If I didn't press Trevor too hard, he would tell me more. He was a terrible gossip. I just had to keep him talking. “Roger and the ants want me to go work for something called West West,” I told him.
“Where do you get that?” asked Trevor.
“Last night I saw Roger with the ants in cyberspace. They were very insistent that West West was the place for me. Very very insistent.”
“West West,” said Trevor wonderingly. “The lowest circle of Hell.”
“What Trevor? What do you mean?”
“The West West guys are . . . shall we say
opportunistic
? They get sued a lot, and a lot of the time they lose. When they lose, they fold and they reorganize. They've had three different names that I know of, and it's always the same guys. They're the U.S. branch of a Taiwanese company called Seven Lucky Overseas. You remember that kitchen robot that killed the baby? The Choreboy?”
Every robotics hacker remembered the Choreboy. The Choreboy was supposed to be able to cook and baby-sit. But the Choreboy had very poor pattern-recognition abilities. One Thanksgiving, a family wanted to take a stroll. The baby was quietly asleep in its crib and the turkey was on the kitchen table, stuffed and ready to be roasted. The family told the Choreboy to keep an eye on the baby and to put the turkey in the oven while they were out. The family came home to find the Choreboy leaning over the crib and crooning a lullaby to ...
the naked turkey
. Obviously the machine had flipped a few bits the wrong way, but? With dawning horror, the family ran to fling open the oven doorâit was too late. The baby had never
had a chance once the Choreboy had shoved the spike of the meat thermometer into its heart.
“The Choreboy was a Seven Lucky machine, programmed by West West, or whatever they were calling themselves then,” continued Trevor. “And before the Choreboyâthat was either the first or the second time, I can't rememberâthese guys lost a fifty-million-dollar lawsuit to GoMotion for doing a byte-for-byte knockoff of the Iron Camel. They hadn't even bothered to change our programmers' names in their source code! You should hear Roger Coolidge talking about West West. He hates them.”
“Then why would he want me to work there?”
“Are you sure it was really him you talked to in cyberspace, Jerzy?”
“No, I'm not. I'm not sure at all. That's why I want to talk to Roger in person. Where is he?”
“Roger went to Switzerland last night.” We'd turned and started walking back toward GoMotion. Trevor seemed nervous. “Roger's the one who told Jeff Pear to fire you. And, get this, Jerzy, he had me set your access level to negative 32K on all the networks GoMotion subscribes to. You're out beyond the pale, guy.”
Off the Net! It was like losing my driver's license. “But, but, what did I do? Was there something wrong with my work on the Veep?”
“Jerzy, I'll be totally frank. I don't know what the hell is happening.” We were standing in front of the GoMotion building. Trevor squinted at me in the bright sun. “All I can say is that if I were in your position, I wouldn't believe
anyone
.” He shrugged and turned to go.
“Wait, Trevor, wait. What about my computer? And my robot, Studly. GoMotion owns them. Do I have to give my computer back in?” If losing Net privileges was
like losing my driver's license, losing my cyberdeck would be like losing my ability to walk.
“Funny you should ask. Roger Coolidge made a special point of telling Jeff Pear to let you keep your robot and your computer. Jeff already mailed you a letter about it. Roger said your machines are contaminated. Roger said that if Jerzy Rugby has any sense, he'll smash up his machines and crush the chips with pliers. He actually said that.”
“Fuck that. The cyberspace deck is a fifty-thousand-dollar box. It's all I've got.”
“You tell âem, Jerzy. Look out for number one.” Trevor shook my hand. “It's been a trip working with you.”
He walked inside and I got in my Animata.
I found the West West offices ten miles south of GoMotion, on the bottom floor of a white adobe-style two-year-old office complex on Saratoga-Sunnyvale Road, right down the street from a Pollo Loco and a Burger King. The fields on both sides of Saratoga-Sunnyvale Road were filled with developments of tract homes thrown up during the Valley's first boom. Before that, the fields had been filled with flowers and plum trees and Silicon Valley had been called “The Valley of Heart's Delight.”
The West West suite was down a carpeted hall that smelled like Holiday Inn rug cleaner crossed with the plastic stink inside a new car on a lot in the California sun. The West West receptionist was a darling young thing, pert and real. She sat on a high stool behind a high gray plastic counter with a sign-in book. Staring at her distinctive little lips, I missed the exact moment when she started talking, and I camped across like a spaced-out horny geek. Not far wrong. She signed me in and ushered me through a big room of workers toward the office of the General Manager of the Home Products Division.
The big room was a white-collar worker pit, a windowless, gray-carpeted space with beige walls and chest-high off-white plastic partitions that divided the space into the cubicles that people used to call “veal-fattening pens.” The noises of the pit were keyboards, computers, fluorescent lights, central air, and murmured conversation. Everyone wore ultralight earphone and mike sets, so they didn't need to talk very loud, even to each other. Aurally they were in cyberspace, but visually they were a bunch of people in front of computer screens in a pit with no living plants. Was I really going to work here?
The General Manager of the Home Products Division said he'd been expecting me. He was a black-haired, sour-faced guy called Otto Gyorgyi. He was thin and he had lively eyebrows and a large, slightly crooked nose. He wore a gray suit with a white shirt and a dun tie. He had a corner office with a view of the West West parking lot and the Saratoga-Sunnyvale Road.
Otto used the occasion of our first meeting to tell me his whole life story. This was, I would learn, characteristic of Otto. He liked to talk about almost anything other than the things an employee would want to know. He was an exponent of what workers call “mushroom management,” meaning, “keep them in the dark and cover them with shit.”
Otto was born and raised in Budapest. His father was a schoolteacher who spurred his children to get every particle of available education. All five Gyorgyi kids studied engineering: Kinga, textile engineering; Arpad, drafting engineering; Tibor, fluid engineering; Erszebet, electrical engineering; and, last of all, young Otto with his chemical engineering. Otto emigrated when a vacationing German university student fell in love with him. The girl's name was Ute Besenkamp. Ute became pregnant and brought Otto home with her.
As Otto told me all this with great raisings and lowering of his eyebrows, I could hardly believe I was hearing information that was so utterly useless and beside the point.
In Germany Otto married Ute and found a job with the Bayer chemical company. This multinational industrial titan had its huge mother plant in Leverkusen. The Gyorgyis purchased a solid house in Bayer's terrorist-proof compound. Otto worked with a group analyzing and refining industrial processes for making rubber out of vegetable latex. Bayer sold the necessary chemicals worldwide, and would send out teams to maintain the processes on site. Otto's specific role was to consult on safety issues, and he became something of an expert on remote handling devices.
After nine peaceful years in Leverkusen, Otto, Ute, and children (two boys, one girl) were posted to a Tokyo branch of Bayer, working with some industrial robots created by the Tsukuba Science City group. Things went well for awhile, but then Ute left Otto and took the children back to Germany. Otto “hit the skids” and next thing he knew he was out of a job. Like me, he'd moved to California on speculation, and now he was General Manager of West West's Home Products Division.
“Which is where I come in?” I suggested.
With great reluctance, Otto came to the point. He made this part of the conversation very brief. “We want you to program for West West so we can kick GoMotion right out of the home robotics market. If you accept the job, your immediate superior will be Ben Brie. Ben is the product manager for the line of Adze robots that West West is going to start shipping in the second quarter. Ben has only two senior programmers, and they need help. You're our man, Jerzy.”
“What would be my annual salary?”
“What were you getting at GoMotion?”
I named the figure, and Otto added thirty-three percent. The fact that Otto had been expecting me meant that the ant-brained vision I'd seen the night before had been, at least in some respects, legit. It sure seemed like a lot of people wanted me to work for West West. And GoMotion had fired me, hadn't they? I didn't owe them anything. West West would put me back on the Net. The thirty-three percent raise sounded very good. And best of all, West West wanted me to keep working on smart robots. I had most of the code for the Veep in my head; it would be a shame just slowly to forget it. If I took this job at West West, my role in the Great Work could continue.
“The Great Work” was a phrase that had occurred to me soon after Carol and I moved to Silicon Valley. In medieval Europe, the Great Work was the building of the cathedrals. Artisans from all over Europe would flock, say, to the Ãle-de-France to work on the Notre Dame. Stonecutters, sculptors, carpenters, weavers, glassmak-ers, jewelersâthey gathered together to work on the most wonderful project the human race could conceive of. I felt that all of us in Silicon Valley were working, in one way or another, on the Great Work of bringing truly intelligent robots into existence. Some hackers felt the Great Work was simply the striving toward a perfect human-to-human interface in cyberspace, but I thought that the real payoff had to be something more mechanical and concrete. To me, the Great Work was to create a new form of life: artificially alive robots.
Keep in mind that, although I had done a lot of creative work on the Veep, I didn't own any copyrights on this work. When you worked as a hacker for a big company, you signed away all rightsâyour employment contract specified that the company automatically owned the copyrights to all the code you wrote for them. So I
had no financial reason for not wanting to help West West beat out the Veep.
GoMotion had axed me, but my own part in the Great Work could continue at West West. I signed the papers Otto offered me, and Otto led me off in search of Ben Brie.
Along one edge of the pit were doorless, semiprivate offices with Plexiglas add-ons that extended the divider walls to the ceiling. In one of these spaces we found Ben Brie.
Ben Brie was so mellow and diffuse as to be the parody of a Californian. He had a wheezy groaning way of talking; he sounded as if he were so merged into the cosmos that getting each word out was a serious effort. “I thought things were going really well at GoMotion,” said Brie after Otto left me with him. “What did you do to end up
here
? Did you piss somebody off?”
“It's kind of complicated,” said I. “West West is giving me a good raise.”
“Sounds groovy,” said Brie. “Can you tell me about the robot that GoMotion's been working on? The Veep?” He was wearing a truly excellent shirt from Zaire, a nifty job covered with repetitions of the pink and acid green Congo logo of Regal Lager.
I explained about the Veep somewhat, and then asked Brie what West West's angle on all this was anyway?
“We've got this awesome robot from the Taiwanese,” said Brie. “Seven Lucky Overseas. They're West West's parent company.”
This was just what Trevor had told me. “Didn't Seven Lucky make the household robot that killed the baby?” I demanded. The question failed to faze Brie. In all mellowness, he gave me a straight, out-front answer.
“The Choreboy. Yes. A tragedy. When our group was selling the Choreboy, we were called Meta Meta. Meta
Meta settled out of court, went through Chapter 11, and reorganized as West West. The Choreboy is a closed case, Jerzy, an unsavory footnote to the history of robotics. Let's move on to more pleasantâ”
A woman in a flowing gypsy dress walked into our cubicle and Brie greeted her. “Janelle, this is our new Adze programmer, Jerzy Rugby. He comes to us from GoMotion. Jerzy, this is Janelle Fuchs. She's in marketing.”
“I don't work for Ben,” said Janelle, brightly. She had rough-skinned, sensual features with plenty of makeup. “And Ben doesn't work for me.”
“The less work, the better,” chuckled Ben. “But Janelle may want to pick your brain about the Veep specs.”
“That's right,” said Janelle. “Ben tells me you did a lot of good work at GoMotion. We're just getting the Adze campaign ready, and we need to know what GoMotion is going to say their Veep can do.”
I told her, which took awhile, and then she brought up a different topic. “Ben says you adapted some a-life algorithms to make Roarworld work better. West West has a line of games. I think a lot of games could benefit from having smarter thingies to fight against.”
“How do you know what I did with Roarworld?” I asked them.
Ben waved the question aside. “Oh, we've done our homework on you, Jerzy. The thing that interests us is that you're good at using a-life to evolve better algorithms for robots programmed in SuperC.” I nodded. “Up till now, we've been writing our Adze software in a Seven Lucky proprietary language called Kwirkey. One of Seven Lucky's founders invented it for his thesis at the Computer University of Taiwan. Kwirkey is a Lisp-parser that sits on top of a Forth interpreter.”