RICHARD POWERS (13 page)

Life was not algorithm. It was ongoing negotiation, a spreading series of overtones. But O'Reilly's cunning simulation presented a problem as large as its promise. Under its simple surface there flowed tide tables of deep intricacy, plumes of intelligence, surges of avarice and hunger that churned in turbulent eddies through the pool of data. How could even the simulation's designer see any one of them in real time? With his static-charting business graphics, O'Reilly could do no more than dredge his dipper into the vat and extract a few test ladles. He foundered on the problem of visualization, snarled at that old investigative impasse like a nineteenth-century neurologist stymied by how to study human thought without slicing into the living brain.

He needed a way to see into four- or six- or eight-dimensional space, even as those several simultaneous data streams unfolded. He needed
color, texture, and motion laid on top of the traditional height, width, and depth. O'Reilly even sketched out a fantasy in which musical pitches and timbres let a user track the states of a dozen concurrent agents and actants.

And then he learned of the prototype's existence. Once he discovered the Cavern, no other spot on Mercator's botched projection would do. He needed the tool that only TeraSys could offer him. And the Cavern needed someone who saw what it might be used for. To be able to stand among the lights and sounds, inside the skeins of regenerating prediction too complex to take in any way but viscerally, in one surrounded glance: for such a chance, O'Reilly would give up most anything. And did.

He took the vow of cultural poverty gladly, throwing over his Neanderthal country without a backward glance. Even the vow of silence
— the forfeiture of intelligent conversation—cost him little, in light of the potential payoff. Celibacy alone gave him pause. On nights of cold rain, O'Reilly cast about in the sphere of his sleep for the thermally generous Maura, and found only an empty half bed. He cursed her roundly and dug in, waiting for her to see what she was missing.

Meanwhile, his
son
et lumi
иre
show played across the walls of the Cavern as marvelous pure abstraction: a ravishing cityscape at night, seen from miles above, where the eye could pan and zoom through the concerted flares of halogen down to the smallest blush of a back-yard Japanese lantern. It took him weeks to learn how to read the gorgeous, motile tapestry. He forced himself to remember that each of these fantastic, fusing, fractal ice floes
meant
something—a transaction, an update, a changing variable in the world being modeled. Only when standing in this n-space flux, flanked on all sides by continuously updated data, reading the revelations with his body, thigh to math's thigh, neck-deep in simulation's Humboldt Current, only fully immersed could he begin to sense the cold, delineated meanings that coursed through these oceans of prediction.

This was the work O'Reilly was born for. Mankind's tenure here had come of age. All the Earth's land masses lay prostrate, mapped out to nau-seatingly fine detail. We'd filled the map with knowledge. Now we had a tool with which to look
inside.
Now the real exploration could begin.

But to date, O'Reilly remained the lone living human who knew how to read this disco-stroboscopic lab report. Everyone else saw little more than an astonishing fireworks show. No matter; the real fireworks weren't yet ready. Much work remained before O'Reilly's pyrotechnic display could lift the veil and lay the future bare.

He'd made some attempt to initiate Rajan Rajasundaran: fellow member of the Decimated Neocolonial Island Club, Sri Lankan by way of Canada, coauthor of ORB, the simulation scripting language that O'Reilly employed to throw his arrays up against the walls of the Cavern. O'Reilly depended on Rajan, invaluable ally, to make the graphics code jump through ever-higher hoops. He kept Rajan on perpetual call for everything from emergency consults to simple sociological shit-shooting.

O'Reilly sought the man out at his favorite haunt, that poor excuse for a pub half a click down the mountain. The place whose inspiration peaked with its choice of name: The Office. As in, "Honey, I'm at The Office." The name worked, in a world that took names for the things they named.

He found Raj sitting in a corner booth, watching a talk show, partaking of the public arena's favorite therapy.

Thank God you've come, Ronan, man. Have a look at this exercise in dissociative schizophrenia, please. Women who tell their husbands, live on camera, that they have lesbian lovers, as brought to you by the Family Ties video salesmen of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. I'm afraid I must ask you: who invents all this?

Ah well, Rajan, my son. The Creator's ways are mysterious.

Please explain this phenomenon to me. You are the social scientist, after all.

Has it ever struck you that anyone with the word "scientist" in his job description probably isn't one?

We're all scientists, no?
Rajasundaran waved his arms to encompass The Office at large. I
mean, every person running this little experiment in being alive?

O'Reilly ordered a beer and a refill for the Sri Lankan.
An interesting formulation. But let's start with you. Do you count yourself an empiricist?

Krishna destroy us. You don't really want to know. I'm dead serious, man. What do you believe?

Rajasundaran held out his left hand. His index finger traced a clockwise circle in the air. Then another, quick, counterclockwise. Now
what's that supposed to mean? Some sort of mystic Ceylonese bit twiddling?

Rajan shrugged.
The breath in the mouth and the breath of the sun are both similarly hot.

Translate, for Christ's sake.

The form seen in the eye is the same as the form seen in the sun. The joints of the one are the joints of the other.

Vulgamott appeared at their boothside.

Michael,
O'Reilly greeted the architect.
Thank God for another Westerner. Have a seat, man. Would you say that you're a materialist at heart?

Can this wait until I've gotten my blood-alcohol content to a respectable level?

O'Reilly ordered the American a Trappist Trippel.
Out with it now.

What do you believe?

Vulgamott looked around suspiciously. I
believe that God created the world one high-resolution frame at a time. And on the seventh frame, he rested.

Rajan smiled.
And then he said,
"You
mean I'm supposed to do thirty
of these things a second for the next ten billion years?"

Thank you both,
O'Reilly snapped.
I'll just tell you what you believe
in, then.

That'd be easier,
Vulgamott agreed.

You
both believe
—as all good lab rats do—that reality is basically computational, whether or not we'll ever lay our hands on a good, clean copy of the computation. At the core of your deepest convictions about the universe lies a Monte Carlo simulation. Sounds about right,
Vulgamott said.

Even miracle-preaching evangelists, God love them, make their point statistically. Every modern mind is out there with a yardstick, a stopwatch, and a chi-square.

Hang on. You're not saying there's a hidden order behind all this?
Vulgamott cast his eyes abroad.
Something bigger than statistics?

O'Reilly smiled.
What do you mean, hidden order? That the universe is formalizable, but not from where we're standing? That it's unformaliz-able? Now there's a one-word contradiction in terms.

Ronan, baba. Some of us believe in contradictions in terms.

O'Reilly faced down Rajasundaran.
Even mysticism is a non-Euclidean geometry. No, gentlemen. The world is a numbers racket, all the way down.

Rajan drummed his hands on the booth top.
Come on, my friend. Don't quit now. This is even more entertaining than violent revelations of deep incestuous secrets as brought to you by the Mormons.

But the Sponsor chose that moment to announce itself. Out of the depths of barroom broadcast, the TeraSys anthem unfurled. On a screen across the room, a commercial began. Its sound-track chorale of Renaissance recorders morphed
—via the malleable magic of MIDI and sampled wave-table instrument definitions—in thirty seconds, over the entire spectrum of world music, cadencing on an ecstatic burst of Shona mbiras. Synched to the sound track with Balanchinean brilliance, a spinning globe mutated in dizzying succession into the rose window at Chartres, an exploding jigsaw puzzle, the condensing chains of a long polymer, inked ideograph characters on an unfurling scroll, tessellated Iznik tiles, solar cells on a space satellite, and finally, back to old Pangea doing its slow, stately breakup into Laurasia, Gond-wanaland, and all the rest of the continental separatists, special interest groups, and irredentist movements.

Rajan beamed.
I'm afraid I contributed to that one. They used my interpolation routines for the pretty morphing sequence.

What in the name of creation do they think they're doing, airing that spot on the Humiliating Public Disclosures Channel?

Big audience,
Vulgamott said.

They're mad, you know.

Of course they're mad. Who's the "they" this time,
О
Ulsterman?

Americans. Every last soul in this national enterprise of yours.

Rajan raised his hand.
Excuse me. Exactly how long can a person live here before he is infected?

None of them has a clue, you know,
O'Reilly persisted.
Like children at Christmas, their whole bleeding lives. Every last mother's son of them.

Be all you can be.
Go
for all the gusto you can get. Who says you can't
have it all?

Well.
Raj glanced at Vulgamott for confirmation.
There's their Internal Revenue Service, to start with.

And this outfit that we work for? They're the worst instigators of all. "Realize your dreams." Clever foreigners really ought to pinch all their best ideas and smuggle them back over the border, into the lands of sanity.

Ach, sure.
Vulgamott affected a frighteningly convincing brogue.
And tell me: what might a Belfast boy know about sanity?

Precious little, you bastard. Yet I alone have held onto a fact that your obscenely inventive lot never seemed to have twigged.

And that would be
...
?

There's a real world out there, underneath the elaborate slipcovers
we're knitting for it.

Rajan rolled his eyes. So
you Caucasian materialists like to insist. Speaking of the real world
...
Vulgamott, the edgy quidnunc, had gone almost a full thirty minutes without a headline fix.
Any word on the Argentina situation today?

As far as we know,
Rajan said,
it's still down there, attached to the skinny part of South America.

Belfast saluted Colombo.
You're blending in here splendidly, Raj. Listen.
Vulgamott sounded desperate.
Would it upset your experiment in assimilation if we watched some news?

Sure, no problem.
Rajasundaran scanned through the channel selector, built into their booth. How
about this little thing called
Celebrity Police Blotter?

Some spin-off of CNN,
O'Reilly guessed. Or
how about this so-called Channel
56? Sport Salary Update? Vulgamott's agitation threatened to spill him out of the booth.
You two have no interest in learning what's going on?

Absolutely,
O'Reilly said.
That's why I vote for pulling the plug. Come on, man. We're living on the brink. The single most precarious moment in
—

Rajan wagged his head.
This has all happened many times before, you know.

13

The room of economics runs to an open horizon.

Every compass heading stretches so far that even walking flat-out, for hours, scrolls you only the smallest fraction against the landscape. Your inlet reveals itself to be but a bight on a cove on a lagoon on a bay on a gulf opening onto a measureless ocean, the one continuous Panthalassa, its waters linking up, its surf cutting the complex curve of these shores.

Light and shadow play upon the deeps. The spills and splashes of geographic accident serve as this world's genes. Here woods work out the local exchange rates. Gorse trades its stored energies with geese. Tundra warehouses whole quantities of carbon. Bottoms, morasses, moors, plateaus, and rain basins bargain in a river pidgin that keeps the dimples of microclimate in nutrients all year.

Where is the nearest caravanserai? Who will swap salt for ocher? How goes the southern coffee bean harvest? Will the scares in Johannesburg tip the Frankfurt
B
цrse?

Will the leading indicators level off? What of the anticipated export boom among the Asian tigers? When will collapse come? This room's tides will tell you.