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Norman Mailer. As the war winds down, he returns from the Peace Corps to run a communal cannabis farm. When this becomes a hassle, he starts a small factory in New, England to make some rare well-crafted implement – say, wood-burning calliopes. Finally he decides that the way to the future lies through Silicon Prairie – though somehow that part rang less true than the rest.
    The three of them began speaking of programming matters in a language opaque to Fred. He tried to remember expressions like
top-down approach, zorched, algorithm, iteration, kludge, kernel, image, smurged, metacommand structure, parameter passing
, the noun
build
and the adjective
include
.
    ‘We need a new build with those other include files, or we’re zorched.’
    ‘Yes, but what happened to the libraries Kim was using?’
    ‘Smurged.’
    After some minutes of this, Fred imagined he saw a patternemerging. It was evident that the three men, though they used the same words, did not think the same way.
    Corky spoke seldom, but in long tortuous sentences.
    ‘There are two kinds of problem with the zeroform module: crossovers in the top levels of parameter passing which, even if we can fix them or swap them, do a reveal on the next levels, and this intensifies two other problems, that dual mode functionality which confuses the operating system when it looks at this guy and finds out it’s this other guy, and which we can’t address until the parameter passing crossovers are resolved, plus possible insufficiencies in the secondary addressing system directive, and third we get a re-initialization procedure that pops up when we don’t want it to zap our arrays, and fourthly the metacommand structure seems to read this guy and lose directivity. Is that how you guys see it?’
    Carl, the old China hand, was bad-tempered and cynical. He would shake his head and smile at everything said, as though he’d heard it all before. Very occasionally he might condescend to drop a remark himself: ‘Why don’t we cut through all the bullshit and admit that our approach is wrong from the top down?’
    Pratt became more intense during the discussion. When anyone else was speaking, he brooded, drawing doodles, tapping his feet, or kneading his hands to crack his knuckles. When he himself spoke, it was rapidly, in a half-whisper, hissing orders. There seemed to be an overwound mainspring somewhere.
    Half an hour passed; Pratt showed no awareness that Fred was present. Then a neat little man in a well-cut Italian suit leaned in the door. He had the face of a happy newt.
    ‘This the new man?’
    ‘Christ, yes, Sturge, I forgot to bring him by. Meet Fred Jones. Our manager, Sturges Fellini.’
    They shook hands. ‘Great to have you with us. I hope you’ll agree we’re doing some pretty exciting things here, Fred.’
    ‘Yes, I … yes.’
    ‘In fact it’s more than exciting; it’s a total species revolution. Man is just the old chrysalis that the robot has to burst out of.’
    ‘Mm.’
    ‘Our frozen industrial culture is being totally microwaved.’
    ‘Mm.’
    Fellini grinned. ‘Don’t look so alarmed. Of course not everyone will see this as a positive change. Some will sense only that we are rushing towards a cataclysmic collapse spelling the doom of Darwinism. But others will welcome the crisis within our mega-culture, hoping for a new and better globality.
    ‘Globality, yes. Mm.’
    The software people had resumed their discussion. Fellini raised his voice and continued over them.
    ‘Yet, as we surge towards a peaked impact, one thing is clear – non-metal humanity is no longer a force here.
The future has a metal face.’
    ‘Metal face, yes, mm.’
    ‘And it is up to us to put a smile on it. Never forget that.’
    Fred nodded, as though agreeing never to forget that.
    ‘This high-impact innovation means the shattering of old values. Are you ready for that? Are you really ready?’
    More nods.
    ‘Good. Because we have a fifty-yard-line seat for