Turn of the Century (27 page)

Being the boss, Lizzie finds, consists of two main tasks. The first one is “finding the signal in the noise.” It means the same thing as “separating the wheat from the chaff.” She used to call it “torching through the bullshit”
until Bruce provided her the more apt and felicitous metaphor she now uses. “Really high noise-to-signal ratio” is Bruce’s standard remark about certain frenzied days in the office or particularly chattery people. To be the boss also requires making snap decisions and making them confidently, big consequential snap decisions, tiny snap decisions that accrue into significance, dozens of all kinds every day. It is all improvisation.

The two-color packaging for Range Daze is fine; I mean Warps. (As long as it doesn’t look too … alternative, or like we can’t afford four colors. The idea is to look elegant and semi-old-fashioned. Like eighties movies and nineties magazine covers.

Ask Boogie; that’s his call.

Ask Bruce, but Softimage is obviously the preference. Because Microsoft owns them. Owned them. Whatever.

Yes, this year people can trade in Christmas Day for the day after Ramadan ends.

Tell them we support—say we have nothing against Gore, the company just doesn’t make campaign contributions.

Okay, two weeks paid, four unpaid. Because it’s a policy for
pa
ternity leave, Alexi, and they don’t have to nurse the fucking kid is why.

We absolutely do too have NEC’s permission to use Power VR in advertising and packaging. Then double-check, but try not to let NEC know.

Tell him Tony said a year ago—no,
two
years ago—that he’d pay for fireproofing the I beams.

Yes, we will cross-promote with Diamond for the Monster 3D accelerator board, as long as Madeline says that doesn’t conflict contractually with the 3Dfx deal; no,
not
“component-exclusively.” And please don’t use that phrase again.

Yes, we’ll have real-time deformation, but who wants to know how realistic our digital fur will be? (
What
digital fur?)

Please
ask Boogie to stop playing that Massive Attack CD all day, every day; I think it’s making people stupider.

Yes, we’re optimized for MMX and 3Dfx, but we will work fine with the new Macs. I don’t know if that means we’re “dual-optimized.” Tell them yes.

What’s with all the inquiries about fucking
fur
? Tell them state-of-the-art digital fur realism.

No, Fox only has an option on the TV rights, nobody has novelization rights; as of this morning, you can safely assure them that they are still available. (Find out what Doom sold for.) A novel based on a video game! Lord. (No, that’s different—the novel is called
Chocolate-Chip Cookie-Dough Häagen-Dazs
, but Douglas Coupland didn’t
base
it on a brand of ice cream. I’m pretty sure.)

No. Ask Lance.

I don’t give a fuck how many of the game designers have voted to add invisibility and healing powers to the Dark Ages—I’m not running a democracy, and I don’t care if Boogie is feeling “harshed”—it’s a game about reality, remember?

Tell them Warps is to Time Commando as
The Simpsons
is to
The Flintstones
, or as
Men In Black
is to
Independence Day
. More
prestigious
? Okay, as James Joyce is to Gertrude Stein.

Say we’ll call back.
No
. Tell them Madeline will call back.

Duh
.

How fast? Tell them we’re not interested. Not forever. For now …

“I’ll take it!” It’s Hank Saddler calling again. “Hello, Hank, I’m just back; it’s kind of nuts here. I haven’t had a chance to finish that memo for Harold yet.”

“It’s Henry. But take your time, Elizabeth!
Not
a problem. Harold’s in Brunei until the middle of the week anyway. I’m calling on another matter, concerning one of your products. The Sho ‘Nuff system?”

“ShowNet,” she says. ShowNet is a Fine Technologies product that she (and George) dreamed up. It’s for movie and television casts and crews to use during production, particularly on location. Dozens of special, dumbed-down laptops are connected into a wireless network, so that script and schedule and budget changes can be transmitted instantly to everyone at once.

“Right, Show
Net
. George probably told you that I’m now executive vice president, corporate communications, synergy, and special projects?”

“He didn’t. But—”

“
Thank
you! Anyway, part of my mandate is liaising with the Department of Defense, sitting on a very special advisory board they have. We and Disney are the media-slash-entertainment participants. It’s really a privilege. Well, one of the colonels down there happened to
mention Fine Technologies and your ShowNet software, and how it is exactly the type of thing they’ve been trying to develop for use in certain Rangers and Special Forces applications, as a tool for our war fighters’ needs. She said to me, ‘We’re always shooting on location.’ Very witty, articulate gal, this lady officer. I told Colonel Rodriguez”—he pronounces Rodriguez with an extreme amount of long-vowel emphasizing and
r
rolling—“that I was a little too far above the line to know much about the nuts and bolts of ShowNet, but that you happened to be part of the Mose Media Holdings extended family. I was sure you’d be happy to help them out pro bono any way you could with software and training, et cetera. Can I give you Colonel Rodriguez’s number and e-mail?”

“No. I’m afraid not. That’s just not something I want to do. No.” Yes! A
serious
snap judgment!

She’s never felt any special antipathy toward the military. The draft ended when she was nine, the U.S. finished with Vietnam when she was ten; Lizzie knew almost nothing about the war until she saw
Platoon
in college. In the second grade, all the students and teachers at her private school were required to sing “Give Peace a Chance” together every Friday. (At her stepbrother Ronnie’s school they sang “There’s No Business like Show Business.”) She did take part in an anti-Grenada-invasion teach-in organized by the cute graduate student who taught her freshman seminar on Japanese Noh drama, but in 1996 she wanted to vote for Colin Powell for president. And Buddy Ramo was in the Coast Guard reserves when she slept with him. It’s just that she doesn’t feel like helping some death squad management consultant repurpose
her
software to track the disappearance of Zapatistas, even if the death squad management consultant is a Hispanic woman. And not for free. And certainly not as a favor to Hank Saddler, the patronizing asshole.

“Super! I’ll have one of my assistants call with all the DOD info. Who’s your go- to guy? Excuse me! Or gal?”

“No. I
don’t
want to help the Pentagon use ShowNet, Hank. Henry. I’d be uncomfortable with that.”

“What?”

“I just—I’m afraid not. Especially given what’s going on in the news, with Mexico. You know?” She doesn’t think George will mind.

“But … but Colonel Rodriguez is Hispanic herself!
And
she’s an African-American!”

Sorry! Fuck you!
Next!
Sometimes Lizzie very much likes being the boss. Not, of course, enduring the parent-and-child-like grousing about salaries and window sightlines and the relative square footage of cubicles, or having to fire incompetent salespeople who happen to be single mothers. Not the irreducible third of the job that is stupid, dull, draining, and thankless. Lizzie likes being boss because at last she’s a member of a cool club that she likes, president of the club, a club custom-made by her for her. As a girl, she was just popular enough to harbor high hopes about the redemptive potential of club membership. But club after club failed to satisfy. Campfire Girls, astronomy club (which almost killed her love of science), chess club (which almost killed her incipient interest in boys), ballet, tutoring first graders in East L.A. (fine until one of the tutors was raped by a tutee’s stepfather), and Junior Achievement at Palisades High (the worst; what had she been thinking?), then the Signet Society at Harvard (Junior Achievement for the intelligentsia), a women’s investment group when she first got to New York—each one started the same, with cheerful anticipation, and each one became dutiful or worse. She still believes in the theoretical virtue of clubs, as she does in the theoretical virtues of piety and small towns and solar power. But she has come to accept her particular catch-22, a variation on the Groucho Marx line: the sorts of people who join clubs are not, by and large, the sorts of people with whom Lizzie wants to be clubmates. So now she has reverse-engineered her way to contentment. She has her own fourteen-thousand-square-foot clubhouse in a loft in Chelsea, where she does her best to keep everyone busy and interested, but she gets to decide who joins, who stays, and what the rules and projects are. The vicissitudes of popularity and democracy have been transcended, the thing has a fucking
point
, she can swear as much as she wants, she can tell Hank Saddler no without asking anyone’s permission, and there aren’t any mothers or faculty sponsors overlooking, clucking, organizing. Except her. And her despotism is benign; Bruce said so last week. Yet every two weeks comes the one unavoidable, vertiginous reminder that this is real life and that she is in charge. Being a boss is stressful always, immersive and harsh in ways underlings cannot appreciate,
but when Lance knocks on the doorframe holding the three-page payroll authorization form, her mood turns a little somber. All larkishness goes.

“Hi,” Lance peeps. Lance Haft is her business manager. (She let him say he was the controller for the first three years. After Bruce admitted to him that the reason he always smiled when Lance called himself the controller was because of the Controllers in
Brave New World
, she let him change his title to chief administrative officer.) He is always a little bashful with this ritual, like a shy mistress. For part of the tension of the payroll signing is its public acknowledgment that none of them, not Bruce or Alexi or Lance or any of them, not even Karen, work for Fine Technologies for the love of it.

“It’s $188,500,” she says, looking at the bottom line. “That’s up.”

“Yes. From $185,300. Annual cost of living kicks in.”

As she signs her name for the period ending March 10, 2000—seignurially dispensing $188,500,
poof
, as she will again when Lance tap-taps on the doorframe in another two weeks, and again just two weeks later, on and on. Every time it alarms her a little, like a wallop of g-force. She’s pretty sure she prefers it, however, to the low-grade, chronic, corrosive nausea of being an employee.

And she has never felt better about the two hundred grand than she does today, since Lance, before the signing ceremony, briefed her on his meetings in Redmond. Moorhead, the oily lawyer with the nineteenth-hole-at-Burning-Tree accent? The one who didn’t approve of Ms. Zimbalist’s
 … cussing
?

“Did Moorhead wear a bow tie?” Lizzie asked Lance.

“Uh,
yeah
,” Lance said uneasily. “Yeah, he did. Both days.” Almost every employee acts nervous around the boss, a caste condition that surprised Lizzie and saddens her, but Lance has always been the extreme case at Fine Technologies. Her bow-tie guess about the Microsoft negotiator made Lance look as if Lizzie, sorceress of West Eighteenth Street, might teasingly decide to turn him into a flying monkey.

Moorhead agreed to pay $5.5 million for fifteen percent of her company, which is less than the minimum Lizzie told Lance she would accept, but only a little less. Taking the investment would mean Fine Technologies is worth $36 million. Which would make her 25 percent
worth $9 million. Lizzie does not dream of big cash sums, and finds George’s pinch-me-I-must-be-dreaming money obsession silly and disingenuous, but
fuck
! Nine million bucks! Seven something after capital gains! And Microsoft would own only a sixth of the company. She’d be nuts to turn this down. She told Lance she’d think about it overnight and discuss it with George, and told him to tell Microsoft that she has to discuss the offer with her senior advisers (Ben Gould and George), mezzanine-round investors (Ben Gould and her father), and the other members of her board (George, her father, Ben Gould, Bruce). But the moment Lance said five, even before he said point-five, Lizzie decided. No.