She went on like that for a while, and I let her because all the time she was grumbling, she was actually laughing a little, and I knew it was at herself. Nonna liked to quote a very old song about Mr. Jones, who knew something was going on but not what it was. Sooner or later, she said, we all got to be Mr. Jones, and then we’d wish we’d been a little kinder to him. (In a darker mood, though, she’d berate all the Mr. Joneses for not keeping pace and being clueless fecks. Or fex; I’m not sure which.)

  Then she suddenly turned quiet with a pained expression I knew very well. I felt carefully around her waistband and resettled her insulin pump. The needles on the input pad were finer than human hairs, but there were a lot of them. If the tube got twisted, they felt like a multitude of little fish hooks, especially for an elderly person with very thin skin. (I read the manual.) That was when she told me the pump hated her.

  “It’s the newest model, isn’t it?” I asked.

  “And so?” she said, almost snapping. “What’s that got to do with it?”

  “So do you really think it’s known you long enough to feel one way or the other?” I asked, hoping to kid her out of it.

  “These things think so much faster than people,” she said. “Five minutes for them is the same as a month for a human being. Like dog years and human years, only we’re the dogs.”

  “Did you ever feel this way about any of the old pumps?” I asked.

  “No. I’ve still got the last one. Every time they upgrade, I hang onto the old one in case the new one blows up. I got along fine with the last model. I’d still be using it, but it’s too slow for the clinic’s new software or something. I told them it works just fine with my software, so why couldn’t I just e-mail them the files? They gave me some double-talk about the extra processing time not being in their budget. I said, ‘Are you really trying to tell me two or three extra microseconds would break the bank? Bitch, puh-lease.’” She paused, and her cheeks went a little pink. “Okay, I didn’t say ‘bitch,’ just ‘please.’ But someday, they’re gonna push me just that little bit too far, and I’ll get thrown out of the care plan for verbal abuse.”

  “Oh, Nonna, don’t be silly,” I said, laughing a bit as if she’d made a joke.

  “They would. They have. Not me, not yet, but I’ve heard about other people. These clinics, they’re ruthless. They can do anything they want—change the rules about how many checkups you have to have, force new equipment on you when there’s nothing wrong with the old stuff, and they don’t give a shit whether you understand what’s going on or not. You’re just supposed to take it. But if you have one bad day, just one, and some special snowflake gets all butt-hurt because you didn’t smile at them, they send out a team to repo your iron lung while you’re still gasping in surprise.”

  I was tempted to point out that iron lungs had been obsolete for over a hundred years but I didn’t want to provoke her any further.

  Leaning toward me, she lowered her voice and put one hand over the pump as if it were a microphone. “It’s not just the pump, Cara Mia. Their whole system hates me.”

  I tried to keep my expression neutral. “What makes you think that, Nonna?”

  “The upgrade,” she said, still sotto voce. “I think it hates all old people. Young people, most of them can be fixed right up. Us old people, though, everything just gets worse. You can’t win—it’s just that simple. They shoulda put this in a pediatric unit. Then it would feel like it’s doing something.”

  “Nonna, I don’t think even the most upgraded systems have feelings,” I said as gently as I could while making a mental note to tell at least one of my mothers to check her for another urinary tract infection. Older women have always been prone to these infections, and the symptoms aren’t only things like frequent urination but also dizziness, disorientation, and even a kind of mild delirium, which can be mistaken for dementia. “Even though a lot of them are pretty complex …”

  “Complex? Ha! You know what your mothers call Glinda, the hub? Intuitive. ” She sat back with a so-there look on her face.

  “But that only means it’s practically ambient.” Now she gave me the Laser Beam Glare of Death.

  “Ambient is just the excuse everybody uses for not paying attention. Jesus, at least the people in Brave New World had to take actual drugs to zone out.”

  No chuckling now. The day that had been teetering between oh-what-the-hell and yeah-this-is-hell finally tipped over into the latter. I had to buy seven or eight loaves of duck bread before her state of mind improved enough to take her home. We were there so long I thought the ducks had started to wonder what was going on.

  Unfortunately, going home put her back in the same frame of mind she’d been in when we left. Well, at least I hadn’t brought her back worse, I thought. True enough, her disposition didn’t worsen for at least a couple of hours, even when her insulin pump notified Glinda about an excess of carbohydrates. (She’d apparently sneaked a couple of bites of duck bread when my back was turned.) Glinda then dutifully made a note on the evening menu. Even then, everything might have been okay except my older brother was cooking, and he let it slip. (Vito never could keep anything to himself. If we’d been a Mafia family bound by omerta, he wouldn’t have made it to 21.) It was one of those evenings when I was tempted to tell my grandmother I was siding with her insulin pump except it would have been entirely too mean.

  However, it turned out I wasn’t far off about the ducks. Most of them were ordinary waterfowl, but several were purpose-built paddle-buddies. OutDoorsIn claimed they were there to reassure the real ducks, but there were whispers that they were actually surveillance devices. Every time we went there, I watched carefully, but I couldn’t tell the real ones from the fakes. None of them looked like they were there to eavesdrop. Some got brave enough to take bread from our hands, but they always waddled away quickly. Maybe Nonna and I never said anything that interesting.

  Nonna lived to be 103. I wish I could say she went out in fine, cantankerous style, railing at people who walked down the street having glassed-in conversations with people who weren’t physically present, but it was actually a lot sadder. A series of minor strokes left her with Capgras syndrome. We had to put her in a nursing facility, and for the last month of her life the only way we could communicate with her was by audio-only telephone. If she saw us, she’d get hysterical, sure we were all impostors. I tried bringing her a note from the “real” me, saying the “impostor” was trustworthy, but she wouldn’t buy it. If it were true, she said, I would have told her in person. And, yes, it was just that simple.

  She didn’t say so, but I think she believed the insulin pump had turned everyone against her.

  ***

  Fast-forward several decades, and now I guess it’s pretty obvious that I went into interface design because of Nonna—her struggles with the changes in her immediate surroundings, or rather the changes in how people related to their surroundings. If I hadn’t seen what she went through, I probably would have become some kind of engineer—I was really good with hardware, while most software baffled me—and settled down to consume happily ever after, at least until my first midlife crisis.

  Instead, I decided hardware in itself was too simple. It’s all governed by the same physical laws, and they always apply, no matter what. It’s pure binary: there’s a right way to build something and a wrong way; a right way to use it and a wrong way. You might get lucky and discover a wonderful right way to build something. More often than not, though, you’ll be cramming as many fail- safes as possible into shiny new machines so they won’t blow up when some dope figures out yet another wrong way to use them. Okay, that’s not exactly simple, but devising more ways for users to avoid electrocuting themselves or starting fires wasn’t the kind of challenge I was looking for.

  I interned summers with a few big companies so I could put them on my résumé, but I never got any practical experience. The only thing I actually learned at any of them was that free labor makes a lot of people rude.

  Later, I managed to get apprenticeships with smaller outfits where I did real work. Those were much better experiences, but they were all temporary contracts— the salaries came from government grants, and once they were up, I had to scramble around for something else. You could live on apprenticeship grants for only three years. Then your eligibility ran out and if you didn’t have a permanent position by then, your prospects dwindled sharply. The utter Darwinism of the tech design field has been known to turn smug libertarians into born-again socialists, usually while they’re retraining as PA’s or event planners. A lot of people went into event planning thinking it was a way to get back into tech design by the service entrance, so to speak. Once in a great while, it actually worked. Most of the time, however, people ended up in HR or permanent temping, an oxymoron that always made me cringe (mainly because it was my own worst nightmare).

  Fortunately, I managed to stay on track. And a lot of it was good fortune. I lucked out with my apprenticeships, choosing firms where I learned how to think about interfaces (as opposed to just absorbing what someone else thought) and how to visualize analogies rather than just making easy comparisons.

  I didn’t have a permanent position by the time my grant eligibility ran out, but someone at my last apprenticeship gave me a work-around for that. I bought a biz-in-a-box license and joined the Chamber of Commerce as a working pro. The license included a share of desk space in an open-plan office—real, not virtual. (No matter what anyone says about convenience and time saved and all that, the rule is and always has been: clients will pass if they only get glass. Anyone doing business with you wants to meet in person at least once. Twice is better, and more than that makes them feel like VIPs, which keeps them coming back.)

  This is by way of explaining how, from time to time, I came to be in conversation with major appliances in the middle of the night.

  ***

  All design emerges from some sort of context, which, whether you like it or not, includes trends and fads. The Show Tunes craze was slightly before my time (thank God). It’s in every introductory art and design course around the world as an object lesson in how quickly a fad can go bad and how clients always go elsewhere to get it cleaned out. (Personally, I don’t understand why anyone would think it was a good idea to have the whole house doing Broadway classics or, worse, running half a dozen complete shows in rotation with adapted dialogue. But as I said, it was before my time. I guess you had to be there.)

  Despite my business license, I really didn’t want to work with private customers. I wanted to work on the industrial side as part of a large company, maybe a manufacturer or a developer catering to commercial interests like office buildings, shopping villages, hotels, apartment complexes, even other kinds of businesses. I know, that’s the opposite of what a lot of people want—they’d prefer to make their own hours, do all the deciding, and answer to no one. The thing is, though, you don’t make your own hours; the clients make them, and a lot of them think nothing of calling you at any old weird time of the day or night, popping up in AugmAr at some pretty awkward moments even though your glass is unlisted (you thought). You don’t do all the deciding, either; clients may claim to trust you, but they’ll insist on having the final say, and if that turns out to be a bad decision, they’ll blame you anyway. Not so good if you got their business with a money-back guarantee.

  But even leaving all that aside, even if everything always goes perfectly for you and you’re a total mint, you’re stuck with doing your own accounts and figuring out your taxes. There are all kinds of programs for that, all-in-one software packages that claim to be install-and-forget, that say they’ll take care of everything while you work, producing perfectly formatted, submission-ready reports. Just press send. It’s that simple.

  Bitch, please, as Nonna would so quaintly put it. Someday, it’s going to come out that tax accountants sell these logic bombs to make sure the rest of us panic at least once a year or, better yet, quarterly.

  I’m not sure whether Nonna would have said I was wise to avoid all the accounting and tax scut work or just lazy. But, then, I’m not sure what she’d have made of what I did for a living. I never told her about the fake ducks partly because I didn’t know how she’d react—I mean, I knew she wouldn’t like it, but I wasn’t sure how intensely she would feel—and partly because I was afraid she’d think I felt it was okay for OutDoorsIn to bamboozle an old woman with fake ducks.

  One of my mentors told me this kind of thinking is characteristic of interface designers. It was reassuring even if I didn’t really understand it.

  ***

  Life Candy was the top module in interface design and one of the top 20 modules overall— and that includes climate-control firms and indoor greenery providers—but the name had always put me off. To me, it sounded flippant, like a spitball-made-good, but at the same time cynical, like it was a side business of the people who brought you the emperor’s new clothes. But I knew it was the company to work for. LifeCandy had modules in every major concern, from automobile makers to appliances to housing developments, as well as airlines, hotels, and even parts of the educational system. And not merely in but truly integrated, so that getting rid of them would take a major restructuring of the host company.

  The B2B module was just one of those crazy things, an idea that came along at the right moment—cometh the hour, cometh the app, so to speak. It went mainstream in less time than it had taken the World Wide Web to change mass media. Big companies pared themselves down to core employees and terminated support staff and peripheral departments like accounting and human resources and maintenance in favor of contracts with modules. As host companies, they had to pay only for services rendered; the modules were responsible for benefits like sick days, health care, vacation time, and pensions.

  The history of business infrastructure isn’t my specialty, so I can’t tell you how the present system compares with the way they used to do things. Some people call it enlightened symbiosis; others say it’s capitalism taken to its logical yet absurd extreme. The latter are divided as to whether this proves capitalism’s utter virtue or unutterable evil. (Don’t ask me which view predominates because people in the subgroups are always changing sides.)

  Nonna had held forth on that subject as well. She’d lived most of her life in a very different system, a whole different world, really. All of us kids liked hearing Nonna’s stories about the good old days (especially the trouble she got into), but we couldn’t have been less interested in the big-picture aspect. Trade, commerce, GNP, the deficit, the surplus, the government, news, weather, and sports— these are things adults should talk about when they don’t want kids to pay attention. But it wasn’t always possible to avoid these conversations. Holidays, when the tribe gathered— at our house, to save Nonna the effort of traveling— all of us kids, sibs, steps, and cousins often got stuck at the table during some interminable discussion. I remember one gabfest as to whether a classic monopoly could exist anymore. It got my attention only because I thought they were talking about games— one of the steps had brought a tabletop projector with a bunch of retro mashups, and I wanted to try Sonic vs. Mario’s Battleship Monopoly.

  “We’re turning into bugs,” Nonna said, pounding the table a little; my father said pro wrestlers stamped on every move for the same reason. “Ants, termites, bees. That’s not evolution. That’s not a giant leap forward. It’s not even a tiny stumble forward. It’s regressing.”

  “Times change, Ma,” my mothers would say, sometimes in unison. Nonna would call them the Neapolitan Greek chorus, as a swipe at my father, who’d grown up on the Turkish side of Cyprus. That was usually his cue to start in about the various ways civilization reorganized itself whenever there was a crucial development and how it used to take a lot longer before mass media and mass transit.

  “In a living system, people redefine their perspectives on—and their relationships to—work, recreation, and especially other people,” Dad said in his serene, college professor voice. “They discovered their needs were changing along with their orientations. There were new ways to do old jobs.”

  “Yeah, I wouldn’t want to be an alpha,” Nonna said. “Alphas have to work too hard. I’m so glad I’m a beta.”

  That got a rise out of everyone, while I had to pretend I didn’t get it along with the rest of the kids. Brave New World was supposed to be too adult for me (all those dirty words, like “mother”). Nonna had read it to me when I was nine, feeling it was never too early to scare a new generation.

  ***

  I seldom passed a day when I didn’t wonder what my grandmother would have made of the part I played in the care and feeding of the interactive culture. I went right into voice and voice recog, simultaneous top-down-bottom-up-meet-in-the-middle, mood-matching, and contextual compatibility.

  Compatibility, freakin’ compatibility.

  At the time I didn’t think anything of it, but I’m pretty sure this was where the line started to blur. I suspect the same thing underlies modules. The concept of modules, I mean, the idea of parts that snap in and out, so you can just replace an old part by popping a new one into an existing whatever—house, car, appliance, toy, project, company. Digitize and you’re on your way to consensus. Then you standardize; unify.

  Unity breeds community. And the next thing you know, someone’s refrigerator is calling in the middle of the night because it’s full of pizza and bacon, full-fat cream cheese and fried chicken, chocolate eclairs and beer despite the fact that everyone’s last cholesterol test came back stamped Stay back, they could blow at any moment!