Richard Powers - The Echo Maker

The third morning,he went alone to Dedham Glen. He needed more psychometry, to test for broader delusional tendencies. He found the place easily. Despite the tangled river valley, the town was a sheet of graph paper. Two days in this perfect grid and — barring any spatial-orienting lesions — one could find anything.

Three gigantic children were camped on the floor around Mark’s television. Mark, in his knit cap, sat between a badger in a prison outfit and a keg-chested man in hunting cap and sweats. Weber recognized them from Karin’s photographs.

On screen, a road through a rolling brown landscape reeled out from the horizon. The taillights of low-slung cars clawed across the veering asphalt. The three seated males jerked in unison with the taillights, jolting the way diabetic Jessica sometimes did, in the middle stages of insulin shock. The footage looked like home movies, handheld vérité motor sports overdubbed with a throbbing techno soundtrack. Then Weber saw the wires. Each of the trio was tethered by an umbilical to a game box. The race — part film, part cartoon — half derived from this trio’s brains.

The wires recalled Weber to graduate student days, the sunset of behaviorism: old laboratory experiments with pigeons and monkeys, creatures taught to want nothing except to press buttons and slide levers all day long, merging with the machine until they dropped from exhaustion. The three men had become the sinuous music, the serpentine road, the engine roar. But they showed no sign of dropping anytime soon. Changes on the screen produced changes in physiology, which fed back into the screen world.

The ribboning road bore hard to the right, floating, then falling. The cars lifted free, nosing into the air. Then the crunch of steel when chassis slammed back to earth and the three bodies absorbed the impact. The engines whined, choking on the pavement. The noise crashed like surf as the drivers ground for higher gears. Specks far down the chute of scenery swelled into other speeding vehicles, which the foreground cars scrambled to pass. No saying where the race unfolded. Somewhere empty. Some square state with more cows than people, midway between prairie and desert. A few tract homes, filling stations, strip malls — the tile set for heartland America. For a few seconds, it rained. Then the rain turned to sleet, sleet to snow. Daytime faded to dark. In another moment night lifted, as the race ground a few dozen more miles down the imaginary road.

Whatever damage Mark Schluter suffered, his thumbs and their wiring were still intact. Recent studies by a colleague of Weber’s suggested that enormous areas of the motor cortex of game-cartridge children were devoted to thumbs, and that many in the emerging species Homo ludens now favored their thumbs over their index fingers. The game controller had at last consummated one of the three great leaps of primate evolution.

The trio on the floor elbowed one another, their bodies extensions of the cars they piloted. They hit an open stretch where the road stopped whipping and became straightaway through sandy hills toward a looming finish line. The racers accelerated, jostling for position. They banked into a last hard right. One of the cars slid wide through the curve and fishtailed. The driver overcompensated, swinging back onto the road, into his companions’ vehicles. All three cars locked up and soared into a spectacular corkscrew. They came down, plowing into a file of slower cars cruising into the finish. One car ricocheted out of the pack and struck the filled grandstand. The screen turned a bright smear. People fled in all directions, termites from a torched hive. The car exploded into an oily flare. An arcing cry cracked open and fell back to earth as laughter. Out of the flames emerged a crash-suited figure, charred from helmet to boots, dancing crazily.

“Holy shit,” the badger felon said. “That’s what I call a big finish there, Gus.”

“Un-fucking-be-lieve-able,” the keg-chest confirmed. “Greatest fireball ever.”

But the third driver, the one Weber came to see, just droned. “Wait. Give me that puppy back. One more time.”

The engines dead, the badger glanced up and saw Weber in the doorway. He nudged Mark. “Company, Gus.”

Mark spun around, his eyes both lit and scared. Seeing Weber, he snorted. “That’s not company. That’s the Incredible Shrinking Man. Hey. This guy’s famous. Tons more famous than most people realize.”

“Pull up a spot,” the hunting cap offered. “We were just winding up, anyway.”

Weber reached into his pocket and turned on his voice recorder. “Go ahead,” he said. “Take another lap. I’ll just sit and collect my thoughts.”

“Hey! I’m forgetting myself. Where the hell are my manners?” Mark scrambled to his feet, shoving off of his cursing friends. “Shrinkster, meet Duane-o Cain. And this one here…” He pointed to the badger. “Hey, Gus. Who the hell you supposed to be, again?” The badger shot him the finger. Mark laughed, an emptying gas cylinder. “Whatever you say. This one’s Tommy Rupp. One of the world’s great drivers.”

Duane Cain snorted. “Driver? Putter, maybe.”

Weber watched the trio maneuver to a new starting line. He was thirty-four years old when he first saw one of these boxes. He’d gone to pick up seven-year-old Jessica from her girlfriend’s house. He found the girls parked in front of the tube and scolded them. “What kind of children are you, watching television on such a gorgeous day?”

The question reduced the girls to derisive howls. It wasn’t television , they sneered. It was, in fact, lobotomized table tennis stood on end. He watched in fascination. Not the game: them . The game was chunky, flat, and repetitive. But the two girls: they were off somewhere in deep symbolic space.

“How is this better than real Ping-Pong?” he asked tiny Jess. He genuinely wanted to know her answer. The same question haunted his work. What was it about the species that would save the symbol and discard the thing it stood for?

His seven-year-old sighed. “Dad,” she told him, with that first hint of contempt for adulthood and all its trouble with the obvious. “It’s just cleaner .”

His daughter never really looked back. Eight years later, she built her own computer from parts. By eighteen, she was using it to analyze the traces of light from a backyard telescope. Now almost thirty, living in Southern California, that most abstract of states, she was winning grants from the NSF for finding new planets, at least one of which would surely turn out to be cleaner than Earth.

The trio of boys conferred without words. They ran laps of intricate ballet beyond the reach of any choreographer. Weber studied Mark for signs of deficit. No saying how coordinated he had once been. But even now, Mark could run rings around Weber in any vehicle, real or phantom. He drove like a maniac. The occasional stunning fireball drew no more than a viscous laugh.

Weber was noting down Mark’s eye movements when a shout tore through the room. It seemed just another of the game’s shattering sound effects. He turned to see Karin in the doorway, her face aflame. Her hands were up, clutching the back of her skull. Her elbows flared. “ Animals . What do you think you’re doing?”

The males scrambled to their feet. Tom Rupp recovered first. “We thought we’d come keep our friend company. He needed a little diversion.”

Her left hand grabbed her neck while her right cut the air. “Are you insane?”

Duane Cain twisted under the injustice. “You want to get back on the Prozac for a minute? We’re just here to supply companionship.”

Karin waved her nails at the video game, the road still snaking mindlessly across the screen. “Companionship? That’s what you call putting him through this again?” She shot Weber a look of betrayal.