Richard Powers - Plowing the Dark

I mean, is this the real thing, this time? Or just another bloody detour?

Kaladjian threw a hand up in the air. It's all a detour. The Cold War is a detour. Yalta was a detour.

You know what I'm asking. Are we supposed to believe, again?

What do you say, Ari, man? Rajan agitated. History or mockery, doc? Signal-process this one for us. He pointed to the sinuous line, its changing slope, its amorphous rise over run. Differentiate that curve, mathematician.

Kaladjian refused the bait. Ask our friend from Belfast. He's the one who is building the electronic voodoo fortune-teller.

Yeah, Ronan, baba. How come your time machine didn't predict this one?

O'Reilly stuck his chin out. Quite simple. It happened too soon. Give me another year or two…

If we have it, Vulgamott said, staring at the human chain.

The cameras hovered high in the air, scanning the Baltics in under two minutes. People were linking up. Whole countries of hand-holders shuttled about plugging the gaps, thrilled with the feel of a process larger than themselves. Their faces signaled one another, animated, weeping, hilarious. The vast act of logistics threatened to turn into a party.

It's beautiful, Spider Lim pronounced, in the flattest American diphthongs. Whatever it is.

What's that? Adie asked. What did you just say?

It's.. beautiful?

Sorry. Syntax error. Command not recognized.

Lim smiled. But it is. Look at it. A fractal tendril. You know that some flower is going to grow out of it. But you can't tell the shape or color.

Spiegel came alongside him. Too much distal stimuli, Spidey. Too exocentric. Better slow up a click or two. You're turning into a poet. He made to take Lim's wrist, feel his pulse. Spider, mistaking the move, offered up his half of the smallest possible human chain. The weakest first link. He caught his error in mid-extension and retracted his embrace, embarrassed.

But it was. Was beautiful — a self-extending experiment, too massive for description. Event ran on an analog machine the size of the globe, a planetary computer that performed the necessary calculations and generated the required results. The world took its instructions from the shapes of its smallest parts, aggregate subroutines, reusable containers, object-oriented modules that forward-chained into ever-larger autonomous agents, extending the program even as it passed through its run-time interpreter. Trees from the branch, fruit from the tree, farms from the fruit, whole nation-states from the farms, until some sum of summer mass movements decided, on the basis of all this higher mathematics, the exact moment to send the drowsy empire to bed.

In September, Hungary opened its eroding border to Austria. East German vacationers trickled through the fissure into the West. Up in the RL studio, the Cavern illuminators fell into an unconscious footrace, to finish the plates in their book of hours before their calendar went obsolete.

One night in the Economics Room, Lim, Karpol, and O'Reilly took turns poking their heads into the floating globe. They watched from the fixed core, as the surface ran through its detailed rainbow. Economist turned to hardware engineer and asked, How many MIPS can you deliver to me, two years from now?

Lim thought for a while. He settled on a number that would have seemed outrageous, had human expectation still recognized the shape of outrage.

Why? Adie asked. How many do you need?

Ten times whatever you can give me at any moment. Desire, like file size, always overflowed the available capacity.

Adie nudged the Irishman. Greedy little rasterbator, aren't you?

O'Reilly nodded. Life is greedy. It always requires an order of magnitude more juice than it has. How many millions of instructions per second do you think Hungary is executing, all told? Adie just stared at him. Spider propagated the gesture. Oh, I don't mean their computing capacity. I mean, how much processing power does the machine of Hungary involve? How much total storage?

Hungary the country?

Yes, Hungary the country. As opposed to Hungary the condition of gastric distress.

Klarpol rolled her eyes. All yours, Spidey.

Lim closed his lids and read the paper tape of some invisible, emulated Turing machine floating in his wetware. You mean, how many discrete pieces of data are involved in Hungary throwing over its old leaders?

O'Reilly's nod narrowed to one bit. One single datum.

I couldn't begin to tell you, Lim said, even to within a couple of exponents. I don't even know how to think about the problem. I don't even know how to start guessing.

A big number, Adie suggested.

O'Reilly touched the tip of his nose and pointed at her. A big number! Give the lady a Kewpie doll. How many millions of instructions per individual Hungarian?

Adie giggled. MIPS per IH. MIPSPIH. Not a sufficiently explored constant.

Another big number, Lim conceded. Bigger than any hardware is likely to deliver to you in the next few years.

Exactly. Any problem of real interest explodes into polynomials. And there's no way around that explosion except icontics.

Stop. Lady wants to trade her Kewpie doll for a definition.

Ontic icons. Icons with real existence. Shorthand agents. Data structures that do for real-world behaviors what an icon does for visual appearance. If you want to convey the idea of Hungary, you don't need a multi-gigabyte geodetic map of the entire country. You can do it with a simple outline. By the same token, we should be able to implement a functional representation of—

Adie rocked her head from side to side, the icon of incredulity. He really has you bugged, doesn't he?

Who?

Kaladjian. He's got you by the axioms. That taunt about failing to predict the chain reaction in the Baltics?

A grin pulled at O'Reilly's top lip. Perhaps. It is a well-defined problem, after all.

I see. So you're totally insane, then? This is what you're saying?

Now, now. O'Reilly put his hand out into the air, on the spot where the three of them shared a vivid, mutual mirage the shape of Eastern Europe. If the present does determine the future, we ought to be able to make the calculations in advance.

Ronan, Ronan. No more time machines. I forbid it. They're evil. Just because civilization has had a nice long run toward the horizon, that doesn't mean we have to hit the vanishing point.

Where do you propose we stop, then?

Someplace realistic? Adie said. Preferably with a nice cafe.

Realistic? That's a sliding baseline. Every new machine — every line of code that we write — changes what we think of as realistic.

My God. You're really serious. You think that 350 million people in Eastern Europe are working out their destinies in some kind of Boolean pinball machine?

O'Reilly nodded. Where else do you propose that destiny work itself out?

I get it now. This is why you and the Armenian are always at each others throat You're really one another's evil twins.

Not at all. He wants to find the Taylor series that underwrites existence. I just want to anticipate the trajectories.

Look. This thing… She dismissed the Cavern with a wave. It's just puppet theater. Everything we're making — just cartoon sets…

My point, exactly. Theater captures the reality of human personality better than CAT scans can ever hope to.