RICHARD POWERS (12 page)

You fall to the ground, gasping. You lie still, sucking salvation into your lungs.

"You ... animal-fucking bastards ..."

"Not talk! No make noise!" Someone smashes you across the face. Black collapses inward, and you are nowhere.

You come to in a white room. Even this feeblest of lights overwhelms you. When your eyes adjust, you make out where you are. Nothing to make out. A squalid plaster box. The room is maybe ten feet wide and twelve feet long. You could stand up fully, if you could stand up.

Here and there, the otherwise featureless walls bear greasy black fingerpainted smudges. Near the corner of one long wall, a five-foot slab of boiler plate barricades the lone doorway. Light dusts the room, seeping around the edges of a wall-sized sheet of corrugated steel nailed over the remnants of French windows.

The planked floor hasn't been swept anytime during your adulthood. The room is devoid of finishing except for a balding mattress and a metal radiator bolted to the filthy floor. Attached to the radiator, a short steel chain. Attached to the chain, your left ankle.

"Hey," you call. Your voice is dry, broken. "Hello?" Louder.

The door rumbles and jerks outward. A young man, no more than twenty-five, stands in the frame. He is tawny, thin, medium height, black-eyed, black-haired, sleek-bearded, hang-nosed, white-shirted, blue-jeaned, and glaring. You've seen whole armies of him, waving small arms, hanging out of car windows patrolling both sides of the Green Line. He's young enough to be one of your English students. He looks, in the second that you are given to scan him, lamentably like your internal clip-art stereotype of an Arab terrorist.

"What are you doing?" he screams. "Cover your eyes! Don't look!"

You scramble on the floor near the mattress, searching for the blindfold that has chosen the wrong moment to go AWOL. Screaming, the guard rushes you and yanks down the rag that has been riding, this whole while, on your numbed head.

You fix it so that you are blind.

The boy does not retreat. He hovers by your head. His breath condenses on your neck. He presses something hard and cold and metal up into your ear.

"You hear me, you cover your eyes. You understand?" You nod your head. Again. Harder. "You look, you die."

12

The moment he glimpsed America's pet project, Ronan O'Reilly was addicted. He'd come to Ecotopia determined to loathe its insular, insulating Gore-Tex righteousness, and he ended up marrying it and moving in. One look at the Cavern and he knew he'd never work on any other project ever again.

He toured it first on a junket to the Northwest, a whirlwind dog-and-pony show up the Pacific Coast, peddling a set of economic modeling tools to American statistical package resellers. No vendor in the U.K.
— leave off the Republic or the Continent—could go to market against the kind of distribution that the Ecotopians were just then ramping up. He hoped to make a few quick quid by licensing his algorithms before North American brute force rendered the whole idea quaintly obsolete. He planned to return with whatever modest profit a sale might net and use the proceeds to rescue the Queen's University's School of Social Sciences from hardware decrepitude. With a new generation of decent iron, O'Reilly might hand-roll a new generation of future-modeling tools. Remind his countrymen that there still was a future.

Ronan landed in Washington armed with a solid prediction package and an accent that the tone-deaf locals mistook for some Public Television Edwardian English monstrosity. He ran a tight slide show, with enough reheated Bernard Shaw cracks to keep the audiences entertained. American venture capitalists seemed ready to throw money at anything that ran on silicon. And the Erse slant on visual econometrics was just different enough to frighten his American competitors into interest. Only after he entered the glass palace of TeraSys, the Solution Builders, did O'Reilly get his first significant offer
—a bid outstripping his most reckless projections. TeraSys had little interest in the goods he peddled. They were after the peddler himself.

It took just a glance to see that the Ecotopians were up to some kind of major madness. But O'Reilly failed to guess the extent of it
—the source of that vibrant organic fascism, their sunny assumption of omnipotence. Only on entering the Cavern did he grasp the scale of the hubris. The Americans were launching an out-and-out frontal attack on electronic transcendence. Mankind's next migration.

Jesus Christ Made Seattle Under Protest: the guidebook's mnemonic for the downtown streets stayed with him after he returned home to his own flawed emerald. Under protest: apt dismissal of the entire Puget Sound. It was as if the Creator had spent eons developing the setting, then botched the city itself, under the project's deadline. The crabs, the salmon, Rainier, Olympus: all postcard perfect, when you could see it through the rain. Even the ice-cold beer wasn't bad, although the hapless microbreweries couldn't thicken a stout to save their souls. But the natives: gluts of aerospace secret-weapons contractors; technohip-pies with too much cash, clinging to the last stretch of Arcadia that Boeing hadn't yet denuded; philanthropic tele-solicitors who crucified themselves over the spotted owl while denying the massive subsistence economy that begged for a buck or grubbed for rotting lettuce heads down at Pike Place Market.

Odious,
he reported back to his fellow Dismalists in University Square.
The whole Northwest coast. Hirsute, illiterate, and malodorously enthusiastic. Blinded by their birthright, which they stole in the first place from more tribes of Indians than even the inane guidebooks care to mention.
Adding:
I'm afraid I've agreed to join them.

O'Reilly's fellow lecturers forgave him with contemptible haste. No excuses necessary. Part of the general exodus. We'd join you on the life raft, if we could.

He felt the self-defeating need to disabuse them. Now
don't go making me out to be just another evacuator.

A nice side benefit, though, no? Not having to worry about getting gunned down for having a Republican name or a Unionist employer?

Oh for Christ's sake,
he ranted at them.
Everything in creation does not boil down to the bloody Troubles. My decision has absolutely nothing political about it.

Strictly a question of
lucre, then?

Had his colleagues but known the figures involved. O'Reilly would never again need to muck about in the wilderness, piddling together bits of elastic and sticking plasters in heroic attempts to get his creations to run. Yet the cash per se wasn't the half of it.

How parochial home had grown, how imprisoning, in just his few weeks away. Belfast air choked him now, acrid and stifling. Bad for the lungs, and everything else that depended on them.

His beloved Maura refused even to consider a visit.
What am I supposed to do there, Ronan? Tell me that It's not my country. I don't even understand the fuckin' language.

You
aren't suggesting that intelligibility is exactly our island's strong suit?

It's home, Ronan.

Well, woman, we'll bring the welcome mat.

How can you possibly want to live in such a place?
You
don't understand, Mau. We're all paralyzed here. Rotting. Stagnant and cynical. Stuck in ancient history. Flogging a dead horse, for as long as anyone can remember, and it's never going to change, because nobody here even remotely believes that it can.

Oh, the Americans own belief now, do they?

Yes,
they do.
You
have to see what they're doing. Those people are changing the rules of creation over there, month by month. They are bringing something absolutely new into existence.

New, sure. But you can't call anything on that continent existence.

They fought for weeks, at a pitch that made their previous five years of warfare seem a friendly match. Each had drawn a line down the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, and neither was budging.

Maura, listen to me. We have one another. What difference in hell does it make where we live?

If hell makes no difference to you, by all means go on and live there. I'll trim you up some pretty sulfur-colored curtains for your breakfast
nook.

Damn your curtains. I can
'
t believe you're going to insist on signing
our death warrant.

You're the one who's doing the insisting, Ronan. I need to join this thing, Mau. I need to know where the race is going. I want to see what happens next.

Stay here, Ronan. I'll tell you what happens next.

Christ help me, woman. I'm going to miss scrapping with you.

But the pace of American innovation left O'Reilly little time to miss anything older than six weeks. Even doing without televised club football hurt less than he anticipated. Work swallowed him, leaving no space for anything else. For months, he had to digest ten new ideas for every one he coughed up. In fact, he brought only a single fresh dish to the banquet, but one that multiplied faster than that original all-you-can-eat loaf-and-fish-fry. His idea was simple, but lay at the heart of practical prediction. He'd found a way to broker econometric modeling's compromise and arrive at that eternal oxymoron, the accurate approximation.

The problem was deep. The more parameters one added to a model, the more accurately the model predicted actual outcomes. But each variable multiplied the complexity of the solution. When would an eternally refined estimate become
real enough?
When would approximation suffice?

Economic theory stopped too soon, reducing the world's mad exchange to mere Supply, Demand, and Price. The result resembled the Budapest Quartet nobly sawing away at a transcription of Mahler's Eighth. But more practical modeling snagged on the opposite sin of profusion. In the real world, no set of simultaneous equations ever really worked out. The classical economist's answer to his functions' functional impotence consisted of adding an infinite series of ever-smaller local factors to the mix, calculated to ever-higher levels of ex post facto multidimensional exactitude. And still the experts couldn't put the dart inside the bull's-eye any more often than your average Thursday night side-slinger down at the local. Predictive economics crashed and burned with the frequency of a turn-of-the-century air show. The market? It will fluctuate.

Hilarious, really. Like one of those Weather Wizards standing up in front of his back-projection map of the New World: hot and humid over Panama, chillier throughout much of the Northwest Territories. Warming gradually toward August, and likely to cool off somewhat again as we head toward winter.

Now reality, at eye level, fell closer to sociology than it did to physics. A child stands in the back yard and hurls a ball. Where will the globe land? Newton trotted out mass and velocity, slow decelerations against gravity yielding a mirroring parabolic slip back down to ground. Close, but no Castro. Then out came all the elaborations: the coefficient of friction, the eddying wind, the spin of the ball off the wrist, the wobble of the Earth on its axis, the wobble of the child on his own pins ...

Worse, the physicist conceded that the smallest change in the tyke's throwing posture could cascade out of control and land the projectile anywhere between here and Katmandu. This took the heirs of the infinitesimal calculus four centuries to come up with. Lower Kingdom Egyptian dads tossing around dried crocodile guts with their sons on Saturday afternoons down by the Nile had figured that one out six millennia ago.

The answer was awful. Let the child throw the ball two thousand times and make do with statistics. Chance perturbations canceled each other out, and the running average gave those who lived in the day's maelstrom their lone limited access to prediction. The compromise satisfied everyone except engineers, truth seekers, and the ball-chasing

parent.

But when it came to predicting fishery yields five years down the causeway, no one was allowed two thousand throws. God wouldn't even spot you two. Extrapolating the graph worked for the first dash or two of the dotted line. But once one began extrapolating upon extrapolation, the whole bloody curve collapsed into fiction.

O'Reilly's idea lay in discarding the search for a set of predictive operators. The realm of real fact did not result from cranking through static functions, no matter how many variables those functions included. The world's events emerged as a resonance, the shifting states of mutually reshaping interactions, each fed back into the other in eternal circulation.

He convinced the Ecotopians with a simple propagation simulation, one that showed just how small the limiting case of complexity could be. He built an island world, sovereign inside its diminutive boundaries. Its entire populace consisted of just two kinds of agents that operated on only two entities, each existing as nothing more than two-dimensional arrays. Each entity came in four flavors and each of the two agents had four possible actions.

Such a market model seemed too brain-dead to generate real interest. But each change in a variable's state updated all the variables that prompted it. Entities influenced agents, and agents created or destroyed entities. Moreover, the application of these feedback loops over time altered the
way
that variables affected other variables. Not only did the elements of the simulation alter one another. So did the rules of alteration.

Out of this meager sea of ingredients, there issued amazingly lifelike phenomena. Segments of data spoke of saturation, conditioning, habituation, fads, cravings, lemming drop-offs, crash diets, lowest-common-denominationalism, prime time, rushes to the bottom, spontaneous altruism, unsponsored innovation, gratuitous novelty, brand loyalty, brand aging, arms races of acumen and finesse, co-optation, preemption, addiction, dumping ... A f
ew iterative, independent, self-
modifying procedures created markets as complex as those run by the world at large.