Richard Powers - Plowing the Dark

In the midst of the general hilarity, O'Reilly dropped his bomb. It's all well and good for this business to have a long-term game plan. But if you're really interested in the future, you'll want to hear my latest projections.

Having predicted, out of the blue, the current oil crisis, O'Reilly's models were enjoying a surge in market value. He invited a band of stragglers from the dispersing group into the Cavern. They stood inside his global interface, looking up on the planet's closed surface.

You're looking at the latest recursively updating map of world petrochemical production and consumption. He gave them a crash course in reading the data, the thermometer of colors from cold to hot. We'll start in 1990. The fractal smoke curls unfolded and refolded in such beauty that the band gasped in pleasure.

This looks just like one of our Weather Rooms, Sybil Stance said. Like our ocean current work.

You're manufacturing some very pretty singularities there, Freese

added.

Bergen whistled. We get these same cascade effects in the new

biosim.

The Red Spot of Jupiter, Spiegel decided.

O'Reilly ticked off the count. OK: here's 2000. The hots got hotter and the cools cooled off. Here's 2010.

He called out the mileposts without passion, having seen the sequence unfold countless times. The color zones began to break up and mix more richly. They spilled like ice crystals across a frozen pane. They swirled like paints on a child's easel. They fused like molten elements in the hearts of stars.

By 2020, all the earth's surfaces began tending toward the higher frequencies. Even the lagging continents started to heat up. The whole globe went beet red, blushing or holding its breath. At 2030, the color map staggered, stumbled, then plummeted. All tones free-fell toward

blue.

After two or three attempts to stabilize, the remaining lit nations settled in around a handful of campfires. One by one, these too blinked out. Lim teetered on his feet and had to be walked around to keep from blacking out. The little band of virtual pilgrims stood in the dark,

tittering.

Rajan broke the silence. Amazing. I'd never have seen it if I hadn't believed it.

Kaladjian gave in to outrage. How can you presume to model that far out with any semblance of accuracy? Between faulty assumptions and compounding error, you're in fantasy land before you get two years down the road.

You know the funny thing? O'Reilly replied. I've run it a few hundred times, tweaking all sorts of parameters, sometimes quite dramatically. And I always get something like this.

What about all the unknowns? Political upheavals. Crazy heads of state. Grassroots revolutions. Technological breakthroughs…

They're in the model.

How can they be in the model? You don't know them. That's the whole point. They're random events.

We don't know them, true. But the last thing they are is random. Those sorts of events aren't the cause of numerical discontinuity. They're the consequence.

Freese fought to look amused. Well, Ronan. It's pretty clear what's happening. Around 2030, we develop the perfect alternative energy source. Then why that massive spike just before the crash?

We run out, Vulgamott asked. Is that it? We just run out? Sustainable growth is a contradiction in terms?

O'Reilly shrugged. I'd expect a smoother tail-off, if that were the case.

So it was with the groundhog race, cursed with the ability to cast its own mental shadow. No matter how dark the projection, someone always had heart left for another six weeks of the game.

At the moment, that someone was Jackdaw Acquerelli. You know, 2030 is right around the time that we'll be achieving total human equivalence in silicon. In another forty years, we'll finally be out of here.

Disappear into our own machine space? Spiegel asked.

Raj chuckled. Why not? That's this five-thousand-year footrace's finish line, right?

Maybe, O'Reilly said. But even human-equivalent machines will need to consume some power.

Sue Loque was first to remove her glasses and wander out of the Cavern. To hell with it. Why should we worry about posterity? What has posterity done for us lately?

The others trickled off after her. Kaladjian walked away clenched, calling back to his antagonist, You realize this means nothing, don't you? Nothing at all.

Absolutely nothing, O'Reilly agreed.

Whatever lay in wait forty years down the pike, other clients waited in

line before it.

Who are they? Adie asked Stevie. The people we're supposed to be pitching to. Who would possibly be interested in buying such a thing?

Oh, the usual suspects. Academic researchers. The theme park people. The movie people. Whoever comes after theme parks and movies. You know: the ones who are always promising consciousness-altering, mind-meld video games in time for next Christmas.

But they'll be buying the box, right? The walls and the projector and the special accelerated graphics chips? Not… our rooms?

Bits sell iron. That's how it always goes. Nobody wants cables. They want what comes through them.

But still. They aren't… it's not like they.. this won't exactly be a volume business, will it?

Spiegel stuck out his lip. Never underestimate mankind's appetite for

the next big escape.

The next big escape came and sought them out. It landed on their outstretched palms, a bird returning to its golden bough. Karl Ebesen led them to Byzantium. He told them what they were after, even before Adie and Steve could lay their meager evidence at the foot of his

cubicle.

Byzantium? You mean the place where civilization wavered. The way

that the world almost went.

Spiegel and Klarpol traded helplessness. Sure, Karl. Whatever

you say.

The imperial capital. The one that kept Rome going for centuries after Rome died. The place where West almost traveled East. Or should that he the other way around?

Ebesen launched a search, knocking over his precarious stacks of sourcebooks and clipping files in the process. He located his discredited, yellowing anthology of world art, its pages halfway on the route back to ammonia.

Here's what you're after. He put his finger on a full-page black-and-white plate. For close to a thousand years, the greatest church in Christendom. And for another five hundred years after that, the greatest mosque in Islam.

Adie peered into the interior — hulking, mysterious, impossible to make out or take in. This? But this… this is in Istanbul.

Ebesen squinted at the picture. Byzantium. Constantinople. Istanbul. A place like that can never have too many names.

Or too many incarnations, apparently. Spiegel edged in for a better look. Just church and mosque? Didn't they want to cover any other bases?

Ebesen wagged his head at an elaboration more outrageous than the thing it explained. Based on a pagan shrine. Built to outdo Solomon's temple. After a millennium and a half, still the fourth-largest church in the world. The Hagia Sophia. The Holy Wisdom.

Adie stood staring, dazed by the space. I… was there. Inside. As a child. When my father… was stationed in the eastern Mediterranean.

And had sent a postcard to a girlhood friend of the inexplicable interior: "Make sure you see this once before you die."

They pumped Ebesen for all the details he had. They stole all his reference works. Then they went after every further source he could point them toward. Karl, for his part, had only been waiting for the call. The architectural building blocks that he and Vulgamott had for so long sculpted out of syntax and thin air now rose to the thing they were made for. The source from which those parts derived.