Richard Powers - Plowing the Dark

Kaladjian gave a victimized shrug. Progress is destruction with a compass.

Raj's nods accelerated a couple of hertz. It does make one wonder what the finish line looks like.

Adie dear, Spiegel said. You've come to a world where truth is stamped with its own expiration date.

Jackdaw grimaced. Not to mention the obsolete media. We still have these ancient tapes from before we ported to the Cavern? They can't be read anymore. The machines that used them have all been upgraded beyond compatibility. And even when we rebuild an antique drive from scratch? The tape has decayed; it spits out check-sum errors every three records.

The world is losing its memory. Raj toyed with a stack of printouts headed for the shredder. Whole areas of the collective brain are being wiped out as its storage degrades. We've contracted a slow virus. Global Alzheimer's.

Kaladjian lifted one shoulder. His tilted ear met it halfway. Perhaps. But look how far we managed to get, from flint to silicon, before the enterprise shut down.

The Cavern caved in for several days, while Lim and company finished debugging a new generation of graphics accelerators. Deprived of their magic testing chamber, imagination's prototypers hit a wall.

Maybe we should do a retreat or something, Vulgamott suggested to his fellow designers.

Adie snorted. Maybe we should do a full-scale rout.

Don't bail on me, please. I'm skidding out, here. Real deadlines. Real demos. No real place to test them. What's the imaginary world coming to?

Ebesen said nothing. He was ready to accommodate — always the path of least resistance.

Vulgamott got hold of a small cabin that TeraSys maintained up on the south fork of the Stillaguamish, near Mount Pilchuck. Art and Design booked the place for a forty-eight-hour stay. Ebesen's dirty flannel and corduroys, so squalid under fluorescent light, seemed almost indigenous, outdoors. Vulgamott, after two hours of the upland air, ceased twitching and began to breathe deeper. Adie went through a small sketch pad on the first afternoon. Thereafter she simply looked, with no more point than looking.

In wildness, description fell away into its parent density. The three of them walked out in the woods, into the network of living agents, rooted, burrowing, and airborne. They drifted their feet in the bone-mashing cold of the river current, the rushing fluid still imprinted with its past life as mountain snow. At night, the curl of their campfire smoke rose and obscured itself in the Milky Way's fainter smear. The haunt of owls on the hollow night turned the listening heart against all hope of representation.

They talked about what they had done, what they were doing, and what they would need to do before being anywhere near ready to release their work to the public. Months of mock-up had not yet even blocked out the floor plan of that furnished rec room of the cerebrum

they pictured.

The vines of Rousseau's Dream had spread, lovely and profuse. Its creatures had scampered in modest For-Next loops through the coded undergrowth. But the forest had remained a thought without a deed, a look without a behavior, flat and planar, less a living thing than a cadaver's cross section. A visitor could walk into the jungle moonlight, but only along fixed paths, strolling past the successive cardboard props of a tableau vivant.

Out of this dream, they'd awakened to perspective. Their tools had all scaled up: frame rate, color depth, resolution, vertices per second. And the Aries bedroom exceeded the sum of these leaps. It zeroed in on that longed-for locale that no one had yet seen but everyone knew by sight. Its bed lay thick with invitation. The sun streamed through its casements, swelling and decaying in the length of a single visit. The wood floor bent to the weight of the current tenant. And yet even that humming space was no more than a single stereo slide. The bedroom filled out its frame, but no farther, refusing to venture beyond the grotto that housed it.

Now Design had to plan its next escape. Under the sap-heavy trees, the chilled antics of a Cascade stream between their toes, the digital artists turned over the problem, less through talk than with shared scribbles. The task was obvious. They needed a way to wed inimical worlds, to combine the dream of these two chambers.

Half a dozen months, Vulgamott repeated, past the point when either of his colleagues heard him any longer. We're in a situation here, people. It's demo or die.

Or both, Ebesen said. "Both" remains a distinct possibility. In her mind, Adie wanded off down hinted-at ravines, lost in the extensions of sight, looking for the room they had to reach. The trick was how to find it without clues. How to resolve the place, without knowing what it looked like. In rapid succession, they torched each proposal put forward. All possible rooms either cloyed or curdled, too banal or too vaporous, too mundane or too incorporeal. Nothing both satisfied desire and yielded to available technique.

No more paintings, Adie said. We tried that twice. We want something that will break out of the frame.

All three knew the medium they would have to inhabit, already laid out for them. Vulgamott and Ebesen's architectural tool chest — now numbering in the hundreds of modular components, from the simple I beam to the ornate ogee molding — all but forced their hand. Their resizable image library had grown into an encyclopedia of smart architectural elements, one that made it possible for any reasonably patient person who could manage a pipe-cleaner sculpture or a box of Lincoln Logs to build her own pan-and-zoom Versailles.

With the suite of Palladian tools, prototyping a simple architectural fly-through shrank from months to weeks. The kit had never been meant as anything but its own demo, a proof of concept rather than a mission-critical development tool. Now it represented their only chance at hewing out a substantial show by press date. Even here, on the verge of the virtual, they were condemned by those absurd constraints, time and practicality.

They determined to build a dazzling building. But forty-eight hours in a remote, three-room cabin failed to produce a viable candidate. They were still tossing around possibilities as they packed to return to

civilization.

Vulgamott tried to rally them. We should do Vierzehnheiligen. An

amazing space. Mysterious, sensual, organic.

Adie jerked back, as if slugged. Oh God. God, no. We'd all be insulin-dependent diabetics within a week. How about something clean,

like… Fallingwater?

A total bear. I mean, it's a staggering building and all. But how in the

hell would we…?

Too innovative, Ebesen agreed. Too singular. The tool set wouldn't be

much of a help.

Well, Karl? Adie clasped her hands together in front of her face.

How about a time-lapse Troy?

Vulgamott howled. Ebesen, you maniac. 1 divorce you, I divorce you,

I divorce you.

All right, all right. Nobody get excited. I vote for the Temple of Diana

at Ephesus.

Oh terrific, Michael said. Why bother doing an existing structure when we can do a building that has disappeared without a trace?

Well, there is some basis for speculation…

How about the RL? Vulgamott proposed. The perfect compromise. We have all the data at our fingertips.

Kill me first, Adie said. It' s bad enough that we have to live in the

place.

Whatever we model, Ebesen insisted, has to be well made.