Something about bright lights, a voice telling him… what? It was a strange kind of dream, but one he’d had before: elusive as ever, slipping away now. But a sweet dream, anyway. As day pushed out night from the room, waking overwrote sleep. He listened a moment. Bird song, a distant rumble of the freeway, a familiar but elusive clicking. Had the voice been telling him… something about the clicking? He swung his legs out of the bed, prising apart his eyelids. He shook his head, trying to clear away vapid thoughts. Light shafted across the room: another bright California day. Something about the light, a network of light. Wasn’t it?
Alfie stretched. Bett turned
over, still deeply asleep. Lucky her. He scratched his ribs, a
little sticky in yesterday’s underwear. Coffee first though. My
brain hurts. The clicking grew as he loped down the corridor, past
the kids’ rooms. Dan on his new Gizmo III. Had he been clicking
away all night? Dad pushed his head in at the door. The kid barely
looked up, resenting the break in concentration – he failed to make
the level seven gateway in time. Kath likewise, when he looked in at
her, was already up and communicating with her MultiFace buds. It
seemed to be more complex than a video conference with his suppliers
at WorldNet: four or five mini screens popping in and out as her
friends chipped in, deconstructing a vid of some Korean boyband.
Facebook on steroids. Kath was focusing too much to do more than
grunt at Dad’s morning greeting.
“Still in bed, Alfie?”
“On my way, I’ll be there in
twenty.”
“Still at home, matey.”
More a resigned statement than a question.
“Greg – I hate it when you
check out where I am.”
“It’s the modern world. Get
used to it. But you never will, though you invented half of it, eh?
MultiFace updates, twitter logs, ‘Where’s my i-phone?’”
“Wish I hadn’t sometimes.”
“Don’t say that – the big
guy will kill you. So we’ll say forty-five.”
“Thirty.”
“You haven’t even showered
yet.”
“Now how the heck did you…”
“Call it intuition. And
sharing a flat in Cambridge. I haven’t installed surveillance in
your place. Yet!”
“Thank god for that!”
“OK, we’ll put back the
brainstorm until 8:30.”
“The brainstorm? I forgot all
about…”
And then he had it. The
blinding flash; the clicks; the voice: the Dream.
* * * * *
“Guys, guys: we’re failing.
This quarter’s sales are down five per cent year on year. This
carries on, we fail.”
“Ethan, this is WorldNet; the
world’s biggest brand. You’ve got to be…”
“And it’s gonna stay that
way, Alfred. And more.” Only Ethan called him Alfred, and even
then only when he was mad – which was most of the time. “But we
can’t rely on releasing minor tweaks of old products forever. The
Gizmo is over five years old now. MultiFace – OK it needs time,
but the take up’s been slower than we hoped. It’s only 80%
planned.”
“The games division is
steady.” Greg – always trying to pour oil on troubled waters.
“Steady?” Ethan – always
ready to set fire to it.
“Well, I’m working on
something.”
Greg looked at him across the
table. One of those looks. You’re blurting stuff out again: don’t
do this without discussing first.
“But I can’t really…”
“I need to know, Alfred.”
But he could see a little suppressed excitement. Ethan knew, for all
the exasperation from having to deal with Alfie, that ‘working on
something’ was a sign the bills could be paid. “Give.”
Give, yes, give give give. Why
did we have to go and sell ourselves to these fuckers?
“It’s too early to really
put into words, Ethan. All in good time.” All in good time? He
hated it when he came out with stuff like that – he sounded like
his father. “I’m sure WorldNet can lurch on for another few
months while…”
Ethan glared. “Alfred: you
know how long it takes to develop a product. To market a product.
To re-launch a product?”
Alfie glared back. “Then to
fix all the bugs because it was so rushed…”
Greg jumped in: “If you’re
referring to MultiFace, which…”
“I’m referring to every
goddam thing that comes out of this company. Brits!” This was as
low as it got in the Ethan Harmer book of world insults. “Basically,
we haven’t had a new product for years now. Are you guys holding
something back? Now give – what is this new idea?”
“Well: it could be
revolutionary.”
Ethan pricked up. “Go on?”
“Well. I dreamed about it
last night. A new kind of mouse.”
* * * * *
“Probably didn’t express it
very well. Bathetic? Now. There’s a word I love!” he said it
again, rolling it around his tongue.
“I’ve told you. Don’t
just blurt stuff out. Especially to Ethan. These things need to be…
finessed. ‘A new kind of mouse?’”
“What I meant was, ‘the
mouse revolutionized the interface with the PC’. This is the next
step: complete human-machine connectivity. He was kind of
underwhelmed, wasn’t he?”
“That’s putting it mildly.
He was thinking: a new bit of plastic they will sell at PC World for
$25.”
“Why did we have to sell out
to these fuckers. They have no imagination.”
“Stop saying that, Alfie. You
know why.”
“Debt Mountain?”
“Debt Mountain. Are you happy
with your mansion by the Bay, your shiny new Bentley, your little
hideaway among the redwoods, and the company jet that gets you
there?”
“OK, don’t rub it in. But –
am I happy? Yes, I’m happy. But you know, sometimes I worry about
what it’s doing to the kids. My kids. All kids. It’s all going
so fast, Greg. Basically we sell stuff that makes them more and more
remote. I looked in on Dan and Kath this morning and they were
already wired in and… do they get any benefit from a nice house,
good schools, whatever? They live in a virtual world already: they
could be anywhere. I take them walking through Stout Grove and look
up at the trees – the world’s oldest living things, the most
massive – magnificent, the cathedral of nature. Light slanting
through dimly to the forest floor, the gentle clicks of the
woodpecker and hoots of the…”
He looked around the cafeteria;
it was a miracle of the interior designer’s art – but did people
care? Half of them were on their mobiles, their hand helds, or other
devices. The rest were gobbling down their burgers so as to get back
to their screens as fast as possible. People used to talk at
lunchtime.
“Why are you saying this,
Alfie?”
Yes, why? I’m beginning to
sound like Bett did, before she too succumbed to the wonders of
technology.
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