The big room was a white-collar worker pit, a windowless, gray-carpeted space with beige walls and chest-high off-white plastic partitions that divided the space into the cubicles that young workers called “veal-fattening pens.” The noises of the pit were keyboards, computers, fluorescent lights, central air, and murmured conversation. Everyone wore ultralight earphone and mike sets, so they did not need to talk very loud, even to each other. Aurally they were in cyberspace, but visually they were a bunch of people in front of computer screens in a pit with no living plants. Was I really going to work here?
The General Manager of the Home Products Division said he’d been expecting me. He was a black-haired, sour-faced guy called Otto Gyorgyi. He was thin and he had lively eyebrows and a large, slightly crooked nose. He wore a gray suit with a white shirt and a dun tie. He had a corner office with a view of the West West parking lot and the Saratoga-Sunnyvale Road.
Otto used the occasion of our first meeting to tell me his whole life story. This was, I would learn, characteristic of Otto. He liked to talk about almost anything other than the things an employee would want to know. He was an exponent of what workers call “mushroom management,” meaning, “keep them in the dark and cover them with shit.”
Otto was born and raised in Budapest. His father was a schoolteacher who spurred his children to get every particle of available education. All five Gyorgyi kids studied engineering: Kinga, textile engineering; Arpad, drafting engineering; Tibor, fluid engineering; Erszebet, electrical engineering; and, last of all, young Otto with his chemical engineering. Otto emigrated when a vacationing German university student fell in love with him. The girl’s name was Ute Besenkamp. Ute became pregnant and brought Otto home with her.
As Otto told me all this with great raisings and lowering of his eyebrows, I could hardly believe I was hearing information that was so utterly useless and beside the point.
In Germany Otto married Ute and found a job with the Bayer chemical company. This multinational industrial titan had its huge mother plant in Leverkusen. The Gyorgyis purchased a solid house in Bayer’s terrorist-proof compound. Otto worked with a group analyzing and refining industrial processes for making rubber out of vegetable latex. Bayer sold the necessary chemicals worldwide, and would send out teams to maintain the processes on site. Otto’s specific role was to consult on safety issues, and he became something of an expert on remote handling devices.
After nine peaceful years in Leverkusen, Otto, Ute, and children (two boys, one girl) were posted to a Tokyo branch of Bayer, working with some industrial robots created by the Tsukubu Science City group. Things went well for awhile, but then Ute left Otto and took the children back to Germany. Otto “hit the skids” and next thing he knew he was out of a job. Like me, he’d moved to California on speculation, and now he was General Manager of West West’s Home Products Division.
“Which is where I come in?” I suggested.
With great reluctance, Otto came to the point. He made this part of the conversation very brief. “We want you to program for West West so we can kick GoMotion right out of the home robotics market. If you accept the job, your immediate superior will be Ben Brie. Ben is the product manager for the line of Adze robots that West West is going to start shipping in the second quarter. Ben has only two senior programmers, and they need help. You’re our man, Jerzy.”
“What would be my annual salary?”
“What were you getting at GoMotion?”
I named the figure, and Otto added thirty-three percent. The fact that Otto had been expecting me meant that the ant-brained vision I’d seen the night before had been, at least in some respects, legit. It sure seemed like a lot of people wanted me to work for West West. And GoMotion had fired me, hadn’t they? I didn’t owe them anything. West West would put me back on the Net. The thirty-three percent raise sounded very good. And best of all, West West wanted me to keep working on smart robots. I had most of the code for the Veep in my head; it would be a shame just slowly to forget it. If I took this job at West West, my role in the Great Work could continue.
“The Great Work” was a phrase that had occurred to me soon after Carol and I moved to Silicon Valley. In medieval Europe, the Great Work was the building of the cathedrals. Artisans from all over Europe would flock, say, to the Ile-de-France to work on the Notre Dame. Stonecutters, sculptors, carpenters, weavers, glassmakers, jewelers-they gathered together to work on the most wonderful project the human race could conceive of. I felt that all of us in Silicon Valley were working, in one way or another, on the Great Work of bringing truly intelligent robots into existence. Some hackers felt the Great Work was simply the striving toward a perfect human-to-human interface in cyberspace, but I thought that the real payoff had to be something more mechanical and concrete. To me, the Great Work was to create a new form of life: artificially alive robots.
Keep in mind that, although I had done a lot of creative work on the Veep, I didn’t own any copyrights on this work. When you worked as a hacker for a big company, you signed away all rights to the code you developed-your employment contract specified that the company automatically owned the copyrights to all the code you wrote for them. So I had no financial reason for not wanting to help West West beat out the Veep.
GoMotion had axed me, but my own part in the Great Work could continue at West West. I signed the papers Otto offered me, and Otto led me off in search of Ben Brie.
Along one edge of the pit were doorless, semiprivate offices with Plexiglas add-ons that extended the divider walls to the ceiling. In one of these spaces we found Ben Brie.
Ben Brie was so mellow and diffuse as to be the parody of a Californian. He had a wheezy, groaning way of talking; he sounded as if he were so merged into the cosmos that getting each word out was a serious effort. “I thought things were going really well at GoMotion,” said Brie after Otto left me with him. “What did you do to end up here? Did you piss somebody off?”
“It’s kind of complicated,” said I. “West West is giving me a good raise.”
“Sounds groovy,” said Brie. “Can you tell me about the robot that GoMotion’s been working on? The Veep?” He was wearing a truly excellent shirt from Zaire, a nifty job covered with repetitions of the pink and acid green Congo logo of Regal Lager.
I explained about the Veep somewhat, and then asked Brie what West West’s angle on all this was anyway?
“We’ve got this awesome robot from the Taiwanese,” said Brie. “Seven Lucky Overseas. They’re West West’s parent company.”
This was just what Trevor had told me. “Didn’t Seven Lucky make the household robot that killed the baby?” I demanded. The question failed to faze Brie. In all mellowness, he gave me a straight, out-front answer.
“The Choreboy. Yes. A tragedy. When our group was selling the Choreboy, we were called Meta Meta. Meta Meta settled out of court, went through Chapter 11, and reorganized as West West. The Choreboy is a closed case, Jerzy, an unsavory footnote to the history of robotics. Let’s move on to more pleasant-”
A woman in a flowing gypsy dress walked into our cubicle and Brie greeted her. “Janelle, this is our new Adze programmer, Jerzy Rugby. He comes to us from GoMotion. Jerzy, this is Janelle Fuchs. She’s in marketing.”
“I don’t work for Ben,” said Janelle, brightly. She had rough-skinned, sensual features with plenty of makeup. “And Ben doesn’t work for me.”