The Blue Nowhere

“The Valley of the Heart’s Delight” long ago though the joy referred to when that phrase was coined was culinary rather than technological. Apricots, prunes, walnuts and cherries grew abundantly in the fertile land nestled south of San Francisco. The valley might have remained linked forever with produce, like other parts of California—Castroville with its artichokes, Gilroy with garlic—except for an impulsive decision in 1909 by a man named David Starr Jordan, the president of Stanford University, which was located smack in the middle of Santa Clara Valley. Jordan decided to put some venture capital money on a little-known invention by a man named Lee De Forrest.
    The inventor’s gadget—the audion tube—wasn’t like the phonograph player or the internal-combustion engine. It was the type of innovationthat the general public couldn’t quite understand and, in fact, didn’t care about one bit at the time it was announced. But Jordan and other engineers at Stanford believed that the device might have a few practical applications and before long it became clear how stunningly correct they were—the audion was the first electronic vacuum tube, and its descendants ultimately made possible radio, television, radar, medical monitors, navigation systems and computers themselves.
    Once the tiny audion’s potential was unearthed nothing would ever be the same in this green, placid valley.
    Stanford University became a breeding ground for electronics engineers, many of whom stayed in the area after graduation—David Packard and William Hewlett, for instance. Russell Varian and Philo Farnsworth too, whose research gave us the first television, radar and microwave technologies. The early computers like ENIAC and Univac were East Coast inventions but their limitations—massive size and scalding heat from vacuum tubes—sent innovators scurrying to California, where companies were making advances with tiny devices known as semiconductor chips, far smaller, cooler and more efficient than tubes. Once chips were developed, in the late 1950s, the Machine World raced forward like a spaceship, from IBM to Xerox’s PARC to Stanford Research Institute to Intel to Apple to the thousands of dot-com companies scattered throughout this lush landscape today.
    The Promised Land, Silicon Valley . . .
    Through which Jon Patrick Holloway, Phate, now drove, southeast on the rain-swept 280 freeway, toward St. Francis Academy and his appointment with Jamie Turner for their Real World MUD game.
    In the Jaguar’s CD player was a recording of yet another play, Hamlet —Laurence Olivier’s performance. Reciting the words in unison with the actor, Phate turned off the freeway at a San Jose exit and five minutes later he was cruising past the brooding Spanish colonial St. Francis Academy. It was 5:15 and he had more than an hour to stake out the structure.
    He parked on a dusty commercial street, near the north gate, through which Jamie was planning on making his escape. Unfurling aplanning and zoning commission diagram of the building and a recorder of deeds map of the grounds, Phate pored over the documents for ten minutes. Then he got out of the car and circled the school slowly, studying the entrances and exits. He returned to the Jaguar.
    Turning the volume up on his CD, he reclined the seat and watched people stroll and bicycle along the wet sidewalk. He squinted at them with fascination. They were no more—or less—real to him than the tormented Danish prince in Shakespeare’s play and Phate was not sure for a moment whether he was in the Machine World or the Real. He heard a voice, maybe his own, maybe not, reciting a slightly different version of a passage from the play. “What a piece of work is a machine. How noble in reason. How infinite in faculty. In form, in moving, how express and admirable. In operation how like an angel. In access how like a god. . . .”
    He checked his knife and the squeeze bottle containing the pungent liquid concoction, all carefully arranged in the pockets of his gray coveralls, on whose back he’d carefully embroidered the words “AAA Cleaning and Maintenance Company.”
    He looked at his watch, then closed his eyes again, leaning back in the sumptuous leather of his car. Thinking: only forty minutes till Jamie Turner sneaks into the school yard to meet his brother.
    Only forty minutes until Phate would find out if he’d win or lose this round of the game.
    He rubbed his thumb