Turn of the Century (49 page)

By Seattle’s lights too, she figures, she’s a kooky, dilettantish neo-Tory socialite devoted to the costly and the frivolous and the irrational. Out here, they mistrust New York precisely the way Americans used to mistrust Europe. And their contempt for Hollywood is the age-old contempt of sensible, hardworking northerners for the slatternly South. But at the moment, each of the three places—New York and L.A. and the Northwest digitalopolis—hungers for an ingredient only the other two can provide. It’s the old Fred and Ginger symbiosis (class for sex) extended into a Metternichian three-way alliance. Give us publicity, and you can underwrite our IPO; you give us gravitas, we’ll give you sheen; you supply the video, we’ll provide the stream; you give us the candy, we’ll give you the eyes; you let us meet movie stars, we’ll invest in your studio; you advertise us, we’ll advertise you; you promote our shows, we’ll take you seriously; you take
us
seriously, we’ll give you a 600-megahertz set-top box. Deal; deal; deal. And we all go on
Charlie Rose
.

She knows New York is irrevocably in the dustbin of history. She still enjoys living in her particular part of the dustbin, especially now that it’s gotten clean and safe. But she knows it’s this strip of America, from here down through Portland to the Bay and the Valley, that is the future, knows it in precisely that dumb, scanning-the-coastal-horizon way—yet another cliché that happens to be correct. Driving up Interstate
5 in her rented white Taurus, she wonders if these malls and endless plains of Boeing hangars and runways will be remembered as comprising one of the great renaissance cities of the new century. Way up ahead, rising behind the skyline, she sees the Space Needle, a ridiculous and wonderful old
Jetsons
folly.

Will history, a couple of centuries from now, conflate the details, so that the Space Needle will be a misapprehended artifact—
You know
, her great-great-great-grandchildren will say,
the Space Needle, Epcot, Reagan, Microsoft, TV, all that early renaissance stuff
. Maybe, she thinks, those same great-great-great-grandchildren will gaze on the software she’s making now with something like her own wonder looking at the brass levers and springs and painted details on eighteenth-century automatons, or 1914 Bugatti roadsters, pieces of Golden Age technology that look to us both gorgeous and fusty, miraculous despite their primitivism. A
single
video game that
forty
programmers working together in a
factory
for a full
year
crafted
by hand!

Lizzie would like to believe she’s now present at the dawn of a renaissance, as the zealots and flimflammers and wise men of the digital age have been testifying for a decade. Maybe Speak Memory and Y2KRx and ShowNet and Warps are a perfect little Milanese chapel fresco, a de’ Medici tomb carving, a school-of-Titian history painting. Maybe. But in her heart of hearts she thinks this is an industrial revolution, not a blossoming of culture, that she’s no artist or patron or merchant princess but a factory owner turning out decent cotton aprons and good, painted crockery. Which would make Redmond and Santa Clara more the Leeds and Birmingham of the twenty-first century than its Florence and Venice.

An insanely courteous Leeds and Birmingham, she thinks, as she passes the electronic road signs warning that the highway is about to shrink from four lanes down to one just before her exit. The cars promptly and prudently slow—
every
car, even the one in front of her with the
I’D RATHER BE SMASHING IMPERIALISM
bumper sticker—and wait to take their place in a slow, mile-long queue. In New York, half the drivers would now be jockeying madly for position in a game of speed and brake and feint, cutting in line, disregarding the fucking five-mile-an-hour single-file line, fuck
you
.

Such nice white people
. Lizzie rarely thinks of Jews as her home team,
of gentiles versus Jews as salient, but here, now, she can’t help it. Still, she doesn’t hate this earnest, earnest, eager-beaver city, if only because of REI. She hasn’t climbed in years, but as she browses the store, she finds herself wanting to buy gear simply because the objects are so precise and purposeful—accidentally sexy. She fondles the purple anodized aluminum cam units; the fake-stone climbing-wall grips and holds—black and red and marbleized green, abstract shapes as small as netsuke and as big as skulls; the heavy coils of black-and-gray rope, MoMA-gorgeous; a chalk ball, soft but tough, that makes her remember the one that disintegrated on Mount Washington, turning her hand and face Kabuki white. She hefts a Chinese chrome exercise sphere, smaller than a billiard ball but twice as heavy, and touches the tasteful matte helmets, the magnesium bars for starting fires, the thirty-five-square-foot gold emergency blanket vacuum-packed into a two-inch cube. The only time she was in Seattle with George, for a wedding, she brought him here, and he said it was like touring the supply depot of an alien expeditionary force. Which is true, and why she loves it. He also said, standing right here by the ice axes, that this was her “equipment jones,” that she reminded him of Roger Baird yammering about his fly rods and antique cars. George resents her climbing, she suspects, because it is such a
two-handed
sport.

Ten minutes and $245 later, she’s on her way back downtown to meet the guy who runs a hardware company called Goat Rodeo. The corporate name isn’t just a random whimsy in an industry full of companies called Yahoo! and Oracle, it’s particularly cocky and ironical—
goat rodeo
is slang for corporate dysfunction and stupidity. Goat Rodeo sells a five-hundred-dollar liquid-crystal video display called PerfectView, tiny monitors that game players strap onto their face like a pair of glasses. Goat Rodeo’s next-generation device, its holy grail, is iZ, pronounced “eyes.” iZ is a tube the size and shape of a stubby pencil meant to replace computer monitors the way mice have replaced computer keyboards, particularly for people playing games like Warps. It scans video images continuously and directly onto players’ retinas.

She finds the Goat Rodeo address just off Pioneer Square. This neighborhood has its quintessential Seattle aspects—a wonderful overstocked map store, a wonderful overstocked toy store, a wonderful overstocked bookstore. (She doesn’t mind, as George said when he was
here, that “half the store is devoted to Garrison Keillor and
Blue Highways
and Louise Erdrich novels.”) Pioneer Square also has its obligatory man-made water feature, Waterfall Park. But the neighborhood is flat, the buildings are dark and old and close together, and there is a leavening of winos. It’s her favorite part of the city. Walking down Occidental Avenue, she sees a white couple in their late teens or twenties, both lavishly pierced—a gold ball on each of her nostrils and a tin girder through the bridge of her nose; on him at least six rings per ear, three in an eyebrow, and one rough yellow crystal on the upper lip—no doubt intended, at least obliquely, to simulate snot. The woman’s T-shirt says
CALL ME A CUNT AND I’LL CUT OFF YOUR BALLS
. As Lizzie passes them, stepping into the street to cross, she turns and stares for a second, not for the reason the boy and girl happily imagine, but because the Doc Martens nihilists are standing on the curb, waiting for the red
DON’T WALK
sign to change to a green
WALK
before they’ll cross. They’d rather be smashing imperialism, too.

From the reception area, the Goat Rodeo offices look and feel like Fine Technologies’, except even more boyish (along one wall a five-foot-high
DAWGS
is spelled out in fist and hammer gashes through the Sheetrock) and much roomier—not bigger, but probably twice as many square feet per unhealthy-looking-young-man-with-goatee. She scrawls her name in one second and hands it back to the receptionist.

“Before I laminate I’m supposed to ask you to
read
the language above where you signed,” says the receptionist, and hands the visitor’s name tag back to Lizzie. “It’s necessary”—she makes air quotes—“ ‘legally.’ ” Lizzie takes the card back and tries to focus on the tick-size lines of type. Watched by this girl wearing overalls, however, she is careful to avoid even a hint of the middle-aged racking move, the incremental positioning of small print—a little closer, a little farther, a
little
closer—to find the optimal depth of field. She sees that what she has signed is the world’s tiniest contract, a five-millimeter-by-thirty-millimeter nondisclosure agreement in which she has not only promised to keep confidential everything she sees or hears at Goat Rodeo, but has agreed preemptively to forfeit any new intellectual property rights that may arise out of any conversation she has with any Goat Rodeo employee. In other words, they own anything she says here.

Lizzie hands the tag back. “Do they want my firstborn too?”

“That’s okay,” the girl says blankly as she encases the tag in plastic and hands it back, still hot, to Lizzie. “Tommy’s office is all the way down the end of that hallway, then all the way to the left.”

The offices have doors, but all the doors are open, and every cubicle is standard issue—the hazy whiteboards, the fat EXPO colored markers and plastic spray bottles of colored-marker cleaner, the multiple computers and soda cans, the candy wrappers, the harsh fluorescence, the charmless dormitory mess. And as she click-clacks past the offices in her expensive black shoes and black Armani suit, feeling like the visiting adult, she sees and hears that in two of the offices—no, three—arguments are loudly under way, about “T3 pipes,” about how many trillion bytes of data are on the web, and about astigmatism. During her years at the foundation, she never heard voices raised, not one time, since even the people who despised each other agreed about everything and didn’t care very much about facts. She’s used to discussions among computer guys—almost every discussion boiling into a debate—although at her shop, the language barriers put a fetter on the tendency. But whenever she’s been out here, every technical and business disagreement is heated and zero-sum, a friendly fight to the death. Someone is smarter, and the smarter person must win. It is a dialect rarely spoken in New York, and so different from Los Angelese as to be essentially untranslatable. Seattle does remind her of college, like George says, but an all-male college where everyone is majoring in the same subject. She doesn’t hate it. It is her major too.

As she turns left, she sees Tommy Thayer in profile at the end of the hall, bouncing a basketball once and passing it, hard, to someone she can’t see, inside an office. She recognizes him from the TED conference in Monterey a year ago, where he gave a speech to seven hundred businesspeople and scientists and designers about “what totally sucks in this business.” She thought he was an asshole, not because he used the word
sucks
sixty-seven times in twenty minutes, or even because he used the phrase
kick some corporate booty
, but because he oozed pride in being the kind of jaunty, crew-cut, chinos-and-Converse alterna-CEO who would give such a speech.

“The princess of Silicon Alley!” he says, his mouth full of something. “Welcome to the Emerald City.”

Fuck you
. “Hi,” she says, reaching out to shake Thayer’s hand. “It’s good to finally meet.”

As they sit down in his office, the Goat Rodeo chief technology officer, a man named Robbie, who’s closer to Sarah’s age than Lizzie’s, sits on a couch dribbling the basketball on the wood floor between his feet. His wandering left eye, which always seems to be looking at his boss, makes Lizzie feel sorry for him. She sees why Thayer’s mouth was full: it’s always full because he is a chain-eater of giant, two-inch-diameter SweeTarts, which he keeps in a black wire basket on his desk. In the first five minutes, they get their real business out of the way, which mainly entails Thayer nodding, claiming they are now way ahead of Microvision, the more established VRD (virtual retinal display) startup, and using the word
deliverable
as a noun over and over and over again.

“My guy said you’re willing to indemnify Fine Technologies on product liability for iZ?” she says.

Donk-donk-donk-donk-donk-donk-donk …
Robbie the technology boy is still dribbling.

“Limited indemnity as he defined it, sure, that’s definitely a deliverable,” Tommy says.

Donk-donk-donk-donk-donk-thwap
, swoosh,
thwap
. Robbie passes to Tommy. Tommy proceeds to twirl the ball on an index finger, but he doesn’t dribble.

“And in your beta testing you haven’t come across any medical issues?” Lizzie asks. “Ophthalmological, neurological, whatever?”

Tommy passes the ball back to Robbie.
Donk-donk-donk-donk-donk-donk-donk-donk-donk …
Lizzie no longer considers his strabismus extenuating.

“Zero,” Tommy says. “Zero on the retina, zero on the iris.”

Donk-donk-thwap
. “I’ve personally logged about nine hundred gaming hours with the product since the fall,” Robbie says, speaking a full sentence for the first time, “and look at me. I’m cool.”

Lizzie nods slowly, wondering if his bad eye prevents him from knowing when she’s staring at it with both of her good ones, and using the pause to calculate Robbie’s exposure (nine hundred hours, six months—five hours every day). Lizzie has been in this business six years, her bar is high, but the easy slur (Get
a fucking life, kid
) remains apt.

Donk-donk-donk-donk-donk-donk-donk-donk-donk …

“We had a year of animal experiments, offshore, tweaking it before we ever tried it on civilians. A few Irish bunny rabbits got zapped early
on, but—” Thayer catches himself, and turns suddenly solemn. “That’s between us. You signed the NDA,” he says, nodding at the tag dangling from her collar over her left breast.

Donk-donk-donk-donk-donk-donk-donk-donk-donk …

“Of course, sure,” she says, “no problem.”

Donk-donk-donk-donk-donk …
Lizzie gives a game smile to Robbie and puts her hands up, a foot apart, palms in.
Donk-thwap
. As she catches his pass, she leans down and tucks the ball under the chair, between her feet and her Kate Spade bag.