The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story (24 page)

As I say, the early signs that the technologist’s utopia was anything but a utopia were subtle. On our watch, for instance, Simon and Robert preferred not to sit together. When Robert entered a conversation, Simon left it. Either I sat with Simon on the deck and Louie sat with Robert on the bridge, or, more often, I sat with Robert on the bridge and Louie sat with Simon on the deck. The two crew members were clearly avoiding each other, without making that big a deal of it. On the third evening Robert and I sat together in the tall swivel chairs on the bridge, facing the bank of five glowing flat-panel display screens. Outside, the sea washed gently against the hull and the stars twinkled. Robert began to talk about what it meant to be an engineer. When he used the word “engineer,” he clearly meant “old-fashioned engineer” and not “computer geek.” He held the view that there were two kinds of people in the world, those who did the work and those who got the credit. Real engineers belonged in the former category. Among other things, he felt that engineers had been generally neglected by history.

“Who invented the gas turbine engine?” he asked, a bit sharply.

I had no idea.

“Frank Whittle,” he said. “Who was the chief engineer on the Apollo project?”

I said I didn’t know the answer to that one either.

“Exactly,” said Robert, and rested his case. In the darkness I could hear him smiling. “But if you want to get your picture in the paper now,” he said, “All you have to do is sit in front of a computer screen.” He whistled a bit to himself, then said, “When something goes wrong with this boat, everyone assumes the engineer broke it. When the computer program goes wrong, everyone assumes the geeks
fix
it.
Why
do you think that is?”

The room was dark except for the glowing orange screens. The waves rocked the boat back and forth. Robert was no more than a thick shadow. “The problem here,” that voice now said, “is that Jim has built the most technologically sophisticated boat ever built and staffed it with nontechnical people.”

This statement made no immediate sense whatsoever to me. After all, Simon had been hired by Clark to present the computers to the crew with a human face. Simon could not program a computer, but he had learned, from a three-week stint at Silicon Graphics, how to perform some rudimentary technical tasks. If your laptop crashed, Simon was distinctly more likely than you were to solve the problem. He belonged to the growing tribe of semitechnical people whose main function is to respond to mankind’s complaints about its computers. Undoubtedly, he was the first deckhand in history who, to become a deckhand, needed to know some computer science. I said as much to Robert.

“If something goes really wrong, Simon can’t fix it,” said Robert. “That’s one of the reasons there’s friction between me and Simon. I told Allan that I thought the person on board who was to be the computer interface should have fifteen years training in the area. Allan doesn’t have any idea how it all works. And neither does Simon.
Simon cannot program the computer
. These aren’t technical people. And you want things to work when you press the button on the computer.”

Apparently, Robert had already become slightly fed up by things not working when he pressed a button on the computer. He was, after all, a technical man. There were times, he said, when he couldn’t figure out how to turn out the lights. And it bothered him.

L
ate on the fourth day at sea we turned south and switched on the engine. South was the wrong direction for anyone making a beeline for the New World. Just a few hours earlier Clark had said he was in a hurry to get back home, as he really needed to give this speech to two thousand doctors who might become customers of Healtheon. But now he’d changed his mind about the urgency of arriving on time; he said he wanted to get out of the cold.

As a weak wind blew from the wrong direction, the computer reeled the mainsail back into the boom and revved the engine to a brisk twelve knots. For the moment we would forget the joy of sailing and rely on the engine to get us across. Clark retired to his cabin at ten o’ clock, and I went to the guest cabin soon afterward. At midnight Steve’s watch ended, and he came into the cabin and fell into the other bed. He reflected briefly on his curious role: the man who wrote the code that controlled the sailboat. The boat was not meant to be carrying a programmer, but now a programmer was indispensable. “Back at the boatyard we really didn’t have a chance to test the system, because we never had the full system up and running,” he said. “I needed to be around just to understand the computers because no one else does—except Jim, and Jim doesn’t want to fuck with explaining it all to Simon. I still wonder how this boat will function without either me or Lance or Tim or Jim on board. If there’s a serious failure, I guess they’ll just reboot the computers and hope for the best.”

I asked the obvious question how
Hyperion
had come to pass. “I’m not sure how much Jim knew about sailing, to be honest,” he said. “He just had this idea he wanted to sail a boat by remote control.”

“He sailed a
lot
before he left Silicon Graphics,” I said, because he had.

“Maybe,” said Steve. “But this thing kind of started as a lab experiment.” Then he said again what he had said once before, so disconcertingly. “I don’t think Jim understood that people’s lives depended on this stuff working properly.”

Then he fell into a deep sleep. The boat whirred and clicked and rose and fell. The new wood creaking into place sounded like a tall tree just before it snaps. Other than that, I realized, every noise on board was the result of the computer doing something. I stared at the ceiling and envied Steve his snore.

Half an hour later, just before one in the morning, the engine stopped. The whirring and clicking stopped with it. The boat went quiet.

When the engine quit for the first time, I was rolling around in bed, attempting to calculate the size of the waves from the violence with which I was thrown back against the wall and forth into the safety board that had been installed to prevent me from being hurled out of the bed altogether. Even I could tell that something had gone wrong. One moment there was the low whir and the feel of a machine cutting purposefully through the waters. The next moment the boat was adrift. The waves rocked the bed more violently than before, and in new directions. Up top I went.

The watch from midnight to four in the morning was manned by Jaime, the Australian first mate, Peter, the American steward, and Celcelia, the Swedish deckhand. Normally, they’d be wandering about checking up on things. When I arrived, all three were in the control room, pushing buttons on the computer screens. They were clearly perplexed. A small red light marked “Alarm” flashed on the computer, which emitted its annoying high-pitched beep. Luckily, the next person to arrive was Robert.

“I couldn’t sleep,” he said, popping his head through the hatch. “What’s happened?”

“The engine just stopped,” said Jaime.

“Well, that’s unfortunate,” said Robert, and moved to the screen and switched off the alarms. The beeping sound ceased. In its place appeared the man who invented the idea of the beeping sound. “What’s going on?” said Clark, climbing up the stairs from the main salon to the control room. “It sounded like the engine stopped.” He moved into a position immediately in front of the bank of display screens. He punched in the password that enabled him to enter God Mode. The darkness was relieved only by the light orange glow of the computer screens.

It was just past one in the morning. To fully appreciate what happened next, you have to remember that it had been at least four days since anyone had slept properly. Now, six of the twelve people on board were in the control room. Robert and Jim, their faces lit a pale orange, poked woozily at the computer screens while the first mate, Jaime, hovered behind them and waited to hear the news. The screens offered no end of information: the sea beneath us was 5,732 meters deep, the wind behind us blew at sixteen knots, the boat we were on drifted at a little more than a knot, in the direction of Antarctica, the wine cellar was cooled to perfection, the door to the captain’s cabin was closed, the captain’s lights were out…on and on the computer went, explaining everything but what we wanted to know:
Why had the engine stopped
? The engine was our salvation. The engine would propel us out of the path of cackling Filipino monkeys. The engine was what would take us home instead of to Antarctica.

Robert vanished into the bowels of the boat. Four minutes later the engine restarted, and everyone breathed easier. Robert reappeared with the look of a man trying to disguise, even to himself, how pleased he was with his work. Thirty seconds later he had some help: the engine quit again. Again Robert vanished, again the engine restarted, again everyone breathed easier. And again Robert reappeared, but this time without a trace of self-satisfaction. The engine rewarded his humility. This time it did not quit.

Louie now stumbled up the stairs from his cabin. Like all good photographers, Louie clearly had a talent for turning up where he wasn’t wanted, and remaining inconspicuous. Soon he was snapping away. “Now you know,” drolled Robert, just loud enough for Clark to hear but not so loud that he clearly
intended
Clark to hear; “if you want to get your picture in the newspaper, all you have to do is go to a screen, open up about five windows, and look like you know what you’re doing.”

Clark said nothing. Robert fixed things. Robert was
useful
. There was nothing wrong with Robert. Ergo, Robert was permitted his careful bit of insolence in this tense moment. Clark and Robert then stood together at the computer screens. Clark naturally wanted to know what Robert had done. Robert explained to Clark that the problem was in something called the “sea chest.” The sea chest took in salt water from the ocean to cool the engine. The salt water did not actually circulate through the engine, of course. It merely drew away heat from the outside surface of the engine. If the sea chest contained air, rather than water, the engine lost some of its ability to cool itself. The computer understood that it was dangerous for the engine to overheat. When the engine overheated, the computer shut the engine down.

“When I went down the first time, I saw air in the sea chest,” Robert said. “I must not have got it all the first time I blew it out.”

On that lovely mahogany bridge at one in the morning there were three responses to our condition. The five nontechnical people—me, Louie, Jaime, Peter, Celcelia—were pleased as punch. The sea chest—whatever the hell that was—had been fixed! The engine worked! We would not drift into Antarctica! The mechanical man—Robert—was satisfied but hardly pleased. Anytime the engine failed, his world became slightly less certain. The third response came from Clark. Clark always insisted on his own response to any technical problem, and it gave him a kind of control over the opinion surrounding the problem. He was distinctly concerned. After listening to Robert’s explanation, he said, “That doesn’t make sense.” Robert asked him why not. “The seas are too calm,” said Clark. “I can see how the sea chest might take in air when the boat was really being tossed around, but it shouldn’t take in air in these conditions.”

At that point the engine was running fine, and so this sounded like the idle carping of an intellectual. Clark pressed his point anyway. “If the engine was overheating,” he said, “we should have had an alarm
before
it shut down.” He motioned to the computer screen. “The alarms that went off were all in response to the engine shutting down. They came
after
.”

It wasn’t that Robert failed to see the reason in Clark’s thinking. He saw it clearly enough. Robert had worked for a lot of rich yacht owners; Clark was the first who presumed accurately to know a great deal about his machine. Robert was forever saying things like “The difference between talking to Jim and talking to Allan is the difference between talking to someone who understands what you are trying to tell him
instantly
and someone who you know will never understand.” But Robert was equipped with a disposition slightly different from Clark’s: when the machines were working, he was not inclined to suspect that something was wrong. And the engine worked! Robert said as much. Clark appeared to agree: if the engine was running, Robert must have fixed it. Wearily, Robert returned to bed. Clark kept fiddling with the computer.

Fifteen minutes later the engine quit again.

This time, as the ocean hurled us crazily, Jaime and Peter and Celcelia spoke nervously among themselves, though when they saw me coming they shut up. When the crew begins to hide the situation from the passengers, the passengers should begin to worry. “This is crazy,” Clark said, more to himself than to the five people who watched him with incomprehension. “I can’t figure it out.”

He pointed to what he was unable to figure out. Attached to the engine were dozens of sensors. The sensors measured pretty much everything that can be measured inside an engine. The computer ordered and monitored this data. But one piece of data—the pressure on the engine—made no sense. The number on the pressure gauge should always be positive, there being no such thing as negative pressure. The number should also be fairly small—typically it read between 1 and 2. Now the computer screen read -38883354.6669. It was a crazy number. The computer clearly had a screw loose.

Clark said, “Steve.” He turned around as if he expected to find Steve over his shoulder. “Steve is…where?” he asked.

“Steve’s asleep,” said Jaime. It was now well past two in the morning. Steve was more than asleep, I said. Steve was in a coma.

“Wake him up,” said Clark.

Steve was awakened. He struggled out of bed and up onto the bridge. He did not look well. The truth was that Steve’s brain, unlike Clark’s, had a limited appetite for technical malfunction. Steve long ago had banned computers from his home back in Silicon Valley to prevent the blasted machines from following him everywhere he went. Here on the high seas he could not escape them; here home was a computer.