Richard Powers - Plowing the Dark

She's called Fatima.

Last name? Adie asked.

Morgan.

You make her change it, she threatened, and I'll kill you.

Spiegel waved for the floor. Let me guess. Mother hails from Tunis and father from Piscataway.

I… 1 don't really know.

Humor, Jackie. Adie wrapped her arm around the boy.

It's an analog thing, Spiegel said. You wouldn't understand.

So what's she like?

Oh, she's fantastic. All over the map. She's got something new going every ten minutes. And she doesn't take any shit from men, I'll tell you that much.

Have you set a date yet?

Date? Oh no. We're still working that one out. One of these years, anyway.

Get it in writing, Spiegel stage-whispered.

So when are you going to bring her around? We need to give her our stamp of approval.

Meet you people? Before we're legally married? You think I'm crazy?

Come on, Jackie. We have to see what you're getting into here.

Jackdaw grinned beatifically. Use your imagination.

What does she do? Adie heard herself, the parental interrogation she'd forsworn.

She's a docs writer. Real verbal chick. The mouth on her? Man.

You like that in a woman? Spiegel asked. Acquerelli nodded vigorously.

What does she look like?

Stevie! Adie punished his upper arm.

Can't help it. I'm visually biased. She's dark. Dark, and… uh, nice? About Adie's height. Adie backpedaled. Documentation writer for…? Motorola.

Motorola? Steve dropped a beat. Which facility? Chicago.

The penny dropped. Where exactly did you meet this woman? In … in a Multi-User Dimension. On-line. A MUD? And you haven't really.. seen her yet? Not. Really. Not yet.

Steve looked away. Adie examined the back of her fingers. The stunted gestures of liberal tolerance.

But of course we'll see each other, before we get… We're going to meet, FTF, pretty soon.

Face-to-face, Steve told Adie. To spare her the humiliation of asking.

They spoke about it alone, in bed, after lights-out. Spiegel spoke with real pain.

The kid. Falling in love with a character in a MUD. Because she's a fast-typing put-down artist.

Why not? Adie said. That's his world. Who else is he going to fall in love with? The whole thing is always an exercise in mutual projection, anyway, isn't it?

Is it? Some projections at least have a chance of surviving the light of day.

Then don't take it out into the light of day.

What are we going to do?

About what?

About keeping Jackdaw safe?

Adie put her hand out to feel this man's neck. Stevie. Stevie. Who ever told you that safe is an option?

The packet-switched courtship grew as rich as any love match. Router by router, chat room by chat room, the new couple negotiated their future space.

She hates TV as much as I do, Jackdaw told them. She loves 'zines. I think I'll eat better once she's around.

He started to dress more carefully. He even shed a couple of pounds of hacker's corn-chip flab. Adie caught him working out in the Cavern, waving the wand like a racket, hitting a projectile back and forth with a distant, animated stick figure a dozen feet beyond the Cavern's front wall.

Aiy. The age-old battle of man versus machine. It's not enough that they have to destroy us at chess? That they've started drawing better than we do? You have to teach them how to beat us at tennis, too?

Jackdaw stopped to look and lost the serve. Oh. That's not a machine at the other end. That's Fatima.

Fa—? Hang on. You mean there's another Cavern? In Chicago?

He swung the electronic racket and cackled at her dread. No, no. She's sitting out there at a terminal, with a joystick. We converted the app interface and migrated it out to her client.

Adie watched in horror: shadowy lives playing against living shadows. A sudden pupaphobia overtook her as she watched the boy volley, step out, recompile a few new lines of code, step back in and volley again. Like Buster Keaton's projectionist, slipping in and out of his own projection. She turned from the scene to bolt, but there was no way out of the frame.

Jackdaw came to them in mid-November, high on adrenaline. She's traveling out here. Over Thanksgiving. For three days.

Here? As in Seattle-here? That's great. Are we going to get to meet her?

You're joking She's in town for three days. No way are we going to waste that on other people.

He returned to work after the holiday, destroyed.

Let me guess, Kaladjian said. She's twelve years old.

No, Freese said. She' s a hundred and twelve. But remarkably well preserved for her age.

Rajan fell in with the cadence. Don't tell us. You didn't realize from the name that she was part foreign.

Her name's not really Fatima?

She's really a guy.

She's really two guys.

She's really a LISP routine.

Jackdaw's nose flared and his mouth caved under. One tight globe of salt water pinched out of the corner of his right eye. He turned on his heel and left, over the cries of group protest that only too late realized the truth.

Freese received a one-line e-mail the following day. Jack Acquerelli would not be returning to the project.

Jackie's departure plunged them all into a cloud of bad faith.

Not your fault, Steve told Adie. But she had long ago learned to discount forgiveness and work harder. And now there was more work for all of them, shorthanded, a man down with the match still in question.

Did not need this, Lim said. Not with the finish line looming. The guy used to put in hundred-hour weeks.

But eighty of them were just playing, Kaladjian said.

You're saying there's a difference?

Adie tried to absorb the bulk of those lost man-hours herself. Slu worked around the clock. She lived in Hagia Sophia now, and wher she couldn't get into the cathedral itself, she pitched tent in the trace; of its flat-screen shadow.

That's where Stevie found her, with the next intruding news.

What is it? she asked him. One look. What's wrong?

Doris Singlegate?

She shook her head, unable to place the name.

The Mole-Woman?

She snapped to attention, revelation already making its way up her neck hair. What's happened?

They let her out. After something like two years underground. They brought her back up to the surface. She passed a physical. A few small, strange things wrong with her body clock, but nothing critical.

Stevie. Just tell me. It's not like I know the woman.

She seems to have taken her own life. Back in her own home. In her own bed.

Your whole body rejects the evidence. Not possible. You can't have been here that long. Time lived and time retrieved don't match up. Those afternoons that took a year to pass shrink, in treacherous memory, to seconds. A month of them wouldn't fill an hour. You can't account for more than a few dozen weeks, let alone two-and-fhree-quarters years.

You clutch to that dead reckoning now, as if to life. Some desperately inventive internal storyteller has won you survival through your thousand-and-one nights. And now, by the terms of the old agreement, the sentence must be lifted.