UPPER FLOOR

On the top floor there's a guy who, around four o' clock or so, loses all his top-floor spirit and wanders down to the basement, where he peppers us with irrelevant questions. Usually they're along the lines of "Where's so-and-so?" or "Are you aware whether so-and-so knows that the meeting we didn't tell anyone about has been cancelled?". Or even better, "What does [Palinode] do here? What project does he work on? Who's the producer on [Palinode's] project?" when I'm off for lunch or something. Then he stands around with his hands in his pockets, glancing around and expecting conversation to start flowing smoothly around him. After a couple of minutes his grin turns fearful and he goes back upstairs.

I hardly blame him for abandoning his cushy top-floor life every afternoon for a taste of production prole zeitgeist. The upper floor is populated by producers, editors, animators and executives, none of whom are all that good for casual conversation. The editors and animators are enclosed in their own brand of technocratic jargon, the producers are semi-suicidal, and the executives may as well be the statues of Easter Island. They are totemic emblems of non-communication who like to describe themselves as "motivated" and occasionally hold general meetings to say things like "value added" and "you guys are what make this company work" and "you guys have to step up and show us what you're worth". Sometimes they hand down corporate emails announcing yet another policy. Sometimes when a person leaves an email will wish him or her the best of luck in all future endeavours. Sometimes an email will advise us not to allow the person into the building again. After a few minutes with an exec here you get the unshakeable sense that you're really an archaeologist inspecting a lost wasted past, and you're only dreaming that you're a researcher and field producer at a modest but growing production house. Any moment now you'll wake up in your tent, the sun illuminating its polyester walls. You'll step outside and stretch, pausing to contemplate those stone idols, wondering again what they could possibly have meant to their long-vanished artisans.

LINES THAT HAVE ME ON THE FLOOR SHUDDERING WITH THE UNCONTROLLABLE HAPPINESS

"I don't even drink Coke. It tastes like robot sweat". - Get Your War on #26

LINES THAT HAVE ME ON THE FLOOR SHAKING WITH THE UNGOVERNABLE NAUSEA

"I see you've got Huggies," I said. "I always get Pampers, myself".
"I find Huggies absorb more," he said. "And Pampers are too tight. They pinch the baby's leg."
"But Pampers have a layer that takes moisture away, and keeps the bottom dry," I said. "I have fewer rashes with Pampers".
"Whenever I use them, the adhesive tabs tend to pull off. And with a big load, it tends to leak out the leg, which makes extra work for me. I don't know, I just find Huggies are higher quality".
A woman glanced at us as she pushed past with her shopping cart. We started to laugh, thinking we must sound like a commercial.

- Michael Crichton, Utter Fucking CrapPrey

ABOUT MICHAEL CRICHTON'S LATEST NOVEL

Arrgh. Errm. Why in god's name did I think I would enjoy a Michael Crichton novel? I thought The Lost World read like a fleshed-out screenplay - one of the characters actually gets sentenced by a judge to spend time with an adorable kid - but this one has no flesh. It's just bones. The bones have rickets. And the plot sucks.

I'm a sucker for fictions about nanotechnology. As my friend Tony says, nanotech invokes all the transformation themes of myth. It's the protean material of the future. As a writer, it's a tempting challenge: what do you do with such malleable stuff? In Crichton's case, make an inept attempt to scare the shit out of us by invoking the bogeyman of untamed science. The characters, a collection of movie-ready nano-fodder stuck in a lab in a New Mexico desert, run around performing pseudoscience and then simply run for their lives from black clouds of implausibly mobile molecular machines. Every so often, whenever the nanobots perform some absurdly advanced action, someone gets to say the words "emergent behaviour," which in Prey has been debased to mean "Our creation has gotten away from us hubristic scienticians!". "Emergent behaviour" functions as a stupidity valve; it vents the illogic and allows you to keep reading. Not that you really want to. You know who dies first? The fat nerdy scientist goes first, then the girl with big tits. She shows up twice in the novel: once to let you know that there are tits around, the next time to die rather horribly. After that other people die. And then the book ends. HarperCollins is grateful to you for your time.

parode - exode