Don’t throw this letter away! You may have already won a beautiful 1997 Nissan Sentra in the PowerMac Magazine Hats Off Giveaway!
Just take a moment to imagine this lovely automobile parked in your driveway at
P.O. Box 838 Santa Clara Station !
You’ll be the envy of everyone on your block…
 
October 16, 1996
Now this is California, thought Danny. Even after four weeks, he still hadn’t quite adjusted to the breezy West Coast pop culture.
There was nothing in Mimi’s Grill, for example, that wasn’t made of driftwood or partially obscured by a Fiberglas cactus. The specials, written in loopy girl’s handwriting with fluorescent chalk that glowed under black light, universally included sundried tomatoes or avocado. The drinks were named for famous Western murderers, and there was no one at the bar older than 30.
He walked in with Skinner, Rod, and Charles, thinking how much they deserved this night out after two weeks of intense concentration. Of psychological manipulation, Danny corrected himself; nobody on earth had a greater mania for controlling than Gam Lampert.
They sat down and ordered drinks.
Skinner: “One of these Jesse Jameses, OK?”
Rod: “I’d like a Charlie Manson, please.”
Charles: “You winos are gonna dissolve your brains. Why don’t you put something healthy into your bodies? Yes, miss, gimme a Pepsi and a basket of fries.”
Danny scanned the Potages list, found a cranberry/grapefruit concoc-tion that sounded good. “A Yosemite Sam, please,” he said. The waitress glided away, roller skates flashing.
Danny half-focused on the TV above the bar, where a CNN correspondent was bringing the world into Mimi’s.
“What once was called the Soviet Union hasn’t had a day of certainty since the fall of Gorbachev. For months the people here have known conflict as an inescapable presence in their liiiives,” went the sing-song. “But for the past six months, Secretary of State Henry Masso has been working to change all that…”
“So check it out. Boys’ night out,” blurted Skinner, squirming happily on the booth bench after placing his calculator on the table. “Four crazy guys, right? Bachelors on the town?”
Charles regarded him dourly. “Our inability to get dates tonight is no cause for celebration, Hsiao. Take a Valium.”
Rod perked up. “Oh—gee—were we supposed to get girls tonight?” He looked to Danny for an answer. “Because I could have gotten one.”
Danny didn’t doubt it. The guy looked like a Kennedy and was about as threatening as Snuggles the fabric-softener bear.
“Maybe you could have, Rod,” deadpanned Charles. “But not all of us were born looking like Robert Redford’s love child.”
Rod looked sincerely shocked. “Robert Redford has a love child?” He blinked in disbelief.
Danny hoped the drinks would come soon.
Mercifully, Skinner changed the subject. “So OK, so how do we feel being the guys who get to write the coolest, coolest software ever?” He talked fast. He always talked fast.
“How does it feel?” Charles checked his pulse solemnly. “Blood pressure high. Dizziness, nausea, ringing in the ears. The only cure is a massive influx of starches and saturated fats.” He smacked his lips.
Danny leaned back and sighed. “I don’t know about you guys, but this schedule is wearing me out.”
“You’re gonna get wiped, y’know?” said Skinner. “I’m to’lly serious. You get into it, y’know? I mean a programmer, it’s like, it’s like a tax guy: don’t do anything for months, right? You sit there. And then suddenly you’re at full throttle for a few weeks. Do-or-die. All-ya-got. You know, while you get a new pro-gram out, OK, and then it’s over—the deadline comes, you ship out the package, you take a couple weeks off, right?”
Danny nodded reluctantly.
“How lovely that we’re just temps,” sulked Charles. “Of that glamorous and fulfilling cycle you just described, the only part we’re gonna see is the crunch. If I were you people, I’d be drinkin’ it in, no matter how much it sucks. ‘Cause in two months it’s Unemployment Time again.” He puffed on half a breadstick like a cigar.
“Except for Gam,” Danny added. “He’ll be basking in the royalties of our work for decades.”
“That child pisses me off,” said Charles. “If I hear one more stupid story about his stupid airplane or his stupid cars, I’ll staple his nostrils shut. Where the hell does he get that kind of money, anyway?”
Danny rolled his eyes. “Probably the same place he gets the attitude.”
“Know what he can do though?” said Rod brightly. “He can dial into anything with his modem! He can bust into a company, or a bank, or anything he wants. He told me he called up the IRS mainframes and made it so he didn’t have to pay any taxes!”
Charles grinned and tried to tousle Rod’s hair. “I think Gam was having a little fun with the ol’ Rod-man.”
Danny wasn’t smiling.
“Unless he wasn’t.”
There was an uncomfortable silence. Rod, annoyed, plucked at his hair to undo the damage.
“What about his programming?” Danny asked finally.
Another silence. Who’d be the first to admit he couldn’t read Gam’s code?
“Well, jeez, y’know?,” Skinner finally said. “The guy writes in Assembly, OK? How should we know how good it is?”
The others exclaimed in agreement. While most programmers work in a pseudo-English structured language like Pascal or C language, Gam did his pro-gramming in Assembly language—almost the computer’s own internal lan-guage. Most people didn’t write Assembly, a nested morass of letters and numbers, like you’d jot down a grocery list; most programmers had to translate it, nugget by nugget, from a higher-level language. Danny knew they were all thinking the same thing.
“The guy’s a genius.”
The others chomped silently for a moment on their breadsticks.
“Well, he has to be, OK?” said Skinner. “Assembly language is a hundred times faster and more compact than Pascal or whatever, right? OK, it’s the only way they’d ever pull off a pro-gram this complex. What if he were one of us, OK? You couldn’t write this program in C, you couldn’t do it, y’know?”
Charles nodded. “Yeah, that’d be a great program. You’d tell your computer, ‘Type my return address,’ and you could do your laundry and come back by the time it was finished.”
The waitress skidded to a stop and set the drinks on the table. “Who had the Manson?”
Rod raised his hand.
“Sorry, we don’t have any more of the little plas-tic chainsaws. I gave you a sombrero instead.” She skated off.
Rod held the sombrero up to the light, fascinated. “Cool.”
“So that’s why they let this creep walk all over them,” Danny said. “They need him to pull this program off. Look, I’ll be honest with you—on Wednesday afternoon I quit doing what I was s’posed to be doing. I took a couple hours to go over some of Gam’s work. I mean, I sat there and walked through it line by line, translating it so I could figure out what he was doing. Took for-ever.” He took a sip from his long, skinny glass.
Skinner leaned forward. “So? So like what?”
Danny swallowed and looked at him. “Freakin’ amazing,” he said. “This stuff is so tight, and so efficient, and so structured—it’ll blow your mind. The guy thinks in Assembly.”
Skinner slapped the table and blinked several times in succession. “So we’ve got this main programmer, OK, running the whole operation, writing code none of us can read, OK?” He was getting agitated. “Some team effort, right?”
“I know, I swear,” said Charles. “If this jerk calls me The Swiss Mister one more time, I’m spraypainting his monitor.”
Danny tasted cranberry, but his mind was racing. “Look, you guys, how are we supposed to come up with something integrated and clean, if he’s doing all the important stuff without letting us in on it? I mean, if we ask him to show us how he’s building the main routines, he’ll just laugh and tell us to learn Assembly better. This is only the third week, and Gam’s already driving us crazy. What about in December, when the final code-freeze date is coming down and we’re staying up all night? How’re we gonna deal with that?”
Charles was stirring his drink with a swizzle stick shaped like a stirrup. He stared into the swirling liquid for a moment.
“Seems pretty simple, really,” he told Danny. “You accept his control and he’ll be nice to you. The one thing Gam doesn’t like is not being in control.”
“Yeah.” Danny couldn’t think of any alternatives. Yet.
He let the drone of the TV enter his consciousness.
“And so the United States has found itself in an unlikely position: an ally to the rebellious Ukraine. If Masso and Ukranian President Jurenko have their way, the American plan just might help the fighting Commonwealth states truly…become a union once again. Jeannie Spinks, CNN, Moscow.”
They ordered nachos with melted goat cheese, laughed and drank, and talked about the economy, the Big One, and the Rams. But Danny couldn’t get his mind off Gam.
 
By looking, it would be impossible to identify the sprawling, cubicle-filled of-fice as the home of PowerMac magazine. Particularly not if you were a subscriber of this colorful monthly, whose 400-page, glossy look connoted more of chrome-and-glass high-tech corporate digs than three cozily cluttered floors of a San Francisco office building.
Tommy Daniel was in the delicate business of handling the monthly News column. Delicate, because in a business where a new product’s image could make or break its success in the marketplace, Tommy had to make sure his reporting was objective and understated; he tended to use a lot of phrases like “the manu-facturer claims” and “prototypes have been clocked at.”
The news release in his hand, for example, was delicate.
ARTELLIGENCE TO UNVEIL TRUE SPEECH-RECOGNITION SYSTEM
Tommy had been through the wave-of-the-future stuff before. First you get a press release; there’s a lot of excitement; all the news editors run the item. By some not-so-surprising coincidence, this media coverage is usually concurrent with an ad blitz by the manufacturer’s marketing department. Reader-service cards come pouring in. The manufacturer’s mailing-list database builds up. And then comes the product demonstration, where you find out how little there really was to get excited about: some crude pattern-matching voice system that can only learn 200 words, and even then only interprets your spoken commands correctly 80% of the time. Give us a break, he thought.
He wondered, though, as he read this press release. This was evidently some-thing new, and its development had required the design of a custom chip. Between the software, the hardware, and the money pumped into the project by Mika, the Japanese consumer-electronics firm, this thing might actually fly. And, after all, Artelligence was the devel-oper. Tommy doubted they’d pour their R & D dollars into a dog.
He wondered if the item was important enough to run in the issue now being laid out—January. Of course, the release indicated that there’d be a product rollout for the press on December 8, over in Moscone. Tommy checked his cal-endar. Didn’t matter what else was happening—he should be at that demo. Even then, there’d probably still be time to get the piece in for January. He dashed off an E-mail to the other editors, describing the event, and noting that a few PowerMac staffers should be on hand.
The contact on the press release was Michelle Andersen; he jotted down her number on a Post-It note and slapped it on the upper-right corner of his monitor.
Behind a space-divider panel from Tommy, Mila Moore grabbed her waist-length brown hair with both fists and threw it backward over her shoulders, as she always did unconsciously when getting serious. The task at hand was to check the camera-ready final proofs of her January-issue Tips’n’Tricks column.
She was about halfway through the proof copy when her associate editor, in the other crook of the S-shaped common desk, chucked a folded letter-size doc-ument over. Mila grabbed it: “What’s this thing?”
Her assistant shrugged. “Got it today; maybe you can use it as a five-liner somewhere.” Mila thanked her and dropped the letter in her In basket.
She didn’t realize, however, how soon she’d be needing an item of precisely that length. The last item of the column, a hint for getting more speed out of lo-cal area networks, required a HyperRing card—but that very morning Mila had heard that HyperRing’s release was being delayed. That meant it might not be available when the January PowerMac hit the stands, and that meant Mila’d bet-ter not run the LAN trick.
“Shoot,” she said out loud, and crossed out the paragraph.
She called out to her associate. “Hey Liz, do you have anything I could—” She stopped, remembering, and snatched the folded sheet from her In box. She un-folded it and read it quickly once, then again more slowly.
Dear PowerMac Tricks’n’Tips,
Here’s a neat little trick for you. We were playing the public-domain game Air Attack, which we got from InfoServe. We discovered that if you change your Mac clock to Christmas, the little oak tree turns into a Christmas tree. Pretty neat, huh?
If you print this, please send the $25 to the address below. We like the magazine a lot.
Sincerely,
Ellen Eckhouse & Mike O’Massey
Farrow House 125a, Rollins College
Tampa, FL 82882
Mila picked up the phone and called the features editor who spent the most time with games. Within moments, he had a copy of AirAttack running on his computer. She directed him to set his clock to December 25, and, from his exclamation, she knew immediately that the trick had worked.
“Hey, great. Is it cute?” she asked him. “All right, that’s what I needed to know. I’m gonna run it for January. Thanks for checking it out. I’ll be down later to get a screen shot of it, OK? Thanks Ted. Bye.”
She hung up. “Never mind, Liz. I was going to ask you if you had a little quickie I could use, but I’ve got it fixed.”
She turned to her Mac and started writing it up. She wouldn’t give the item another thought until months later—but by then it would be too late.
