Richard Powers - Plowing the Dark

events…

Her neck hairs rose up, obeying their own rules. Every repeated time without exception, the harmless, artificial game advances in absolute lockstep with measurable event. The implications are inescapable. The marbles and the canisters — the simple but rigorous rules — somehow embody physical reality.

The veil fell, and she stood looking on this abandoned man. She did not know how he managed to remain behind, in such pain.

These inconsequential games mimic the most grandiose patterns we can identify. Gravity, time, light: name your fundament. Creation keeps to a few simple rules of interlocking shape and color, patterns replicating themselves across impossible distances. This is what the mathematician calls beauty. An ever more elaborate edifice spun out of the sparest symmetries. A perfection that outstrips all attempts to capture it.

She put up her palms in puzzlement. This is a bad thing?

He turned to her, his edge of aggression again sharpening. He stood and beckoned for her to follow, out the room and down the hall. They reached the Cavern, where Sybil Stance was taking her rightful slot on

the sign-up sheet.

We have an emergency, Kaladjian said. We need the machine.

Aril I'm right in the middle of— Please. Ten minutes. You can have my hour tomorrow. He booted up an environment Adie had never seen. A shape like a Cycladic figure mushroomed in front of them. Kaladjian put the wand through an unaccompanied partita. The figure metamorphosed, its planes sliding upon itself, turning inside out in a virtuoso conjuring act of knotted space.

All legitimate topological transformations of one another, he said. Adie nodded, hooked. She saw a centaur. The torso of a naked Aphrodite. A wondrous stalactite. A nexus of ribbonlike tubes passing through their own surfaces. Proteus, unholdable. We're going in, Kaladjian announced.

The figure swelled in the air around them, and they passed inside. When they steadied out again, they found themselves riding along the inside edge of a secret junction of knotted expressway lanes, the deeply entangled passages of a decadent queen conch. Brace yourself.

Kaladjian hit a button on the wand. The waterslide surfaces fragmented into the mosaic of polygons that composed them. Shards flew in all directions, a shower of math-meteors. The community of screen phenomena — a capacious, fecund, and extraneous metaphor of the machine's internal states — revealed itself to be a bastard lingua franca where alien races could meet in compromise.

Adie's body grew large, galactic, her head wrapped in a cloud of stars. They zoomed out, pulling back to a distant vantage above what condensed into a spiral nebula. She looked out across a sweeping interstellar pinwheel, its slow spokes lapping around her midriff. Each wash of stars unfolded another billion years of cosmic evolution. She swelled to the size of God's recording angel, attending at the day of Creation.

It's… magnificent. I had no idea. She felt her eyes spilling over, and did not care. There was no foolishness, no vanity, no shame in anything a body felt, looking on this.

Yes. Now here is the math behind it. He pushed a button and the expanding universe fell away into a few polynomials, breathtaking in their slightness.

She tried to say his name: An. The tag soured inside her mouth. I don't… I still don't… The man's pettiness appalled her more than ever, after what he'd just let her see. Where's the problem?

The problem? The problem is that we still live here.

He spread his hands to indicate the projectors, the modular office furniture, all the ugly bundles of cable and molded-plastic printed circuits that filled the space around them. It dawned on her. His days of true research were over. He had done no useful math, no beautiful math, for years. He, too: banished to industry. Wherever the there that the colored marble game whispered of, this man could no longer

reach it.

Words left Adie, to sound across inconceivable distances. That is no country for old men?

That is no country for old men. He measured the line, liked it. Perhaps he thought she'd made it up. Clever of a young woman to see that.

Not clever at all, in fact. Clever were those who had not seen, yet still perceived.

That was no country for refugees of any age. Some nights, when Spiegel knew Adie was home in her island hermitage, he would call, chatting away happily to her answering machine. He'd hold rambling conversations on her tape, knowing full well she was in the room screening and could hear every word.

Can I try something out on you? It's a Personals ad: "Carbon-based life-form seeking same to help fill the chilly immensity of existence." What do you think? I know, I know — the dictions a little off. How about this: "The universe is fifteen billion years old. I'm pushing forty. Looking for Solar System-based female in similar temporal predicament."

At first she listened in real time. After a while, she turned off the speaker, checking the backlog of messages only at long stretches. Finally, she pulled the machine's plug.

Early one morning in Aries, she at last hit upon the concealed hope that bound all these messy exiles to the same project. She stood in a room-sized cartoon among four men, each with his own agenda, each terrified that the breakneck pace of technology would prove too little, too late, each desperate to turn the Cavern into something more than a prohibitively expensive, slow, grainy, cold, monstrously cumbersome stereoscope. She looked through the windows of her provisional Mediterranean summer cottage, down along the fabricated path to the coast, out to the invented sea, and the farther sea beyond that one. And she saw, at last, what these men had been for so long gazing at.

The Cavern was irrelevant. The Cavern was not even a flip-card deck compared to the Panovision it pointed at. The Cavern would shrink, year after rate-doubling year. Its carapace would wither away until all the pipes and projectors and reality engines fit into a gym bag. Steady improvement would knit belief-quality graphics into the living-room walls of every middle-class condo. Pin-sized lasers lashed to the stems of reading glasses would etch conviction directly onto living retinas.

The technology meant nothing. The technology would disappear, go transparent. In a generation or two, no one would even see it. Someone would discover how to implant billions of transistors directly into the temporal lobes, on two little squares of metal foil. If not in Klarpol's lifetime, then soon enough — just around the bend of this long, logarithmic curve. The clumsy mass of distracting machine would vanish into software, into the impulse that had invented it. Into pure conception.

Something gelled, and Adie saw this primitive gadget morph into the tool that humans have lusted after since the first hand-chipped adze. It seemed the prize at the end of a half-million years of provisional leapfrogging. It was not even a tool, really. More of a medium, the universal one. However much the Cavern had been built from nouns, it dreamed the dream of the unmediated, active verb. It lived where ideas stepped off the blackboard into real being. It represented humanity's final victory over the tyranny of matter. She'd mistaken this variable room for a high-tech novelty. Now Adie saw it as the thinnest first parchment, a thing that rivaled even speech in its ability to amplify thought. Time would turn it into the most significant jump in human communication since the bulking up of the cerebellum.

The mature Cavern would become the body's deep space telescope; the test bed for all guesses; a programmable, live-in film; the zoom lens of the spirit; the umbilical cord for remote robot control; a visualization lab as powerful as human fancy; a tape deck capable of playing back any camera angle in history; a networked web of matter transporters where dispersed families would meet and greet as holographic specters. It promised the wishing lamp that all children's stories described. It was the storybook that once expelled us and now offered to take us back in.