The secretary's voice buzzed on the intercom to inform me that Perkins was on his way up. I grinned. I loved it when the secretary called while I was on the phone with one of my friends. "Just a second, man." I swung the phone around so that the microphone faced the intercom and the speaker was still held against my ear. "Send him on up, Mary." I'd never called her Mary before.
A few moments later Perkins gave the door a courtesy knock and slid in the office. I interrupted my phone conversation for long enough to wave him in. He rolled his eyes and made a wank-off motion before plopping down on the chair on the other side of my desk.
I hung up. He didn't waste any time.
"Okay, man. I've drawn up the rules. Give them a read." He tossed a folder on my desk.
"Fuck you thinking, man? I'm not reading all that. Just tell me."
"All right, whatever. We're going to--what's the deadline on the Motorola project?"
I checked my PDA, which I was really happy to put to any task, no matter how brief. "About three months from now."
Perkins ran his hands across his slacks. "Good. Good, okay. Mine's around the same time, I'll have to check. I'm pretty sure Matt and Wes have deadlines sometime in May, too. This is good. All right, listen. Obviously, we have to do our respective things within the confines of the modem. Meaning, find out how much memory is built into your modem, and work with that. No cheating. No linking to remote servers. It all stays in the box. This is for a reason. This stuff is plastic and silicon. Short of being whacked with a hammer, even after hundreds of years, nothing's going to happen to it."
"Deal."
"Second point. Accessibility. I don't know about Motorola or the other companies, but 3Com's QA department is a fucking joke. They won't check shit. I could make the signal status page full of photos of your grandma naked and they wouldn't notice. But just in case, you have to bury it a little bit. Hyperlink, like, the copyright notice from the Logs page. A place where someone will only look if they're really bored."
"If we bury it too deep, this'll be the biggest waste of time ever."
Perkins smiled again. "I don't know, man. How many cable modems are out there? I know the U.S. has like 300 million people in it...so let's say as a conservative estimate there are...what? 2 million cable modems spread across the country? Never mind the rest of the world, I haven't figured that out yet. Actually, let's just say fuck it to the rest of the world, it's too much work. This'll be good enough. Anyway, a couple million cable modems, dude. Someone's going to discover this and it's going to make their fucking day. Now."
He kicked off his shoes and crossed his legs. "Third point: content. At first I was thinking that we should keep from discussing what we're writing with each other. But then I thought that maybe it would be fun if we kind of worked together. And, I mean, this is an example, but check this out. Say I talk about how, like, the island nation of 3Com attempted to secede from the Motorola empire. Our rebellion was quashed and Motorola punished us by selling almost all our children into slavery. And then, in your Motorola modems, you can write about your glorious victories over the 3Com people or something retarded. I know that's retarded man, whatever. I don't know. I'm just throwing something out there, we'll come up with something more believable than that."
I laughed. "Yeah, what the fuck is this? Let's tell someone to find the fucking ring of Gondor or whatever."
"Yeah, yeah. I know, but you know what I'm saying. Which leads me to the fourth point: At what point will this hold relevance? Like, how far in the future is far enough for these things to be considered treasured artifacts? Five hundred years, maybe?"
"Something like that. I don't know."
"Think of how much of a trip that'll be. But the thing is, we have to make it relevant, we have to write it in the right voice. Think about it. Deep down, you think people from 1500 were retarded, right? Same thing here, I bet. If we write things that are really senile, they just might buy it because they assume the worst about it. So we should knock ourselves out. Write about how we worship the great modem god and place his effigies all over. Something stupid, you know? It'll be funny."
I leaned back in my chair and began to swivel back and forth. "We'll be telling a joke for an audience born long after we're dead."
"Right." Perkins shrugged. "But we're laughing, right? If we're laughing, what the hell do we need to hear other people laughing for?"