Richard Powers - Plowing the Dark

How smart an image was — how much it embodied. Whole volumes of words could not contain the information locked up in one road map. The art and design people knew this instinctively, from a lifetime of looking. The heft and feel of a thing, its list of nicks and bruises, the deed of its actions and of all the actions upon it: in the long lens, these rays met at a single focus, the Maker's outline. But art knew these facts only by other names, other procedures, methods lost in translation…

Spiegel came clean. There's another way we can make you a leaf. The oldest process going, even though we're still pretty new to it. We can build the leafs description the way a real leaf gets built. We can grow it.

Over the course of more makeshift sessions, he showed them how. He drew up genetic algorithms: fractal, recursive code that crept forward from out of its own embryo. He worried over their sapling, a RAM-cached Johnny Appleseed. He spread the best iterative fertilizer on the shaded texture until it flung itself outward into a living branch. His commands no longer called for products but processes. They ceased to stipulate the stipule. The leaf grew itself, from the self-organizing rules arising along its lengthening blade.

Physical law alone laid down this palisade layer. The push of petiole, the stomata's maw, the closest-cubic packing of chloroplast and cuticle and conducting tube: the whole serrated sprig sprung its surprise from out of hidden inevitabilities.

The ad hoc committee of artists and technicians tested their successive grafts in the Cavern greenhouse. The blackness that these graphics primitives floated in was not yet the air. The planes of the confining flower box did not yet compose a volume. The Cavern walls were not even empty. They were whatever came before empty. But in that flat void, just below the front screen's midline, a leaf hung twirling.

And there Klarpol and Loque stood, shoulder to shoulder in the simulator, where their sprig of laurel turned on the mute breeze. Adie stared at the spinning wreath while Sue navigated through a menu waterfall with a tilt of her head, selecting from commands with a blink of her laser-tracked eye.

Loque blinked twice, choosing "Brightness" from a menu labeled "Chroma Tuning." A beveled representation of a knob sprung into existence, out of nothing. It acted exactly like the knob it represented, except that it slid back and forth in its track simply as Loque shook her head.

She slid the knob all the way to the left. In a literal eye blink, the laurel went dark. Each wrinkle and vein deepened into shadow. Dusk swept across the face of the plant. With another head wag Sue swung the slider to its opposite pole, bathing the branch in the overhead glare of midday.

How' s that for turning over a whole new leaf?

Crikey, Adie answered. I cant take it What do all the numbers mean? How much is minus 170? What 's a plus 190?

They're arbitrary. The scale runs from zero to 255.

Two hundred and fifty-five? You people are truly occult.

It's a binary thing, babe. Give me this one on faith.

Sue shook her fuchsia head and twitched her ruby-studded eyebrow, dragging the knobs through their paces. She called up sliders for contrast, saturation, and hue. The laurel wreath metamorphosed into supersaturated narcissi and hyacinths. It hardened to a turn-of-the-century black-and-white lithograph. It ignited in a lurid laundry soap commercial.

We can tweak each color channel separately. Or we can nudge around points on a histogram or an active compensation curve.

Adie looked on her colleague in awe. Loque's own aggressive Papagena plumage began to make sense. That's OK. I trust you.

Big mistake. Here. Watch this. From out of a menu labeled "Transforms" came a choice called "Vortex." Sue blinked, and the laurel sprig descended into a Cartesian maelstrom. It wrung itself out like a topologisfs spent dishrag. And still it twirled in the mythic blackness.

Wait. God. What have you done? You've wrecked it. It looks horrible.

Easy, sweetie. Haven t you heard? What's done can always be undone.

With a single click, Sue returned the spinning branch to mint condition. There you are. Unblemished. Untouched by human tinkering.

The idea grazed Adie, like a pile of bricks falling off a scaffold and killing the pedestrian in front of her. She saw why the mind raced to convert to digital. Why it needed this place where ingenuity could always hit the Undo button.

Sue Loque warped and bulged and folded the innocent sprig until it was no longer fit to grace a wilted salad. Laurel twisted into oak into maple. Each derangement offered its own custom parameters, permutations too numerous to investigate.

Adie watched her expert pilot steer them into "Shadows and Edges." On the Cavern wall, the leaves fell away to a penciled outline. The mottled surface of a thousand greens vanished into mere contour flapping in the invented breeze. Surface reduced to a ghostly mold, a pipe-cleaner sculpture that Adie reached out and poked her fingers through.

This isn't right. I cant cope…

Hang on. It gets worse.

We're not meant to be able to do all this. It's not good for us.

Loque turned her attention to the archaic creature. She fiddled with the chains dangling from her studded skirt. I don't get it. You've never used a computer in your work?

Adie shot her head back, horrified.

All those little pastel magic princess thingies of yours?

Thanks, Sue. By hand. Every one. You remember the human hand, don't you?

Do you? Sue asked, and reached out. Adie, despite herself, stepped back. Sue laughed, and snorted again at the color she brought to the artist woman's cheeks. You've never seen Monday Night Football? Saturday cartoons? This stuff is all over every prime-time fifteen-second commercial spot that—

Another horrified head shake. I don't own a TV .

Well. Aren't we precious? Wait until the baddies at TeraSys learn who they've hired.

Adie regrouped. What they don't know can't hurt them.

Oh, they know everything, finally. And nothing hurts them.

Sue popped backward through the Undo catalogue, the history of their voyage here. She retrieved the original plant from its pipe-cleaner outline. The thousand greens returned from their brief banishment to transparency, now deepening, by contrast, their mimicry of the living.

OK, doll. Pull up your virtual La-Z-Boy and kick back. Are you ready for this?

I severely doubt it. You want a minute?

I want a lifetime.

Sue tsked. Chill out, girl scout. Here goes. Let's start with "Water-color."

She blinked the word, and the fact followed. The result did not resemble a watercolor of a laurel sprig. It was one, down to the fibers in the moistened idea of rag paper. Down to the simulated color-bleeding, the dribbled imperfections of a gummed-up camel-hair brush, although the brush that painted it never existed outside this software library.

Everything was perfect: the palette, the semitransparent matte, the fuzzy borders, the splotchy jade inks running into each other like broken yolks in a crooked skillet. All the kinks and cutaneous leaf landmarks still laced this revamped image. Only now they appeared as manhandled, hand-mangled parodies of the original. The leaf bobbed on its stalk in front of Adie, a copy of a copy, a debasement of the debasement of the Forms.

Help me, Adie whimpered, appalled and euphoric at once. Ãò drowning.

No prob. Heading for dry land here, boss. What'll it be? Chalks? Colored pencil? Dry point? Conte? Here's something a little offbeat: stained glass. At a blink, the laurel fractured into the leaded lozenges of a free-floating lancet, hued in cool Chartres blue.