Richard Powers - Plowing the Dark

The scientists trot out their visualization tools, environments that, even as they debut, have already become commonplace. Kaladjian treats the paying visitors with his standard contempt, for remaining stupidly human in the face of so much rigor. He and Stance draw the first applause for their climate theater. Bergen's biosimulator entertains the industry nametags for a full half hour.

Freese presides, smiling like a gracious head of state. But his heart is already elsewhere. Only two weeks earlier, lie received his first look at civilization's next leap. He's been to a demo of his own, returning with a little piece of software that will turn the whole Net into a medium of universal exchange. He's come away with a glimpse of the thing the human yarn has been spinning itself toward, ever since its first camp-fire recitation: every soul in the world, serving as every other soul's twenty-four-hour server. Movable type was no more than a shadow puppet show.

The software he's seen is still text-only. But the breakout — pictures, clips, and, finally, the inevitable merge with VR — is just a few clock cycles away. The machinic phylum is on the move again, spinning itself out into another species. As always, there will be hell and turbulence to pay. But whatever the costs of this Next Big Thing, Freese means to be there.

The first wave of the Cavern's prospective purchasers stroll through a string of worlds of increasing visual interest. Spiegel runs flack, hinting to all parties that the best still waits in the wings. Hoping it still does. He hasn't a clue what it looks like, the country his mate has left them with. No one has had time to run the place through a final test.

He knows only that she is gone, that she was gone already, weeks before she left. In the last leg, just before the final tape, she'd become obsessed. Something had happened under the dome, some visitation invisible to everyone but the project's designer. She dug frantically at the structure, as if at the mouth of a collapsed mine shaft where people had been trapped.

She disappeared into the place she was making. Her immersion grew so total that he finally cornered her. What is it? he asked. What's happening in there?

Stevie, it's … I can't tell you. You'd never believe me.

Belief? When have I ever failed you with belief?

She looked at him, weighing the odds. Then she shook her head, dazed, denying, her own credulity spent. There's… something in there. Something that wants out. Something we didn't make.

I… don't understand. There? Where? Where exactly are you…?

She turned to bolt, and he reached out to grab her — to force her now, this once, to stay. And in that reflex force, he lost her. She went passive, giving in to his stronger grip. He tried to turn her toward him, to lift her eyes up to his.

Ade. If…I didn't know better, I'd say you were cheating on me.

And the look she shot him then — caged, uncovered; How much do you know? — was worse than confirmation.

I believe you, he tried again, in the dark. Wherever. Whatever you're …/… believe.

But she was already off, lost in that emergency rescue mission her overworked imagination had devised. She worked alone, keeping some tryst, meeting some phantom assignation that Spiegel could not even begin to hang flesh upon. Her trips away into that private geometry were as terse and desperate as love.

Three weeks before the end, they received a cardboard box from a small town in Ohio specializing in Shaker museums and close-security prisons. It was filled with books, tapes, photos, and a handful of other archaic media, earmarked for the two of them, discovered by the orderlies who cleaned out the bedroom after its tenant's forced evacuation.

All Adie took from the inheritance was a floppy disk, Ted's last composition, the chamber symphony, in MIDI format. His bizarre, wilderness notion of a music that people might want to listen to.

That's your keepsake? Steve asked. That's all you want, to remember him?

Adie nodded once and made off with the file, a magpie thieving a shred of tinfoil for its growing nest.

She worked on Byzantium flat out until she collapsed in exhaustion. They sent her home, feverish. She came back the next day, over the group's collective objections.

Sweetheart. It's just a damn demo, Steve told her. People are going to buy the thing, whatever rooms we show them. The machine is state-of-the-art. Someone will want one. Adie. Ade. It's not worth ruining your health over.

She went back, feverish, to work as if health were no more than a guilty, survivor's privilege. A figment of the imagination.

She took her stolen shreds of code and quilted them into a landscape. She worked, deep in covert conversation with a life just out of earshot. The room might have gone on forever, a work in progress. But when her assemblage came provisionally together, Adie seemed to shake free, for the space of an evening, into a safe place. She came up for air and sat with Stevie once more, spent, silent, in the brief truce of accomplishment.

He read the fact in her face. It's done?

For now, she said.

For good, I hope.

Come on. Accredit me. I'm cutting-edge, for another few weeks at least. People are lusting for what I do. I can get a job anywhere I want.

So where might that be, exactly?

Search me. At least we know what we're looking for, now. At least we have a template. She hugged the loyal, uncomprehending Pinkham to her. We'll recognize it when we see it, huh, pup?

I'm going with you, Spiegel said.

She put her palm on his chest, the gentlest refusal. He grabbed her wrist, and she drew back.

Ade, listen to me. Nothing I can make … makes much sense. Without someone to make it for.

She smiled a sfumato smile, the grin of one already sacrificed to canvas. Her finger came forward again, to trace his ribbed flesh, connecting the freckled dots she knew now by heart.

How long have we all been cooped up here? she asked. My God, it's been forever. Like death. I've got to get out of this place. Head south. Do some sightseeing. You know: I don't know the first thing about what it looks like, out there?

We can see it together. Better. Stereo.

Stevie. I need … to reinvent myself. Alone. In situ.

He said nothing.

She worked her mouth again, struggling. Just… give us a head-start. Six months. Then come find us.

Where?

If I knew, I'd tell you. She laughed and swept her arms. No, I wouldn't. That would be cheating.

No clue? Anywhere?

Sure. Scavenger hunt. How big can the place be?

Big, Adie. Big enough for us all to get lost in.

Small enough to fit in a shoebox, buddy. And shrinking by the nanosecond.

She disappears just days before the audience arrives. Drafts an escape hatch and slips down it, off through color's interface, into the negative space, between the single brushstroke, the vanishing point that the hand invents to fool the eye.

What's left of the design team stands in front of the Cavern mouth, waiting for their cue. Vulgamott paces, cursing under his breath. Damn artist. Bugging out at the eleventh hour. Leaving us to run the thing alone.

Ebesen stands by him, wearing his first new shirt in years. His trousers, too, can only be a goodbye gift, if for no other reason than that they fit. Of course we have to run it alone. That's the whole beauty of fake reality.

Vulgamott pretends not to hear him. News is something a civilized person shouldn't have to do more than watch. What if it doesn't work?