Richard Powers - Plowing the Dark

Vulgamott came by just to fuss, New Yorker to New Yorker. Make sure you re leaving enough space between those plants. It's not the foliage that makes this painting so brilliant. It's all the space he somehow manages to cram in between.

Dont worry, Michael. Ãò good with air. Air is easy. There'll be plenty of air in the finished weed patch.

Once, she could have scrutinized the original Dream, whenever she wished. That canvas hung in her own personal attic, at MoMA, one flight up from the cafeteria where she had bussed tables and peddled coffee. Once she had lived almost close enough to hear the spillover from that flute player's tune. Now she had to scour around a little toy town of a port city for the best reproductions of the image she could lay her hands on, testing the defects of each against the print that still hung in her mind's clearing.

Most nights between ten-thirty and quarter to eleven, Karl Ebesen checked in to say good night. Or so Adie assumed, for on these visits, the senior visual designer mostly said nothing at all. He'd show up in a streaked trench coat, a prop out of some Mitchum film noir, his ratty portfolio of the day's digitizing under one arm. He'd heave himself into the corner across from Adie's workstation, capitulating to the gravity he'd fended off for five decades, wheezing through his mouth and scowling.

She'd ask him about the architectural fly-through that he and Vulgamott were assembling. Ebesen would answer snidely or just wave her off. Over the course of several evenings, Adie settled into returning the man's morose silences with the mirror of her own. The idiom had for Adie a comforting familiarity. The silent conversation of her childhood. The absence she was raised in.

Ebesen would sit mute for anywhere from five minutes to an hour, then shuffle off like one of those benign street people down by the ferry docks who accept all offered change without once asking for any. She came to think of Ebesen as her guardian bagman. Any sign of human drama caused him to slink off to whatever Presbyterian soup kitchen had coughed him up. When Karl was around, she could talk out loud without worrying about anyone answering. Drawing into a digital graphics tablet seemed less displacing, in the shadow of this odder interface.

Then one night, the derelict talked back. She was chattering, just making noise while her hand moved around the bits on her electronic palette, a little verbal dribbling, spinning through sentences the way some people spin through radio stations on the car dial, with no real intention of landing anywhere.

All these creatures, she said. All these animal eyes. What are they all looking at? An elephant, a snake, two birds, two lions, two monkeys…

How many monkeys? Ebesen sneered. A barking seal after the emergency tracheotomy.

Adie whipped around from her workstation. She stared at the man in the corner, the one she'd stopped looking up at half a dozen visits ago. He had his head down, circling ads in an old travel magazine with a red felt pen. She looked back at the twenty prints of the painting taped over every free corner of her cubicle. And saw the third monkey.

Bit by bit, bouquet by bouquet, she reconstructed the painted Dream. Every six days, she took her week's handiwork into the Cavern for a road test. Spiegel found her there one night, passing dismayed through a stand of Rousseau's head-high, alien anemones.

Stevie, help me. Nothing has depth. All the pieces are so planar. I want real furniture in my dollhouse. Not just cardboard flats.

He crafted her a solid lozenge, a blank batten upon which to paste her petals' surfaces. For each new blossom, now, she invented those sides hinted at but hidden in the plane of paint. Front folded seamlessly to back, and the flower stayed bulky from all points of the compass. Not much — and yet, dimension. All the axes that we're given to live in.

The vessel took form, piece by piece, each separate square of hull arc-welded onto the mold of the master scaffolding. Klarpol became a tourist in her own Eden. Her wand and glasses did more than bring the jungle to her eyes. They spied back on her, gathering the data streams released by her every glance. The lenses that tracked her head also logged her glances into saved tables, files of code detailing the angles her eyes subtended, the time she spent focusing on each leaf, the errors her glimpse made in selecting its target, the tries she took in moving through these blooms that, even here, in her infant clumsiness, had already commenced using her…

She would come from the Cavern recharged, in search of new techniques. Desire forced her out into the halls of the RL, that commonwealth beyond her cubicle, looking for new repertoire. In such a state, on a rainy spring evening, she found Spider Lim slumped over his workstation in a baby coma. He sat still, intent upon the screen, but dazed. Frothy, arrested, viscid, like someone in the first stages of hypo-glycemia. His fingers no longer clacked at their keys. He'd gone off elsewhere, lost down the successive iterations of a nested loop.

Adie called him. Spider just sat there, holding the keyboard, sub-audibly humming some catchy MIDI pop-synth arrangement. She bolted down the hall for the nearest live body. She found Steve and Rajan Rajasundaran, deep in conversation.

It 's Spider, she said. There's something wrong with him.

The two men exchanged looks. Spiegel patted her. It's OK, Ade. Sometimes when he's working at a screen? He forgets to breathe.

The three trotted back to Spider's cubicle. Stevie and Raj stood above Lim and rubbed him gently. Their colleague sat numbed, a Seattle grunger dozing off for the afternoon in the entrance to the Space Needle.

Spider! Raj called. Snap out of it, man. You're system-crashing again.

Breathe in, Spider, Spiegel encouraged. Come on, buddy.

I'm breathing, Spider called back, irritated at the interruption. Still a little out of it, some tangled knot tying up his processor cycles. Some puzzle of fluid flow, of air convection wrapping its turbulence around a sculpted wing. Adie touched his forearm. His temperature had dropped, like a lizard caught in a shadow.

Spiegel harassed the returning patient. What's with you, Spidey? This is some kind of meditation effect, isn't it? Something to do with your Qi?

Spiegel, man, Rajasundaran warned. Don't mess with the inscrutable East. Don't even try to scrute it. There are mysteries that the people of bologna and yellow mustard are not given to understand.

I'm from Korea, Spider objected. He'd lived long enough in the States to speak with a slight Okie drawl. We don't do Qi in Korea. That's a California thing.

Keep breathing, Spidey. Spiegel urged him. We need your expertise.

Raj seconded. Yes, man. Keep on working for Chairman Gatt. To get rich is glorious.

Korea, Spider said. Korea, you stupid Tamil.

Asian transplants had no corner on weird physiological responses to the man-machine interface. All of this virtual country's immigrants tended to maze out on silicon's sub-micron boulevards, tranced over their keyboards, their carpal tunnels hollowed out for maximum brain-finger throughput. But Spider's body tracked the machine especially steeply. He could generally catch himself overheating, hyperventilating as he tested an overclocked processor or a heat-stressed IC. But a hang could snag him, pull him down under consciousness's event horizon.

We're going to find you crashed like that someday, Spiegel scolded. Completely stalled. Like a token ring that's lost track of its packets. Like some student infinite do-loop. And we won't be able to spring your processes.