Frequently Asked Questions about Ultra Micro Beta Electro Tech (UMBET)

McClean, on the other hand, has no family and continues to ride his mountain bike throughout the valley. He's in great shape because he doesn't believe in owning a car. He often works for 48 hours straight and then sleeps for twelve before mountain biking through the hills for another eight. He's all boy and manages to know the latest video games, the best snowboarding technology and the best routes up El Capitan.

The epistolary line will be told through email read with voice overs. It will leaven the mix and help build extended segueways that fill longer gaps in time. Often, the transition between days or weeks will be filled with these voice overs. The line should be sound driven and as writerly as possible. The letters should snap with the quick, sloppy, quirky, uncapitalized diction of on-line text. The Web is one of the most textual mediums around and this should be the vein for bottling that verve and distributing it to the viewers.

It's also an excellent device for letting characters talk about their life in silicon valley without introducing new scenes. Someone might be quite quiet around the office, but write long letters to friends at home slicing apart the different characters. They're quite free with their speech because they think it won't be read by anyone around the office. It's an ideal way to give a voice to lower-ranking people without coming up with a social situation that allows them to speak.

Ideally, the firm will also begin to take longer term equity stakes in its own development. It should be important to introduce the risk taking, stake taking nature of the valley and emphasize the lotto-like nature of stock options. This is the other major job of the firm: inject enough nervous capitalistic greed to sustain growth in the plot.

None of the equity dreams will become real. There will be no great wealth at the beginning or the middle. There will be modest successes. The rent will be paid. They'll get bonuses from time to time that will buy a new car or a fast boat, but there will be no home runs. Only singles and doubles.

There will be deeper questions about Tamara Regents and her relationship with him. Can it be sustained at such a distance? What is the bond that makes these two so close? How can they love each other so deeply and yet live such detached lives? They seem to meet infrequently and yet both know everything about each other. Uncovering the depths of this relationship will be a mystery to unravel.

Garrison Gray will provide another source of mystery because he will be consciously generating noise about himself on the net. That is, he'll be weaving a contradictory and improbable mythology for his past by inventing strange posts and leaving trails throughout the Net. Pulling out the real facts of his incarceration and his failed marriage from the phony stories like the one of his ascent up Mt. Killimanjaro will be a major goal. From time to time, the most outrageous stories will seem to prove true while the more mundane ones will fail.

Gene Albertson will be something of a foil. He is, at least on paper, rich. But the wealth is now wildly overleveraged and tied up in land. He needs to work to pay for the gasoline for his Porsche. His main job is to provide an direct illustration of the tantalizing grapes that drive the people while reminding everyone how fleeting the rewards can be. This will be exposed in bits and pieces. He may sell one of his Porsches (sigh!) through an epistolary plot line. Or perhaps he will find himself dealing with a girlfriend who doesn't understand that he can't afford to take them to Paris to celebrate their 4 month anniversary even though he has a house that might be worth $2 million.

Tambourlaine will be something of a fish out of water. She'll be aggressive and female. So although the world is largely male, she may not get as many dates as the statistics would indicate. On the surface, this doesn't phase her. She'll be able to tease some guys and seduce the thrill seekers who want to see her tattoos, but it won't yield either a steady boyfriend nor a great love. This will prove daunting to her because she will crave the die-for-you romantic bliss that motivated Michael Furey in The Dead, but never realize that these bonds can't be acquired with a ``Go For It'' attitude.

For instance, Tamara Regents enjoys to toy with the boys. She's usually McClean's, but they're constantly on hiatus. In one scene, she fiddles with the feelings of a contract programmer they brought on board. He's not as sophisticated and the entire show consists of one long tease until he manages to connect at a quick level. Then she cuts him off. He's left with nothing because he doesn't want to alienate McClean.

There will be relationships that stick. Regents and McClean will come into alignment, from time to time. He knows, instinctively, that she only responds to muted interest and uses it to snag her. For instance, there will be one liaison that begins with her interrupting one of his meetings. He ignores her for three minutes while the other person finishes the presentation, brushes her off and then asks her to meet him later for dinner.

There will also be fulfilling relationships of our dreams. Two programmers may meet and write poems to each other. Their email will all be in verse. This may evolve over several shows before settling into a predictable bliss that can keep the show from sinking from too much of the nastiness of life.

There will be two acted plots and one epistolary one. The main acted plot line will revolve around the beginning of Ultra Micro Beta Electro Tech, as McClean and Sexton come together again. Sexton manages to wrangle a contract out of a major insurance company to build a website that will make it easy for people to buy auto and homeowners insurance on-line. The work isn't glamorous, but it is steady and serious. He must talk McClean into coming on board and working again instead of bumming around the Sierras. They talk about what went wrong with the last start up. They wonder if they can truly work together again. In the end, he agrees to join if he can name the company. Sexton insists on something "normal that won't scare away investors". McClean offers the hyper normal name.

In the second plot, Alexandra Tamborlaine will try to understand just who Garrison Grey is. They're both newly hired to work on the project and Tamborlaine checks out everyone by searching through the web. The problem is that she finds more and more data about him that is blatantly contradictory. One database says he was in prison for the last two years. Another listed him as a rock music promoter who created several all female, folk rock extravaganzas to save the redwoods in Northern California. Yet another suggests that he was doing standup routines in St. Louis as the manager of a comedy club. Nothing seems to fit because there is no physical way he could do all of these things. Grey dodges all of her questions and suggests that he only tells the truth after making love-- a policy that he admits is sometimes not conducive to a long term relationship. Tamborlaine is silenced for a second before asking, "What about throw away sex?" After that, he says, "I only lie."

The third plot emerges as letters fly back and forth between Francesca Sorley and Kevin Tarkerson, a new contract programmer. Both went to undergraduate school together and Sorley tells Tarkerson about a mutual friend and master programmer named Aaron Nash. who lived down the hall. She had heard that he had bought an expensive motorcycle and crashed. Nash survived, but supposedly spent two months in the hospital. The girl on the back of the bike supposedly died.

Tarkerson disputes the rumor. Nash couldn't get a date in college. How could he get a girl on the back of his bike? Plus, he's extremely cautious. He would never go fast. The exchange continue, but neither can locate Nash. In the end, all they have is a rumor.

The problem metastasizes when someone looks up ``breast cancer'' and finds no information because the search software was screening it out. This produces some angst as everyone begins to dream up more ways that the software will hurt the lives of children who do things like look for first aid for a finger prick.

In the end, the firm ships the software with an overly complete list despite a bit of hand wringing. The bottom line is that they are contractually bound to do a complete job despite some qualms about first amendment stuff. The parents, it's argued, can always disable the features at select moments if the information doesn't appear.

Several days later, she pops into his office in the middle of a meeting. He keeps her cooling for more than a bit. (Interleave the plot here with the other line.) Then when she's run the line out as far as possible, he finally asks her for drinks.

That evening, he kids her about using the word ``relationship'', a word that is code for ``You did something wrong...'' Words are more than meanings, they argue. Words carry a structure for how to behave and act. Words filter our feelings and filter our actions. Using words can be terribly limiting they argue.

They banter a bit before coming up with their own list of forbidden words. Some, they even talk around because they're too difficult to say even after several scotches. Others, are inside jokes like the name of the restaurant where Regents threw up on the waiter, the word ``infrastructure'', the word ``ginger snaps'' (in reply, ``yes. definitely.''), the phrase ``Content-based Web Service'', etc. Nuzzle, nuzzle, smooch, smooch.

The next day, they're back to ignoring each other again. They don't talk to each other in the halls and seem more interested in making weekend plans than seeing each other. Yet, this line ends with someone asking for McClean and Regents saying, ``He's off at Yosemite again. He wants to beat his time up the Western Route [Insert authentic name] up El Capitan.'' She knows everything, but seems unconnected to him.

The firm soon finds that one client is asking them to insert a function that allows a boss to read everyone's email. The function makes it easy for the boss of a bank to enforce its policy about personal email. Everyone quickly argues that it could only be used for bad things and the invasion of privacy. Sexton agrees, but also points out that the bank boss claims he wants to stop clerks abusing the privacy of customers by emailing out data of famous people to their friends.

In the end, they are able to dodge the client because they get more money from the insurance firm to add boating insurance to the website keeping them in business for a bit longer.

At this point, the visual shows Tamborlaine sudsing up his car while Grey goes to check his email. The last messages between the woman and Grey scroll across the voice over. In these, they agree to meet and when she asks how she'll recognize him, he tells her about the muddy car with the phrase ``cleanse me'' written on it.