Richard Powers - Plowing the Dark

The year that ended history came to its own end. The retaining Wall fell down, and all certainty came down with it. The Realization Lab's engineers entered 1990 adrift in a fluid landscape, stripped of

all tether.

O'Reilly asked Klarpol, How do you like living in a time without safe

assumptions?

Have you ever lived anywhere else? she answered.

A world without assumptions should have been a world without surprises. But every day brought new shocks to the invented landscape, shocks requiring perpetual invention to smooth them over.

Wiring the Cavern for sound made more difference than Adie could have imagined. More than it should have. The Arlesean Room designers brought in Rajasundaran, who'd done a stint down at NASA/ Ames in Mountain View, to give the sunny South a tongue. Every event in Jackdaw's cabinet of interactions now came into its audible inheritance. Chairs learned to creak, floorboards to pop. The wind outside the window began to hiss a stereo mistral.

The key is spatiality, Raj said. We creatures evolved to believe in space, and that's about all you can say for certain about belief. We're binaural. Binocular. These are evolution's tricks for getting us to think in 3-D, and we can't help falling for them every time. 3-D is a trick? Adie asked. She sounded hurt. Sure. What isn't, finally?

They set to work voicing Aries, teaching the rented bed-sit to sing. To their arrays for texture and surface and dimension, they added sonority. The drawer coughed softly as it slid open. The pitcher pinged with the perfect pitch of porcelain. Off in the distance, past the edges of the casement, southward toward the invisible bay, gulls called.

Even the earliest results unnerved them. Six channels run through five speakers implanted in each wall face sufficed to raise the neck hairs on the most sophisticated visitor. They put Spider Lim, the human litmus, alone in the room. They flew a sonic pigeon through the rafters. He tracked the arc of the flapping bird, a fuller, more physiological belief than had he actually seen one. They broke a pane of glass in the center of the left-hand window. Spider jumped, a full-scale startle. He slammed his fist against his chest.

Don't ever do that to me again.

Sound is better than visual, Steve decided. It's more immediate. More virtual to begin with. It hangs in space, getting sharper in memory.

Adie ignored his invitation. She spoke to him now only when work required.

Raj sailed through the subaudible battlefield, unaware. Every modality that you can add will square the level of believability. Every new affordance, every connection we can lay down between out here and in there increases the sense of immersion geometrically.

Spiegel paced in place. We need some haptic device. Some kind of force-feedback jumpsuit that'll resist when you try to walk into things. Pressure-hammers that'll bruise your legs when you scrape against

the bed.

Not necessary, Lim said. And showed them his shins.

Raj grinned. At bottom, you know? At bottom, the mind wants to be

taken in.

Poor Jackdaw went back and affixed a new element to every data array, a variable pointer that would hold the clicks and pocks that Adie wanted to add to every plunkable object in the room. But he worked gladly. Rajasundaran's audio — the lowing and keening of it — had something of the innermost eerieness, something a visitor assimilated into her tissue before even noticing.

It knocked Adie out. The sounds are so present! Better than the real thing. It's as if the noises are going off inside my brain.

Oh, they are, Raj said. They are! We do our real-time signal processing right inside those flaps of twisted cartilage of yours. He wiggled his own flaps in question. We put a microphone in a subject's ear canal, capture the chaos, and reverse-engineer the sampling. Waves crashing into waves, nodes and antinodes wiping themselves out all over the place. Sounds like the Lower East Side, Adie said. You ought to try Jaffna. That's where you lived? Oh no no. Jaffna came to me.

Her hands dry-pointed the air in front of her, talking before her words could catch up. They scuttled, flustered, like the hands of library patrons at the five-minute warning, gathering together their materials and carrying their quarry up to the charge desk before it shut down for

the night. Explain.

What is there to explain, really? Raj spoke in the subcontinental, singsong inflection of Imperial English, whose practitioners outnumbered all of England several times over. My family and I were living our lives in Colombo. The Tigers made some high-profile power plays up in the peninsula. Our Sinhalese aunties and uncles decided that the Jaffna deaths required some symmetrical mischief to put them right. They voted to set fire to the hundred nearest Tamil houses, no matter that these belonged to their dear friends and neighbors. We beat a hasty retreat to Vancouver. A lovely city, by the way.

What do your parents do for a living?

You mean before our move or after?

Both… Both.

A familiar story. You don't really want to know.

How… how did you end up living here?

Here? He cast a gaze back at the Cavern, where windows broke, floorboards popped, and pigeons flew about the eaves. You mean Seattle? The idea amused him. I don't really live here. I'm just renting.

Raj wanted to develop a high-level audio programming language to match the visual one that Jackdaw and Loque were assembling. He wanted fast filter transforms that would change a frog to a choirboy with a few typed commands. He wanted to spin the aural sources in space, make them wheel about with each turn of the head.

But as with images, acoustic precision exacted its price in responsiveness. Milliseconds loomed huge. Latency killed the sense of presence. Only the tightest virtuoso chorus of sounds would flush the ear into belief. Spatializing the noisy universe and synchronizing it with sight involved a bit of higher mathematical modeling called the Head-Related Transfer Function.

We should get the Armenian in on this, Rajan said. Adie balked. Is that really necessary? Nothing is really necessary. Not really.

He's so incredibly unpleasant. The man has raised ugliness to the level of haute art. He's ugliness's high priest.

They brought in Kaladjian. He started out on his best behavior, which consisted of not saying anything at all. He walked into the Van Gogh bedroom and shrugged. He tapped the shutters and rapped the porcelain with a hand-gripped Polhemus sensor, unhappy with the delayed pocks and pings. He stepped out of the room and removed the stereo glasses.

Why would anyone want to build something like this?

Why does anyone want to build anything? Spiegel answered.

Kaladjian shrugged, more concession than contest.

Over the space of days, the quartet of males slowly squeezed Klarpol out. Form and warmth, rapture and azure all collapsed into engineering problems. The tasks at hand were well defined, formalizable. Why did they need an artist any longer? They had Adie's careful, hand-drawn surfaces. Once the authorities got their composite sketch, the artist was just ballast.

Adie went to Sue Loque. They're stealing my room.

Your room? Didn't you steal it from some Dutch guy?

My idea. My eye. I took everything off the flat plane and laid it out in three-space. I repainted all the surfaces by hand. Every inch of it is detailed enough to look good at life size.