Richard Powers - Plowing the Dark

Now they won't let you play?

Well, they let me sit in. But they're turning the whole thing into this

gigantic Rubik's Cube.

That's their thing. It's what they do, babe.

I know that's what they do. What am I supposed to do?

Sit in and listen, maybe? It's how I got into this racket

Serious? What did you do before?

Before what?

Before learning to program?

Oh, I taught myself to program when I was twelve. I had to cover for my parents. They couldn't even handle their dimmer switches. But before I started listening in on the boys — before I learned how projects worked — I was… just a programmer.

Adie went back and listened. She followed the four males as they invented problems, then invented solutions to throw at their problems. She watched them communicate by grunts and silences. She studied Jackdaw, Steve, and Raj as they hacked at their huge triple concerto for QWERTY keyboards, lost to a runaway pruning algorithm, while Kaladjian etched away on complex functions with a number-two pencil into yellow legal pads.

She sketched them in turn, capturing their shared trances in her own media. Their facial muscles reminded her of her father's, snoring on the sofa in any of a dozen Quonset living rooms, sleeping off the latest controlled R-and-R drunk, twitching in a dream of final, anesthetized escape. But the goal of these four men differed from her father's on one essential account. Her father retreated into a place that he hoped would silence the outside world. These four men, on the other hand, worked to build a mutual mirage that would match its source, noise for noise.

There's some kind of major tension there, Adie told Loque. / don't think any of them likes Kaladjian any more than I do. Bingo, babe. He's a nasty man.

Deeply creepy. But he knows a shitload. So everyone manages to make allowances for him, on strictly practical grounds.

Well sure. That's easy for them. They come from the same world as he does. They speak his language.

Not really. Not with any specificity. Anyway, that's not the real issue. They put up with him. They use him. The social contract, hon. They're getting something from him they can't get for themselves. I think he's masturbating over me.

He's what? You mean in private, right? Now how do you figure that? I'd really like to know.

Oh, I don't have any hard evidence. It's just this sixth sense. More like an eighth, if you're keeping count. I can always tell if there's somebody I'm working with who…? It's like radio waves. You can't ordinarily perceive them, but if you have the right equipment…

Uh, Ade? Sweetheart? I don't know how to tell you this. But any one of us might be putting out that channel.

Rajasundaran alone enjoyed going head-to-head with the team's problem child. Indifferent to the drama of human personality, he savored each clash with the Armenian as if it were a good cricket test match.

We ought to make it, he said one day, so that closing the shutters actually dampens all the ambient sounds coming from outside the bedroom windows.

Kaladjian went for the easy kill. A pointless exercise. A complete

waste of processing power.

No, it's interesting. What might damping do to create a sense of

inside and out?

Don't ask vapid questions, Kaladjian said.

What is your algorithm for telling vapid questions from their opposites? Jackdaw held up his hands in a T. Please, guys. We can't afford to start with the philosophy stuff, again.

Kaladjian ignored the chance for peace with honor. A vapid question is one that any mature researcher recognizes as fruitless. You are willing to be ruled by consensus? You? All right. Then it's one where the answer serves no end but itself. Raj studied Kaladjian's face, as if he were his own portrait. When you look at the Pythagorean theorem, when you draw it graphically…? When you actually build little squares on each side, why should the two smaller squares be equal in area to the largest one? Is that a vapid question?

Yes. Kaladjian smiled, even as the trap took shape.

But it is also a profound question as well?

Well. That depends.

Spiegel waved his arms, drawing fire. There are no vapid questions.

Only vapid questioners.

May I ask you one? Adie asked Kaladjian. Probably vapid? What exactly is your problem?

Kaladjian blinked condescension. His smile easily absorbed the attack. I suppose you find me largely contemptuous.

Pretty much, Adie chirped.

The kind of mutual flaming that enlivened a good Multi-User Dimension turned Jackdaw's stomach when it occurred face-to-face. Maybe we should put all this human stuff back in the box and get on with our work?

The others humored him. Hours later, with the project scattered for the day, Adie cornered Kaladjian in his immaculate cubicle. So tell me.

Kaladjian looked up, waiting. And what exactly would you like me to tell you?

Why you're at war with the rest of creation.

The Armenian appraised her for the length of a short syllogism. Is that what I am?

Yes.

He thought for a minute. You wouldn't understand.

Adie swallowed the stream of ready profanity that welled up in her throat. Try me with the dumbed-down version.

Something in the challenge appealed to him. He gestured for her to sit, then turned his back on her and gazed out his window into the rain-dripped woods. You know what I do for a living?

Something to do with numbers.

His laugh condensed to a bitter nib. I've told you already, young woman. Everything has something to do with numbers.

Not young, she said.

The silence lasted long enough for Adie to think she'd been dismissed. Then he broke it, addressing the plate glass.

Say the thing that gives you more pleasure than anything in existence is to arrange a set of colored marbles according to strict and surprisingly sparse rules. God knows why, but the pastime fascinates you. So long as you're not hungry or cold or otherwise impaired, you want to devote yourself to it.

Painting, she said. Something like painting.

The hardest kind of painting. The most accountable. The more you push the marbles around, the harder it is to get them into interesting configurations. But you're not alone in the pursuit. A handful of other devotees have the same obsession. Everyone looks over one another's work, fixing and extending. You memorize all the beautiful moves of the grand masters. This goes on for a few thousand years. Every so often, someone stumbles onto a hidden wrinkle, one that puts the marbles into a surprise configuration, special, pleasing, something no one expected.

Each of them stared off at an altarpiece the other couldn't see.

Then, out of the blue, someone discovers that the marble game is a profound reformulation of an interlocking canister game, unknown to you, played by another circle of monks centuries ago on the other side of the world and shelved as a useless curiosity. These two unrelated, formally beautiful pursuits turn out to be, in a deep, singular, and unsought way, synonymous.

She nodded toward some analogy. The concealed and ubiquitous

golden mean.

A truly shattering insight descends on some master practitioner. Colored marbles and interlocking canisters, taken together, form a perfect translation of phenomena in the physical world. The patterns of marbles and canisters compose a map of, say, the cycle of tides or the bends in a river. And this correspondence works, not only after the fact, but in advance of it The game makes it possible to predict all kinds of otherwise unknown, otherwise unlooked-for, otherwise immeasurable