You made a lot of money in the tech boom.
That’s an understatement.
Tell me how it got started.
I don’t feel like talking about that today. Shut off the recorder.
Come on, now.
Shut off the fucking recorder.
Okay, it’s off.
The red light’s still on.
That’s the battery light. The switch is to OFF, see?
This whole thing is bullshit.
Why are you angry? Did I make you angry, Luke?
I’ve been nothing but patient with you. But nothing I say is going to move you to do anything besides file your stupid little report. You’re humoring me. Nothing I say is going to matter to you.
Of course it matters to me.
Bullshit.
Okay, have it that way. You can find someone else to help you tell your story. Be my guest.
[…]
Come on, Luke, be reasonable.
[crying]
Here. A tissue. I know this is hard for you.
You have no idea.
Can we get you anything? Better food? More books?
[crying]
We can continue tomorrow if you prefer.
No. Let’s keep going.
Why don’t we take a half hour, get our bearings, and come back.
Okay.
All right, we’re back. We were talking about your early days in the tech boom.
Yeah, so after I cleaned up my personal appearance I started talking to Wyatt and Erika about all these little companies that seemed to be sprouting up around the city. Netscape launched. AOL was rising. We started going to smart-drug parties and talking a lot about virtual reality. You could get swept up in these convergent zones of Bay Area freakishness and technology and money. Someone would get a weird idea that someone else made happen with technology and then capital started flowing. It struck me that those who understood the languages of technology were those who attracted the most money. So I bought a computer and set out to learn HTML and C++ and Perl at community colleges. I’d hang out at Wyatt and Erika’s and we’d drink copious amounts of coffee and take ginkgo biloba and write code all night. Soon Wyatt and I quit the reprographics company and I started working for a company called Netversive while he joined something called Boing Dot.
You gave up trying to find the proof for the brochure?
We did. I was a little disappointed in myself at first but, at the same time, throwing in the towel liberated me. Not that it mattered one way or the other. A week after we quit our jobs at the reprographics place the whole building burned to the ground. The official reason was faulty wiring. Wyatt and I suspected that something malevolent was at our heels but we didn’t have much time to ponder the situation. Our new jobs demanded our complete attention and all of our time.
What did Boing Dot and Netversive do?
Good question. I still couldn’t tell you. Really it all boiled down to making Web pages and developing the back-end systems to support them. That’s what everyone was actually doing. But everything was pitched as “internetworking solutions for revolutionary crossfunctional database management” blah blah blah. Boing Dot had something to do with those annoying pop-up ads. Netversive’s product was more like a suite of analytics tools. I lasted there five months then accepted a job at a start-up called iPeanut. An online peanut-butter store. But more than just peanut butter. Other nut butters as well. While I was there I successfully oversaw the launch of our jams tab. My base salary was $150,000.
How long did you last at iPeanut?
Not long. Six months, maybe? Because the company was bought out by—okay, you’re not going to believe this but I swear it happened—an online bread company. The vision of eBread was to be the market leader in online sandwich ordering. I hung around the merged company long enough to attend an all-hands meeting with the founder. Nice enough guy named Ray. Completely delusional, obviously, a real Kool-Aid drinker. His goal was to provide a way for people to order sandwiches on the Internet and have them delivered within the hour in major metropolitan areas. I remember a heated discussion breaking out in a conference room about whether we should offer free pickles. One time Ray put up a PowerPoint with all this market research about how many people in America routinely eat sandwiches. The numbers were astronomical, as you can imagine. He argued that if eBread were to snag just one-half of 1 percent of the national market in sandwiches, we’d be a $1 billion company within a year. The company went public, I cashed out my stock, and walked away with $500,000 more in my savings account. I was sick of eating sandwiches every day. Meanwhile, Wyatt tired of Boing Dot and went to work for Skinwiggle. They developed virtual mannequins for online clothing stores. I got a new job as director of customer solutions at Iceberg Software. The obsessiveness with which I had tried to track down Nick transferred easily to my new work ethic. I would get up at six, stop by my favorite café for a triple latte, be at my desk by quarter to seven, work until nine at night, and come home or sleep in a sleeping bag under my desk. I don’t think I took a crap in my apartment’s toilet for a year.
What did Iceberg Software do?
Firewalls, mostly. Security for high schools, filtering software. I cashed out my stock there for three-quarters of a million. Then I went to join Wyatt at Skinwiggle. I developed a customer relationship management system there from scratch. Insane the stuff we cranked out by hand when there were dozens of companies churning out products that did the same thing only better. The good thing about working at Skinwiggle was I got to spend more time with Wyatt. He wasn’t in the best of shape. The Internet aged him. He was chronically sleep-deprived and overworked. He started complaining about his chakras and the troubling condition of his stool. He bitched constantly about the company, responding to every perceived slight with biting sarcasm. The thing about Web companies is there’s always something severely fucked-up. There is always an outage, always lost data, always compromised customer information, always a server going off-line. You work with these clugey internal tools and patch together work-arounds to compensate for the half-assed, rushed development, and after a while the fucked-upness of the whole enterprise becomes the status quo. VPs insecure that they’re not as in touch as they need to be with conditions on the ground insert themselves into projects midstream and you get serious scope creep. You present to the world this image that you’re a buttoned-down tech company with everything in its right place but once you’re on the other side of the firewall it looks like triage time in an emergency room, 24/7. Systems break down, laptops go into the blue screen of death, developers miskey a line of code, error messages appear that mean absolutely nothing. The instantaneousness with which you can fix stuff creates a culture that works by the seat of its pants. I swear the whole Web was built by virtue of developers fixing one mistake after another, constantly forced to compensate for the bugginess of their code. Then, on top of the technical fucked-upness, you add the human emotions of an office environment. People feel undervalued, hold grudges, get snagged into little vendettas, fantasize about shoving their bosses off the roof. At Skinwiggle, where I was making $250 grand, there were constant turf wars. The CEO was this colossal prick named Vikram Ramakrishnan. He’d come up through the brutal Indian university system, and was unanimously reviled by his employees. Every morning he’d tell his assistant, “I’m ready for my breakfast,” and she’d go prepare him a bowl of oatmeal, cubed mangoes, orange juice, and coffee and bring it to him on a tray. Vikram believed the best way to motivate his employees was to either quote from the Upanishads or ask them, “How’s it feel to be a fucking failure?” in front of everybody at department meetings. He hired a bunch of his misogynist cousins to run the development team. Big-time nepotism. I recognized right away that I needed to get the fuck out of there as soon as I could. This was the spring of 2000. Then one day I woke up and all the start-ups were dying. One by one they started to wither. Massive layoffs all over the Bay Area. I quickly sold what Skinwiggle stock had vested and braced myself. A few weeks later the ax fell and Wyatt and I lost our jobs. I had been prescient and purchased a town house near Coit Tower, which was where we found ourselves the day after the layoffs. We got really, really fucking high and ate nachos and talked about what the hell had just happened to us. Not just in terms of the layoffs but in a more metaphysical sense. We’d veered off the path in our search for Nick, Squid, Bickle, and Kirkpatrick. I did some back-of-the-envelope calculations and discovered that I could live my modest lifestyle for thirty or so years without having to work again. Now, I felt, I had to wait for something. It was like my life had entered a lobby, somewhere I was supposed to sit and read old magazines. Which is just what I proceeded to do, more or less. My days were simple. I’d exercise, read, watch a movie, read some more, eat in restaurants, go on walks. It was a life so exotically different from the cubicle-bound existence I’d led for years, and in many ways it felt charmed and fantastic. I started dating, had a string of amusing relationships that didn’t last longer than a couple months each. I had no idea at the time the kind of bomb Erika was going to drop on us.
She and Wyatt were still together?
Yeah. I had plenty of room, so I invited them to live with me, rent-free. Erika’s career was starting to pick up steam. In her line of work, fantasy and science fiction writing, it was all about building brand awareness around the name and ensuring repeat readers through a series or trilogies. She could crank out a trilogy in a year. And not thin, wimpy little books. Big-ass doorstoppers. Often I could hear her writing upstairs, bashing the hell out of her keyboard. She typed like a prizefighter. Extraordinarily disciplined about her work. Wrote solid from nine to four every day.
Anyway, when she wasn’t writing books, Erika went to this support group for UFO abductees. You can imagine the place. Some community center room with an air pot of coffee, chairs arranged in a circle kind of deal. At least that’s how I pictured it. According to Wyatt the sessions could get pretty emotional and often Erika came home utterly drained. Through the group she met this therapist named Wendell Hoffman who looked exactly how you’d expect someone named Wendell Hoffman to look. He specialized in recovering buried memories of alien visitations through hypnotherapy. Wendell suggested that Erika attend a private session in which she would be put under hypnosis and he’d record her impressions on paper during the experience. Nothing sexual or untoward happened at these sessions, if that’s what you’re thinking.
So one night Wyatt and I were stoned as per usual, eating takeout Thai and watching 2001: A Space Odyssey. Erika came home and just stood in the middle of the room for a minute. At first I thought she was entranced by the movie but she was standing in such a way that she was just staring into the kitchen. People standing immobile for long periods of time isn’t really an uncommon event among cannabis fans, so she must have been standing there a really long time, maybe even into the star-child sequence, before I noticed it was weird that she was just standing there. So finally I asked her what was wrong. She just shook her head. I noticed she hadn’t set her purse down, and in her other hand she held a sheaf of papers. The astronaut turned into an embryo after some rad special effects and Wyatt turned off the DVD. “What’s wrong?” one of us said again. Erika handed us the papers.
Are these the papers right here?
Well, look at that. My God.
And she transcribed these, or wrote them, during a hypnotherapy session with Dr. Hoffman?
I don’t think he was an actual doctor, but yeah.
I was wondering if you might read this document aloud.
Do I have to?
Yes.
[…]
We’d really like you to read it aloud.
All right then. Here’s was what Erika wrote during that session with Wendell Hoffman.
1. The following is TRUE PROPHECY for humanity. Heed it and receive enlightenment and love. Disregard it and incur punishment and suffering.
2. The ultimate holy purpose of the human race is to actively spread organic life throughout the universe.
3. Haeckel’s Theory: ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny: “Ontogeny is the growth (size change) and development (shape change) of an individual organism; phylogeny is the evolutionary history of a species. Haeckel’s recapitulation theory claims that the development of advanced species was seen to pass through stages represented by adult organisms of more primitive species. Otherwise put, each successive stage in the development of an individual represents one of the adult forms that appeared in its evolutionary history. The embryo becomes a fish, a lizard, a mammal. Haeckel formulated his theory as such: ‘Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.’ This notion later became simply known as recapitulation.” So says Wikipedia.
4. So it is with the life cycles of individuals and the species Homo sapiens. As the individual experiences childhood, adolescence, adulthood, old age, and death, these stages are recapitulated by the human race as a whole.
5. Childhood: Breaking away from our primate ancestors with the acquisition of tools, fire, language, pantheism.
6. Adolescence: The majority of what we refer to as history, the rise of monotheism, nation-states, philosophy, empire, democracy, and the rapid migration of humans to every corner of the earth. The industrial revolution represents the end of adolescence and the onset of adulthood.
7. Adulthood: The information technology revolution. A growing awareness of the mortality of the planet. Secularism and global market capitalism as the foundations of societies.
8. Middle age: An era of stewardship, of securing our legacy, and also of regret.
9. Old age: A great slowing as the institutions built during adulthood begin the process of disintegration. Yet with this slowing and suffering, the blossoming of wisdom.
10. WE ASK: Can it be that our responsibility as humans during this age of adulthood is to reproduce?
11. If we CAN reproduce, we MUST reproduce. This is the law of living things.
12. Should we reproduce sexually or asexually?
13. If our species is to reproduce sexually, we must first find our lover. Perhaps this lover is already among us, waiting for us to begin our courtship.
14. If we decide to reproduce asexually, we must seek our children within. These children won’t live in the physical dimension we inhabit but will exist as cognitive constructs in a qputer operating system.
15. Our holy task is not as simple as reproducing to create a new species, i.e. Nietzsche’s übermensch. Our holy task calls us higher. We seek to reproduce life itself.
16. Our holy task is to guide into being life that will thrive long after our planet has died.
17. We find no conflict with the world’s great religions. We honor them for lighting our way. We honor the memory of the Christian god who claimed to create humanity in its own image. We honor the memory of the Eastern gods who promised eternal return. We seek PEACE with all believers and nonbelievers.
18.
19. Our highest principle: Love is the metaphysical framework upon which the physical substance of life depends.
20. We create life cognitively (asexually) and physically (sexually). The life we create cognitively we create with information. The life we create physically we create with matter.
21. We pass life to the NEXT BEINGS as life was passed to us by the previous beings, our gods.
22. The messiahs appeared in order to prepare our societies for greater control over the transformation of matter. Societies guided by religion created the steam engine, the factory, the computer. We unburdened ourselves from physical labor with machines, then from thinking with computers.
23. Marshall McLuhan wrote that technologies were extensions of man. As we extend, we delegate tasks to our creations. We delegated the digging of our hands to shovels. We delegated long division to the pocket calculator. By delegating our tasks to our technologies, we become more fully aware of who we are, and are terrified by the alienation this awareness engenders. Our final extension is into NEW LIFE.
24. With computers we delegated more complex functions of our brains. With the Internet we delegated our nervous systems. With the Bionet we delegated our immune systems. With qputers we have begun delegating our spirits.
25. As our spirits become extended through qputers a great, terrifying void opens before us. Do not fear this void. GO DEEPER.
26. Confronted with this void we have but one choice: Channel the spirit into NEW LIFE.
27. We are not CREATORS of life. We are that which life passes through. We don’t manipulate biology into forms that flatter us; we employ biology to reveal beautiful forms that REJOICE upon coming into being.
28. The religious man looks to the suffering surrounding him and asks, “What god does this to me?” The newman looks to the suffering surrounding him and says, “I will relieve this suffering with my love.”
29. The afterlife is a construct of asexual reproduction. Our old religions warned of Hell and tempted us with Heaven. Trillions of heavens and hells beg for creation. It is our task to create these states to host spirits. Heaven and Hell are the SERVERS where the new spirits reside.
30. We are called upon to become a species of creators. We honor our own creation to the highest by creating anew, with humility, love, and gratitude for that which gave us LIFE but is now dead.
31. Conceive of these truths as vision, strategy, and tactics. Our vision is to become stewards of life in our universe. Our strategy is to gather together those who wish to make this vision happen and spread these truths. Our tactics use the Bionet as a means of sexual reproduction and qputers as a means of asexual reproduction.
32. When we defiled our planet to the point of threatening all life, we came together to change. We suffered the Age of Fucked Up Shit. Those who remained after these years of pestilence, tyranny, and warfare opened their eyes upon a world boldly asserting its beauty. We ask, now that the planet is reawakening from its convalescence, what responsibility do we have to LIFE itself? Our responsibility has never been more clear. We are responsible for spreading LIFE throughout the universe.
33. Christian gospel celebrates the transformative power of God’s love. We invert this gift. It is our love that transforms the new life. It is our love that makes gods.
That’s it.
What did you make of it?
Well, first, we were high on marijuana. Second, we’d just watched 2001. So you could have read us a receipt from the grocery store and our minds would have been blown. That night we treated the document as a form of entertainment more than anything. Erika was shaken by the experience but we weren’t really all that receptive to the gravity of what she was feeling. We sat around the kitchen table trying to figure out whether this was simply a product of Erika’s imagination or whether it was something else.
What did Erika think?
She believed it was a transmission of some sort. She definitely believed she hadn’t brought it into being via her normal creative channels. She said she’d felt like a human fax machine. Was it possible it was just her imagination at work while she was under hypnosis? Maybe. Or was it really something sent through her from another source? That it was in the form of a numbered document suggested it was a kind of philosophical argument, something along the lines of Leibniz’s The Monadology. And the actual substance of the argument, that humanity was intended to promulgate life throughout physical and virtual space… that sure sounded like speculative fiction to us. Not to mention these other technologies the document referred to—qputers, the Bionet, Wikipedia.
The next morning I went out and bought us coffee and scones. When I got back, Erika took her food upstairs while Wyatt and I messed around on a couple of his computers doing who knows what. I sensed that something was wrong but couldn’t figure it out. An hour or so went by and I realized I hadn’t heard Erika’s typing all morning. Wyatt observed this around the same time. We went upstairs to peek in at her to make sure everything was all right. She was in her study, sitting at her desk in front of her computer, her back to the door. A blank Word doc was open in front of her. Quietly, we went back downstairs and got on with our day. Then the next day, the same thing. And the day after that. Erika couldn’t write. Completely blocked. She’d go to her study at the usual time and sit there for eight hours. She was under contract to produce X number of novels a year, so this was a problem. She withdrew, and the more Wyatt and I tried to talk to her about it, the less she spoke. It was like her well of words had instantly evaporated as soon as she channeled that message. A couple weeks went by. She returned to Wendell Hoffman to see if he could help her figure out what had happened. She arrived at his office in the Castro to find the place overrun by cops. A couple hours before, a patient of Hoffman’s had shot him three times then turned the gun on himself.
Just like the café owner who hanged herself before you could talk to her.
That’s exactly what I thought. It felt too neatly tied up. The whole thing scared the shit out of us. We holed up in the house for several days, flushed all the dope down the toilet, and tried to get a handle on the situation. We’d taken this detour into the dot-com world, lost the trail to Nick, but now the case had caught up to us and was pulling us back in. And now we had the money to devote ourselves to it for the long haul. We needed to find the building on the brochure. We needed to find Squid. We needed to figure out whether this strange document that had come through Erika had anything to do with Nick and whether the Bionet or qputers really existed.
I had a couple friends, a couple hard-core geeks named Chi-Ming and Saltzman at Intel, whom I’d met in the trenches at eBread. I emailed them to ask if they’d ever heard of a qputer. Neither of them had, though Chi-Ming asked if I was talking about a quantum computer. What was that? He filled me in a bit. While a digital computer stores data in bits, which can exist only in a one or zero position, a quantum computer uses qubits, which can exist in a one, zero, or a superposition. This makes for a hellishly fast computer, a machine that can defeat any sort of digitally based cryptography. Even though the research goes back to the seventies, quantum computers still, you know, exist entirely within the realm of the theoretical. Quantum computers haven’t been developed yet, unless some group of scientists somewhere is keeping one secret. As for the Bionet, no one we talked to had ever heard of such a thing.
A couple months passed. Erika still hadn’t written a word. Every morning she’d go up to her room, and every afternoon she’d come downstairs defeated. She started getting these cramps in her hands, her fingers would get all claw-like, and Wyatt had to massage them so she could use them. We asked her if she might be willing to go to another hypnotherapist but she kept saying no; the experience with Hoffman had so rattled her that she was afraid of hypnotherapy altogether. Wyatt and I pored over the document for clues. He’d read about Haeckel’s Theory in some freaky alternative medicine book. I was familiar with McLuhan because of my dad, and read Understanding Media again, finding a lot to think about in light of the explosion of the Web.
What about the Bionet?
We had nothing to go on but our imaginations. We ended up concocting a science fiction explanation. This was a lot of fun, actually. Wyatt brought his knowledge of various medical modalities, I supplied the tech knowledge. We decided the Bionet would be a biological version of the Internet, a monitoring system in which individual bodies would transmit information to other bodies or groups of bodies. The initial stages of the Bionet would involve already existing technology, like pacemakers. When a pacemaker detected a cardiac event, it could transmit a distress signal with GPS coordinates to 911, triggering a response from paramedics. Then we thought, what if the Bionet could also accept signals from a remote source, and say, dispense certain things into the bloodstream? For instance, what if instead of swallowing a pill, there was a nanotechnology pharmaceutical factory installed under your skin? What if the Bionet was an extension of the immune system? And what if it could respond to a pandemic by releasing the proper cocktail of antigens into an entire populace, effectively putting up a wall against a particular outbreak? Then we started thinking about the neural ramifications of such a technology. Remember all those movies in the early nineties where people had bulky cable jacks in the backs of their necks? What if you could accomplish the same sorts of virtual immersions without the wires? What if your thoughts could transmit data about your body to an external server? Or what if you just got over a cold, and your friend got the same cold—could you send a thought into his brain that could provoke his artificially enhanced immune system to produce the appropriate antibodies? We pitched this stuff back and forth, eventually writing our book, Foundations and Principles of Bionet Technology. We had little ambition for our manuscript beyond our own entertainment. We wrote it with a sort of formal, academic tone, taking after Borges. It was just as sci-fi as anything Erika had ever written. While we were working out the early draft at the kitchen table, she was still upstairs not writing. After a few months we had a complete manuscript, which we uploaded to a print-on-demand Web site. We did no marketing, no promotion, just put it up there and kind of forgot about it. It sold three copies in the first week, which we found more funny than anything.
Erika didn’t meet her deadline for her next book and had to pay back her advance. This was our wake-up call that we really had to get her to a counselor. She felt like the part of her brain that wrote had been wiped entirely clean, like a magnet on a disk drive. Part of her still wanted to write, but she didn’t know how anymore. And she started wondering if she wanted to write only because that had been her routine for so long. Maybe she needed to do something entirely different now. Maybe her time as a writer was up. I doubted that, because when the hypnotherapy transmission had come through she’d been a hundred pages into the third book of a trilogy. She still had this stillborn manuscript on her computer, paused midsentence.
Summer came and went. The three of us had become something of a family. I loved them, I truly did. Our Bionet book sold a hundred or so copies. Then one day, a week before Halloween, I received an email. The person said he had read our book and understood we probably had a “mental block” problem on our hands. The sender promised to reverse the process and cautioned us to practice extreme secrecy. We were to meet him at Golden Gate Park at 10 a.m. on Halloween. He would appear dressed in a Chewbacca costume and provide more information at that time. I called Wyatt over to the computer before I even got to the end of the message. But there it was, in the signature and in the “from” line. The email was from Squid.