Richard Powers - Plowing the Dark

Start modestly. Get them to walk in single file, keeping a rough group tempo. Parade them in simple formations — whatever twirling squares and stars you can remember from junior year playing clarinet in the Greater Des Moines Combined High Schools Marching Band. Then get them to form a few short words, strictly Anglo-Saxon monosyllables, lettered constellations of cockroach bodies, formations of synchronized scuttling, tricks for which they'll repay you with grateful companionship.

You read something once about how these creatures make high-frequency pitches by rubbing their rear legs together. Like bows across violin strings, or maybe that was crickets. You might start them on Suzuki-method arrangements of "Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall," working up to barbershop quartets and four-part chorales pitched too high for any but the captive ear to hear.

You see yourself on your hands and knees, playing with your six-legged cellmates. Can you really need people that much? Each day widens your disbelief at the discovery. You wanted this solitary confinement. You made love to the idea. The whole reason you came to this country in the first place was to escape human connection. The endless birthday-present shopping. The interminable dinner parties. The relentless letters of recommendation. You came here hoping to reclaim your life, to sail over the edge of society into selfhood's new world.

But isolation warps you into someone you don't recognize. You feel the thing in all its nakedness: a need so great that you'd stupidly tried to shed it. Your invitation to the human party — the constant obligation, the stack on your desk you could never clear. The drain on your resources. The perpetual static in your ears that kept you from your own, coherent thoughts. That petty, niggling burden. Your trueing, your delight, your sanity, your only health. Others.

You've spent your whole life dining out, while bad-mouthing the meal. No better than a thief who helps himself to the movable goods, then slanders his victims' taste. Solitude proves how little of you is yours. Everything that you've ever thought, everything you've ever felt, you owe to that company you could never abide.

Somehow, you must boost the odds of surviving this suicide you've arranged. April is your month to start taking stock. Bare waiting has killed one hundred and fifty days, days of nothing, days you will never get back. You're through calculating how much longer they'll hold you. However long it takes, that will be your length. You'll walk out of here knowing what you did not know on walking in. You vow to study that dependent self you never looked at, to converse with it every day from dinner until bed.

You start by replaying every detail of your life you can remember. The years you've lost to evasion you must reclaim now, second by second. Surely some core must exist inside you, some essence that you haven't simply sponged from a world of others. Some green oasis of wherewithal that won't return to desert, now that its feeder springs are sealed off.

Some tune that Jihad unwittingly hums you. A hymn to the forgotten Source. A convalescent's song.

August gave birth to a human chain, large enough to be seen from outer space. It solidified in several hundred hamlets across a landscape of scrub and failing farmland, accreting like some fearsome, foretold northern serpent. It ran for five hundred kilometers across three national frontiers, from the coasts of the Gulf of Finland down beyond the shores of the Kaunas Sea. Link by link, it snaked across the Cartesian plane, person by person, hooking up digits.

Nothing, it seemed, had died under June's tread. Disaster in Asia, the resolve of power, had slowed the worldwide movement, but could not stop it. The largest empire ever assembled began to evaporate into fiction. Transcaucasia spun out of orbit. A handful of freed prisoners took control of Poland. And across the wastes of three nominal republics, a spontaneous human rope played Crack the Whip while the cable-ready world looked on, whiplashed.

Even impromptu, a chain the length of three nations needed wartime logistics. A division of vegetable trucks stood in for half tracks, bussing villagers to gaps in the line. All was ad hoc. A leviathan longer than any camera's ability to document arose from thousands of local committees messaging one another, as fluid and pointless as song.

Ari Kaladjian floated above the spectacle on a sky hook, watching the transcendental function roiling from out of a scattered set of points. Don't any of these people have to work for a living?

Jaysus, man! O'Reilly said, without taking his eyes off the screen. Do you hear what you're saying?

I'm saying that if these people had put this much effort into being economically competitive, they wouldn't be in this hole that they now have to climb out of so theatrically.

For love of the bleeding Mary. You're a traitor to your race.

What does my race have to do with the price of tea in Tallinn?

Where the hell do you come from? Don't you think Armenia is next up on this carousel?

Armenia, Georgia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan.

Didn't your family come to this country as refugees?

Not the same thing, Kaladjian snapped. We're here because various powers have enjoyed killing us by the hundreds of thousands over the course of the century.

And the Baltics…?

The Baltics! My friend, what's happening there is not political. This is not about oppression. You're an economist. You of all people ought to know that.

Not political!

This is not about forms of government or appropriations of power or anything of the sort. This is about the globalization of markets, the apotheosis of consumerism. Your… human chain — Kaladjian spat both words — is nothing more than a glorified product-promotional placement.

Well I'm not going to stand around discussing the fall of Eastern Europe with this crypto-fascist.

Absolutely astonishing, Dale Bergen said, to no one. If seems to be self-assembling.

Michael Vulgamott snorted. You mean the human chain, or the global socialist meltdown?

I'm just a biologist, Bergen answered. I couldn't tell you about the thing's politics. But from this distance, it looks an awful lot like a long polypeptide growing itself out of side chains.

Adie broke in on the speculating circle. This isn't happening, she said. Again? Didn't this dream die two months ago? I cant take any more developments. I'm overloading.

You think you're overloading? Jackdaw gestured toward a screen, where news of the latest upheaval coursed through the system. You ought to see what's happening to the network access points. Every time there's a new development, the whole Net grinds into gridlock.

It's true, Spiegel said. The Ethernet pipes can't keep up with all the excitement. The links are gummed to a standstill. Like southbound 1–5 at late afternoon. Too much happening at once. We're generating more transcript than we can move.

Lim grew defensive. But we're doubling data capacity every—

Don't flatter yourself, Kaladjian cut in. Current events will always double faster.

Adie stood spellbound by the five-hundred-kilometer game of Red Rover. Hands grasped one another, adhering like nerve cells into an embryonic spinal cord. Someone? Please. What are we supposed to hope for here? How many times are we supposed to get burned?

Loque laid her arm around Adie's shoulders. You don't really want to know, do you, babe?