Richard Powers - Plowing the Dark

The room of the Cave is one continuous chasm.

Its chambers all connect. They run together, the way old Greek was written: no spaces, no commas, no periods, just one long flow without dams or rapids, a single subterranean stream that never changes its course. But never the same stream twice.

Here you have lived since childhood, facing the darkness, taking shadows for the things that cast them. On the walls of this room, a story unrolls. In it, someone just like you gets miraculously sprung. He turns to the light, which instantly blinds him. You cheer for him to run, but he turns back from the glare to the safety of this room.

Your eyes adjust to the light of this hypothetical. What you take to be the boundless world may be no more than just this underground spring. You make out the peep show to be just a peep show, but only through the clip projected in front of you. The clunkiest of puppets say shadow, say story. And in that tale — continuous, no spaces — the tale you've been chained to since birth, you make out the room you live in.

But even while trapped in that old scroll's closed O, the storytelling race has been busy. Millennia pass in the war against matter. Every invention bootstraps off the next. The tale advances; thought extends its grasp over things until it arrives at the final interface. The ultimate display, the one that closes the gap between sign and thing.

In this continuous room, images go real. You come to rest at last, in no more than the idea of a bed. The mere mention of love brings on the fact. The word "food" is enough to feed you. A carved-soap gun can kill your enemies. And a quick sketch of the Resurrection suffices to raise the dead.

The room of the cave is something more than allegory. But the room of the cave is something less than real. Its wall shadows ripple with an undercurrent of substance, more than representation, but not yet stuff. Notion springs to life from the same, deep source in which the outdoors is scripted — what the run-on Greek once called the Forms.

In this room, before this play of fire, you feel the deeper freeze just outside the cave's mouth. From here you can make out those more turbulent axioms, chill forces you couldn't feel until you touched your fingers to this coded pane.

You breathe in. You lean forward, and the images advance toward you. You look up and rise, or gaze down and sink. You materialize on a stony cliff, ruined streets cutting switchbacks through a grove of olives. You fly to the end of the cliff and lift off, careful to stay, this time, above the ocean but below the sun.

You learn to steer your fragile machine. You skim above the surface of a dark sea. You dive beneath these scattered reefs and float in your birthright air. The flight feels like reading, like skimming a thousand exhilarated pages, but without the brakes and ballast of an ending.

Everywhere you look on the horizon, there are more islands. You fly past them, but always more appear. Desire moves you through them, down toward their surfaces. You've found your way back to the cradle where this project started. Here and there, against the sun-bleached shores, an amphitheater emerges, or a temple to that same bleaching sun that trails you overhead. One minute the air is thick with autumn, the next, a sweet-sapped spring. The seasons track that kidnapped goddess through the year, wandering to and from her underground prison.

You fly too freely, or the land's geometry is wrong. Some titan fails to hold up his corner of the air's tent. Or you simply reach the edge of a story that, even at this final stage, remains eternally under construction. An embankment, pitch-white and blinding, looms up in front of you, too fast for you to take evasive action.

The scene crashes before you do. The room of the cave slams to a breakpoint and empties itself into error's buffer. There on the wall where the oceans and olives and temples were, where the marble crags ran from their spine down into their unbroken chasm, the machine seizes up, the faulty allegory crumbles, the debugger spits out a continuous scroll of words.

Only through this crack can you see where things lead. You step through the broken symbols, into something brighter.

In the room of shared experience, she disappears.

She vanishes just days before they are to give the demo for the first round of visitors from the secular world.

She's not the first to sign off and take up work elsewhere. The wizard Rajasundaran has already quit to join a team farther up the mountain, a loose confederation of technical visionaries backed by a serial venture capitalist who promises to underwrite wilder extensions of simulated space: direct electro-muscular stimulation tactors, ear monitor implants, digital-endorphin interfaces, 3-D scanners, force-feedback reality augmenters that slide whole data structures in and out of the visual cortex for direct parallel processing. Vishnu will assume all shapes before the world starts up again from scratch.

O'Reilly, too, decides to bail, just before curtain time. But he heads in the opposite direction, back to the body's home islands. The spur comes in the form of another handwritten note sent by archaic air mail. A shock to recall: the race is still dragging around sacks full of scribbled paper in the cargo holds of lumbering jumbo jets.

Ronan,

All right; so I lied. The wedding was just a literary device. Clearly it failed. And you know what's especially pathetic? The fellow I invented? This Stephen Powys character? He's even worse than you are…

It is enough for him; more than enough. What was he thinking, after all? Midwife to the future: a man would have to be mad. He's seen what they're birthing — the runaway victory of the flat graph. The future does not need a midwife. The future needs an abortionist.

By Delphic estimate as shrouded as any, the species still had another forty years. Best to spend them locked up among the earth's most backward people, who won't get the news for centuries, in a place where even one afternoon can stretch out into an eternal now. He'll put himself up against this fantasy husband, projection for projection.

It will have to be a progressive arrangement, by Irish standards. But surely between O'Reilly, Maura, and this Powys invention, the three of them can reach some civilized understanding. He can return to the island of the damned. He can live in endless savagery, raise his children in savagery, await the savage future, and no one will ever be able to say just what may come of the life they'll make of it.

The rest of the team is in attendance. Lim, in his passion for assimilation, plays the emcee. He puts the clients at their ease, speaking to each in the common diction of equipment. He shows them the reality engines in the hardware room, thinking Rembrandt, Claude, Hsieh Ho, but identifying the Power Agate servers by their current model designations.

Here's where we started from, he tells the tour. Then he demos, for comic contrast, the first few primitive software rooms ever assembled for the Cavern. And something in those first childish endeavors — the nubby stray arc of crayon, after the distance they've come — jars loose an image in him. An aunt putting him on an airplane, telling him in a still-comprehensible foreign language that he must be big and brave. Handing him photos: this will be your country. This white woman with the funny, wedged head will be your mother. This woman, these features: yours.

Sue Loque shows off her prototype visual development environment, playing to the hilt her role as token crossover. Her boy's gee-whiz soul in a girl's pierced body keenly awaits all the possible worlds to come, when she will be no more than the tamest of fertile blurrings. The virtual world will leap past all birthmarks. No age, no sex, no race, no clans, no power politics…