Three And A Half Billion Year Old Men

Description

Stanford University, the heart of Silicon Valley - at the beginning of the dot-com boom. A young man leads even younger men in developing web sites for one of the world's top medical centers. In their off hours, they stay rooted to their desks, drinking beer, slaughtering one another in the virtual corridors of ultra-violent video games – and dreaming and pondering about… women. When did their difficulties start? Was it six million years ago, when we branched off from our nearest hominid cousins, the chimps? Or maybe the die was actually cast 3.5 billion years ago – with the first prokaryotes squirting around in the Earth soup. This 7000-word short story, from the author of the acclaimed thrillers The Manuscript and Pandora's Sisters, traverses some of his most important and incendiary thematic territory: young and frustrated men, beautiful and conflicted women, and the crossed wires of human sexuality. Also the baffling legacy of evolutionary psychology, the absurdities of high-tech modern existence, and technology itself – and not to mention the strange and lovely people who work making it run for us. Also included in the short story collection, Don't Shoot Me In The Ass, And Other Stories.