Moby Dx: A Novel of Silicon Valley - Volume 1 Max Ebb

Prologue

[The story you are about to read is intended for mature readers due to its sexual content and language. It may not be appropriate for all audiences.]

Epigraph

My feelings at the moment … were prompted by that glorious principle inherent in all heroic natures—the strong-rooted determination to have the biggest share of the pudding or go without any of it.

—Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life, Herman Melville

Note: you can listen to the author reading this prologue at the link below

http://www.mobydx.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/2014-01-08-Prologue.mp3

Prologue

It is an ever-fixed mark

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

It is the star to every wandering bark,

Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.

—Sonnet 116, William Shakespeare

To the long-suffering returning from exodus, Silicon Valley is the land flowing with milk and money. It is the mecca of would-be entrepreneurs making their hajj. It is the Fountain of Youth to those remaking their careers. It is the cosa vera, the genuine article, the real McCoy, the true cloth, the ne plus ultra, the veritable North Star to those venturing forth into the world of startup companies. It is no longer a place much driven by silicon, but would you rather we auctioned naming rights to the highest corporate bidder?

For decades, through thick and thin, through the 1970s birth of biotech, through DRAM- and EPROM-dumping and the near-death experience of the early 1980s, through the Asian Flu of the 1990s, through Wall Street’s infatuation with the dotcoms, and even through the Lesser Depression, about a third of all venture capital invested worldwide has originated in Silicon Valley.

There is so much startup fever in these towns that [redacted] is working on a vaccine to prevent it, and middle schoolers are figuring out how to transmit it. Taking a page from John-Hennessy-of-Stanford’s playbook, the school districts require that every child, upon enrolling in kindergarten, sign a contract with the teachers’ union permitting the latter to buy up to ten percent of any qualified offering in which the former is a co-founder. The schools have great science labs and no sports facilities, so high school students must assign all their invention rights to the Sports Boosters.

Instead of dance parties, there are hackathons. The balloon-tying clowns on urban street corners have been pushed aside by millennial buskers who perform feats of coding 3D printers powered by stationary unicyclists. Parents worry that their high schoolers’ uncontracted liaisons might lead to procreation—shorthand for product creation—and downstream litigation. The nerds are so revered that the jocks feign Asperger syndrome just to get a date. On Halloween you’ll see more girls dressed up as Sheryl Sandberg than Batwoman, and more boys as Hank Rearden than the Man of Steel. It’s a place where mooning doesn’t mean teenage pranks or moping, but going to the moon, and maybe further, and not metaphorically. It’s where PARC is neither a typo nor a Francophile’s garden, but the birthplace of the GUI and the laser printer. Cupcake and Ice Cream Sandwich are ten-foot-high sculptures commemorating software releases, and so is Jelly Bean. Over forty different languages are spoken in the homes there, and that doesn’t include PHP, R and Ruby, HTML, Verilog, or Hadoop, or dead languages like COBOL. Cakes are delivered by drones, crime is illegal, MOOCs and Tor are POR, thirty is the new fifty, and the singularity is (always) around the corner.

At a fountain on California Avenue in Palo Alto, legend has it that Bill Hewlett and David Packard added grape Kool-Aid to the water supply—in an engineer’s idea of a bacchanal—and danced there naked on the night they sold their first oscillators to Walt Disney. To this day, street urchins stop cars at the intersection of University and Emerson, imploring “Drink the Kool-Aid, ma’am,” and offering glass vials with a milliliter of putative purple holy water from the same said fountain, while across the avenue, Cassandras and end-of-the-worlders holding placards chant “Don’t drink the Kool-Aid!” over, and over, and over.

On the street where Steve Jobs lived, pilgrims come from halfway around the world—and they’d come from further if they could—to take selfies in front of his slate-roofed former residence.

Look around, and what do you see? Thousands and thousands of mortal souls fixed in startup reveries. All of which is to say that if in Melville’s time Nantucket was no Illinois, neither is Silicon Valley in this one. Silicon Valley is the Nantucket of entrepreneurs.

--- and now, time for a commercial ---

I'm posting all of Volume 1 here on Wattpad, expecting completion in another month or so. The entire book, with graphics and glossary, is available now on Amazon. Volume 2 is now available as part of the subscription model on my website. Please reach out to me if you're interested. I'll make it easier for wattpad users.