Richard Powers - Plowing the Dark

No hiding place could escape continuous update. Wherever Adie went, she stood looking through the crosshairs. Her colleagues poured over every scrap they pulled off the cable feed. Downhill from the labs, gas stations and delis inundated her for free — aerial bombardment, like green stamps, supplied as a public service. Stevie, addicted from the start, would hit the Mute button and drag about the house, pretending not to look. A dozen times a day, Adie ingested the same Kabuki footage: slow-motion replays of sky-strewn annihilation, lit in the eerie palette of video infrared. She stopped eating. She began to throw up, at odd hours, behind the closed bathroom door.

Smart bombs beamed back video to even smarter bombers. Nose-cone shots documented their descents all the way up to the moment of deliverance. One missile steered itself down the midline of a twenty-foot-wide bridge. Another threaded the chimney of a suspected command-and-control center. Laser beams guided their cruise pay-loads for hundreds of miles over the wrinkled earth to land on a square smaller than the Cavern's front wall.

Pinpoint delivery turned evidence so intoxicating that no one who once looked at it could look away. The race had achieved the precision of its earliest dreams. Coverage worked to keep up with the apotheosis. But the more Adie watched, the less actually took place.

Event disappeared down the chute of choreographed news. She grasped at the accounts and came up empty-handed. People died without a sound, bloodless, thousands of feet below the all-seeing eye.

Overnight, yellow ribbons sprang up everywhere — tourniquets twisted around wounded trees — and no one could say exactly where they'd come from. Scores of mega-celebrities banded together to record a radio hit, their caring voices abstracting any hint of political stance into a general message of hope and ecumenical well-wishing.

At timed intervals, tuned to the perfect intermittent reinforcement schedule, the Joint Chiefs gave press conferences, explaining their multimedia clips in careful play-by-plays. A riveted Realization Lab tuned in to the course of the war's master narrative, its purposes as long and obscure as its means were swift and expedient. Violence seemed ready to expend even its viewers as collateral damage.

Babylon became a bitmap. Pilots took its sand grains apart, pixel by pixel, their soldier bodies tied to weapons systems by electronic umbilical, their every joystick twitch duplicating moves overlearned in years of now-consummated simulation. Nightscopes revealed minute movements, at impossible distances, in pitch-dark. Robot stalkers chased living targets. Formal edge-detecting algorithms told heat from cold, friend from enemy, camouflaged caches from empty countryside. Human intelligence migrated wholesale into its artifacts.

It was the perfect operation: the kind you carried out deep in enemy territory. It told no story, finally, aside from these abject images. Adie and Stevie stared nightly at a mute set, from under their bedcovers, forced to watch the upshot of everything they'd put their hand to.

We did this? she whispered to him. It's us?

He stared straight ahead, afraid to miss a scrap of acquitting evidence. Of course not. Don't be nuts.

The bombs with depth perception? The ones that can tell our vehicles' silhouettes from the Iraqis'? The cruise missiles with a whole digital map of the world inside them, so that they know exactly where to explode?

His shoulders dismissed her. Too defensive to mount a defense.

Stevie, I need to know. Her voice lay just this side of its own smart violence. What have we been doing here? Are they using the same electronics as us? Are they taking our code?

He smiled at the near-total naivete". The military? The Air Force invented virtual reality half a century ago. Mission trainers, flight simulators. The Army made the first computer, back when the game was still about beating the Nazis. They've been hip-deep into VR from the beginning. ARPA built the Net. They ordered the first microprocessor. You sow the Whirlwind, you reap SAGE. He went on, numbly, dull. On automatic pilot. If you want to know the truth, we're stealing their code. The whole runaway century, living off military spin-offs.

She got out from under the covers and shut off the signal. I'm sorry. I can't watch anymore.

No. Of course. You're right.

They curled up against each other for protection, warmth, sleep. But each other wasn't enough. She could not lay still, but turned every two minutes, on truth's spit. Of course the Joint Chiefs wanted what art promised: to break the bonds of matter and make the mind real.

You didn't know? he asked, in darkness, too small a voice to want a real answer. You really didn't know?

She howled at the words, and he could not calm her.

She went to Jonathan Freese. Who are we doing this for?

Well, I've been doing this for myself. Who are you doing this for?

Jonathan. Don't jack with me. Not now. Who's buying what we're selling?

He studied her, deciding whether to laugh or fire her. He showed her the list of interested parties who'd already signed up for Cavern demonstrations in the spring. He couldn't very well refuse to show her. Disney, yes. Sony, yes. Half a dozen research universities, yes. But among the rest of the roster were other agencies, groups whose upbeat acronyms could not disguise their affiliation. Slaughter was a free rider, a virus using them, using the RL, using the Cavern as a way of spreading its genome.

You fucked me over, didn't you? Just like you wanted to, from the day I signed on.

Sweetheart, 1 know we're all under a lot of stress here. I'm going to forget you said this.

She did not even bother to give him the finger.

She sought out Karl Ebesen. She found him and Michael Vulgamott manning their cubicle, watching SCUDs and Patriots proxy-battle in the upper air. She put her finger to the screen they gazed at, where a trail of refugees streamed north. Her voice sounded almost level. Did we do this?

They looked at her, afraid to move.

This? Is this our fault?

Ebesen turned to look at her. Everything… everything we ever do is our fault.

She sat down by the side of his desk and broke down. He slid his chair toward her, baffled. For one brief moment, he seemed actually to touch her.

Since I was born? she said. For as long as I can remember. All I ever wanted? All I wanted to do was make something beautiful. Something that wouldn't hurt anyone.

He nodded. He knew already: to make something good of our work and days. That was the place all guilt came from. She couldn't want anything that hadn't already burned him.

She shook her head, enraged. Her sobbing sounded like a tearing veil. Why didn't you tell me?

He frowned. Scowled at her. Held up his helpless hands.

I know, she wept. I know. I never asked.

Her fault: her own doing, all along, from the very first crayon smear. She must have wanted it, somehow, to have gotten in this deep, without once seeing the size of the betrayal she so lovingly enabled. Death from the air would win out in the end. Remote and ingenious, all piloted by absent fathers, the warcraft were flying again, despite the gifts she'd drawn to distract them. Once before, the Air Force had thrown away her handmade bribes. Now, worse: they took all her pretty pictures and put them to use.

The Parasite Room had lodged inside her. The RL, the Cavern — all smart weaponry — were just first sketches for the next, larger assembly.

simulators. The Army made the first computer, back when the game was still about beating the Nazis. They've been hip-deep into VR from the beginning. ARPA built the Net. They ordered the first microprocessor. You sow the Whirlwind, you reap SAGE. He went on, numbly, dull. On automatic pilot. If you want to know the truth, we're stealing their code. The whole runaway century, living off military spin-offs.