Richard Powers - Plowing the Dark

"I don't know," he replies. "You want I ask Chef."

"Yes, please. Please ask."

Your answer comes that evening, along with a plate of gristle rejected by its previous eater.

"Chef say you no hostage. America lets our brothers in Kuwait go free, you go free. Simple. Tomorrow. Tonight." You hear him shrug: Now, if we get the respect that Satan owes us. Or never. Makes no difference. Entirely up to your people.

He delivers his message and leaves. You fall on the clue as a devout falls upon his prayer mat. Kuwait. Incarcerated brothers. The men who slip your food into this box and lock the door behind it are Shiites. At last you have a label for them. Beyond that there is only your willed ignorance, your stupid refusal to have learned any more than the basics of the war you so blithely waltzed into. Something in you, even now, does not want to know this organization's name, the one-word credential stamped on their ransom notes. Something in your scrambling soul still denies that you've been taken by the only organization capable of doing so.

Not a hostage: just some collateral pawn, held for imaginary leverage in a game where no one can say just what constitutes winning. Word must be out by now, whatever the word is. The school knows that you're not playing hooky. And surely, in this city, they're left with only one conclusion.

By now you've made the world papers. "Yet another American," like the reports you used to read and file away, unimaginable. Chicago now knows the name of those who captured you, while you as yet do not.

Hand between your head and the infested mattress, your free leg slung across the manacled one, you force your two column inches of captivity to materialize on the crazed plaster ceiling. And along with it, you summon up the whole front section of today's Tribune— World's Greatest Newspaper — the first image of any resolution to grace your private screening room. The blue banner and the hedging headlines. The weather for Chicago and vicinity. Metroland meanderings, carping columnists, gridiron second-guessers: pages scroll across your field of view on microfiche of your own devising. And tucked away, make it page 12, safe where the news will spare Des Moines and hurt only those whom hurt will benefit, you put a black-and-white reduction of your college yearbook photo, a face so saddled with goofy impatience for the future that even you no longer recognize it.

Days pass without your marking them, days spent squinting at the accompanying text, at all the details of your mistaken capture, at reports of your captors' confident predictions that, all sides cooperating, you'll be home by Christmas. You read your life as only another would have told it. And you wonder, God help you, if your story has reached the one whom you vowed would never hear word of you again.

You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building.

Stark words flashed across the network's broadcast channel, like that annual decree going out from Caesar Augustus. Like the first four measures or "Auld Lang Syne." Like the face of a friend bobbing out from a crowd just clearing International Customs, lit in familiarity's halo.

Jackdaw Acquerelli, his day's work put to bed and his night's fantasies brought up in a foreground window, laughed to himself at the phantom text. Similar bursts of recognition must have passed through everyone still logged in at this hour. The sender was good. The message carried no header, no time stamp, no originating workstation ID. Just a raw text stream, plopped down on a hundred screen status lines, like a writ coming straight from God, Gates, or some other upper-echelon SYSOP.

Jackdaw ran a quick check to see who was on. Eighty-six users, not counting concurrent sessions. Folks at all six facilities, from the Sound down along the coast, as far south as the Valley. Seven people right here at the RL. Night and prototypes: something about 2 a.m. rendered it the perfect hour for wire-wrapping.

Any dozen of these guys were good enough to have managed the stunt. A few of them had written the damn operating system. There were too many wizards for Jackdaw to trap the identity of the sender. The words were best treated as a collective artifact.

Jackdaw killed the user check and popped back to the OS, prompt. In just those few seconds away, some fleet-fingered soul — a certain arj-raol, working on a TG Graphics box over at the mother ship — had already managed to dispatch the follow-up any one of these late-night acolytes could have supplied:

Around you is a forest. A small stream flows out of the building and down a gully.

The words filled Jackdaw with a great sense of well-being. Happiness flowed in its own small stream out of Jackdaw's chest and down into his typing digits. It felt like a snatch of last year's plaintive progressive-rock waif bleeding out of the radio of a car that tracked up a mountain road in the dark. Like a drug, maybe, though Jackdaw had never partaken. Like first love. Like learning, word of mouth, that your first love loved you back.

His eyes took in the summons of the words. His hands on their keys felt the fingers of that seventh-grader still inside them. He stared at the sentences and saw his father, one Saturday morning in 1977 when young Jackie had been acting out, taking him to the office and parking him in front of a gleaming Televideo 910, hooked up to a remote mainframe through the magic of a Tymeshare 300-baud modem.

All a trick, Jackdaw saw in retrospect, an elaborate diversionary tactic to fool a boy into — of all things — reading. The screen had glowed at him then, each letter a phosphorescent worm made up of a couple of dozen discrete pinpricks of green light. You are standing at the end of a road. Before a small brick building.

"So?" eleven-year-old Jackdaw had pouted. "So what?" But half-enthralled already, half-guessing that this place might be vastly more interesting than the larger one that was good for so little except disappointment.

"So," his father mocked. "So type something." "Type something? Type what?"

"Anything. You're standing in front of a building. What do you do?" "Anything? You mean, like… anything?" "For heaven's sake. Just try something and see what happens." Belief, at eleven, was still wide. And those words were even wider. Boy Jackie read the sentences on the screen again. This time the road, and the small building, and the forest, and the stream flowing out of the building, and the gully it flowed into jumped out at him in all dimensions, cobbling up some temporary, extensible, magic scratchpad valley expressly created for getting lost in.

The idea of walking through this valley lifted him out of that morning's misery and set him loose along that small stream. He found himself split over two locales: at the end of a road and in the middle of a chorus line of letters, through which he hunted, with escalating excitement, for the key e.

Enter building, Jackdaw typed into the broadcast dialog box and let it rip. The message echoed on his screen's status line, amid a hail of identical messages bouncing around the wide area network all over the North Coast.

His was not the only private raft out on this nostalgia cruise. Most of late-working TeraSys, apparently, remembered the archaic incantations, the geographies of pleasure buried in the mists of a dozen years back. Like calls to a radio contest, the responses flooded in. Exhortations to Enter buildingand Go buildingpiled up along the bottom of his screen. Even a simple Buildingand a simpler Enter.

Get out of my life, Jackdaw howled. You gotta be kidding me.

Spider Lim, dozing on the cubicle couch, shot up, spilling the bag of Sun Chips balanced on his sternum. What is it? What's happening? Something crash?