption next to me read: "Sara Abrams-Strathmore, wife of Deus Ex Machina president Sascha Strathmore, grows tired of selling herself as a ‘booth bimbo’ at San Francisco’s MultiMediaWorld Expo."
Peter’s piece wasn’t complimentary, but neither was it particularly false. He didn’t leave much else out, either, from our sex lives to Frick’s duplicitous actions. It’s really amazing how much humiliation can be crammed into four thousand words or so:
"It’s this year’s MultiMediaWorld Expo in San Francisco’s Moscone Convention Center. After a night of corporate debauchery in the plush penthouse of the city’s Fairmont Hotel, Sascha Strathmore, 30-year-old Napoleonic president of whiz-kid groupware company Deus Ex Machina Software Inc., arrives at the company’s booth to discover what every publicity-hungry small-software-company mogul dreads: he has been hacked.
"Strathmore, ever volatile and quick to lay blame, mistakenly believes that IBM has caused the mischief. In return for his accusations, he finds himself being dragged by a security guard from Big Blue’s booth.
"After all, IBM is a recovering computing giant, regaining its power and influence, and flush with cash. The boys and girls at Deus Ex Machina Software are losing CPU in real time. Within eight months, this company, based like many on MIT-alumni connections, big egos, and chemically fueled Messianism about the future of technology, will be victim to many hacks and acts of self-destruction and fate that will reduce it from a proud, tightly knit organization with an enviable product, ExCommunicate, to a losing proposition, forced to sell off its Cambridge headquarters and all its worldly assets.
"Think of the fate of Deus Ex Machina as a kind of morality tale for the ‘90s: bratty, long-haired Techies who refused to give in to the realities of the times. Call it, if you will, the ‘Bonfire of the Hackers’."
*
Oddly enough, Sascha took this all really calmly. He had passed through the valley of the shadow of death yet again, and not much could touch him. When the other reporters started swooping over Casa Deus, which now had a big "Sale Pending" sign on the unmowed front lawn, he welcomed them in with something akin to politeness, and told them whatever they needed to know as long as it didn’t compromise anyone’s personal secrets.
At night, he watched over me in our little moonroom as if he had never quite seen me before, or hadn’t been introduced to me properly. "You are so strange and beautiful," he told me. "I never thought I’d marry someone who’s so different from me." The irony here, of course, was that when we got married, I was so utterly alien to him that he couldn’t even get his mind around me. Now that my ones and zeroes had shifted enough for him to understand my basic framework, he finally saw how much I differed from him. But I figured Elia’s potion was pretty strong; we’d be together for a while, at least.
Casa Deus ended up being bought at a modest profit by a small venture capital firm that specialized in financing start-up high-tech companies. The firm, which was not planning on using 86 Magazine Street as anyone’s living quarters, liked all the connectivity and the house’s juxtaposition of old-world luxury and new-media technological overflow. But they were all business anyway; soon all the cozy effects of home, the temporary asylums for tired hackers and would-be girlfriends, would be replaced by discreet mini-fluorescent lights and industrial carpet.
Only thing was, no one could get the boardroom table out of the Casa Deus boardroom. In the end, it had to be sold with the house, stuck in there as firmly as a ship in a bottle. A couple Deus Exers laughed nervously about whether the table’s new owners would be stuck with the financial curse of the previous two.
Sascha was not quite as upset by all of this as he could have been. Number one, he was taking large doses of some homeopathic floral remedy Elia had cooked up for him, which was supposed to relax tension and reduce fear. Number two, a company had actually offered to buy the rights to SWorld, with a big advance on future royalties.
The president of the company, which was another one of those "expert systems" firms---i.e., they really were creating AI but wanted the AI market to rebuild itself before they admitted it---had read the article in Rolling Stone. The president was an old cohort of Troll’s from the early 1980s, and knew that Troll knew Sascha. Troll told this guy that Sascha’s product was exceptional, Sascha demo’ed it for him, and suddenly Sascha was holding a five-figure check in his hands, with promise of a 3% return on all copies of SWorld sold. Sascha muscled around a bit, and landed a lucrative contract to work with the firm, developing the follow-up product, SWorld 2.0.
We threw a low-key BYO party to celebrate. Casa Deus was already starting to be boxed up and the wild, precious things put away. So we sat in the debris with a bowl of Brazil nuts and a bottle of Bombay Sapphire Gin while Portishead and Kate Bush played on the stereo, and commiserated with the picture of Queen Victoria on the bottle about what it’s like to lose an empire.
No one was quite sure where they’d go next. Sascha and I were the only people who actually had to move their residence. Sascha was swinging some deal to take over the mortgage of a defunct housing collective in the Oakland Hills, but that project seemed bigger and more ambitious than anyone could manage right now. His real-estate machinations didn’t seem to stress him out; actually, he needed something concrete to think about. In fact, the only thing that really seemed to bother him was the impending arrival of his sister Daphne.
He didn’t know quite when she was showing up. She was coming from Botswana via New York, and she was stopping in Cambridge on her way over to see their folks in Ohio. Unfortunately, most of Sascha’s information was provided through the not entirely reliable filter of Crystal, who had since skipped town for somewhere in or around Coos Bay, and, like always, didn’t leave a forwarding address or phone number.
So one morning, after I had been up late writing the promotional material for SWorld (my work was part of Sascha’s contract), I heard harsh voices coming from the mostly dismantled second floor. "I can’t believe you have Daddy’s table in here!" a woman was shouting. "No wonder you went out of business. It’s the curse of the patriarchy!"
"You should have seen it here when everything was beautiful," whimpered Sascha. "You were just too busy being Ms. World Savior to ever even come and visit."
I took a quick shower and ran downstairs. Sascha and his sister were standing nose-to-nose, arguing. The resemblance between them was spectacular. Daphne, fists on hips, was just an older, butchier version of the same model. She wore cut-off army fatigues, and had one of those permanent, baked-in tans from many years spent in the hot sun. Sascha looked like a breakable figurine next to her.
"Hi, I’m Sara, Sascha’s wife," I said pleasantly. "You have to be Daphne."
Daphne sized me up with fearsomely pale blue eyes in her dark face. "So you’re the one who hates Patricia, huh?"
"No, no, it’s not like that, really. I had some...ideological differences...with her---Crystal---at first. But I’ve come to see how much she’s done for Sascha, and the---" was I really going to say this? "---the intrinsic value she has as a person and as a mirror to reflect all of our heteropatriarchally instilled prejudices." I smiled brightly at Daphne like I had just beat her at a round of golf.
"You haven’t had sex with her?"
"Of course not."
"Has Sascha?"
I looked back to the night I found them up in our rooms. Sascha had never told me what had happened prior to my arrival, and I had never asked. "No."
"Good. I’m not staying here with you two, by the way. I need to spend the day tracking down Patricia. She left me with some clues about where she was going, but no specifics. I need to see her. Soon. I’ve been in love with her for eleven years now. It’s been hard."
"You know she goes by a different name now," I offered helpfully.
"Yeah. She’s told me. But I know who she really is. I can see through names." She motioned to Sascha. "Gimme a phone."
Sascha handed her the digital cordless receiver. Daphne stared at it for a minute. "I’ve been gone a long time," she said to it.
"Are you going to go back to Botswana? Or are you going to end up somewhere here?" I asked.
"Dunno. Depends on where my heart leads me, I guess. I need to see Patricia face to face and know what she’s thinking. Are gay marriages legal in the US yet?"
Wow, I thought. This woman has come back to the United States to chase an eleven-year-old memory of a love affair with a teenage runaway. The Strathmores definitely do not take loss of love very well. Or maybe Crystal’s powers were really as great as advertised.
*
Sascha and Wendy had a plan. It was about time for one. All of Casa Deus’ worldly assets were temporarily stored in a warehouse in East Cambridge, and Sascha and I were crashing in a bare, cavernous apartment in the Square. He didn’t want to be in Cambridge any more. The city had been "sucked dry" for him, he said, and every block had "multiple layers of memory strangling it." Mixed metaphors aside, Sascha Strathmore, like any American man with a past, wanted to head West.
In the afternoon, I came back to the apartment to find Sascha and Wendy, pale blond and rich dark, sitting on our crashpad’s bare wooden floor and bent closely together over some blueprints and documents. I felt a moment of insane jealousy fire through me. I had forgotten---actually forgotten---that they had been lovers on and off for nearly six years, and the shock of remembering was strong. It may have been the first time I had ever seen them together without a chaperone.
"How about living in Oakland?" Sascha asked me, looking at the whining fax machine next to him. He pulled the sheets of paper out of it before they dropped to the floor. "Excellent," he said. "They’re sending us more documentation. I’d like to get this deal rolling soon."
I sat down next to them on the scuffed floorboards. "What deal?"
"A woman on the MIT-alum ‘Deviants’ mailing list bought some land and a bunch of houses in Oakland a couple of years ago," explained Wendy, who magically pulled a sleeping Llewellyn out of a little sack at her side. "She wanted to start a cooperative housing development, but she couldn’t get enough funding or enough people to join to make the mortgage payments. Plus there was the earthquake and the fire, all that stuff. People got superstitious. So she bailed a while ago. They’re hemorrhaging money worse than us. But a bunch of us---if we all pool our money together---have enough people and cash to start up shop."
"So we’d all be living together. Not in one house, though, right?"
"No, but all in one compound, though. We’d have a common kitchen and living area, and spaces for parties, and childcare for people who needed it. Maybe eventually we’d even go for passive solar or growing our own food or composting toilets or something. Sascha and I have been talking about this for ages. It was something he and I had always wanted to do, before the company got so much in the way."
This comment shut me up for a while. I couldn’t imagine a time when the company hadn’t gotten in the way, but it must have been a very long time ago indeed."
Soon enough, the Web page and various other forms of advertising for Elysian Fields Cohousing were getting their own share of publicity. Sascha hadn’t matured quite enough during the Deus Ex Machina ordeal to lose his flair for the overdramatic. The Web page read:
"We are establishing the perfect technopagan idyll---a co-housing arrangement, somewhere in the Oakland Hills, with a little bit of private land, little houses, a big house with performance/feasting/ritual area, a home school maybe, workshops, and a T1, with fiber to the little houses. Maybe a greenhouse, some outbuildings. Not off the grid, but mostly self-sufficient. We’re starting to ingather interested parties."
I was astonished at how many parties wanted to be ingathered. Some of them were old, skanky hippies who had been living in Berkeley for the last three decades and didn’t know a T1 from a tambourine. But more were Cantabrigians who wanted to start a new life somewhere else, or younger people who lived on the West Coast and thought a wired, cozy development with a bunch of hackers who had been on the cover of Rolling Stone would be just the thing for them.
Amazingly, we got the eight groups that we needed, and slopped together the funding for the Elysian Fields Corporation---cash, no mortgage. People in the computer industry are rich. I’m still a little amazed by it.
Wendy was in charge of the finances; Sascha was handling the logistics. He was teaching himself to program in Perl by writing a system that would manage the practicalities of shared living, from determining who needed to pay what proportion of the utilities, to who would cook and clean in the common area on what night. He was actually happy, and relieved to be taking the geographical cure.
Jonathan and the others were busy trying to get jobs or rustle up some consulting, so this left me to be Miss Hospitality. I didn’t actually have to interview people all by myself. This was good, because my harsh judgementalism was getting a little flaky these days and I couldn’t quite tell what candidates my self of a year or so ago would have booted out the door before they even opened their mouths.
Once people had been accepted into Elysian Fields, though, it was my job to talk to them about their expectations, start building some kind of group consensus, and prepare our "mission statement." The mission statement had to be given to the City of Oakland for its approval (I guess the City had finally succumbed to the ‘90s) and we had to have it posted up on one of our common bulletin boards, like the anti-discrimination bulls and OSHA workplace standards all offices have to post in their cafeterias.
The other thing I was doing---horrible dictu---was taking classes to be a certified massage therapist. Do you believe this? Maybe I had been on my beautiful rave trip when I had this epiphany, and the brain damage had been instantaneous and permanent Either that, or the Imp of the Perverse had taken hold of my hands and compelled them to touch the bare flesh of strangers. I wanted to heal all the hurt I had created in my adult life: the men I had led on with my face and then spurned when their throbbing bodies reached out to me; the well-meaning women who felt hurt and snubbed when I refused to be hugged. Like any convert, I was becoming among the most fanatical of my adopted creed.
My first victim was a sad young woman, the new wife of one of the programmers who had been accepted into the development. Her name was Faith, and she was small and blond like me, and scared about leaving Cambridge. I felt like her big sister. I told her I was studying massage, and would she like one? "Oh no, I can’t possibly impose on you," she squeaked, but I led her to my new portable massage table and told her she didn’t even need to take off her clothes.
"I used to be like you," I told her, shaking each of her arms and legs to relax them, and stroking a reassuring hand down her spine. "It took me a while to get used to living so openly like this. But now I’m happier than I’ve ever been. What have you done to loosen up and get grounded? Have you tried hottubbing? Tantra? A ritual?"
She looked at me like I was mad. "How long have you been in this scene?" she whispered.
"Oh, I don’t know," I said cheerily, rubbing her goosebumped bare back with lavender-scented oil. "A year, a year and a half. Things change so quickly. I’ve lost track."
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