Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
Pong
My electronic seduction began in 1973 in the bar of a
French hotel. The year before, when I was four and a half
years old, my family--mom, dad, little sister, and I--had
moved from Manhattan to Paris. We stayed five years. Although
today I regret none of it, glad to have learned to
speak a second language and know another culture, at the
time it was a nightmare. To this American boy, the City of
Lights was little more than a drab, dark, miserable place. I
spent that first year grappling with a new language, starting
school, and embarking on what would become a familiar
cycle for me--new school, isolation, the first flowering of a
friendship or two, then the inevitable breakup as the cycle
repeated and I found myself in the next new school.
Close the door, take off, and leave your world behind.
We'd done that in 1972. Planes were both fantastic and
frightening to me. Fantastic for their size and power and the
excitement that came when the machine lifted off the
ground. Frightening because they were the engines of separation.
One day in October we packed our things, got on a
plane, and moved thousands of miles from our home in
Manhattan, sent away by a force my dad called "business."
My grandfather had died earlier that year, and my dad at
thirty-two suddenly and unexpectedly inherited his father's
connections built over years of investments, loans put together
to finance projects in faraway countries such as Algeria
and Iran. My dad, a young investment banker, was
expected to build where his father left off. In my four-year-old
mind this was all inexplicably cruel, beyond understanding.
By age twelve I'd already attended five different
schools, having moved from America to France and back
again.
Those first school days in a strange land among the
proudly xenophobic Parisians set me on my course as a professional
outsider. In preschool I learned that the world was
divided into two groups: popular children and those on the
fringes. I wanted to be popular, one of the group, liked if
not loved. None of this happened. Instead, I attracted trouble.
I was a foreigner with thick glasses, crossed eyes, and
terrible coordination caused by my lack of binocular vision.
On my first day of class I was the butt of jokes that quickly
escalated to blows. In the concrete courtyard of my small
French school during recess I'd accidentally broken another
kid's plastic toy car. Other kids circled around. One stepped
forward, and before I knew what happened I felt a sharp
pain in my cheek. When I touched my face I felt sticky
blood. As I cried and felt the sting of a deep scratch the boys
scattered. When a teacher came by I could feel her disapproval;
surely I, an unknown kid, was to blame.
I started to spend more and more time in worlds of my
own. I began to daydream, and over months I began to
read. Owing to my double vision I had trouble making out
words on paper; letters moved, words ran together. Reading
felt hard, but slowly, under the guidance of a special reading
teacher I saw every day after school, words, sentences,
and eventually whole paragraphs came into focus. One day
when I was seven I found myself lost in a book, the words
making a world so real that I forgot where I was. I'd reached
a point where reading had become intensely pleasurable,
and I discovered books without pictures; these were
science-fiction novels my dad bought for himself, in our
family's bookcase.
I read the great classics of space exploration--books by
Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury--and they
filled my mind with escapist fantasies as I rode the bus to
school or flopped on my bed after school, lying on my side
reading, refusing to move until the cramp in a tingling arm
or leg became so intense that I had to leave that world and
roll over to get the circulation flowing. Here were stories of
nomads traveling through deep space, alien ships crash-landing
on Earth, lonely astronauts and their families wandering
the bleak surface of Mars. Looking back on these
books, all written in the 1950s and '60s, I see that what's
most striking is the near absence of computers; if they were
foretelling the future, they missed an important part of it.
By third grade school got marginally better. As my French
improved I no longer made embarrassing mistakes, mis-using
similar-sounding words. I discovered that among the
bigger kids and popular kids were other kids like me.
We reached out. One in particular, Jean-Baptiste, was the
smallest kid in school. We made an odd couple. I was taller
than most; he was tiny. He was nimble and fast in sports. I
was not. Yet together we found common escape, swapping
French comic books or playing complex games with glass
marbles in the paths of a nearby park. When my books or
Jean-Baptiste were not around I immersed myself in an addictive
game of "let's pretend" that lasted until fifth grade.
The game was simple: I was in fact not human; I'd been
sent to Earth to investigate the nature of Homo sapiens. My
plan made sense. What better way to learn about this strange
species than through the eyes of a child, one who could
"grow up," go through the entire cycle of human life, and report
back with authoritative inside information? My parents
were not my parents at all; they were just the target family
selected. Through a highly sophisticated process, the details
of which I hadn't exactly worked out, my identity was inserted
in vitro into the fetus that came to be named David.
There were great advantages to this identity. I could stand
at a clinical distance whenever anyone spoke to me, especially
when they were angry. An adult shout became an act
to be studied. As angry words cascaded around my ears I
took careful notice of the reddening faces, tics, and other
physical symptoms displayed by the speakers. The content
of their communication was lost, erased. Only the process
was observed and preserved. At school, my special mission
helped me forget the need to be liked; I could navigate more
safely through the halls.
In fact, isolation became a particularly good means of
studying the worst in people--sparing me pain as I stored
up valuable information for my report to my own race.
Every now and then I would question my alien identity,
sometimes looking in the mirror after brushing my teeth at
night, challenging myself to do something inhuman to
prove the story was real.
I knew of a spaceship concealed on the roof of our apartment
building to be used only in the gravest emergency.
Shaped like a small flying saucer, it had two gull-wing doors
that raised themselves to allow entry. Inside were two seats
and the simplest of controls. By sitting down I could speak
to the ship and navigate with my voice. Inside I imagined a
supercomputer like HAL in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey,
an intelligent machine to do my bidding. I could ask it anything,
to fly me off to anywhere. I'd fantasize about taking
this ship around the world or through time, visiting and exploring
other eras or planets.
The French obsession with cinema greatly helped these
fantasies. Paris had dozens of revival houses playing old
movies. In the 1970s, when French television consisted of
two state-owned channels broadcasting nonstop boredom
to a nation of millions, children rarely associated the box
with entertainment. When I wanted to see something interesting,
I went to the movies.
Every Sunday afternoon a dilapidated tiny theater off the
Place de L'Odeon in the then-seedy Left Bank offered a celluloid
brew of Tom and Jerry cartoons followed by Stanley
Kubrick's millennial masterpiece. As a seven-year-old I went
as often as my mom and Samantha, my little sister (who was
barely four), could stand taking me, certainly more than two
dozen times. Seeing that film so regularly became a kind of
mystical education for me, the way some children commit to
memory verses of the Bible or the Koran.
"Open the pod bay-doors, HAL."
"I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that."
This was the film's exquisite moment for me, when the astronaut
named after me faces the full implications of a conscious
computer that has knowingly chosen to kill him--the
now-familiar threat that an intelligent machine, no longer
needing its creator, might decide like Frankenstein's monster
to turn on him and his race. Indeed, in the brave new
world of computers it seemed that the creation process is
not complete until the machine is capable of destroying its
creator.
The sparse dialogue and obtuse story line could have bored
me, as it bored many adults who saw it; but at age seven I
barely heard the words, so drawn was I to the special effects
that created a future world, one for which I was better suited
than the school yard. Every time I saw the film it reinforced
my obsession with outer space and confirmed that one day I
would travel there. I was certain that my destiny, and the destiny
of all human beings, involved leaving Earth.
My parents tell me that when Nell Armstrong landed on
the Moon they woke me up and sat me down in front of the
television set; at eighteen months I wasn't interested. Another
eighteen months would pass before I knew what the
Moon was, what spaceships were, and that people were
going up into space all the time, boosted by multistage rockets.
I have faint memories of my parents showing me a copy
of the New York Times with a blurry photograph of a space
capsule orbiting the Moon taken by an astronaut through
the porthole of his moon lander.
While that picture was an early confirmation that I'd go
to space one day, it was 2001 that showed me what my future
in space would look like: the space station, the moon
base, the long, long Jupiter-bound spaceship with its
nuclear-powered engines at one end and bulbous sphere at
the other, where the astronauts rested in cryogenic sleep.
In Paris I was comforted by the prospect that such a world
would one day exist. Now I know better. When I watch the
film these days what strikes me is its loneliness: A crew of
two manned the ship, or rather watched as HAL manned
the ship, arranging for their food to be processed and their
communications sent to Earth. The astronauts were left to
jog round and round the white ship or play chess with HAL,
who was programmed to lose 50 percent of the time. The
environment is desiccated, a machine-mediated universe
where each astronaut lives alone, separated from others by
layers of technology that stifle direct human contact.
Back then the computer HAL seemed infinitely more interesting
than the human protagonists, more interesting
even than space itself, that void through which the doomed
crew traveled; and so I thought nothing of the loneliness of
the astronauts. I probably thought loneliness was a natural
part of life. It was for me.
Christmas 1973 we went to the French Alps for a family
ski trip in a part of the country that catered to the functionaries,
civil servants, and middle management of France.
Rarely visited by foreigners, these resort towns had few of
the trappings of European luxury. France as a nation has
strong socialist tendencies, and these holidays were meant
to be communal experiences; all meals and ski lessons were
taken together, without class distinctions in either.
We stayed in a huge hotel called Hotel de France, a wall
of windows facing the mountains with a dining room where
hundreds ate at long tables, soup was ladled out from communal
bowls, and everyone nibbled on the same kind of
bread. I loved this part of France because it allowed for
safety in anonymity. That holiday in ski school I fumbled
on the slopes. I was a first-level novice, which entitled me
to a small metal snowflake that I could pin to my ski jacket.
Fascinated, I listened as my father explained that when I
moved to the next level I would get a pin with two
snowflakes, then three, followed by whole new shapes--stars,
camels, and for the best skiers, rockets. As I slid awkwardly
down the mountain, thinking of becoming the best
skier in the world, Samantha took to the slopes with ease
on tiny foot-long skis. We fought most of the time, vying for
our parent's attention. Because she was younger and the
jump from English less jarring, she spoke better French.
Born with better eyes, she read and wrote better than I did
at her age. At her small school Samantha won a prize for
being the best student. She seemed more French than the
French. Her success translated into less attention at home:
my parents--especially my mother--paid less attention to
her and more to me. Every day after school my mother took
me to a special reading tutor. My sister was left at home
with a baby-sitter.
On our holiday my dad skied with the grown-ups, and my
mom--who didn't ski at all--watched us from the valley
below. One afternoon I came crashing down the slopes and
tumbled into a heap of snow a few feet from where she
stood; terrified that I'd broken my leg, my mom called the
ski patrol. Basking in all the attention, I decided that accidents
were exciting. A few X rays revealed nothing more
than a sprained ankle. I was bandaged, given little crutches,
and my dreams of two snowflakes and a golden rocket pin
were banished to fantasy. Left to wander the hotel during
the day and watch people swimming in the bizarre outdoor
pool, hot water producing billows of steam in the Alpine air,
I discovered something fantastic.
Outside the dining room was a bar decorated in the
sparkling, smoky-mirrored chrome that presaged the coming
disco era. One afternoon I wandered in. I made my way
past the bartender, drawn toward a machine at the far end
against the wall. It looked like a television set running a cartoon.
I wondered which show was on. As I got closer something
seemed strange; I'd never seen a cartoon like this one
before. I'd never seen a TV like this before. Where was the
channel dial? What lame cartoon is this? I wondered, staring
at the almost blank monotone screen. I stood watching
the "show"--two rectangles batting a square between
them--bonk ... bonk ... bonk went the machine. And
then it all became clear. This wasn't a television show; this
wasn't a television. It was a machine playing some sort of
game with itself! It was showing off, to me. It wanted me to
play with it. I grabbed the knobs and spun them around,
noticing the coin slot. Back and forth went the blur, jumping
across the screen in rapid, barely visible increments,
eminently familiar yet totally strange.
Like a Three-Card Monte player, the machine lured me
into a familiar game, but one played on its own terms. It invited
me to join in. Setting my crutches aside, I balanced on
one leg, suddenly coordinated enough to stand without tipping
over. Digging through my pockets I found some change
my mom had given me for snacks and dropped a coin in the
slot. The screen refreshed itself. Holding the knob, I
watched as my electronic paddle followed the movement of
my hand. Bonk. I hit the luminescent ball. Bonk. It came
back. Bonk. Faster now. Bonk. Too fast! It shot by. Several
rounds later the game was over. I could lose privately. No
one to laugh or yell at me for missing.
I found another coin and played another game, my
crutches, my silver snowflake, my sister the better skier,
school--gone. This was bliss. Here was something I'd been
looking for without knowing it. If I had one of these, life
would be better; life would be great. There was nowhere else
I'd rather be. The sounds of the grown-ups in the hall and
the bartender flipping his paper faded away until all that remained
was the bonk bonk bonk and that silver square traversing
the black screen, from paddle to paddle, left to right
and right to left, following a clear but barely comprehensible
logic. Who or what controlled my opponent's movements?
What were the rules governing the flight of that square shuttlecock?
Staring at the plastic console with the words AVOID
MISSING BALL FOR HIGH SCORE written on it in English, I
knew this was going to be a great trip after all.