Do you have difficulty decoding social behaviour?
Do you have an encompassing obsession with one or more specific and restricted activities?
Do people tell you your technical preoccupation with parts of objects is abnormal or unusual?
Are small personal rituals important to you?
Do you have any repetitive motor mannerisms (tics, gestures, rocking, etc.)?
Are you or have you ever been employed as an engineer?
Asperger’s Syndrome was a bad thing, a disease. Yet, as he filled in his answers, Arjun realized that this profile fitted the majority of people in the AV group, possibly including himself. He was obsessive. He liked repetition. He hated ambiguity. Change could be a problem. Was he ill?
Others evidently harboured similar suspicions, and for several days a stream of messages flowed around the intranet. To his surprise Arjun discovered that at Virugenix (unlike most workplaces, where being diagnosed with a neurological disorder might be a cause for concern), Asperger’s was a badge of honour. Emails pointed out that mild AS is associated with extremely high IQ scores, that AS sufferers are often brilliant programmers, and that Bill Gates (who rocked back and forth, spoke in a monotone, was obsessed with technical detail and happened to be a billionaire) was proof that high-function autists were superior to the common herd. Someone mailed to say that he had always suspected ‘people like us’ were wired differently to ‘people like them’. Gradually a competition developed, as people tried to prove that their own special cocktail of dysfunctional personality traits was casually connected to professional brilliance.
To: avgroup@virugenix.com
From: darrylg@virugenix.com
Subject: I WIN FOOLS
FACT: If I did not have sound and visual reminders programmed into my
PDA, I would forget to change my clothes EVER.
FACT: I can recite pi to ninety-seven decimal places and know the exact times of sunrise and sunset at seven named locations in the continental United States FOR EVERY DAY OF THE YEAR…
Arjun suspected that Darryl’s email disqualified him, since boasting was excluded by a clause in the American Psychiatric Association’s definition of Asperger’s, which mentioned a lack of spontaneous seeking to share enjoyment, interests or achievements with other people’. He tried to assess his own situation. He was clearly less symptomatic than some of his workmates: Shiro, for example, never spoke and his only discernible enthusiasm was for a certain series of telephone switches used by Pacific Bell in the early 1970s. He, on the other hand, knew not to stand too close to people and responded to body language with his own appropriate body language. But did he do so naturally, or was it a learned response? At what point should one consider oneself abnormal? The question started to preoccupy him (was that itself a symptom?), so finally he emailed the person who had first sent out the mail, and asked for advice.
To: chriss@virugenix.com
From: arjunm@virugenix.com
hello chris girl or boy i am wondering about your quiz…
A response came back that afternoon.
To: arjunm@virugenix.com
From: chriss@virugenix.com
2 x chromosomes. How do you feel about team sports?…
She had been roped into a Softball game over at the Microsoft campus. If he wanted to talk to her, she would be there on the sports field after work. He would recognize her easily enough.
I’ll be the one with most visible tattooing.
As befitted the demesne of the reigning power in Redmond, the Microsoft campus sat on top of a hill. Arjun could walk there from Berry Acres in ten minutes, and he had hovered outside the entrance once or twice, but his meeting with chriss was the first time he had gone any further. The MS perimeter enclosed almost 300 acres of terrain, landscaped around discreet buildings that for some inexplicable Gatesian reason were all named after famous golf courses. The structures were functional glass-clad boxes, with few architectural quirks or tics. Security cameras perched proudly on their roofs, and they were linked by marked fitness trails, colour-keyed according to length and difficulty. New cars sat in the parking lots. Young people in conservative casual clothing walked along the paths or waited for company shuttle buses. At the centre of the complex was a large playing field, used by staff, their guests and local freeloaders for every kind of activity from five-a-side soccer to interdepartmental croquet tournaments.
The softball game was not hard to find. Arjun just followed the sound of whooping and cheering. When he reached the diamond he found to his surprise that there were very few spectators. The noise was generated by the players, who were positively reinforcing each other with a vigour peculiar to corporate employees engaged in an organized bonding exercise. One team even had yellow polo shirts with Go Sales! printed on the back. At the side of the field, an impressive buffet table had been set up, laden with soft drinks and finger food to stimulate post-game networking. Despite the yelling, no one appeared to be taking the game very seriously.
As Arjun walked up, he spotted her: a slight young woman in grass-stained denim cut-offs and a sleeveless black t-shirt with iloveyou.vbs written in white across the front. Her brown hair was tied up in a scarf, and from biceps to wrist her left arm was covered in a blue-black coil of intricate tattooing. Against the backdrop of khakis and polo shirts she stood out. Hesitantly he held up a hand. She beckoned him over.
‘Arjun, huh? Chris. Good thing you made it. We’re one short.’ She handed him an aluminium bat. ‘You’re up next.’
Off the bench. On the team. Chris’s first gift to him.
That afternoon Arjun surprised himself, making contact with the ball more often than not and sending sedentary yellow-shirted salesfolk huffing and puffing into the outfield. His success modified his natural contempt for softball, which he considered basically an attention-deficit version of cricket, a sort of child’s bat-and-ball game with no real tactical complexity. Naturally he kept this opinion to himself; it was fun to be congratulated on his play, especially by someone as unusual as Christine Schnorr.
She was not beautiful exactly, or even inexactly. Her face was lopsided, as if it had drifted down to the left, and her right eye wandered intermittently when she was talking, lending her expression an uncannily divided quality, as if she were concentrating simultaneously on him and on some object in the middle distance. At twenty-nine, she was older than Arjun, and he got a sense that she had seen more of the world than him. Since Arjun had seen relatively little of the world, he reasoned that many people (particularly in an affluent country with a developed tourist industry) would statistically come into this category, were the idiom to be understood in a strictly geographical sense. But there was something less definable, something extra-geographical about her confidence, a restrained energy that seemed to come from knowing things he did not. He liked it.
Christine worked for the firewall group, and her preferred mode of social interaction was the interrogation. As the game dissolved into chat and buffet-grazing, she started to question him. Had Arjun any brothers and sisters? Where exactly in India? What social class would he say his parents belonged to? His answers appeared to form a satisfactory constellation of data points, and she nodded encouragingly, as if he had confirmed a hypothesis or made progress in some unstated experimental task. She appeared to have forgotten that the purpose of the meeting was for him to ask her something, rather than the other way around. He took a deep breath.