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Later in the day, as a result of watching too much TV (though I don’t know why TV and not some other excess), the conversation got onto the subject of kids. I seem to get onto that particular subject a great deal these days. Thoughts about kids prowl about my head so often I sometimes feel as though my brain has sprung a brood. When I admitted as much to Nancy, she said:
‘It’s the age. You and I are an invincible brew of roaring hormones. I should know because I’m even older.’
‘But what I mean,’ I added, ‘is have you thought about, you know, actually having any.’ It was a stupid question. No woman reaches her thirties without turning over in her mind whether or not she might have children.
Nancy hesitated, crunching up her eyes to give her better access to her thoughts and stared through the TV.
‘You hear such stories, twelve-year-old rapists and I don’t know what. I’m not so sure I really understand kids these days,’ she said.
‘We don’t seem to like them much any more.’ I looked at the TV for a moment. ‘Why is that?’
Nancy shrugged and flicked back her hair. The rills around her eyes deepened, leaving tiny crevasses, like cracks opening up in drying clay.
‘I dunno. Envy, maybe?’ she asked in an exploratory tone. ‘When we were kids in the sixties and seventies there were so many worlds still to be invented or discovered or imagined whereas these days …’ She tailed off and we sank into a gloomy kind of Sunday funk, tucked up on the sofa together while the TV bled its way through prime time. Some sort of animal connection passed between us, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. I thought of the children I might have, and wondered whether I’d ever comprehend the world they would inhabit, thirty years on from my own dimly recalled childhood, when colour TVs were still a novelty, and no one had ever heard of a VCR. Eventually I broke the silence.
‘You know, Nancy, if this high-tech thing really is the new frontier, then it’s the kids who are going to be settling it, not us.’
‘I guess.’ Nancy seemed suddenly to have lost interest in talking about kids. I wondered vaguely if I’d touched on some painful secret, but ploughed on regardless. ‘In twenty or thirty years’ time it’ll be today’s kids who will really be feeling the impact of the Net, the Human Genome Project and virtual reality and nanotech and all that stuff.’
I went to bed that night with the sense that some immense gate was opening up ahead of me. I knew I was about to pass through it and I hoped that when I did I wouldn’t find myself walled off from the world I’d left. I thought about the people behind the IRC handles Rosebud, the panda bear and the artist’s mannequin and wondered if I’d ever come across them again. As I was about to fall asleep, Nancy slid into my room clutching something to her chest. She sat on the bed, looked about her at the library of books and began to wonder in a wistful tone whether we were just part of some transitional generation, unconvinced by the old myths but incapable of absorbing the new ones either, condemned to cling on to a fifties B-movie future of personal commuter jet-pods, clingy silver suits and robot pets which we knew to be a fake.
I could tell by the droop in her voice that she was struggling not to believe her own predictions. She handed me the paper she’d been holding to her chest, a computer print-out of a name, a phone number and an e-mail address.
‘Hey, if you’re really interested in kids, you should visit this little guy. He’s the youngest kid ever to hang out in virtual reality.’
‘That’s sweet.’ I imagined a little boy in a baggy romper suit tumbling round in a set of VR goggles, and felt a sudden strong purpose and a sense of knowing.
‘Let’s hope so,’ Nancy said.
Sitting in bed in Nancy’s room, watching the shadows play about her books, I decided to give myself a mission. I would hunt down the future, starting with the everyday intimations of tomorrow – the games, gadgets and consumer fads – that were already an invisible part of so many young lives and I would work my way up to the networks, which will, in their turn, become a mundane part of the lives of those children’s children, and perhaps also of my own children. If digital culture was going to be the new frontier, I had an urge to become one of its pioneers, to comprehend it from the inside, to feel less like an observer and more like a participant. To be truly honest, I wanted to be sure there would be a future – of almost any sort.
WEDNESDAY
Click and something happens
Three days later I’m driving back across the Golden Gate Bridge towards San Francisco admiring the heaped up pile of the city stretched silver white across the bay. Streaks of sun are beginning to slice through the morning mist on the ocean side and the weatherman at KCBS radio has promised it’s going to stay sunny and dry until the weekend. Traffic stammers along at 19th Avenue, stop-starting and banging about for breath, before picking up speed south of the city and unwinding into two skeins at the exit to Silicon Valley and San Jose. America feels ordered and uncomplicated today.
Alex Rothman and his dad are expecting me the other side of lunchtime.
Twenty miles further on at Millbrae the mist is all burned off. By the time I’ve reached the Valley town of Redwood City I’m popping the first of the morning’s root beers and thinking about how the world must have been when I was three, the same age as Alex. I say must have been, because all I have by way of memory from that time are vague impressions of age-long days and months, spiked at regular intervals with odd intrusions of anxiety and our neighbour Mrs Ivan’s treacle toffee. I remember my dad buying me a clockwork duck when he won the football pools and I can taste the toffee apples Mrs Ivan made on fireworks night. But of the larger world around about I can recall almost nothing.
The events of the year spanning ’67 and ’68 when I was three passed me by. While the Paris uprisings raged, Woodstock rocked, Vietnam was plundered, my generation was regardless, too busy being fed and formed by our mothers and – maybe – our fathers too. Too busy with Alphabetti Spaghetti and Top of the Pops, the TV and David Cassidy and all our clockwork ducks and toffee apples.
So I wonder what Alex will remember of now, of this week, this month, this year, of this day even, in twenty years from now?
Somewhere in Palo Alto I take a wrong turn and end up driving around the suburbs before finding myself by some miracle back at Page Mill Road from where my directions begin again. With the map spread out on my lap I head west towards the Santa Cruz Mountains. Up at 6000 ft on Skyline Road a wispy grey foam appears to have crept back over the Valley, hinting at rain, but the radio weather reports continue to promise a dry day. I wonder if the mist might be a smog cloud spilled over from San Francisco or San Jose, if such a thing ever happens. By the time I reach Boulder Creek my head feels as thick as a plate of dumplings left to boil too long.
I explain to the man in the Boulder Creek General Store that I have a migraine coming on.
‘That’ll be a thunderstorm, I expect,’ he replies, wrapping a packet of painkillers in a brown paper bag with a missing persons message on it, then dumping the change on the counter. I mention that the weather reports are insisting it’s going to stay dry.
‘The two most unpredictable things in this world are weather and women,’ the man says, turning away.
Boulder Creek was a logging town until the Silicon Valley suits started moving in, and though it still has some of the tarry conservatism and pine-needle neighbourliness left over from those days, the racketing confidence of new money runs through its veins.
In the driveway where Alex lives a woman is loading bags into a station wagon. She looks up at me, wary, and gestures with her arm towards the porch but before I’ve reached the door a man has already opened it and ushers me in, muttering, ‘My wife is running into town to pick up some supplies because friends of theirs think there’s going to be a storm.’
Alex’s father, Peter, is one of those gently cumbersome, ursine men peculiar to North America; a biter on life, a big-eating, big-earning human Panzer tank. According to Nancy, he develops virtual reality software for financiers and the US military, through which connection they are on waving terms at industry parties. His job is to write code so complex that it can trick a person into imagining he’s moving through a stock exchange, or crouching in a bunker and surveying the horizon, when all he is really doing is processing data projected on to a screen and held fast in front of his eyes by a helmet.
Wasting no time on niceties, the human Panzer waves me into an armchair, surges over to a cupboard by the kitchen, dives in and comes up for air minutes later with a black strip of a thing trailing cables from its sides. Plugs it into a computer on the table.
‘This,’ he announces, ‘is a total immersion VR helmet.’
The thing in his hands shines like a black ball of insect eyes. He urges me to put it on. Inside the helmet a blue room rises. For a moment it feels as though I’m in a deep sea diving bell, listening to the steady purr of my breath and drinking in the first view of a newly discovered territory.
‘It’s great isn’t it?’ Peter tips me very gently with the ridged track of his palm. ‘Look, when you move your head, the computerized world of images inside the helmet moves with you.’ I glance down at the depths, and look up at the heights. All blue. Too blue to belong to for long. I lift the helmet from my face to find a little boy watching impassively, marking time in the way that children often do. This is Alex. A regular-looking three-year-old. Matt brown hair, Bermudas and a sweat shirt, nothing like the grinning future-creature I’d envisaged at the weekend. I’m shamefully disappointed.
‘So, Alex, buddy,’ says the father to his son, ‘say hello.’ He gestures towards me.
‘Hello,’ obeys Alex, inching forward. We cross gazes for a moment then I open with a question.
‘What’s your favourite colour, Alex?’ I’m imagining that it must be blue. VR blue. But Alex merely looks at me, turns tail and toddles back to his room. He returns with a Bart Simpson doll.
‘Bart Simpson, great,’ say I, taking the doll, ‘but you play with computers, too, don’t you Alex?’
The boy scampers back to his room. Returns with a Bugs Bunny wind-up toy. Winds it, sets it pacing and begins squealing in time with the clockwork.
‘Do you have any electronic toys you could show me, Alex?’
Alex contemplates, snatches Bart Simpson, flees back to his room. Five minutes later he comes running out clutching a Power Ranger.
‘Look,’ says Alex, sprawling on the carpet and using the Power Ranger’s face to shovel out some of the shag pile. ‘Cool.’
‘So it is,’ I chirp, then more sly, leaning down to whisper in the boy’s ear, ‘but I bet it’s not as cool as the games you play with Dad’s computers.’
Alex pushes my head away in disgust. The head incidentally which is booming along the temples in time with my breath and pulse.
Peter returns from putting away the VR helmet. ‘Alex first wore one of those things on the fourth of July 1992, when he was just over a year old. The youngest kid ever. He loves it. Navigates through buildings, whole star systems in virtual reality. Doesn’t even know the alphabet yet. Now, Buddy.’ Peter turns his attention to his son and lifting the boy onto his knee, silencing the squeals, whispers ‘tell us what you put on when you’re playing special games.’
‘A head-mounted display,’ returns the boy, unimpressed.
‘And what does that do, Bud?’ Peter backs up into his seat, then manoeuvres his body forward again at a different angle, as though he were the driver of some intractable piece of plant.
‘Oh, you know,’ the boy follows Bugs Bunny crawling across the carpet. ‘You get to see things, and when you move …’ Tails off.
‘Yeah,’ says Peter. ‘And what happens when you move, Bud?’
‘Uh, you get to see more things,’ confirms Alex, clambering down from his father’s lap and running away. He returns from his bedroom with a Tonka toy.
‘This is heavy,’ he says, holding it out for me to feel.
Peter shoots me a look of mock despair, mixed in with a chesty heave of involuntary pride.
‘I was thinking. A while ago a German film-maker guy came over and took some film of Alex wearing his virtual reality helmet. He was a baby then. We’ve got it somewhere in the den if you’d like to see it.’ He motors off, tagging Alex, who has discovered a bamboo cane and is waving it to make whizzing noises in the air. Peter finds the tape and fast forwards it to a shot of a baby, naked except for duvet-diaper and VR helmet, blind to reality, grappling with his hands for something in the virtual world behind his eyes. Peter giggles with recollected affection for the Alex that was, while the Alex that is prowls about the room, as yet a shadow of a person made bright with temporary definition.
Just then the wife bursts into the room, registers the video, smiles to herself and at Alex and shakes some dampness from her hair.
‘It’s raining already. I think it’s going to be some big storm. The forecasters are going crazy.’ She stares at me with a doubtful eye. I feel myself returning the look, and we catch each other’s eye, exchanging hints of competitive pride and a resistance to the other’s unoffered pity. Rain begins ticking on the window panes.
Alex, oblivious to all this, toddles about happily brandishing his bamboo cane. His father pulls him close, thundering into his ear.
‘Tell us how you use a computer mouse, Bud.’
‘I click and something happens. I click and something turns on.’ The mother retreats from the room and switches on a radio somewhere. Peter ignores the music and rumbles ahead:
‘Alex has been playing this game I wrote for VR, called Neo-Tokyo. Actually, we play together. You’re the renegade pilot of a high-speed police hovercraft, and you have to steer your vehicle through the city, shooting out billboard advertisements. It’s cute.’
‘Everything breaks,’ remarks Alex, unasked. ‘I shot a window and I shot a sign.’ He dismisses the light stick and climbs up into his father’s lap.
‘You were going everywhere, Dad, and you were shooting.’
‘Yeah,’ says the father.
‘And there were some bad guys and I got them.’ He looks up at his father for a reiteration but the father merely smiles and raises an indulgent eyebrow.
‘No you didn’t, Bud, there aren’t any bad guys in NeoTokyo, remember?’
‘Yes there are,’ says Alex, emphatically. ‘I shot them.’
I suddenly realize that my little game is going to be harder to play than I had first imagined.
Out on the road leading back east to Palo Alto, the rain is punching fierce cold fists, drumming at the windscreen and emerging in dirty great geysers at the side of each wing mirror. The radio hisses in and out of non-stop country hits, overlaying Kenny, Tammy, Dolly, Garth and the rest with the dim waves of a news flash from some other station announcing that a state of emergency has been declared around San Jose.
It’s times like these that an alternate reality would be really handy. And not just a blue VR room, either, but a place with substance, in other colours. You could plug into a beach there and wait until it’s all over. On the other hand, there is something so absolutely American about blustering, muscular weather like this that you’d have to be a fool to want to escape it. Great, roaring weather it is, as big as the forty-eight.
A captive stick begins to whirr its way round the front nearside wheel arch, spinning rainbowed water onto the bonnet. Underneath the chassis, the four low tread tyres skate along on a meniscus of grease and every so often the suspension bumps over fallen branches and other dead things, sending the car sidling towards the silt-laden river by the side of the road. I’m wondering whether I should stop at the first big town, find myself a pay phone and call Nancy, but I can’t make out any exits off the highway.
The police have set up a road block at Mountain View. I pull up and leave my headlights burning. A cop with a torch runs over, hunched against the rain. Leans into the car.
‘We’re about to close 101. There are some nasty holes opened up five miles north of here. Is your journey absolutely necessary, ma’am?’ Shouting against the beat of water on the blacktop.
‘I’m going home.’
‘And where is that?’ I consider how to answer this, think of Nancy.
‘Marin County.’ The cop lifts his hand to cut me short, shouts something into his cop phone, then leans back in again. A rope of rainwater bungees from his hat, blackening the upholstery.
‘When did you begin your journey, ma’am?’
‘At nine o’clock this morning, give or take.’
The cop checks in over the phone, waves me forward.
‘We’d have turned you back if you’d known there was going to be a storm, but we’re gonna let you go through this time ’cause no one saw this thing coming. Stick to the far lane and you’ll miss the holes. Go slow, now.’ I nod, and switch the window up. Only the weather seems to know its own future.
Nancy is sitting at her computer reading off her e-mail.
‘Some storm,’ she says, checking to see I’ve taken my shoes off. ‘Erica was saying that quite a few folks in Marin don’t have any electricity.’
Naturally I’ve no idea who Erica is, but in this case, it doesn’t matter.
‘How was Alex?’
‘Sweet. Normal. I mean, I don’t know, I haven’t really had time to think about it.’
‘I tell you,’ says Nancy, ‘Silicon Valley is like one big prototype-farm right now. Some kind of mutant factory. They’re turning out new patents down there fast as McDonald’s turn out burgers. Software prototypes, business prototypes, chip prototypes, even prototype kids.’
I snicker, expecting Nancy to join in the joke, but she surprises me by tossing out one of her super-serious looks:
‘You’d better believe it, Sweetheart.’
THURSDAY
Vote now!
The sun is back this morning, burning off the rainwater and leaving a crust of dried mud, twigs and storm debris on the blacktop of the 101 freeway running south from Marin. In the queue for the post office in Sausalito the talk is of the neighbours’ broken shingles and the sleepless night, and the air down at the houseboat pier fronting onto San Francisco Bay still smells as strongly of static cling as the upholstery on rental cars. And all this some four or five hours after the final lightning strike.
Nancy has given me a list of groceries to buy at Mollie Stone’s and a book – the first published guide to the Net, signed by the author, an acquaintance of Nancy’s from her college days. She makes me swear on a carton of Ben & Jerry’s not to lose it.
The inside of Mollie Stone’s feels more like a provisions cathedral than a supermarket. Along either side of the aisles sweet indulgences dazzle the nose and promises of edible heaven line the shelves. At the fish counter the whole of the sea bed from San Francisco to Patagonia lies outstretched and odourless upon its icy lilo. Trial titbits of this and that lie in wait round each corner to assault your senses and dizzy you into a purchase. A sales clerk lurks about to take your money while your eyes are still in reflex action. There are six varieties of sun-dried tomato, twenty-four styles of chocolate biscuit, spaghetti in seven flavours. In the fruit and veg section organic Guatemalan mange tout fight for space with Napa Valley chanterelles and things I’ve never heard of. There’s no lettuce, as such, only Batavia, Butternut, Beet leaf, Romaine, Radicchio, Rocket and Stone’s special selection, all ready to go. The whole store reeks of money. Northern California reeks of it.
Turning left at the end of the Oakland Bay Bridge I find myself in Emeryville, a strip of waterfront warehouses, malls, parking lots and golf driving ranges looking out over the black quays of Oakland to San Francisco. Mr Payback, billed as the world’s first interactive movie is playing at a specially converted theatre in the United Artists multiplex just round the corner.
A typical matinée crowd of truant teens, retired couples, students and lonely housewives beats about the ticket counter chewing popcorn and waiting for friends or for the start of their movies. Further inside the overactive air conditioning blows the smell of estery butter sauce out through a series of metal vents into the larger space of the foyer. TV screens show clipped versions of the new releases to a scattering of people sitting on the padded benches set around the walls. An atmosphere of quiet separation prevails, lending the building the genteel air of a public records office with all its dark secrets locked up in mysterious boxrooms off to the sides.
While my eyes are still adjusting to the shade in theatre five, six Chinese boys press past, heading towards the screen, murmuring, ‘Hey, cool,’ at their first sighting of the modified seats, each fitted with a joystick carrying three buttons in green, orange and yellow. I check my ticket, move down the steps to row L and settle myself into a seat behind the boys. The speakers begin to spew out soft rock numbers by Bread and Captain Beefheart. Within seconds of finding their places, the boys have already mastered their joysticks and are lost in a thick din of clicking thumb candy. Aside from myself and the boys, huddled together into two rows, the theatre is empty.
I sink into the velvet scoop of L14 with my coat about my legs to ward off the air conditioning, and position three of the fingers of my right hand on the green, orange and yellow buttons of the joystick in front to get the feel of it. Each button gives to pressure with a handsome poot and a wiggle of resistance.
‘Maybe it’s like the orange button is BLAM, and it offs the bad guy and the green just puts him in jail for life,’ speculates one of the boys, pounding his joystick.
‘Like, who, man?’
‘The bad guy, asshole.’
And the row of boys begins clicking as if their thumbs had evolved precisely for the purpose.
Voice-over and a red Testarossa on the screen: ‘The world is digital, fibre optic, cellular, but still there are assholes, jerks and scumbags around.’ Dissolves into the Title Sequence. The voice-over says ‘When you see the “VOTE NOW” message press the orange, yellow or green button on your joystick to make your selection. The film will then follow whichever selection wins the largest number of votes.’
