I was awake to run four miles before the dawn was a glimmer in the day's eye. I'd worried that no one else would be out running in the blackness, but I was wrong. When I pulled into the parking lot at Green Lake, the car's headlights caught a bunch of those small reflectors sewn into running shoes, the reflections uncannily like wild eyes hiding in the forest.

These are the doctors—the psychiatrists, neurosurgeons, internists, what have you—that you see and wonder how they manage to be so fit when they have to work all the time. In my imagination, I gave each one of them a white medical coat skin.

I drove to Redmond to sign a piece of paper. I hadn't driven by the Microsoft campus in years, about 30 buildings ago, and had never been inside it. Since then, the government has outfitted the neighborhood with a new offramp and street names, all of which I found disorienting and time-consuming to navigate. Campus was no better, driving slowly among the homogenous buildings and peering over the steering wheel at the small signs, Choosing My Own Adventure all the way.

There was no place to park in the visitor parking, and all the signs said that improperly parked vehicles would be impounded. So, I didn't park but stopped in the roundabout and went in to the reception desk where the woman, without raising her gaze from the monitor in front of her, told me I couldn't park there. She said I could park anywhere else, and that I should look in the parking garage, too. So I did. And in the parking garage and every other spot were various models of Audi, Porsche, BMW, and other expensive cars all strikingly similar. Not one beater among them.

Back in the building, the person I was to meet notified and en route, I waited and watched people come and go by their badges. People came to the reception desk asking for shuttles to other buildings, for couriers, for access. This is a place where you can ask for things and get them.

The men wore khakis and long-sleeved cotton casual shirts in solid or plaid. They had those short haircuts with the tidy half-sideburn add-ons and the front sculpted for ramp-up time. If they wore glasses, they were small black squares. Freds and Barneys. Sometimes whole groups of men dressed like that. Women wore the feminized analogue.

This is not just a company culture, but a different universe. Where were the engineers in T-shirts and jeans and hair and nails left to grow? Where were they? In another building, I suppose. Another identical building. I can't imagine myself in an office like other offices, in clothes like everybody else's clothes….but, oddly, I don't disdain the culture. Instead, I'm awestruck.

You see those thick glass security doors and you know the place, when it is locked down, is airtight. You look around the vast lobby at the artwork, the wood paneling, and the thick glass countertop of the reception desk, which probably cost thousands of dollars alone (and there are 50 of them, at least), and it's hard not to think of all the people in this community—all the people I know personally—who have benefited from working there and how the region is better nourished as a result. I could only think, All of this because of DOS and Windows? I know it's more than that, but it's still hard to imagine what—including monopolistic tactics—could result in such a magnitude of wealth. However it works, I'm glad it's here and not somewhere else.