Thomas Pynchon - Bleeding Edge

BUT SHE CAN’T stay out of DeepArcher. Since it went open source and welcomed in half the planet, none of them who they say they are, acquiring a set of option menus the size of the Internal Revenue Code, anybody is likely to be wandering around the site, herds of tourist-idle, cop-curious, the end of life below the spiders as we’ve known it, ROM hackers, homebrewers, RPG heretics, continually unwriting and overwriting, disallowing, deprecating, newly defining an ever-growing inventory of contributions to graphics, instructions, encryption, escape… the word is out, and it seems they’ve been waiting years, such is the what’s called pent-up demand. Maxine is able to settle in among the throngs, invisible and at ease. Not addicted exactly, though one day she happens to be back out in meatspace for a second, looks at the clock on the wall, does the math, figures three and a half hours she can’t account for. Luckily there’s nobody but herself to ask what she’s down there looking for, because the answer’s so pathetically obvious.

Yes, she’s aware DeepArcher doesn’t do resurrections, thanks for pointing it out. But something odd has been going on with Windust’s dossier, the one she copied onto her computer shortly after Marvin brought the thumb drive it was on. She’s been sneaking moments away to look at it, not, lately, without twinges of colonorectal fear, because each time she consults it now, there’s been new material added. As if—a breeze given her generations-old firewalls—somebody has been hacking in whenever they feel like it.

“Consider the recently advanced theory,” for example, “that subject, while not a double agent in the classic sense, may have been pursuing a well-defined personal agenda. According to recently downgraded files, this may have begun as early as 1983, when subject allegedly expedited the escape of a Guatemalan national, of interest to the Archivo as an insurgent element and to whom subject was married at the time.” And similar updates, all strangely nonnegative when not outright eulogy material. For whose eyes would stuff like this be intended? For Maxine’s Only? who would benefit from knowing that twenty years ago Windust was still capable of a good deed, in saving his then-wife Xiomara from the fascist murderers he was technically working for?

The first author to suspect here would be Windust himself, trying to look good, except this is insane because Windust is dead. Either it’s Beltway tricksters out on maneuvers or the Internet has become a medium of communication between the worlds. Maxine begins to catch sight of screen presences she knows she ought to be able to name, dim, ephemeral, each receding away into a single anonymous pixel. Maybe not. Much more likely that Windust remains unlit, terribly elsewhere.

Even though its creators claim not to Do Metaphysical, that option in DeepArcher remains open, alongside more secular explanations—so when she runs unexpectedly into Lester Traipse, instead of assuming it’s a Lester impersonator with an agenda, or a bot preprogrammed with dialogue for all occasions, she sees no harm in treating him as a departed soul.

Just to get it out of the way, “So! Lester. Who did the deed?”

“Interesting. First thing most people want to know is what’s it like being dead.”

“OK, what’s it—”

“Ha, ha, trick question, I’m not dead, I’m a refugee from my life. As for whodunit, I’m supposed to know? I arranged over the phone to drop a shrink-wrapped cube of cash as a first installment for Ice underneath The Deseret pool at midnight, next thing I know, I’m here wandering around with my spectral thumb in my metaphysical ass.”

“Igor Dashkov said you talked about trying to seek some kind of asylum in DeepArcher. Is this who I’m really talking to now, Igor? Misha, Grisha?”

“Don’t think so, I say ‘the’ too much.”

“All right, all right. Assuming there’s still an edge somewhere. And beyond it a void. If you’ve been out there—”

“Sorry. Just a mail-room scrambler here, remember? You want prophecy, sure, I can do that, but it’ll all be bullshit.”

“How about at least letting me bring you back up. Whoever you are.”

“What. Up to the surface?”

“Closer anyway.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.” She doesn’t. “If it’s really you, Lester, I hate to think of you being lost down here.”

“Lost down here is the whole point. Take a good look at the surface Web sometime, tell me it isn’t a sorry picture. Big favor you’d be doing me, Maxine.”

MIGHT AS WELL BE HOMECOMING weekend down here. Next thing she knows, here’s who but her very own Ziggy and Otis. With a whole expanding universe to choose from, among the global torrents somehow the boys have located graphics files for a version of NYC as it was before 11 September 2001, before Ms. Cheung’s bleak announcement about real and make-believe, reformatted now as the personal city of Zigotisopolis, rendered in a benevolently lighted palette taken from old-school color processes like the ones you find on picture postcards of another day. Somebody somewhere in the world, enjoying that mysterious exemption from time which produces most Internet content, has been patiently coding together these vehicles and streets, this city that can never be. The old Hayden Planetarium, the pre-Trump Commodore Hotel, upper-Broadway cafeterias that have not existed for years, smorgasbords and bars offering free lunches, where regulars hang around the door to the kitchen so they can get first shot at whatever’s being carried in, city-summertime movie theaters with signs in blue display type bordered by frost and icicles promising IT’S COOL INSIDE, Madison Square Garden still at Fiftieth and Eighth Avenue and Jack Dempsey’s still across the street, and in the old Times Square, before the hookers, before the drugs, arcades like Fascination, pinball machines so classic now that only overly compensated yups can afford to buy them, and recording booths where half a dozen of you can jam inside and cover the latest Eddie Fisher single on acetate. The retro machinery in the streets, though undefined as to makes and years, is plentiful and ever on the move. Ernie and Elaine, as probable sources for all this, would be screaming with recognition.

She sees the boys, but they haven’t seen her. There aren’t any passwords, still she hesitates to log in without an invitation, it’s their city after all. They have different priorities here, the cityscapes of Maxine’s DeepArcher are obscurely broken, places of indifference and abuse and unremoved dog shit, and she doesn’t want to track any more of that than she can help into their more merciful city, with its antiquated dyes, its acid green shrubbery and indigo pavements and overdesigned traffic flows. Ziggy has his arm over his brother’s shoulder, and Otis is looking up at him with unhesitating adoration. They are ambling around in this not-yet-corrupted screenscape, at home in it already, unconcerned for their safety, salvation, destiny…

Don’t mind me, guys, I’ll just lurk here on the visitors’ page. She makes a note to bring it up, carefully, gently, when they’re all back in meatspace, soy-extenderspace, whatever it is anymore. Because in fact this strange thing has begun to happen. Increasingly she’s finding it harder to tell “real” NYC from translations like Zigotisopolis… as if she keeps getting caught in a vortex taking her farther each time into the virtual world. Certainly unforeseen in the original business plan, there arises now a possibility that DeepArcher is about to overflow out into the perilous gulf between screen and face.

Out of the ashes and oxidation of this postmagical winter, counterfactual elements have started popping up like li’l goombas. Early one windy morning Maxine’s walking down Broadway when here comes a plastic top from a nine-inch aluminum take-out container, rolling down the block in the wind, on its edge , an edge thin as a predawn dream, keeps trying to fall over but the airflow or something—unless it’s some nerd at a keyboard—keeps it upright for an implausible distance, half a block, a block, waits for the light , then half a block more till it finally rolls off the curb under the wheels of a truck that’s pulling out and gets flattened. Real? Computer-animated?