Richard Powers - Plowing the Dark

Which is?

"Meditations in Time of Civil War?"

He pronounced the word to rhyme with "far." The Americans studied one another.

Buy you a pint if you recite?

You could have gotten it for free, woman. But it's too late now. They went over to The Office, where the standing suite of TVs offered the full range of available data streams. O'Reilly parked them in a booth in front of the drive-through news headlines. Apparently history was still in the throes of ending. The largest, most heavily armed nation on earth was cracking apart, apparatchik by apparatchik, scattering its warheads into a host of makeshift republics. Western experts were fanning out through the Eastern Bloc, ministering to the total economic disintegration by doling out shock therapy.

The beers arrived. O'Reilly warmed to his. You think the fourteenth century was a free-for-all? You think the Dark Ages were a major step backward? Amateur night, my friends. Small change. We're watching the show that those acts merely opened for.

Spiegel laughed at the hyperbole. Come on, Ronan. What are you talking about? The Cold War's over. The most destructive suck of resources in history.

Well, that's your problem right there, friend.

What? You're going to get nostalgic for Mutually Assured Destruction, just because it was familiar?

It kept things in check, that particular madness. It kept those resources of yours from realizing their full capacities. Ronan, Adie said, I've never seen you like this. That's because I've never been like this.

The news cycled through its cavalcade. Europe's vacationland, Yugoslavia, prepared to repeat the unthinkable.

All right, we have a problem there, Steve conceded. But doesn't that whole morass go back to the Ottomans?

The Iraqis still occupied by force the world's most concentrated dome of oil, invited there by the United States, which now threatened Armageddon if they did not vacate.

Stevie fidgeted. Well, you can't use the Middle East to prove anything. The Middle East has been self-destructing since the dawn of civilization.

Now we know the reason for the oil price hike that my model predicted a few months ago. Too bad I couldn't predict the cause.

They'll have to back down, Adie said. It's suicide otherwise, isn't it?

O'Reilly pointed to her, then put the tip of his pointer to his own nose.

The news stories did not wait for explanation. They went on to describe an American prison population greater than Orlando, with a per capita cost that outstripped most Ivy League schools. Lockups, the cable said, had doubled in less than a decade, making no discernible dent in the crime rate. O'Reilly glanced over at the Americans and raised his eyebrows.

Spiegel shrugged. We're a lawless people, Marshal. Always have been.

Adie thumped the booth. Hey! You promised us a recitation here. We're not picking up your tab if you don't deliver.

"Meditations in Time of Civil War"?

Adie nodded. Stevie shook his head.

O'Reilly looked into the foam on his beer, reading the scraps of text there. It' s that bit toward the end, he said. The Stare's Nest at My Window. The words, when he finally spoke them, came out in astonished starts, like a gift left on the table of an empty room, locked from the inside.

The bees build in the crevices

Of loosening masonry, and there

The mother birds bring grubs and flies.

My wall is loosening; honey-bees,

Come build in the empty house of the stare.

Each looked away from the others, into a lost place. O'Reilly on his country, Spiegel on his abandoned calling, and Klarpol on the bee-loud Crayon World.

---------------

O'Reilly's despair revealed itself in another collective shit-shoot at week's end. Freese called a meeting and laid out the revised timetable for the next half a year, leading up to the commercial Cavern rollout in the spring. Then he threw open the floor to the usual free-range futurism that any gathering of two or more of them always degenerated into.

Everyone agreed that the data transfer rates would continue to rise without foreseeable limit. Lim predicted they'd be able to move complex surfaces around at film quality without dropping a frame by the mid-nineties. When the curve of data compression and the curve of bandwidth crossed, people would be able to swap imaginative spaces as easily as they now traded roses or bottles of Chardonnay.

But who's going to make those spaces? Vulgamott wanted to know. Doesn't matter how wide the pipes get, if all we're going to pump through them is shit.

Aesthetic elitist, Rajasundaran said. You don't think that content is also an engineering problem?

Just you wait, Mikey. Once the Cavern develops an installed client base, things are really going to take off. Loque rolled the threat of fecundity around on her tongue tip, savoring it. If we can get the kinks out of voice-activated, user-directed, high-level VR-CAD, virtual spaces are going to come pouring out as fast as users can dream them up.

Vulgamott cocked his head. And when exactly is this breakthrough slated to happen?

By the end of the decade, Loque said.

Century, Jackdaw corrected.

Millennium, Rajan deadpanned.

Wait until the immersant starts to design pilot worlds on the fly. Clearly Loque couldn't wait. Who knows what will come pissing out of the collective imagination.

Kaladjian almost choked. Who wants to live in a world pissed on by the collective imagination?

We're approaching the point of full symbolic liberation. Free and infinite creation of imagery. Loque almost sang it, gospel-style.

What's the point? Ebesen asked. Wasn't there enough imagery out there already?

But reality had never been large enough, because the body had never been large enough for the thing it hosted. Where else but in the imagination could such a kludge live? The engineers carried on speculating. Human appetite would not stop short of the fully deformable universe. The walk-in hologram was right around the corner. Full-body force-feedback devices would extend illusion to the crucial sense of touch.

Electronic skin promised pleasures deeper than the real thing. Full six-direction telepresence would follow shortly thereafter, linking the mind to remote robotic agents anywhere in space, lifting human senses off the face of the planet.

Jackdaw opened up the latest hot topic — painting images directly onto the human retina. A couple of competing groups were busy honing micro-scanning lasers up to 10K by 10K scan lines, close enough to the resolving power of the retina to call an image continuous. Now if you can get the bandwidth to flip these images at fusing rates, you can take direct control of the whole field of vision. The complete airspace…

Belief, Adie said, is not a question of bandwidth.

Lim looked surprised. What else can it be? That's the variable, isn't it? A question of how much symbol you can fit in the pipe at one go…?

I'm taking bets, Raj announced. On the precise year that computer-generated worlds will first be mistaken for NSR.

NSR? hapless Adie asked.

Non-simulated reality. You know. The secular world. All this opaque stuff.

They got together an ad hoc office pool. Everybody agreed to put up 1 percent of the pots of money they were all going to make, once their machine started selling. The one who came closest to guessing the year that simulation finally surpassed reality would win the kitty?