/usr/bin/god opening

Cory Doctorow

doctorow@craphound.com

--

[[in honor of breaking the 30,000-word mark on my new novel,
working title (to be changed), "/usr/bin/god," I'm posting this
2,000-word excerpt]]


Mason's car -- "The Mobile Nerd Command Center" or MNC2 for short
-- died the morning of the most disastrous job interview of his
life. He practically lived out of the MNC2, charging his
device-array -- phone, email pager, GPS, laptop, MP3 player,
digital camera, and PDA -- from the DC inverter that dangled from
a wad of duct-tape around the cigarette lighter; the back seat
was full of dead Mountain Dews and empty coffee-cups from Highway
101's many Starbuckses; and both sun visors bore clip-on CD
organizers filled with home-burned MP3 CDs that contained six
hundred plus hours of music.

As Mason pulled into the empty Menlo Park parking-lot that
morning, the dashboard lit up christmas with a Defcon 5 array of
idiot-lights. Six different chimes sounded from the absolutely
spectacular sound-system, resonating with jeep-beat bass that
made his gut churn. The engine died as he pulled into the spot
and the transmission made a horrible, grinding noise as he
shifted into park. When he switched off the ignition, the engine
made a chuggetta-chuggetta noise that sounded like a cartoon
foley effect. Mason had a vision of his car's hood popping open
and emitting a geyser of steam, followed by all four tires going
flat in unison, but the chuggetas died down and he was sitting in
the parking lot, seated at the conn of the former Mobile Nerd
Command Center, with twenty minutes to his job interview.

Job interview! He cringed at the words, cringed at the memory of
the grueling, humiliating pre-test he'd had to do to even *get* a
job-interview, which had included fifteen essay questions on the
history of the Internet, the fine points of Microsoft Foundation
Classes, and SQL query-syntax. He'd had to define a glossary of
no fewer than 30 technical terms, including "PEBKAC" ("Problem
Exists Between Keyboard and Chair"), which had been his freaking
*login* for five years on an underpowered Solaris box at his ISP.

He put his hands on the wheel and breathed deeply, feeling the
grinding ache in his lower back, feeling the caffeine jitter
behind his eyeballs, feeling the old pains in his forearms and
wrists, feeling thirty-three years' worth of cellular decay,
mitochondrial shortening and gravity in every muscle, every
tendon, every bone and bonelet. His PDA chimed the ten-minute
warning bell for the interview and he sucked in a deep breath
that made the softness of his belly press up against the cruel
dig of his last good belt in the loops of his hateful grey wool
slacks. He dug through the glovebox and found his retro-nerd-chic
flying toaster tie in its ripstop nylon travel pouch. He
unspooled it and got it noosed around his neck, swept his
device-array into his ballistic green nylon travel-case, and got
out of the car. He tried to lock the doors with the keychain fob,
but there was no satisfying chunk-beep of the car arming itself
against invaders, and so he circled it, opening each door and
manually locking down each lever.

He'd consulted for some startup in this office park sixteen
months before, at $150/hour, and at 8:30AM, the parking lot had
been filled with nerdmobiles of every make and model. The blank
eyes of the ranked windows had been enlivened with cubicle
totems, plush animals, and geek-humor posters. European H1Bs had
milled around the doorways, puffing cigarettes and shooting the
ployglot shit with one another in half a dozen languages. It had
been buzzy and exciting and smart.

Oh, so smart. Everyone was a font of creativity and interesting
factoids. Conversation was solidly anti-idiotarian, a form of
discourse that ran, "Here is a $THING. It is stupid. I am
smarter;" "I see! Here is $ANOTHER_THING, it is likewise stupid
and I am likewise smarter."

It wasn't just a fucking stock-market bubble -- it was nerdvana.

The parking lot was empty. The windows were empty. The European
coders had been laid off and deported to the land of six-week
vacations and socialized medicine. There was no security guard at
the front door and he had a job interview with a company that did
*really dull* middleware for migrating databases from one
proprietary format into another.

An unsmiling secretary sat him down in a board-room crowded with
bankruptcy-sale chairs. She gave him a radio-station gimme-mug of
lukewarm tap water and a cardboard coaster and left him to sweat.
He popped open his laptop and stuck in a wireless card to see if
he could find an open network, but there was nothing. The
cube-farm he'd passed on the way in had a white-box PC and a 17"
CRT on every desk, no laptops, no need for impromptu "meetings"
on a sofa in a well-stocked kitchenette, and hence no wireless.
He tried to imagine himself sitting in one of those cubes for
eight hours a day, five days a week, fifty weeks a year, and
thought that it would heartily suck.

But a man's gotta eat. The headhunter taught him that one. "It's
not as exciting as the kind of job you're used to, Mason, but a
man's gotta eat."

His gut rumbled.

The interviewer showed up ten minutes late. He was a big guy who
looked like he worked out, about Mason's age, with a knobby
class-ring, a chin-dimple and a sprinkling of distinguished
crow's feet. Mason got up when he came in and stuck out his hand,
which the guy waved at.

"Sit, sit." He had his hands full with a cup of coffee and a
two-way pager, which he was prodding at with one thumb at high
speed. He grunted at the two-way and snapped it shut. "Mason,
right?"

"Yes," Mason said, folding his hands over his laptop --
specifically, over the "WHITEY WILL PAY" sticker plastered over
the manufacturer's logo, a joke, haha only serious, shit, why
hadn't he left the box in his bag?

"Franklin. I'm the CTO. I've looked at your resume and I wanted
to talk to you about it."

"Shoot!" Mason said, loud enough to startle himself. His car was
dead, he was broke and he was here, begging Franklin-the-suit to
quiz him on his resume.

"Have you ever worked at one job for more than a year, Mason?" He
rapped his two-way on the table twice for punctuation and sucked
down some coffee, sighing out a little "Aaah," as he set the cup
down.

"I was a consultant," Mason said, hearing the weasel in his
voice. *If you're explaining, you're losing.* He'd given that
advice at $150/hour not all that long ago. "So I did short
contracts. I did good work. I'm a turnaround guy."

The two-way buzzed and Mason pawed his hips in sympathy, groping
for a phone or pager or other species of vibrating gear. Franklin
flipped open the pager and pursed his lips at it, thumb rolling
on the wheel. He nodded and flipped it shut.

"We're not looking for consultants," he said, drumming his
fingers impatiently on the table. "We don't need to turn around,
because we're not fuckups. We're doing it right and we need a
senior engineer who can help us keep on doing it right. You did
well on the test, but your resume sucks, Mason. On paper, you
look like a dot-com snake-oil salesman who only sticks around
long enough to make some fast coin, then moves on to the next
victim."

Mason grinned politely and shifted in his seat, fingers digging
into the hummus of stickers on his laptop.

"Well?"

"Was there a question in there, Franklin?" Mason said. He knew
about hard-asses. He could handle hard-asses.

"How much running code have you written, Mason?"

"I've been coding since I was ten," he said.

"How much of it is running today? You know MFC. You know Visual
Basic. Perl. Python. C++. C. C#. 8086 Assembler. PHP. Lisp. It
says so on your resume, in a bulleted list. I'm sure you can get
Hello World to run in any of those environments. But how much
*running code* have you written, Mason?"

"I've done plenty of solid back-end for numerous clients. I sent
along a portfolio as an attachment --"

"Online quizzes, demos, interactive marketing presentations. Are
you a talker, Mason, or are you a doer?"

"It's clear you've decided which one I am," Mason said, scraping
his laptop into his bag. "So thanks for the water."

"Sit the FUCK down, Mason," the man said. "And don't twitch one
fat cheek off that chair until I say goodbye and wish you a nice
day, or I'll talk to your recruiter in some depth. In some depth,
Mason. I hire five to ten coders a quarter through her, you know.
I think that makes me her best fucking customer these days."

Mason began to lever himself out of his chair, but his legs
wouldn't move.

"You're the kind of sneering, *creative*, self-important
'consultant' that sucked the economy dry. You're a carpetbagger,
Mason. You're a phony. You have a Humanities degree. You know the
gag-lines from last night's South Park, but you can't write code
from stubs. Wherever there's an entrepreneur with a great idea
and a little money, there you are, like a tapeworm, eating the
company out from the inside. I've seen a thousand of you, Mason,
and there's no more place for you in the Valley. Go find another
industry to pick on, and get the fuck out of mine." He delivered
this all with a wet smile and a charming crinkle in his eye and
only the veins standing out in his neck mirrored the hostility of
his words.

Mason was mesmerized. This fucknozzle had dragged him 50 miles
down the peninsula for the express purpose of telling him that he
thought he, Mason, sucked. He opened his mouth, then closed it.

"Good bye, Mason. Have a nice day." Franklin popped open his
two-way and spun the wheel, an unconscious smile on his lips.

Mason opened his mouth again, but he couldn't form the words.
Franklin was head-down on his pager, radiating a cone of
don't-interrupt-me that stilled Mason's tongue. Fucking two-ways.
He remembered mocking them on-stage at a conference somewhere,
making fun of the manufacturer's claims of "trickle-synching" --
"Trickling?" he's said, knowing he was gonna get a yuk.
"Trickling? So, it's, like, the Internet with prostate trouble?"
The audience had dissolved into shocked laughter.

Big yucks. Franklin's thumb danced over the keys and spun the
wheel, tapping out executive haiku for his underlings. Mason
gathered up his device-array, patted down his pockets and
verified the presence of all his customary gadget-bulges, and
slumped out of the office.