Richard Powers - Plowing the Dark

Jack, she badgered him. Why do those bees buzz? What holds that house up? Could one make the grass grow under a visitor's feet? Conjure up some kid to come mow it for a silver-gray two bits? She grew worse than a five-year-old who'd just learned that every question bred another.

Jackdaw struggled mightily to address the barrage. But he could not parse her. Their interface was makeshift, the cable between them noisy, and their throughput limited to the intermittent burst.

Think of it all as a kind of trick, he said. He could not both look at her and address her at the same time. He wasn't comfortable talking to living things. Living female things. Their firmware algorithm eluded him.

I knew it. I knew it had to be a trick. But, but, but: how does the trick work?

We do it all with liquid crystal back projection. One Electrolamp Luminox projector throwing alternating double-buffered images onto each of the five walls. We cast the floor onto a refracting mirror, through a hole in the ceiling.

Liquid? Adie whimpered. Crystal?

It's the only way. Trust me. The alternatives are all too crude.

Her laughter battered him. She tried to squelch it. Sorry, Jackie. That does not compute.

Sure it does, he said. So LCD streaks a little. It ghosts. So we don't get the brightness that we'd get out of a goosed-up electron beam. And the response speeds still aren't what you'd hope for. But don't forget: you can eliminate fade by simultaneous, multirow addressing…

Sure. Of course! Adie smacked herself on the forehead. What was I thinking? But tell me, Jackdaw. How do you get the pretty flowers to come off the wall like that? They just… float a few feet out into the room.

The question stopped the boy short in mid-ratchet. He seized up, unable to pop all the way back off his internal stack. His conversation hung on that old scheduling puzzle beloved of multitasking programmers: the five dining philosophers who share four spoons. Some part of him forgot to put some other part's spoon down between courses, and the whole meal crashed to a halt.

Jackdaw fell back, slack-jawed at what stood flushed out into the open. Adie saw herself through his eyes: a totally alien life-form. A frilly, intuitive blur. Some non-carbon-based, vegetative intelligence. She read the proof in the boy's face. They shared no mother tongue, nor any father either.

Even at this point of derailment, Jackdaw refused eye contact. She spooked him, her loose, twill gaze worse than a Gorgon's. The boy quit his fiddling and stared off into the lab's black. He stroked the hood of a modular connector with thumb and forefinger. She watched a quorum of clear-thinking chip architects convene in his mind, debating what her question could possibly mean. How much they knew, these new children. How concentrated their knowledge of every mechanism, except for life.

Jackdaw slogged back into the breach. You mean the stereoscopic effect?

Maybe. She felt herself a brat in braids, prevailed upon to show her prize puree.

The stereoscopic effect comes from the glasses. Shuttered lenses. We've settled on a hundred-and-twenty-hertz oscillation. Alternate left-eye and right-eye views, each flashing sixty times a second. We sync the projected images to the shutter rate. Your eyes put the two back together. That's where you get the sense of depth. The stereo 3-D.

Oh God. You mean, like a big View-Master? That's what you're saying? I'm going to live the next several years of my life inside a giant View-Master?

That depends. What exactly is a View-Master?

She yelped. You're kidding me. You never had…? You never saw …? Those round white paddle-wheel disks with the paired squares of Kodachrome at opposite ends? Old Faithful and Half Dome? Inside the Vatican Library? Goofy and Mickey on Holiday?

A look stole across Jackdaw's face. The 3-D representation for Scared Shitless. This woman was infected. Something viral. Something contagious.

A look stole across Jackdaw's face. The 3-D representation for Scared Shitless. This woman was infected. Something viral. Something contagious.

Forgive me, she explained. Ãò being silly.

Huh. I see. His head jerked back, resetting the input stream. Whatever. Anyway, our rendering rates don't come near to sixty frames a second yet. But as it turns out, the eye only needs about a dozen frames a second to trick it into fusing discrete images into continuous motion. Film is only twenty-four. So anything over thirty is more than adequate. His eyebrows went up. For now.

Can you explain something else to me? What exactly is the difference between you and that Spider?

Which spider? Jackdaw clicked away at his keyboard, as if transcribing the whole conversation. Oh. You mean Lim? He's mostly hardware. Ãò mostly software.

That's a difference?

He's like, Korean. Ãò what you call Italian?

You're his baby brother, aren't you? You suck out his soul and use it in your own body when he's not around, don't you?

She shocked him into looking almost at her. He shook his head gravely: huh-uh. Honest injun.

You're all clones of the same experimental genetic material. Admit it.

At last Jackdaw smiled. But she still couldn't tell if he smiled at her inanity or at something on his monitor that his typing had produced.

She saw in the smile some spark of software loyalty. This boy would always do things for her. Small, stray errands and favors, whatever happened in the lab between them. And the seed of his devotion made her feel safe, here in this precarious new world. Safe, knowing that she would never ask anything from him but the smallest of favors.

Jackdaw, she said. Jackie. He flinched at the familiarity on her lips. You still haven't answered my question. What makes the pictures?

What makes the pictures? His face labored at the cipher. It squeezed itself through every real-time translation algorithm that he possessed. What makes the pictures?

Yeah.

Uh, we do? Not even hoping that he'd guessed right.

No! Not that! She pictured herself stamping on the floor, the spade-footed kick of a dwarf whose secret name has just slipped out. You know what I mean.

You mean, what hardware do we use to generate the graphics? What computers?

Yes. Probably.

Jackdaw took her back for her first look at the monsters. The Cavern's graphics engines filled a room at the far end of the RL's long central artery. Jackdaw and Adie threaded down this hall, past knots of flannel and corduroy that stood around volubly sharing their latest discoveries in a language entirely foreign to her. Those who noticed them waved, taking Adie in as if she'd been among them for years, laboring away on her few square inches of the common canvas.

Some unseen whole was taking shape here: a gargantuan corpse, hauled in chunks along this animated ant trail. Each worker they passed carried an integral piece of the spoils many times his own body weight, part of a prize orders of magnitude larger than all of them combined. Hey, her new colleagues called to her. Hey. The quick facial dip of acknowledgment: you're creating, I'm creating. We're at the peak of our assembled powers, joined together, about to set in place civilization's crowning capstone. Each distracted knowledge engineer exuded a happy preoccupation, needing no words. The whole picture scared the daylights out of her.

Jackdaw led her to the end of the corridor, and let her into a window-less back room. Between its dropped ceiling and raised floor, the space felt almost as cramped as the Cavern. Inside the sanctum, a woman in her mid-twenties, her hair the color of a Faberge egg, paced between the machine furrows, chattering back at the murmuring chrome.