As if Alaska Airlines is allowed to fly over a top-secret base.' And Bug replied, 'Look down there, Dan - that's the place they staged the fake moon landing back in 1969.' I looked, and it did resemble the moon. He told me, 'They have UFOs and aliens cryogenically frozen there.' He almost got whiplash from craning his neck halfway through the flight trying to catch a glimpse of the ultrasecret Groom Lake military facility. He's a vast improvement over Jeremy, and Bug is suddenly so much more himself, relaxed and joking and just.

Sig is an ophthalmologist from Millbrae who convinced Bug that he wasn't stereogramatically blind. Karla, it turns out, is an expert at shiatsu massage. The crew set up shop in Daniel's home in Palo Alto, and Daniel's father, who in the last excerpt was drunk and despondent after losing his job at IBM, is now merrily working for Interiority doing 'alliance building.' Bug has come out of the closet, Susan has found her calling as the leader of a Net-based women's movement called Chyx, and Karla and Daniel have fallen in love. they were joined by a number of new recruits, among them Ethan, a perpetually dandruff-laden venture capitalist (who later contracted skin cancer), and Dusty, a female bodybuilder and accomplished coder (whom Todd found at Gold's Gym and later got pregnant). Michael asked the original Microserfs to come down and help him form Interiority Co. Once he tasted Silicon Valley and realized its potential, he never came back. Michael, who in the first installment had left Seattle on a secret mission for Bill in Cupertino, became the catalyst for the company. In 18 months of coding madness, they created Oop!, a cross between Legos and an erector set, with the smarts of AutoCAD built in. In this excerpt, the original crew has grown in number and found the courage to leave the mother ship, move to Silicon Valley, and pursue the ultimate goal: starting up a company and building a product of their own creation. That story has become the first chapter of Coupland's recently released book, Microserfs (HarperCollins).

_The cover story for the January 1994 issue of Wired *spun the tale of seven Microsoft employees - Todd, Bug, Abe, Michael, Karla, Susan, and the narrator, Daniel - searching for purpose while grinding code for the all-knowing Bill. The full story including this excerpt is now a novel, just released by HarperCollins. 'Microserfs' started out as an acclaimed short story in Wired about the life of young coders at Microsoft.

Microserfs by douglas coupland