anuary 3, 1998 OF MICE AND MEN, RELEASE 2.0 By JEFF MACGREGOR S unset flared against the dun hills of the Silicon Valley. Lennie spoke quietly in the gathering twilight of a wooded grove, "Tell me again, George." "Tell about what?" "Tell me 'bout the laptops again, George." "I already tol' you a hunnert times. You know the story as good as me." "Tell me 'bout the laptops again, George . . . and, and how we'll live on the fatta the land." George took off his hat, fingering sweat from the band; he sighed wearily and reseated it. "O.K.," said George, "but just this one last time and then we gotta go." Lennie leaned forward with the rapt attention of giant child. "See, Lennie, we live in a age of 'information.' Nobody knows what that is exactly, not even Esther Dyson, but there's lots of it and everybody's racin' everybody else to tart it up and make it turn cartwheels or jump through a hoop. The high-tech fix is in, make no mistake. But nothin' much works the way they say it ought, and it's the little man, the regular Joe, that suffers for it, see?" Lennie nodded slowly. "Like last year," George went on, "when America Online blacked out more often than a test pilot with a drug habit? Oversold themselves and got too crowded. How's people supposed to get their important E-mails 'bout discount Plutonium Mastercards or home delivery of spicy bulk luncheon meats if they can't get on line? How you ever gonna find out who was voted Sexiest Paranoid on 'The X-Files' or ogle them celebrity pinups if you can't surf the Net?" "I dunno, George." "Well you can't, is the point of it, Lennie. They promise you a earthly paradise but then deliver the Muskegon County Fair. And if that ain't bad enough, now Microsoft wants to make it a rule that every new baby borned from here on out comes bundled from the stork with its own Web browser." "Not the little babies, too, George!" "At least that seems to be the gist of it. Janet Reno's suin' Bill Gates a million bucks a day for sayin' so, and that means he'll be out of dough in approximately never, so don't look for no sudden improvements. It's all like Monopoly money to him anyhow." "Tell me 'bout the laptops again, George." "In a minute, Lennie," George continued. "Now, slow and stupid as it may be, the infotainment superhighway/town square/grange hall/billiard parlor is a swell place to work making Web sites if you're tryin' to finance your next excursion to the mothership behind that 'ol comet Hale-Bopp. Buy yourself a nice new pair of Air Jordans, a roll of quarters for if they got jukeboxes or piggy banks in the seventh dimension, a purple barber's bib from Supercuts in case they serve lobster your first night there, and Shazam! Your ticket's punched for the baggage carousel at Heaven's Gate. See, part of the lib'terian democracy of psyberspace is that you can say whatever you please and can't nobody stop you; the law and Mr. Pierre Salinger say so." "Do they really got piggy banks in outer space, George?" "You bet they do, Lennie; it's called Mir. That's the Russian word for 'Invest your precious rubles here, fellow citizens, from whence they cannot be retrieved until the day this vessel splits open like the greasy waistcoat of an overfed village bureaucrat and returns to Earth, spilling your multiplied wealth a thousandfold down upon your heads, except now in the form of flaming supersonic chunks of faulty computer components and poorly wired carbon dioxide conversion devices.' Leastwise I'm pretty sure that's what it means." "I like little piggies, George." George sighed and was still for a moment. A soft west wind rustled the willows along the data stream beside which they sat. " 'Course we did get them happy snapshots all the way back from Mars that prove conclusive they got important space rocks there named for retired cartoon characters. Maybe we're goin' outta control, Lennie. I don't know anymore. We're all so busy askin' 'how?' that nobody bothers to ask 'why?' Except the stockholders at Apple, of course; they must rock back and forth all day and ask themselves 'why?' over and over again." "An Apple a day keeps the profit margin away, right George?" "You learned it real good, Lennie. We can make a computer to beat famous chess players like they's Ruth Messinger, but we can't figure no way to check a can of beans out of the local grocery any faster. We can merge and rearrange all them cradle-to-grave entertainment and communications and hardware and software and plush toy conglomerates, but if they're still gonna let Kevin Costner direct 'The Postman,' what's the good of it?" "I thought it was an apocalyptic thrill ride in the epic tradition of 'Spartacus' or 'Birth of a Nation,' George." "You been writin' movie blurbs again, Lennie?" "Sorry, George." "Well stop it. Ain't there an end to it somewheres? Good Lord, even Barbie's got her own workstation now. What's she gonna run on it? Spreadsheets on the variable rate mortgage for the Malibu playhouse? Maybe when Mattel does her body over they can give her and Ken and Skipper the carpal tunnel syndrome . . ." "That's a hot one, George!" ". . . or let her handle all the word-processing chores for the lawsuits that come in from them recalled Cannibal Patch Kids." "But what about the laptops, George?" "I'm gettin' there, Lennie. It ain't just computers, either. It's the pagers and the cell phones and the palmtop organizers, too. We're all caught up in the vanity of our own indispensability, is what I think. You can't never be out of touch for fear you might miss somethin'. Miss what? Half the time all you can do with a cell phone is explain to someone that you'll have to call 'em back 'cause you can't hear a word they're sayin'; the other half, the things blow you a big, wet digital raspberry 'cause you're in the wrong service area. Then everybody shows up at the cigar bar for dinner and complains about how all the cool area code numbers is gettin' et up by strangers. It's like runnin' faster and faster in place -- you drop to the ground exhausted at the end of the race and you ain't moved even a inch." "You're scarin' me, George." "Well, year-in-review pieces'll do that to you, Lennie. So here's what we do: Coupla no account bindlestiffs like us could maybe find a little piece of land somewheres. Nothin' swank, just a place where the grass is green and deep and the air is clear and the sky is blue and the cream's so thick on the cowsmilk you need a knife to cut it . . ." "Fatta the land, George, fatta the land!" ". . . and there's a little potbellied stove for the rainy winter days and some hot stew on it, too, and a porch swing for settin' of a summer's evening, and maybe there's a ISDN fiber optic hookup for the laptop and a 56Kbps-throughput flexfax/modem box so's we can telecommute. . . ." "Can I have a little laptop all my own, George? Can I?" "Sure, Lennie, but you gotta take good care of it." "Fatta the land, George! Fatta the land!" The sun went down on them then, and the breeze shook the willows, and there in the dark, in the quiet, the two men sat. From somewhere deep in those shadows came gently, persistently, the chirping of a bird. "Is that you or me?" said Lennie, hunting for his pager.