RICHARD POWERS (42 page)

We can use some of those old motherboards as souped-up serial ports.

Spider, these things are all dead. Killed by bigger, faster, better. Cartons of milk past the stamped expiration date. Tickets for last night's concert.

TeraSys might be able to sell them to places that are still back at earlier machine levels.

You mean that Bulgaria might be interested in running its own experimental virtual reality program, now that it's joined the Free World?

I was thinking more like, you know, Arkansas?

She mentioned the elephants' graveyard to Jackdaw and Rajan.
This world digitization thing is the single most wasteful expenditure of effort in history.

The kid bared his palms. You
think the hardware side is wasteful? At least you can make those things into doorstops and paperweights. At least you can pirate last year's million-dollar state-of-the-art research tool for its edge connectors.

Rajan chuckled.
Right. Smelt them down to reclaim the two dollars and fifty cents' worth of gold plating on the pins.

But software... ?
Jackdaw said.
Nothing is more pitiful than Version I. The biggest sinkhole of human genius in existence. The average lifetime of a given release is now shorter than the time it takes to leam its features. And as soon as Version 2 comes out, Version 1 turns into a time bomb in the operating system, just waiting to foul up any improvements in other software that postdates it.

Let us put this in your terms,
Rajan said.
Suppose all of world art came down to the last three months of images. Every time an artist painted a painting, it invalidated all previous paintings of the same subject.

Sure. That's called commercial design. I did that for half a dozen years.

It's worse than that,
Jackdaw cut in. Most
development has no coordination to speak of. The wheel gets reinvented a million times a day, even in the same company. Even at the same workstation. It took half a century of coding to come up with reusable objects. And even now, they're not all that reusable, because, you know, the APIs and the hardware standards are changing the ground underneath them by the nanosecond.

Rajan's cranium went into sympathetic oscillations.
Truly demoralizing. Every basket of subroutines has to be invented dozens of times, each one doing the same thing in slightly different ways. Then all of these maddening, incompatible variants are thrown into public battle to determine which one will become the de facto standard, and everyone who puts money on the wrong flavor has to throw it out and start over again.

Kaladjian came and stood nearby, cleaning off his glasses.
Fortunately for all of us, waste is this culture's greatest engine.

The others looked up, snagged by some expansive departure from his usual tone.

Is that supposed to be ironic?
Raj asked.

Kaladjian gave a victimized shrug.
Progress is destruction with a compass.

Raj's nods accelerated a couple of hertz.
It does make one wonder what the finish line looks like.

Adie dear,
Spiegel said.
You've come to a world where truth is stamped with its own expiration date.

Jackdaw grimaced.
Not to mention the obsolete media. We still have these ancient tapes from before we ported to the Cavern? They can't be read anymore. The machines that used them have all been upgraded beyond compatibility. And even when we rebuild an antique drive from scratch? The tape has decayed; it spits out check-sum errors every three records.

The world is losing its memory.
Raj toyed with a stack of printouts headed for the shredder.
Whole areas of the collective brain are being wiped out as its storage degrades. We've contracted a slow virus. Global Alzheimer's.

Kaladjian lifted one shoulder. His tilted ear met it halfway.
Perhaps. But look how far we managed to get, from flint to silicon, before the enterprise shut down.

The Cavern caved in for several days, while Lim and company finished debugging a new generation of graphics accelerators. Deprived of their magic testing chamber, imagination's prototypers hit a wall.

Maybe we should do a retreat or something,
Vulgamott suggested to his fellow designers.

Adie snorted.
Maybe we should do a full-scale rout.

Don't bail on me, please. I'm skidding out, here. Real deadlines. Real demos. No real place to test them. What's the imaginary world coming to?

Ebesen said nothing. He was ready to accommodate—always the path of least resistance.

Vulgamott got hold of a small cabin that TeraSys maintained up on
the south fork of the Stillaguamish, near Mount Pilchuck. Art and Design booked the place for a forty-eight-hour stay. Ebesen's dirty flannel and corduroys, so squalid under fluorescent light, seemed almost indigenous, outdoors. Vulgamott, after two hours of the upland air, ceased twitching and began to breathe deeper. Adie went through a small sketch pad on the first afternoon. Thereafter she simply looked, with no more point than looking.

In wildness, description fell away into its parent density. The three of them walked out in the woods, into the network of living agents, rooted, burrowing, and airborne. They drifted their feet in the bone-mashing cold of the river current, the rushing fluid still imprinted with its past life as mountain snow. At night, the curl of their campfire smoke rose and obscured itself in the Milky Way's fainter smear. The haunt of owls on the hollow night turned the listening heart against all hope of representation.

They talked about what they had done, what they were doing, and what they would need to do before being anywhere near ready to release their work to the public. Months of mock-up had not yet even blocked out the floor plan of that furnished rec room of the cerebrum

they pictured.

The vines of Rousseau's
Dream
had spread, lovely and profuse. Its creatures had scampered in modest For-Next loops through the coded undergrowth. But the forest had remained a thought without a deed, a look without a behavior, flat and planar, less a living thing than a cadaver's cross section. A visitor could walk into the jungle moonlight, but only along fixed paths, strolling past the successive cardboard props of
a
tableau vivant.

Out of this dream, they'd awakened to perspective. Their tools had all scaled up: frame rate, color depth, resolution, vertices per second. And the Aries bedroom exceeded the sum of these leaps. It zeroed in on that longed-for locale that no one had yet seen but everyone knew by sight. Its bed lay thick with invitation. The sun streamed through its casements, swelling and decaying in the length of a single visit. The wood floor bent to the weight of the current tenant. And yet even that humming space was no more than a single stereo slide. The bedroom
filled out its frame, but no farther, refusing to venture beyond the grotto that housed it.

Now Design had to plan its next escape. Under the sap-heavy trees, the chilled antics of a Cascade stream between their toes, the digital artists turned over the problem, less through talk than with shared scribbles. The task was obvious. They needed a way to wed inimical worlds, to combine the dream of these two chambers.

Half a dozen months,
Vulgamott repeated, past the point when either of his colleagues heard him any longer.
We're in a situation here, people. It's demo or die.

Or both,
Ebesen said.
"Both" remains a distinct possibility.
In her mind, Adie wanded off down hinted-at ravines, lost in the extensions of sight, looking for the room they had to reach. The trick was how to find it without clues. How to resolve the place, without knowing what it looked like. In rapid succession, they torched each proposal put forward. All possible rooms either cloyed or curdled, too banal or too vaporous, too mundane or too incorporeal. Nothing both satisfied desire and yielded to available technique.

No more paintings,
Adie said.
We tried that twice. We want something that will break out of the frame.

All three knew the medium they would have to inhabit, already laid out for them. Vulgamott and Ebesen's architectural tool chest—now numbering in the hundreds of modular components, from the simple I beam to the ornate ogee molding—all but forced their hand. Their resizable image library had grown into an encyclopedia of smart architectural elements, one that made it possible for any reasonably patient person who could manage a pipe-cleaner sculpture or a box of Lincoln Logs to build her own pan-and-zoom Versailles.

With the suite of Palladian tools, prototyping a simple architectural fly-through shrank from months to weeks. The kit had never been meant as anything but its own demo, a proof of concept rather than a mission-critical development tool. Now it represented their only chance at hewing out a substantial show by press date. Even here, on the verge of the virtual, they were condemned by those absurd constraints, time and practicality.

They determined to build a dazzling building. But forty-eight hours in a remote, three-room cabin failed to produce a viable candidate. They were still tossing around possibilities as they packed to return to

civilization.

Vulgamott tried to rally them. We
should do Vierzehnheiligen. An amazing space. Mysterious, sensual, organic.

Adie jerked back, as if slugged.
Oh God. God, no. We'd all be insulin-dependent diabetics within a week. How about something clean, like
...
Fallingwater?

A total bear. I mean, it's a staggering building and all. But how in the hell would we
...
?

Too innovative,
Ebesen agreed. Too
singular. The tool set wouldn't be much of a help.

Well, Karl?
Adie clasped her hands together in front of her face.

How about a time-lapse Troy?

Vulgamott howled.
Ebesen, you maniac. 1 divorce you, I divorce you,

I divorce you.

All right, all right. Nobody get excited. I vote for the Temple of Diana at Ephesus.

Oh terrific,
Michael said.
Why bother doing an existing structure when we can do a building that has disappeared without a trace?

Well, there is some basis for speculation
...

How about the RL?
Vulgamott proposed.
The perfect compromise. We have all the data at our fingertips.

Kill me first,
Adie said.
It'
s
bad enough that we have to live in the place.

Whatever we model,
Ebesen insisted,
has to be well made.

It has to be beautiful,
Adie said.

Vulgamott let loose a bat-pitched scream.
It has to be doable. You people. I can't believe this. What a colossal waste, this whole hug-a-tree idea. Two days up here and we haven't figured out anything that we couldn't have come up with in fifteen minutes back in the gerbil-run. A beautiful, well-made building. For this we needed to eat Stemo-soaked vegetable kabobs and encourage chiggers in the joys of symbiosis?

Adie took her leave of the two men and headed back up into the woods for a last look, before
returning to
made existence. She followed
the streambed awhile, to a narrowing that she figured had to exist. When she found the place, or a reasonable facsimile, she looked around, listening for any sounds larger than a muskrat. Hearing none, she stripped. She slipped into the water and sat in the eddy of her own naked body. She spun about in the numbing current, her length a lode-stone, until she faced upstream. Somewhere near this water's source lay the solution they needed.

She knifed in the water, a rose-brushed trout. She kept under for as long as she could bear. The liquid ran colder and denser than she'd thought. It contracted her arteries and hammered her head. She felt her ideas go soft, giving in to the snow-fed current. She worked back to the shore. It took her two tries to lift herself up on a boulder. As the glaze of water on her evaporated, her core temperature plunged still deeper. She huddled on the rock, hands around her knees, convulsing.

Adie?
a voice twenty feet away called.

She screamed and splayed, grabbing the rock as she lost her balance. She fought to reach her stack of clothes, and she fell. She cowered, clasping her T-shirt against her nakedness. Down the path, through the skirt of trees, his back to her, his hands folded in a cowl over his head, stood Karl Ebesen. She closed her eyes, breathed out hard, and slugged herself in the chest, to restart her heart.

Ach,
Ebesen moaned.
Jesus. Sorry, sorry, sorry.
Plaintive burlesque crept into his apology. She had to laugh. The most anguished she'd seen the man since meeting him.

Hang on. Give me two minutes.

Fright, at least, had killed the chill. Her clothes felt good going on, wicking the water off her skin.

She stepped out from behind the rock.
All hid.

Ebesen lowered his hands and edged forward, shy caller in some overgrown game of tag.
Forgive me. I figured it would be worse for you to hear me slinking away through the branches.

Not a big deal. My fault, really.
She reached out to reassure his elbow, which withdrew from her touch as soon as politeness permitted.

That old spirit of noblouse oblige,
he said.
Susanna and the Elders. A genre subject that for some reason has fallen into neglect in the last few years.