The Enterprise - 22

It occurred to me one day in early December that I hadn't seen Brett in a while. Normally he was hyper-present: banging away on his guitar, stomping around the office to peer over people's shoulders, boots up on the conference table barking at the staticky entities on the other end of the phone. Today he was gone and I tried to remember the last day I saw him. I could not.

I swiveled around to Steve, the recently hired quality assurance manager.

"Have you seen Brett? Where's Brett?"

Steve craned his neck over his partition and scanned the environs like a periscope.

"I dunno."

"You dunno? You work for him."

Steve shrugged. "Dunno where he is."

"Has he been gone for a while?"

"I dunno," he frowned. "Can't remember."

"Don't you think that's weird?" I asked.

"What?"

"The fact that he was here and now he's gone."

He shrugged again. "Don't ask me, man. I'm just sitting here trying to write a fucking test plan."

"Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know."

David rolled over between us.

"Is this a conversation I should participate in?" he inquired eagerly.

"Maybe," replied Steve. "I dunno, man. I think it's over."

David scrutinized Steve's face and mine in turn as we sat in silence. I rolled back and forth a little. I liked the sound the casters made against the wood. Finally we broke off and returned to work.

The Enterprise - 21

On the street I discreetly observed the vagrants and the crazies, those who operated out of bounds. I was fascinated by their brusque, discombobulated intrusions upon the cozy realm in which the rest of us were coddled. It was difficult not to perceive within their batty declamations the stark ring of truth.

As I left the gym one day I realized I needed a quart of milk. On a corner a block away I spotted the reassuring neon glow of a deli. But as I approached I detected a hulking shadow by the doorway.

"LADIES AND GENTLEMEN PLEASE GIVE TO THE HOMELESS," the man wailed monotonically. "PLEASE GIVE. PLEASE GIVE TO THE HOMELESS."

People walked by him in a slight arc, as though magnetically repelled. Without a glance.

I asked myself a craven little question: Do I really need milk? I turned around at the edge of the sidewalk, back across the street.

"DON'T GO MY BROTHER!" the man pleaded after me. "I'M YOUR LONG LOST LITTLE BROTHER!"

Still other strange things happened on the street and underground. I was at Union Square, waiting for the uptown 6, late on a scotch-soaked night. A man walked down onto the platform, a stocky white guy in his thirties. He wore workboots, a hooded sweatshirt under his denim jacket. His jeans were faded and frayed from honest work outdoors. He was in a state of extreme agitation.

"Fucking COCKSUCKERS!" he raged. "Fucking douchebag son-of-a-bitch COCKSUCKERS!"

He slammed the standing subway map with his elbow. It rang like a dull gong.

"Internet rich-kid MOTHERFUCKERS!" He glared around, red-cheeked and a little out of breath. "You fucking hipster motherfucking CUNTS!"

I turned my head and gazed tensely at the trash between the tracks. I hoped he would not kill me. But I thought he might. Why not? In time he wandered out of sight, his curses reverberating down the tiled walls.

On my way to work one morning, my reverie was interrupted by a deranged woman at 110th and Malcolm X.

"They lie! They lie! They lie!" she howled. "They lie in circles on the street!"

One day I was on a train. A fairly crowded train. It was reaching peak velocity between stops, the point at which it sways uneasily on the tracks. A somnolent man was leaning on a window when it suddenly popped out and disappeared into the blackness. The roar of wheels and wind filled the car as he flailed, his head and torso dangling in the dark. He caught his balance and – petrified, ashen – backed away from the awful, noisy hole. He gazed around at us with a curious smile. Almost apologetical. A few smiled back, nodding gently. No one said a word. He stepped gingerly through the throng, like a man returned from outer space. Then he took a spot at a handrail and waited for his stop like everybody else.

Me, I got home and filled my shaker up with salt. I watched as the crystals formed their conical pile at the bottom and the powder escaped vaporously at the top.

The Enterprise - 20

Brett lurched across the floor one morning, grabbed an empty chair, swiveled it around and sat facing me.

"Sex," he stated.

"Hmm?"

"Sex!"

"What about it?"

"Exactly! What about it?"

"Yeah?"

"I type in 'sex.' How does the application respond?"

"I see."

"I see?"

"No, I see. The application, let's see, I mean, uh..."

"What does it say when someone says 'sex'?"

"Right."

"Because that's the first goddamn thing everyone's gonna say to it."

"Probably."

"It might not be the sort of thing you pick up in Judy's fucking usability testing. But trust me."

"I suppose you're right."

"Faced with a blank screen. A keyboard. People are gonna type S-E fucking X."

"People are predictable. We're in the business of predicting people."

"It's the first and the last thing on everyone's goddamned mind." He gave a sly smile. "You know what's everything in between, of course."

"In between sex?"

"Death."

"Death. Wow."

"Death is the other thing."

"Yeah. I don't know how we sh–"

"We got death covered already."

"We do?"

"Someone says, 'I want to kill myself.' What do we say? In your opinion."

"Don't do it? There's so much to live for?"

Brett closed his eyes and shook his head.

"Please type your zip code and I will provide you with the phone number for the nearest suicide prevention hotline?"

He shook his head a little harder. "Nope."

"Then what?"

"Nothing."

"Nothing?"

"Someone says they want to kill themselves. We say nothing."

"We change the subject? We present the home screen?"

"Nope. Nope. Nothing."

"We say nothing? In other words, we don't say anything?"

"Precisely," he stated, satisfied.

"Blank screen?"

"Empty space."

"Wouldn't that constitute a tacit endorsement?"

Brett shrugged. "Lawyers told us."

"Lawyers?"

"They examined the question and determined that in order to fully protect ourselves from any conceivable liability, we should go dark."

I pondered this a moment.

"So forget about death. Sex."

"Right, so–"

"So what does it say?"

"What does it say?"

"The application. I came over, I sat down. I said 'sex.' What do you say?"

"That's very interesting."

"Really? Interesting."

"What an interesting thing to say."

Brett thought it over for a little while.

"I like it."

And so I began writing my first domain. The Sex domain.

The Enterprise - 19

There was a bodega on our corner, run by Yemeni brothers. Each morning they fried up a giant, tangled pile of bacon on the griddle and the thick, rich smell would pour out in a steam plume from the vent to 105th.

Jeff the Happy Homeless Guy stood on the corner all day, every day, like it was his job. I never did see him more than half a block away on either side. He was perpetually drifting past the bodega door, on his way to nowhere. He'd signal me cheerily, eyes alight, flashing a chipped-tooth grin. Then his face would fall. He'd mumble something to indicate he was in need, always as though it were an unexpected and exceptional circumstance. Can ya help me out? It was important to him – maybe important to me, important to us – that this transaction not become as rote as the exacting of a toll. So it became a little ritual: the bright greeting, the solemn appeal, the inevitable donation, the warm parting of ways. At the end he usually asked after my sister and told me to tell her something I couldn't quite understand.

A conversation I overheard between a man and a woman in their thirties, walking down Seventh Street in the Slope:

Woman: "'Singin' in the Rain' was in 'A Clockwork Orange'?"

Man: "Yes it was."

Woman: "I had no idea!"

The Enterprise - 18

Outside of work I drifted around Manhattan in endlessly overlapping figures. The gym on the Upper East. The bar in Gramercy for shooting pool. The Park, the Village. Trying not to let the antenna of my StarTAC poke me in the balls.

I lived in Spanish Harlem with my sister Su and our friend Sean. Every day I'd walk home from the 6 at Lex and 103rd: down the sidewalk with the windblown wisps of trash; past the garden cantina with the plastic chairs, the tires in a pile, the knee-high grass and weeds. The liquor store on the corner with the yellow sign and the bulletproof booth. I once bought a bottle of wine I'd noticed in the window, vintage 1972. For twenty-eight years it had rested in its spot in the display while the hood lived and died beyond the glass: babes paraded in prams by proud and hopeful moms grew up to go to school, to became teachers, cops, paper pushers for the city, to inherit the taqueria, or to become the truant, dealers maybe, gangstas, doomed to die young on the street; some felled by rivals, some by brothers in arms for a trifle—a slight, a rumor, a betrayal. A girl. A man who once screamed and strained for his mother's breast now lay on the corner in a gently expanding pool of blood. Through it all the stupid bottle of French wine looked on. I took it home. It was piss.

For many years before I moved I'd ride the Metro-North down. My sister already lived here. But a Connecticut boy never really needs a reason to see the City. It exerted a magnificent gravitational pull, out of the woods and down the coastline, through the dollhouse towns of Fairfield Country, behind a jumble of graffiti'd warehouses and finally: Grand Central Station. I was always fascinated by the stretch of elevated track between 125th Street and the plunge under Park Avenue. I recognized that this was, objectively, a bad area. You could tell from the overgrown lots, the cracked windows, the peeled-paint signs. But in the late sun shining from the west it sparkled like a jewel. This was the paradoxical result of decades of violence and neglect: glass everywhere, crushed nearly to powder, from car accidents, break-ins, discarded bottles. It gave the impression that the streets of this city were paved not with gold but with diamonds.

It would be crazy to live here, I thought to myself, gazing out the train. I tried to imagine how different my life would be, how strange and wonderful and awful it would be, if I lived right there in that scintillating ghetto.

The Enterprise - 17

My friend Mike from back in Connecticut had a big idea of his own. I went down to his apartment, a creaky industrial loft in Chinatown, after work one Tuesday. The space was spare, with splintering floors, a computer, a hammock strung from wall to wall. Several sixteen-millimeter Russian windup cameras were stacked in a corner. He had an angle on them from some ex-pat named Boris. He bought them cheap, fiddled with the insides so they'd work a little better, sell them to NYU film students. This wasn't the big idea.

There were four of us in at first, besides Mike. There was Adam, from back home too. There was Jim, one of our circle in the city. There was Evan, a bleary-eyed doctor friend of Mike's. We gathered in folding chairs in a circle around nothing. As Mike began his pitch, a dull, rapid pounding emanated from beyond the ceiling. Though it was rhythmic it was not musical. It was relentless and oppressive, the beating heart of a great mechanical beast.

"What is that?" I interrupted.

"That's the sweatshop. The sewing machines."

"When does it stop?"

"Never. Well, sometimes. But mostly never."

Gradually, haltingly, Mike outlined his plan. It seemed sensible. He wanted to build an online interface too – a video player, specifically, tricked up with features and controls – through which people might learn languages. We asked him what we imagined to be wise and diligent questions: What's the business model? What's the exit strategy? He offered few answers.

"I'm going to need some money," he declared.

We each pledged thousands of dollars in exchange for shares in this vaporous endeavor. We did it automatically, dutifully. Not one of us considered not buying in. Certainly not if the next guy was. It would have seemed contrary to the spirit of the gathering. It would have seemed rude.

I was certain the enterprise was doomed.

We made plans to meet again and parted under the robotic throbbing of the machines.

The Enterprise - Prologue

Tom begged me not to write this book.

"I dunno, man," he said, grimacing, squirming on his barstool.

"What? Why? Why not?"

He shook his head. "It's just that–"

He looked up for a moment, jiggling the warm remains of his martini.

"Never mind," he said. He took his penultimate sip. "Never mind. Forget it."

He always did this.

"What? What? What?" I pleaded.

Now he smiled, a little warily. Preparing to explain it after all. He always did this, too.

"I wouldn't do it."

"I know you wouldn't fucking do it. Why shouldn't I do it?"

"I dunno, man."

His left leg was fidgeting and he appeared distracted. It was a source of great distress to me that he was not supportive.

"You won't look bad," I assured.

He put his hand up. "Don't care about that. Not the point. Not the point."

"What is the point?"

"I dunno man." He sucked a breath in through his teeth. "Just doesn't seem like a good idea. That's all."

I peered into the watery remains of my Johnny Black on the rocks, a goddamn familiar sight if ever there was one. I felt Tom's approbation press against the walls of my body: my chest, my shoulders. It had all the more authority for being inchoate, unexplained. Unjustified. It existed beyond justification. Beyond words.

"I wouldn't do it," he repeated.

"I know you wouldn't do it."

He spun towards me and adopted a reasoning posture, hand extended to the side. Then, haltingly: "What do you expect to gain from– What's the point of– Is it that important to you to–"

"I'm not out to fuck people. It is not my intention to fuck people."

His expression broke a little bit. "Really?"

"Really."

"Then what is the point?" he asked.

"It's all I got, man."

He tilted his head and narrowed his eyes. "Explain."

"Some people are programmers. Some people are project managers. Some people are this or that, biz dev, VP, blahdee blahdee blah."

"Yeah?"

"And I'm not any of those things."

"So?"

"So this is all I got. All I've got is my story. And the inclination to tell it. This is what I have."

My mouth was dry. I had a feeling I had waited my entire life to speak those words. They hung gravely in the air between us as I drank the icy water from my glass.

"All right," Tom said. "I changed my mind."

"You changed your mind?"

"Yeah."

"Yeah?"

"I think you should write it."

The Enterprise - 16

The application – the Product – could be conceived of as an assemblage of subject areas – domains – within which content was aggregated from one or more sources. It was unclear to me who had devised this breakdown, and on what basis. Had there been market research? Focus groups? At first it seemed that the subject areas had arisen organically, by some collective intuition. It then grew clear that more prosaic factors were at play: The availability of content. The cost. The degree to which deploying it as a new domain within the Product would turn into a goddamned pain in the ass.

In the Product as it stood you could, among other things, get your horoscope for today or search words and phrases in the Holy Bible.

Each developer under Brett was in charge of one or more domains. These had been distributed according to some combination of interest, proclivity and seniority. Sports belonged to Kevin and his sidekick Jim. Movies to Julie. News to Rob. Stock quotes fell to Peter, games to Lucy. Each fiefdom was defended with wary pride. They were all, perhaps, a little bigger than they had to be. More complex. For there was an unspoken competition to lay claim to the most end-user requests and session time, statistics that were scrupulously culled, parsed and displayed each day on an internal reporting site. The traffic to one's domain became a measure of the self.

The developers became adept at using little tricks to exploit the algorithm at the heart of the Product. Liberties were taken in the definition of synonymous words and phrases. Dubious predicates and key words were added. Matching scores crept up. The entire department existed in a state of cold war over language. Not over meaning – at the expense of meaning, really. Over raw language.

There was a rolling whiteboard in the middle of the room, beside an island of cubicles. On it, Brett had listed guidelines to remember in red:

1. Synonyms. Did you think of every fucking synonym? Add synonyms!!
2. Predicates. Check the score of your predicates. Is your predicate too sticky?? TEST!!
3. Matching. Add alternations! Add optionals! Does every query you can think of match?? WHY THE FUCK NOT!?
4. Ambiguity. RESOLVE AMBIGUITY.
5. Last but not least: Does your domain suck? Ask yourself. MAKE SURE YOUR DOMAIN DOES NOT SUCK!!!
6. See #5!!!

At first I lived on the periphery of this world, making occasional, meek requests for copy changes. I had no programming skills, after all. I was on the creative team, the builders of images and concepts. I was not meant to get dirty. But the editorial process was absurd. I'd write up and format a Word document, send it to the right person. They'd have to lift their heads out of their code long enough to tediously copy and paste my edits. So Brett and Bob agreed to give me access to the web-based domain editor, a mostly foolproof tool, with the understanding that I was only to touch the output.

I deleted a word. And another. I deleted a sentence. I wrote a new one. I saved the file. It was queued for production.

The Enterprise - 15

Cindy Metzger was in charge of public relations, or press relations, or whatever you want to call it that amounts to PR. She was friendly, attractive. A bit discombobulated. She always had a sleepy look, like she'd just spilled out of bed. The following morning, she sent me a draft of the name-change press release from her room at The Prison. She called me up a few minutes later. It was seven something, her time.

"Did you get it?" she asked.

"Looking at it now."

"Ugh. Ugh!"

"What's wrong?"

"Judy wants the final draft on her desk, first thing in the morning. I was up all night writing this."

"I think it looks pretty good. I–"

"God fucking dammit."

"What?"

"My hair. My fucking hair. There's no fucking hair dryer in this fucking place."

"I'm going to send you back a version."

"Does it look OK?"

"It looks good. There's just a couple of–"

"Can I just tell you what a cunt she is?"

"Sure."

"I got here late yesterday. I was supposed to meet her at the office. The plane was late. She acted like it was my fault."

"Damn."

"THE PLANE WAS LATE."

"I know."

"Do I fly the fucking plane? Am I the pilot of the plane?"

"Right."

"Am I the co-pilot? Am I that other fucking person in the cockpit?"

"Exactly."

"Am I the air fucking traffic controller?"

"Yeah! No."

"Do I look like the guy who waves the fucking little sticks around? Do I look like that guy?"

"You do not."

"The fucking little orange sticks?"

"Yeah, yeah."

"So HOW IS IT MY FAULT THAT THE PLANE WAS LATE?"

"I don't see a way how."

"So then she sends me all these fucking changes to the press release. Like she couldn't have sent them last week. For Christ's sake."

"Good Lord."

"And so here I am, at the fucking Prison, with my hair still fucking wet," she concluded in a weary singsong.

"Yeah. God."

She broke into soft sobs.

"Are you OK?" I asked.

"I don't know how much more of this I can take!"

"It'll be OK," I reassured. "I'm sure it'll be OK, I think."

"Thanks Paul," she said with a sniff and a halting sigh.

"I'm sending you the doc in five minutes."

"Thank you. Thank you."

The Enterprise - 14

The clock had counted down and read zero for a few days now. Weeks, maybe. It was hard to keep track without its steady, reassuring decrementation. The bright-red digits saying: There's still time. Or: It will happen soon. Depending on your point of view.

I stood beside Bob's desk as he reviewed a hardcopy of my website edits.

"The clock's at zero," I remarked.

"Hmm? Oh, yeah. Yeah," he replied, and looked back down at the marked-up pages.

"Are we going to reset it to something?"

"I don't know. Why?"

"Isn't zero when we launch?"

"Zero came and went."

"We launched? The Product?"

Bob grimaced and rolled his head from side to side. "Not exactly. Sort of."

"Did we blast off into space?"

"The current strategy is to soft-launch," he said.

"When's the soft launch?"

"Super-soft."

"But did it happen? Or is it going to happen?"

He sighed. "It's happening right now."

I looked around us. The office was enveloped in the characteristic hush of digital industry, everybody seated, pointing, clicking. Occasionally a desk phone emitted a soft, electronic burble.

"Really?"

"The idea is to let the Product seep into the world rather than to inject it. It's more authentic that way. It's organic. The virality should really benefit."

I nodded.

"It's a known strategy," he continued. "I think it's Japanese. Possibly Finnish."

"Seeping?"

"Not sure what they call it. And plus, the feeling at the tippy-top was that the Product is not ready. You didn't hear it from me."

"The feeling out west?"

"The feeling out west. Back east, too."

I stared at the expired clock and pondered it all.

"We did change our name. I'm working on a new logo for the business cards. By the way, they're going to need you to weigh in on the press release. Cindy's going to reach out to you tomorrow morning."

"Prizm? With a Z?" I asked.

"No. Our lawyers did some investigating and there's a conflict with some fucking consulting company. Probably not a big issue but they judged it to be imprudent."

"So what's our name?"

"Intracto."

"Intracto," I repeated.

The Enterprise - 13

On the way back down to the Valley, we'd been talking about – debating – the home screen issue in the product interface when David suddenly fell silent.

"What's up?"

No reply. He shifted in the driver's seat, staring straight ahead with a vaguely pained expression.

"Hey," I insisted.

"The windmills," he stated hollowly.

"What?"

"There are windmills on that hill."

I peered through the darkness toward the indistinguishable horizon. Frankly, I could not see a thing.

"Really. So?"

"Windmills spinning in the dark make me uncomfortable," he muttered.

I scrutinized his face. The light from oncoming traffic produced a greenish pallor.

"Really?"

"One day–" He gulped nauseously. "One day, I was driving back to Berkeley from San Jose. I started feeling weird. Pulled over and puked out my guts."

"Jesus."

"I had a migraine the rest of the night. Trembling and sweating. I went to the doctor the next day. He ruled out food poisoning, the flu."

"Yeah?"

"He asked me where I'd been, what I'd seen. What I hadn't seen."

"And?"

"He determined that the presence of windmills along the highway, spinning in the–" he shuddered in disgust – "dark had made me sick."

"How is that even a thing that can happen?" I asked.

David shrugged. "There's lots of people like me. It's an environmental sensitivity."

"How about windmills in the daytime?"

"Not a problem."

"What is it about them, do you think, at night?"

He sighed and answered through clenched teeth. "It's dark. They're spinning. They're spinning in the dark. I don't know what else to say."

"All right."

"It's awful, I'm telling you. Awful."

"Want me to drive?"

"Could you?"

The Enterprise - 12

You get a special feeling in San Francisco. It's airy and isolated, impervious to the dreary ailments of other cities. I cannot imagine a wisp of trash blowing in its streets. As we approached it from the south dusk fell upon it gently, like a hallowing.

It probably didn't hurt that the place was inundated with capital.

David had wanted to rent a motorcycle, ride it into the hills and up and down the PCH. I don't know. I contemplated what an afternoon at The Prison might feel like, drifting into evening and finally, night. The microwave food. The cheap booze. The pornography. Time distending, collapsing into silence. Is that what I wanted? It was almost what I wanted.

But for all his enthusiasm David was frustrated in his quest. And so now we found ourselves parking the rental on Haight Street, two guys on a detour from business, anonymous, without a purpose.

The sidewalk was peopled with what appeared to be runaway kids. It was impossible not to think back to the so-called Summer of Love. That's what everyone thought about when they thought about this street, even those who weren't alive in '67. Especially them. For myth has greater power over those who did not witness fact.

A scrawny boy with spiky black hair and a face both acne-scarred and studded approached us, hand outstretched.

"Gimme some money," he demanded.

"Why?" I asked.

"Fuck you."

He walked with us for another fifteen feet or so, hand still out, as though the interaction so far had been perfectly normal and might well result in the dispensing of a dollar or two. I glimpsed his girl behind us, by the wall. She wore a wild tangle of dreadlocks, a lip ring, a granny dress, nothing on her feet. She clutched a trembling dog and kissed him between the ears. Finally her boy broke away and returned to her.

We pressed on, nowhere to go but forward, nothing to do but this. We wandered in and out of bookstores and cafés, their entranceways festooned with calls to demonstrate for this and that, against the other thing. The neighborhood itself seemed to be a living bulletin board. Behind the latest tract was last year's; and behind that one, the year before's. No one ever bothered to throw anything out. It'd be disrespectful. Or worse yet: negative. Nihilistic. The anarchy flyer's OK, just don't tear anything down, man. If you have a new idea, pin it on the past. And any surface that wasn't covered had absorbed the smoke of all the fires it had seen: peace marches, feminism, black power, animal rights, environmentalism, gay rights, whatever. You could drill out a sample like a scientist, read the history of our time.

We had a drink at a tall-ceilinged, decrepit bar.

"Now what?" said David.

"I don't know."

We sat in silence for a while longer.

"Let's drive around," I said.

"OK."

We drove to the Presidio and stopped where a street took a right angle to the right and straight ahead the earth just fell away. In the distance was the Bay. We parked the car and got out and walked down the steps, the Lyon Street Steps, shouldered by ornate, shuttered Venetian-style homes with terra cotta roofs. It was all beautiful and precious and I wondered what it would be like to be one of these joggers, rich, healthy San Francisco people, running up and down the steps and stretching against the stone walls of the garden.

David had gone to Berkeley and lived there after graduating. He wanted to drive by his old haunts, the Greek Theatre, the old chemistry building. We ate at the most famous and expensive place in town, a legendary bastion of locally sourced and seasonal cuisine. We spent lavishly.

"I think the first thing the user needs to do is type 'home,'" said David between bites of mesclun.

"I agree," I replied.

"If they don't see the home screen right away, they have no idea as to the scope of functionality."

"Clearly."

"If they don't type 'home,' we should force them to type 'home.'"

"How?"

"Deliver a message. Telling them they should have typed 'home.' Type 'home' now. Please."

"No matter what they typed?"

David nodded.

"I'm not sure I agree."

After dinner we drove back across the Bay Bridge. We sat at another bar, a posh one this time. Ornate and old-timey. Might've been a literary haunt some time ago, or might've been  made to look like one. Some of the ritziest bars in the world are the ones where broke writers used to drink. David had expected some old friends to be there. We drank expensive and pretentious martini-style cocktails. Nobody came.

Finally, there was nothing left to do but cross the Golden Gate. Up in the hills beyond it lay Marin, home of rich musicians, artists, free thinkers of privilege and means. I wondered what it might feel like to cross this bridge at the end of every day.

As soon as we arrived on the other side we pulled in to the vista lot and turned around.

I thought I'd hate "Avatar" but I liked it slightly better than that. Sure it was hokey and stupid and formulaic. But I appreciated the savagery of its attack on American militarism and imperialism, the notion that we're essentially entitled to the world's riches and we can run roughshod over other countries, races and species to feed our greedy maws.

The sun found all of Brooklyn today, every shuttered commercial tiling warehouse, every precious little park, all the waterfront condos and the pita joints on Atlantic Avenue.

The Enterprise - 11

"The sensei is a friend of a friend," Bill declared. "We let him come in and use a computer sometimes."

"And he gives lessons in return?" asked David.

Bill nodded. "I think he's homeless."

Conversation quieted for a few minutes and our attentions drifted to the television, where a bicolored mosaic crept across the national map from east to west, favoring red. We balanced paper plates of takeout Chinese on our knees as Bill's little boy and girl ran around smacking into things and scaling the furniture.

We were in a ranch-style house on a tiny patch of grass beside a busy street, near a vast and gleaming shopping mall. Bill volunteered that the place had cost one point two million dollars.

"Did you enjoy it?" Bill asked.

"What?" I replied.

"The sword training. Audrey! Come here!"

We made favorable sounds and expressions.

"It's my team-building exercise!" he beamed.

Later, back at The Prison, I lay on the stiff bed clutching a flask of scotch. Things were getting weird in the election. Al Gore had called George Bush to retract his concession. It was not immediately clear whether Bush understood the meaning of the word "retract." Florida had been declared but now was back in play. I drifted off to sleep to the increasingly surreal metaphors of Dan Rather, sounding like a drunk Mark Twain.

The following day we concluded our testing, the final user exiting after having provided the same ingenuous and anodyne feedback as practically all the others. We sat with everyone for a midafternoon conference call with New York. The contested election shadowed every conversation. Someone put up CNN on the projection screen and we watched the gap in the tally narrow by the minute.

It was early Wednesday afternoon and we had nowhere to go, nothing to do.

Rachel Maddow's interview of Jon Stewart tonight was curiously depressing. He seemed obstinate, touchy, ornery. His defense of his neutral posture was obviously practiced, and not without validity or insight, but there seemed to be an emptiness at the heart of it all, one that he, more than anyone, perceives. He kept saying things like, "That's true," or "That's a fair point," or "Fair enough," in the manner of a too-reasonable boyfriend who, despite his erudition, is losing the fight. "That's a valid point, honey, I fucked the babysitter." Or more like: "You're right. I want to fuck the babysitter. But I never have and never will." What I mean to say is that his points were too fine.

And Rachel didn't take him sufficiently to task. Occasionally she ventured the observation that they are in the same line of business, but she didn't make it stick. The fact is, Stewart is in her business when he wants to be in hers and in his when he wants to be in his. What a privilege! What an opportunity! He should embrace it honestly, make the most of it. He claimed that he was in one of the oldest professions in the world (satire - second oldest?). But maybe he's in one of the newest. Why not celebrate that? Why not see where it takes him, where it takes us?

Sometimes I look out the kitchen window into the apartment across the street, the things on their walls, the furniture, the back of a speaker in the den. An old man in a red shawl, seated in his usual chair. Other people live their lives in there.

Sometimes I watch the cables hanging from the roof and swaying in the breeze.

The Enterprise - 10

We checked in to the sad little hotel across from the office, a distressed outpost from another time, from when people did not come to town to tinker with machines but passed through to hike the Russian Ridge, maybe. Or God knows what. To escape on a doomed tryst with the secretary. To light out for the desert with a body in the trunk. It was inappropriate, it would seem, to the bright-shiny character of our endeavors, to say nothing of our cozy sense of privilege. So we chose to laugh about it: the nickname for the Pacific Inn was The Prison. If you were going to spend a few nights out west, it was said you were going to prison. One of the rooms – you'd have to be awfully unlucky to get it – was equipped with a Murphy bed.

Dinner was a selection of plastic-wrapped burritos, stacked beside the microwave. The yellow one, the red. The jumbo for the bigger appetites. Atop the microwave sat a Mr. Coffee machine with a perpetual pot, darkening by the hour. The Styrofoam cups were stacked up beside the sugar and the Sweet 'n' Low, the half-and-half, the Coffee-Mate. You were free to help yourself anytime of the day or night.

The following day was Tuesday, November seventh, the presidential election between George W. Bush and Al Gore. I'd voted days before in Manhattan, dutifully filling out my absentee ballot on Varick. Still, of all possible days, it seemed peculiar that on this one we should find ourselves across the country, about to scrutinize a series of strangers as they interacted with the fruit of our labors.

The Sunnyvale branch was predominantly hardcore technical: guys who didn't see much light of day, who were involved with the Product at the seabed level: where it was darkest, coldest, forbiddingly dense. The New York office was full of salespeople, business developers, designers and the like, people accustomed to looking each other square in the eye and smiling.

Of course it wasn't that simple. There was a bit of the West Coast in the East. There was a bit of the East Coast in the West. There were aspects of the people themselves that you couldn't readily see.

The office itself was located at an intersection, on the ground floor of a dismal commercial building that also housed a roster of utterly prosaic small-town concerns: an accountant, a lawyer, a distributor of medical supplies. Behind the glass door lay a jumble of desks, computers, computer parts and idiosyncratic personal effects. Judy appeared from her office in the back and introduced us to whoever happened to be around: the joyless and matronly office manager, Nancy; an enormously obese programmer, Nick; the genial Frenchman Jacques and his introverted echo Julien, and finally, the famous Bill, officially the CTO but really just the famous Bill.

Judy took us to the conference room and introduced us to Lisa, from Interim Consulting Services. Lisa was attractive, officious, a little bit distracted. She had a file folder open before her containing several documents and pages of handwritten notes. A keyboard and monitor were set up at the empty head of the table.

"Lisa will be facilitating the usability study," Judy declared.

"What does that mean?" I asked.

"I'll be asking the questions," said Lisa.

"What are we going to do?"

"I want you guys to observe," said Judy. "Note-take. I'll be asking for your thoughts later. Thoughts and impressions. They'll be invaluable as we take on board the feedback, reassess and reconfigure."

"So we sit. And watch?" asked David.

"Watch."

"Where?"

"Over here, if you like," said Lisa. "Or over there."

"Right where you're sitting now is OK," said Judy. "Is that OK, Lisa?"

"That's fine. That's OK."

For the entire morning and the better part of the afternoon, men and women, mostly young, perhaps recently unemployed, paraded in and took their turns in the seat of honor. They examined the screen with alacrity, eager to please, or at least to satisfy.

A rather large tray of catered snacks was on offer on the credenza: brownies, petit fours, cookies, strawberries, sliced melon. It remained largely untouched.

"What might you type, do you think, at this point?" was the first question Lisa would ask, or a variation thereof.

"I don't know," some replied, frankly flummoxed.

Others might meekly, tentatively key in an overture: "Hello." "Hi." "What is this?"

"Were you at all inclined to type 'home'?"

"Oh!" they'd reply, like chastened pupils. Or: "No." "I don't know."

"Type 'home.'"

They did as they were told and the interaction continued, sometimes veering into vexing dead ends, sometimes concluding more or less happily, it would appear.

"There!" Lisa would exclaim.

A bashful smile from the user.

"Do you think this is an experience you might be interested in having again?" she asked. Or: "Would you tell other people about this if it were available? Family? Friends?"

"Oh yes," was the inevitable reply. "Yeah. Definitely." And if any cookies were eaten it was on the way out.

It was only midafternoon, and we had arrived at the end of Day 1. Judy led us in an impromptu debrief after Lisa had packed up her notes and folders and left.

"I wasn't too happy with the quality of the usability testers today, guys."

We murmured vague noises of assent.

"I didn't say anything to Lisa but I will. Do you realize how much we're paying for this?"

We smiled and nodded, allowing the question to be rhetorical. Just then Bill walked over with some urgency.

"Training time, guys! Take your swords."

He handed each of us a practice Japanese samurai sabre, a sinister-looking, gently curving wooden object that seemed only marginally less lethal than its steel analog.

"Everybody out in the parking lot!" yelled Bill as he strode through the main room clutching his sword. "Practice time!"

The programmers stood up creakily, stretched, and took up arms as well. Soon we were all out back, between the dumpster and the cars, standing in traditional dojo formation before a bald sensei clad in a flowing, black robe.

"Transfer your swords!" he barked.

The others dutifully moved their swords from left hand to right and held them stiffly at the opposite hip, as though they rested in a sheath. I stood in the back, fumblingly imitating them.

"Pair up!"

Everyone found a partner and stood ten paces or so apart. Mine was Nick, the tremendously obese programmer. His face bore an expression of solemn concentration and a faint sheen of sweat.

"You'll get the hang of it," he said. "Just watch what I do."

"Does everyone remember the kata from last week?" demanded the sensei. "New people: pay attention!"

He grabbed Bill from the front row and demonstrated a series of swift, cutting motions, each time bringing the tip of his sword hard and fast to within a few inches of Bill's neck.

"Yoko giri! Side cut!" he exclaimed. This time he swung his sword laterally and halted it beside Bill's pudgy abdomen. "The objective is to slice your opponent in half like a ripe fruit. Cut briskly and cleanly, without mercy! You must be completely dedicated to your strike. Hesitate for a moment and your opponent–" the sensei grabbed Bill's wrist and forced it upwards, the sword hanging high overhead in a chopping position – "will come down on the top of your skull with one hundred percent commitment and cut you to the core."

He broke away from Bill and turned toward the class, his every movement self-consciously fluid, ritualized. His posture was immaculate.

"Your turn!" he shouted at us.

Nick and I came at each other haltingly, deliberately, and positioned our weapons in the prescribed manner. I brought mine down over his skull; he parried as instructed. I had the feeling of participating in a staid, courtly dance.

Suddenly the sensei was behind me. He pulled back my shoulders and oriented me directly ahead.

"Face your opponent! Face your opponent!"

"Right, right, right," I said.

"He wants to cut you to ribbons!"

"I know."

"The kesa giri is like casting a fishing line. Try it! Try it!"

I pulled the sword over my head and brought it down in what I imagined to be a clean and graceful manner.

"No! No! No! No! No!" shouted the instructor.

Again he grabbed my shoulders, then my hips, my elbows, my hand, my wrists, and again my shoulders, shaping me and shaping me again, as though I were made of uncompliant putty.

"Don't force the blade."

"OK."

"Don't force the blade!"

"Got it."

"Let it fall. Let the blade do the work."

"I see."

"It's very sharp! Trust the sharpness. Trust the blade!"

"Yup."

"Move quickly, decisively. Bring the blade down through Nick's skull."

He grabbed my wrists and moved them for me, bringing the sword down with them.

"Collapse your wrist before the point of impact. Move your body through. Move your body through!"

I leaned far forward, holding the sword loosely with the tip in the vicinity of Nick's forehead. I was off balance and out of breath. I hoped desperately I would not fall over.

"Better. Better!"

"Thanks," I said, returning to the ready position.

"Chiburi!" the master howled.

"What?"

"Chiburi! The blade!"

"Hmm?"

"You've just cut clean through the body of another man."

"Yes?"

"Shake the blood off that blade before you sheath it!"

He took my wrists again and shook them up and down. The sword bobbed in the air a few times and we all imagined fat, crimson drops falling from it onto the tarmac.

"Good!" he declared, satisfied, and continued on his rounds.

Beyond the parking lot fence the Caltrain roared by, whistle blaring, on the way to San Francisco.

Jon Stewart's interview with Texas governor Rick Perry last night was excruciating. What a glib, glad-handing asshole Perry is. His mocking suggestion that people couldn't possibly prefer living in India to living in Texas was repugnant. It felt racist.

As is too often the case, Stewart was feeble, fawning. He undercut his own lines of attack with tension-cutting schtick. The liberal critique of the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear is correct: it presented a false equivalency between the loudest voices on the left and right. Stewart was disingenuously trying to seize the moral high ground. The story of the 2010 election season has been the resurgence of right-wing extremism: fear-mongering, race-baiting, bullying, intolerance and, above all, the cynical wielding of lies as propaganda. The craven outrage over the "Ground Zero mosque," the lies about health care and financial reform in the service of corporations and millionaires, the continuing vilification of immigrants. All of it is disgraceful and odious. And is there anything more reprehensible than fake populism? The tea party groups paid for by oil billionaires, lobbyists, corporations. There is no equivalency between these forces and the "unreasonable" voices on the left. Stewart's "can't we all just get along" message came off as pathetic and dishonest.