Today, I broke the 30,000-word-mark on my new novel, "/usr/bin/god," which I'll likely finish off around Christmas. To celebrate the milestone, I've posted a 2,000-word excerpt from the opening of the book:
Mason's car — "The Mobile Nerd Command Center" or MNC2 for short
— died the morning of the most disastrous job interview of his
life. He practically lived out of the MNC2, charging his
device-array — phone, email pager, GPS, laptop, MP3 player,
digital camera, and PDA — from the DC inverter that dangled from
a wad of duct-tape around the cigarette lighter; the back seat
was full of dead Mountain Dews and empty coffee-cups from Highway
101's many Starbuckses; and both sun visors bore clip-on CD
organizers filled with home-burned MP3 CDs that contained six
hundred plus hours of music.
As Mason pulled into the empty Menlo Park parking-lot that
morning, the dashboard lit up christmas with a Defcon 5 array of
idiot-lights. Six different chimes sounded from the absolutely
spectacular sound-system, resonating with jeep-beat bass that
made his gut churn. The engine died as he pulled into the spot
and the transmission made a horrible, grinding noise as he
shifted into park. When he switched off the ignition, the engine
made a chuggetta-chuggetta noise that sounded like a cartoon
foley effect. Mason had a vision of his car's hood popping open
and emitting a geyser of steam, followed by all four tires going
flat in unison, but the chuggetas died down and he was sitting in
the parking lot, seated at the conn of the former Mobile Nerd
Command Center, with twenty minutes to his job interview.
Job interview! He cringed at the words, cringed at the memory of
the grueling, humiliating pre-test he'd had to do to even *get* a
job-interview, which had included fifteen essay questions on the
history of the Internet, the fine points of Microsoft Foundation
Classes, and SQL query-syntax. He'd had to define a glossary of
no fewer than 30 technical terms, including "PEBKAC" ("Problem
Exists Between Keyboard and Chair"), which had been his freaking
*login* for five years on an underpowered Solaris box at his ISP.
