Richard Powers - Plowing the Dark

They found a vacant bench. Adie sat and exhaled. Unfolded. The sun ducked in and out through a scattering crowd of cloud.

God, she said. Damn. I feel like the Mole-Woman. You know? The one they've buried in that hermetic sunken shelter? The woman who lives in that Ramada Inn lab at the bottom of a mine shaft, with the flock of video cameras and microphones pointed at her around the clock? What's her name again?

Mmm… Doris.. Singlegate?

Stevie. You never cease to amaze me. How long has she been underground?

Good question. It has to be at least a year.

And what's the point, again?

Study her physiology. Changes in biological clocks and such. In the absence of all outside cues.

You science types are all sickos.

He laughed, a little offended. Since when do you lump your old fellow traveler with the science types?

Ever since you wired up your iambs.

Look who's talking. But I'll admit to a certain sick fascination with the Mole-Woman. I hear she's gone sidereal. That her body's reset itself onto a twenty-five-hour cycle. Can you imagine? Every four weeks, she loses a whole day.

What do you mean, "imagine"? How long have I been working for you thugs, anyway? I'ò ahead of schedule.

At least we let you come up for air now and then.

Spiegel produced a sack of slightly linted honey-coated peanuts from his jacket pocket. Adie ate the minimum that politeness dictated. Stevie swung his head east to west, a pivoting Minicam. Through his eyes, she saw the square unfold. A clump of people queued up for the next Seattle Underground tour. Knots of autonomous agents milled about the lost pergola, each holding to the hem of a private goal.

People school, Adie said. They flock. Have you ever noticed?

He nodded. They're looking for places of power. But they cant find them, because none exists anymore.

Places…?

You know. Stone circles. Barrows. Temples, cathedrals, mosques, pagodas. Even town halls, I suppose, once upon a time.

Stevie. I thought you'd graduated from poetry. I thought you were sticking to subroutines these days.

He flashed his can't-hurt-me-with-that smile. Not entirely incompatible, I've found.

And these places of power of yours…?

All dried up. Where's our Stonehenge these days?

What, they've moved it from Salisbury Plain? Those vandals.

Spiegel snickered. No, it's still sitting there. Behind a chain-link fence. Salisbury Cathedral, down the road, is no better. Two pounds for a peek, and a little numbered walking booklet demystifying all the high points.

Adie waved her hand outward. I don't suppose you'd be willing to count a colorful totem pole and a tasteful bust of Chief Seathl as magic lenses?

People don't even see those things. They blow right past them, on their way to the stores.

Well, the stores, then. The malls.

I'm talking about places where we can be subsumed by forces larger than ourselves.

You've obviously never run up a monolithic MasterCard tab at Bloomie's, have you?

Places where we can reconstruct ourselves and nature. Where people can share transforming experiences.

The Kingdome?

His lips tightened, without much mirth. All right. Adie sobered. Books, then. Who has time to read anymore? Little magenta books from your childhood. Lost. Broken.

Movies. Of course. Movies.

Too solipsistic. You sit there for an hour and a half, chained up in the dark. Immersed, sure, but eyes forward, on the screen. Your guts get turned inside out, completely manipulated, fine-tuned by the industry's latest big release. But two weeks later, you cant even paraphrase the plot. Adie threw a few honeyed peanuts to the birds. Every pigeon in the Pacific Northwest went into an all-points feeding frenzy. Why do I have this sneaking suspicion about where you're heading here?

He nodded. You got it I mean, the car, the airplane, even printing. They only changed the speed with which humans can do existing tasks. But the computer…

Ah ha! Adie said, slapping him on the thigh. The computer changes the tasks. Other inventions alter the conditions of human existence. The computer alters the human. It's our complement, our partner, our vindication. The goal of all the previous stopgap inventions. It builds us an entirely new home.

Hey? What's wrong with the old home? I liked living in the old home. Did you? He held her eye. She looked away first. Well, however you feel about the new one, you have to admit, it's out of this world. Oh, that much Ym sure of.

You know what we're working on, don't you? Time travel, Ade. The matter transporter. Embodied art; a life-sized poem that we can live inside. It's the grail we've been after since the first campfire recital. The defeat of time and space. The final victory of the imagination.

Whoa there, cowboy. It's four bedsheets and some slide projectors. Oh, you ain't seen nothin yet. Forget the technology for a moment. I'm talking about the raw idea. The ability to make worlds — whole, dense, multisensory places that are both out there and in here at the same time. Invented worlds that respond to what we're doing, worlds where the interface disappears. Places we can meet in, across any distance. Places where we can change all the rules, one at a time, to see what happens. Fleshed-out mental labs to explore and extend. VR rein-vents the terms of existence. It redefines what it means to be human. All those old dead-end ontological undergrad conundrums? They've now become questions of engineering.

Adie tilted her head, withholding and conceding at the same time. What makes you think…? Nothing else has ever worked. All the arts, all the technologies in the world have failed to placate people. Why should it be any different this time around?

First, because we're assembling them all into a total—

Na, na. That's Wagner. That's Bayreuth. And you see all the good that did.

But the Cavern blows opera out of the box. We're not just passive recipients anymore. We'll become the characters in our own living drama.

She shook her head. The problem isn't going to answer to technology, you know. The problem is inside us. In our bodies.

The Cavern is the first art form to play directly to that body. We're on the verge of immediate, bodily knowledge.

It doesn't work that way, Stevie. We habituate. Something in us doesn't want to stay sublime for very long.

We can be refreshed. Revitalized, by the sheer density…

She took in Pioneer Square in one glance: this palpable place, the master foil to Stevie's crazy vision. All at once, the tap of sunlight opened. Why not life, then? she said. Life itself, as our final art form. Our supreme high-tech invention. It's a lot more robust than anything else we've got going. Deeply interactive. And the resolution is outstanding.

But we can't see life. He gestured to include the world's tourists, rushing through the miraculous density of day's data structure without so much as a second glance. Not without some background to hold it up against. In order for the fish to know that it's swimming in an ocean-He has to jump into the frying pan?

Spiegel snorted. Something like that. Something like that.

Some cloud passed from off the face of the sun. The sky grew so briefly radiant that it forced Adie's face up. Something in the light felt so desperate for sharing that it stretched out the deficit in her heart and left it, for the length of that glint, fillable. Breezes were stronger than reason. They just didn't last as long.