Quick, whip out your bio/logic programming bars

by Liz Henry

Infoquake hooked me with its cyberspacey dot com product manager drama, its fast-moving plot, and its silly descriptions of “biologic code” & futuristic programming. Since I have worked in Silicon Valley environments for years, this book is total crack. Also I have a fond spot for any book that takes William Gibson’s way of writing cyberspace as angular geometric shapes and updates this by rounding off the corners and having *blobby shapes*. Radical!

I have to give you a taste of the Cheez Whiz prose. Here is a scene where the barbaric, throwback White guy programmer from Hawai’i, one of the world’s few mavericks who are Unconnected and strictly limit the biologic code in their bodies, shows the Best Programmer in the World how it’s done.

“Watch this,” commanded Quell. And then he plunged his bare hands straight into the middle of the holograph.
Horvil gasped as connection strands rose like snakes charmed from a basket and wiggled thei way to the Islander’s fingers. Soon, Quell had amassed a bundle of data fibers in each hand, which he proceeded to weave in and out of the code blocks with astonishing alacrity. The connections looked just as well seated as if they had been stuck there with a pricey set of programming bars.
“I didn’t even know you could do it that way,” said Horvil. He thought of the clunky silver slabs roosted against his side and felt a rush of inferiority.
“How do you think people made code before bio/logic programming bars?” replied Quell. . . . “With their bare hands, that’s how. On the Islands, we remember such things.”

Kill me now, I’m laughing too hard! This scene is really great if you read it aloud.

The thing that made me want to throw the book across the room was the really dumb product launch scene. Here’s the setup. Natch (aka Gary Stu) is the supergenius CEO badboy and libertarian wet dream. His startup company is about to launch MultiReal, the ultimate disruptive technology, and as the World (Solar System?) Government wants to crack down, he has to launch it by Tuesday. Did you hear me! Tuesday! My god, that’s impossible! or is it

Horvil had already pushed aside the injury to his pride for the more pressing issue of an intellectual challenge. Using the tip of his finger, he was busy sketching lengthy equations on a virtual slate. The engineer ended up with a very large and unwieldy number at the bottom. “Totally impossible,” he said.
“What?” asked Natch.
“This is going to take a lot of grunt work, Natch. A lot. If this MultiReal program is as complex as Margaret says it is, it’s bound to have thousands of nodes we’ll need to hook up. Tens of thousands, maybe. Even if you and me and Quell and Ben work on this nonstop, we couldn’t get it done until” — Horvil scribbled his way through a maze of algebra — “December nineteenth.”
“You see?” cried Jara. “There’s no way we can do all this by Tuesday. No way.
The fiefcorp master flashed her the barest hint of a suggestive look, which Jara could feel right between the shoulder blades. Natch extended his finger towards Benyamin. “You’ve managed assembly-line coders,” he said. “Do you know a shop that can pull this off at the last minute?” The young man looked wide-eyed at his cousin, inhaled deeply, then nodded. “Good, then it’s settled.”

WHAT’S WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE! Number one I don’t care what sort of hand-waving hooha you are up to with your swirling hologram globs, you are not fast talking your way out of The Mythical Man-Month by hiring some “assembly line coders”. Ahahahah! My suspension of disbelief broke completely. I pictured a thousand CEOs reading this book on airplanes and getting the idea into their heads even more firmly that acting like a hard assed Alpha Male and outsourcing to remote teams will magically move up their launch dates.

I would also point out the hilariousness of the guy who scribbles a maze of algebra to figure out… what? How long it will take them to finish a project? Algebra? Really? That project-management quadratic equation really is a brain-cracker!

Algebra!

Now we come to the worst problem of the book, you’ve been waiting for it, right? The really dumb sexism. Jara is a bio/logic programmer and an “analyst” but somehow also the marketing chick and accomplisher of shit work for the team. She’s super great at what she does, in theory, but she’s constantly undermined by self doubt and by Natch’s sexual manipulation of her, which is set up right in the beginning of the book with a long chapter from her point of view. She sees Natch as a complete jerk and keeps trying to quit her job, but then he runs SexualHarassment 2.69 code on her and she tries to counter it with ColdShower 4.0. Basiclally he shoots her a sultry little bad boy smirk backed up by his “biologic” and she can’t help but DO WHAT HE SAYS because.. because he’s hot? Or something? Inexplicable! He did it in the scene I just quoted and apparently he aimed his sexay at the middle of her back. Right. Cause that’s where I always get a sexy little tingle when my boss comes on to me while putting me down. Yup, right between the shoulder blades.

My other point about Jara is that, though she started out with decent potential as a cynical, tough, smart character, every other sentence about her is laden with her girly self-doubt. She cocks her head. She cries out in puzzlement. During the scene above she “snaps with a swagger she doesn’t feel.” She contemplates her helplessness. She sighs that through his clever plotting, her boss has “enslaved” her. She panics, whines, exclaims that she doesn’t understand, or feels her “mental gears” grind to a halt.

The other female character of the book, Margaret Surina, is a boddhatsiva, which is something like being Bill Gates and a hereditary monarch of a giant powerful family Clan or “Creed” which I suppose people join and can leave at will. (Maybe semi-libertarians are prolific breeders, or maybe there are bio/logic baby incubators; no one explains the Clans.) So while on the surface she’s super powerful, she is always shown disempowered, uncertain, helpless, cursing, wondering. Not in a head-cocking, petite, perky yet sullen disempowerment like Jara; it is the noble, shining helplessness of a princess in her tower. And while she in theory did 20 years of programming work on MultiReal, we only see her henchman, or lover, Quell, the big white hawai’ian guy, doing the programming at his fancy workbench.

What can I say? I’m easy to please, at this point I’m happy no one has been slapped in the face yet, raped, mindwiped, or told off to serve everyone some mugs of steaming klah coffee nitro and it’s almost a relief just to have supposedly-competent female characters in a world supposedly without any sexism just happen to be described in ways and put into situations that undermine and demean them. Good job David Louis Edelman.

Okay back to the book, I’m near the end, and someone just patted his pants pocket to feel the reassuring heft of his bio/logic programming bars. I can’t look away!

- More blogging by Liz Henry at http://liz-henry.blogspot.com

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