Turn of the Century (68 page)

For the last two hours, Lizzie, her boy-genius Boogie Boffin, and Bruce have been watching videotaped bits of Warps focus group testimony annotated by the marketing consultant Lizzie hired. Madeline, the Fine Technologies sales-and-marketing vice president, should be here, but she quit last week; Lizzie thinks her politician husband pressured her to get out because of the Brouhaha.

“So that’s the plus-or-minus gamut,” the consultant says, standing to shut off the VCR, “with both your Typical Typicals and Typical Outliers represented proportionately. FYI, we found a great deal of player interest—like that older fellow in the suit—for
future-time-travel
capability.”

Boogie looks at Bruce, and Bruce and Lizzie exchange a look. This had been the major debate from the beginning. Lizzie ruled that they would stick to historical events. “We can do the future in Warps 2: To the End of Time,” she tells Bruce and Boogie.

“In all eleven focus groups,” the consultant says, “the music negatives are the only issues with any predictably impactful consumer salience. Which I understand you’re already dealing with.”

“The ‘authentic’ versus the ‘twenty-first-century’ player choice for the music track,” Boogie reminds Lizzie. “Toggled.”

“And after our third retesting,” adds the consultant, sotto voce, sounding as dumbstruck as if he were leading the archaeological team unearthing the hull of Noah’s ark, “the f-gender scores remain simply unprecedented.” In other words, girls and women enjoy playing Warps.

“
Great
. Speaking as a member of the f-gender.” She turns to Bruce. “ ‘Dope sick’ means that kid
liked
the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire, right?”

“Yes, Mom,” he replies.

“And the focus groups’ reported game-play excitement levels,” the consultant says, “correspond beat for beat to your new London dopamine and serotonin data.” Lizzie gave Bruce the okay to commission the English neurobiology lab to perform a second battery of tests on people playing the latest version of Warps. Based on those results (the 1348 Black Death excitement level was too intense, the Cuban missile crisis simulation was not frightening enough), Bruce and his people have been tweaking the game, trying to get the balance of simulated fear and actual pleasure just right. Optimized, not maximized.

Lizzie is pleased, so pleased to be finishing with Warps at last. But now that they’re nearly done (Friday is Bruce’s last day), she is permitting herself to see squarely that she’s not ecstatic, she’s relieved. She’s proud of having done her job, not of being the auteur responsible for “a groundbreaking multiplatform game that for the first time in gaming history straddles and synthesizes four major genres—role playing,
action, strategy, and journey/enlightenment,” as her web site puts it. True enough, that blather. But it’s just a video game. She has happened into a
fun, youthful, exciting, challenging, cutting-edge
business, she realizes, about which she doesn’t really give a flying fuck.

Unlike George, who always loves what he’s doing at some deeper level than she does, even when it’s hellish. Lizzie assumes it’s hellish for him now, inferring from the pallor, the tight, frightened look, and the metallic, skunky odor when he gets home after midnight and slips into bed, not quite waking her. Finishing Warps will deprive her of the excuse she’s had for putting off the “George, we need to talk” talk. Except for bare-bones logistics—the kids and the car and her father’s estate (her stepsister-in-law, Gennifer, wants to turn the Palm Springs house into a day spa)—they haven’t had a conversation in weeks. Or sex. On the other hand, they haven’t had a fight in weeks. After George’s show premieres, she figures, he’ll be normal again, and they can try to move from peaceful coexistence toward détente. LuLu asks every few days if “Daddy is going to suicide himself.” (The question that follows is “Then will he murder
us?
”) But the kids seem otherwise engaged, and oblivious. Lizzie is pleased that Sarah is pleased by her user-support job two afternoons a week at C. Girls, Felipe’s brother’s hair-and-makeup-information web site. Max is even more eerily self-contained than usual, on the computer all the time. She was both relieved and a little sad when he announced that he doesn’t want anyone to call him Sir anymore (too many kids at school thought it was some Knights of the Round Table fantasy, a misconception he found intolerable). She still figures Max is the one who swiped her last pack of cigarettes from the closet, particularly after he announced one night out of the blue that he was “studying” carcinomas, but she replaced the pack, found a new hiding place, and has never mentioned the disappearing Marlboro Lights.

Lance Haft stands in front of her desk holding budget printouts, trembling.

“I was already planning to get rid of Chas,” she tells him, “but I certainly did not fucking ‘lie’ to you.”
Lance!
Accusing her of
lying!
The postadolescent anarchosyndicalist spirit of the Fine Technologies staff has finally infected the controller. “I was being
optimistic
,” she says. Lizzie has temporarily brought in extra programmers and designers to meet the
June deadline for Warps. And now there is the Chas Prieve debacle. She hired him to set up an office out in Woodside, California (“Two minutes from the old Buck’s,” he bragged, which meant nothing to her), and he booked $400,000 in revenues the first week, selling ShowNet software and hardware to equip a movie studio in Bombay. But then it turned out the Indians thought the deal was for 400,000 rupees, or $9,457, and Chas has done nothing but spend money and annoy Lizzie in the six weeks since. Fine Technologies’ costs, Lance says, are running $420,000 over budget for the quarter, with a month still left to go.

“Okay,” he says, pulling nervously at the bottom of the gray cotton crewneck, his spring uniform, which seems newly pinkish. “All right. Okay.”

The first act of self-assertiveness in his life, and she’s stifled it already, quashed him, cut off his tiny Massapequa balls. He’ll probably go home and shave the new goatee. Poor little Lance. “In any case,” she says in quasi-conciliation, “if we do the IPO, the market is not going to care that we have negative earnings from operations. In fact they’ll probably like it.”

“Okay. All right.” He disappears.

Lance is discombobulated by the Brouhaha, but the rest of her employees seem to be getting off on the crisis atmosphere. They’re young; round-the-clock work and the influx of freelancers are exciting. They even enjoy the press depictions of themselves as dupes and peons and victims. As long as morale isn’t souring (and Bruce and Alexi assure her it mostly isn’t), she can laugh off the
Voice
series
(NOT SO FINE TECHNOLOGIES: THE CHRONICLES OF LATE CAPITALISM PART IV)
and the second and third Molly Cramer whacks on the op-ed pages of the
Post
. The best was her use of a quote from a computer magazine, in which Lizzie called Fine Technologies’ approach “militantly agnostic.” This, Cramer wrote in one column, was evidence of “Zimbalist’s liberal antireligion agenda.” After Lizzie finally agreed to appear the other night as a guest on
And Another Thing!
, the MBC Entertainment newsmaker Q&A show, the host sandbagged Lizzie. He humiliated her over her involvement with Buster Grinspoon (“Still doing that cat ESP work out there in Area Fifty-one, are you?” and “So, that would be pussy-to-pussy communication?”), called her “very attractive for a cyber-Nazi,” and encouraged his studio audience to boo her. As soon as the show
ended, he apologized very warmly, and told her that the show had been going nowhere and he needed a villain. Sometime she should remember to tell George she’s sorry she wasn’t more sympathetic when Molly Cramer attacked him and
NARCS
last fall for “giving aid and comfort to the trendy drug legalizers.” At the time, she made fun of him for finally proving her point about people in the media—that no one’s skin is thinner than journalists’ when they get bopped by other journalists.

Lizzie’s Brouhaha acquired critical mass the day the second
Voice
piece and a
Teen Nation
exposé
(UNCOOL!)
came out. She had gone a little overboard, and called a staff meeting. She intended to celebrate the removal of the off-gassing carpet, demonstrate that she was unfazed, and answer questions (dissemblingly) about the IPO and takeover rumors, to reassure everybody that everything was fine. When one of the game designers asked about the Vanessa Golliver discrimination suit, Lizzie said, deadpan, “You’re fired. Any other questions?” When people laughed, she launched into an extemporaneous employee-by-employee culling of each person into their respective “protected classes”—people over forty (the receptionist and Lance), women (most of the nontechnical staff), people of color (nineteen), people whose religious holidays (two Sikhs, five Muslims, and a Wiccan) are not on the official company holiday roster; and the disabled (Bruce, for diabetes, and Karen, because of her stutter). Finally, she asked everyone currently taking antidepressants to raise their hands (about a third of the staff), which by her reckoning (“
psychiatric
disability, like your former colleague Vanessa Golliver”) pushed the last two employees into a protected class. Everybody smiled and went back to work. The following week, both the
Voice
and the
Daily News
ran items about this exercise, both neglecting to make clear that it had been a joke.

Ben Gould told her that she’s a victim of the presidential primary season winding down, that the clucking about Fine Technologies has become a pretext for filling one Manhattan nook of the late-spring void in political chatter. “You’re getting cut up by crossfire,” he said to her, “from a Great Asshole Convergence. In a month, with the conventions coming up, it’ll all be forgotten.” Since the
Times
ran its front-page story on the Pat Buchananites’ and the Dick Gephardtites’ mutual obsession with reducing the number of foreign high-tech workers, and cited her as the prime New York example (“where
roughly half of the programmers are working thanks to H1-B visas”), Lizzie has been turned into a kind of poster girl for the issue: “CEO Elizabeth Zimbalist” and “the little-known Manhattan software company Fine Technologies” have been Nexised from newspaper story to magazine story to TV story, like a contagion.

Lizzie is bored by the cardboard depictions of herself (
what
“flair for the politically incorrect”?) and distracted by all the attention, which she figures is consuming a third of her time. The staff, however, seems to bask and glitter in the reflected ignominy. The various
causes
have all become so muddled that the only part of the Brouhaha remaining in clear focus for her employees is the
célèbre
, which they enjoy—even Reginald, who burned his company ID card as the centerpiece of an ermine-themed, animal-rights media event on the sidewalk in front of the building yesterday. The murderous work schedule to complete Warps is blamed by the staff on the collapse of the Microsoft deal, not on Bruce’s leaving or on Lizzie’s overoptimistic scheduling. Lizzie has made no effort to disabuse anyone of their grumbled “Microsoft
scheisskopfs
”s and late-night “motherfucking
Gates
”s. The company’s new intranet that Fanny Taft set up includes a
REASONS MICROSOFT WILL FUCKING IMPLODE
page. (The old system consisted of a three-year-old swath of corkboard opposite the elevator, crudely labeled
INTRANET
in Wite-Out and covered with tacked-up layers of staff memos, clippings, snapshots, single mittens, and felt-tipped
SANE M/F ROOMMATE WANTED
posters.)

“New hat?” Lizzie says to Alexi, who has just arrived wearing a yellow beret.

“You won’t believe. Yesterday as I was leaving? One of the animal assholes at Reginald’s little demonstration insisted that
GO HOMOS
was about
Homo sapiens
. I’m serious! She finally called me a ‘humanist,’ grabbed the hat, and ran away. It was very
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
. At least I didn’t get splashed with the fake blood, like Lance. He told them he was the CFO and controller, and they thought that meant he was the boss. By the way, did you really say to somebody at
PC Week
that the protests weren’t disrupting the production schedule ‘because we’re all used to working in goat rodeos of various kinds’?”

“Something like that. Yeah.”

“Well, my friend at
New York Press
says the Animal Salvation League
was faxing around a communiqué last night saying you’ve ‘admitted to participating in bizarre rodeos involving goats.’ ”

When she sees a copy of the fax, she gets more upset than she’s been since the beginning. Not only does she purportedly discriminate against employees with animal companions, “Zimbalist has personally sanctioned macabre violence against pigs in order to ‘harvest’ livers for untested, unproved transplantation into humans. And until recently, her company was preparing to hire Buster Grinspoon, ‘the Butcher of Seattle,’ whose gruesome experiments involving painful brain probes in living cats were halted by authorities last winter. On a chilling tape recording obtained by the ASL, Zimbalist can be heard bragging to Grinspoon, ‘To be honest, I really don’t give that much of a fuck about animals being used in research. I don’t use cruelty-free cosmetics … I’m eating steak!’ ” The president of the Animal Salvation League calls her “the new Dr. Mengele of the animal-cruelty establishment.” For further information or interviews, members of the press are invited to contact the group’s media liaison, Iris Randall—George’s Iris.