Richard Powers - Galatea 2.2

For a considerable fraction of eternity, Lentz said nothing. He looked away from my surveillance, at his notes. At the ignorant terminal.

"Empiricism?" he sneered. He seemed disappointed in me, but not surprised. Prying, snot-nosed kid. What did one expect from a kiss-and-tell, aesthete dilettante? He looked up at the picture, verifying it, although every pixel must have long ago burned permanent silhouettes into his visual cortex. When he sat in here with the door closed, the flood of color would fill his focus, immense at eye level.

He looked away again. He worried the mouse pointer, a cat feeling contrition after the kill. Come on, get up and run again. Like when it was fun.

"I suppose you want the caption?"

I didn't need a caption. I could see well enough. A homemade calendar hung by a tack, still clasping to January. I say "still," for while we had yet to reach that month, this particular one had been buried twenty Januaries ago.

Just above the paper matrix of days, a pasteup color portal opened onto a couple. They stood, arms around one another, out of focus, on a frozen and deserted beach.

The man was Lentz. He was young, as I had never seen him. He had hair. He seemed impossibly taller, slim. The woman at his side was no older. Yet this couple was ancient beyond saying. Age tented just under youth's peeling onionskin. The shutter exposed this geriatric core in X ray. It showed antiquity lying in wait, ready to blossom like an aneurysm.

The craftwork was too clumsy to be a customized mail-order gift. It had the look of a child's school project — Christmas or birthday present — from before those offerings disappeared in adolescent embarrassment. See what I made you. The earliest bribe of love.

I touched the image with my eyes. I half expected the museum guard's reprimand. But no one told me to step back. In my mind, I palpated the prematurely old man's shoulders. Before the camera, they crumpled in a last attempt at bravery. I stroked the woman's face where the cling of desperation already promised to sag it.

While I indulged myself, Lentz stood and moved to the window. Outside, a gang of grackles combed the landscaped lawn like a homicide squad dragging a field for evidence.

"Lentz. You never told me."

' "What? That I'm married? That I have a family? Everyone, Marcel. Everybody but you."

That wasn't what I meant. That he had a private life was no particular shock. And naturally, that life would be peopled. But the way these two held on to each other. Their too light clothing, their backs to the ice-crusted beach. Nothing but this other waist, this other pair of shoulders between each and their end.

The Lentz I knew could never have posed for such a shot. The Lentz I knew might well have had a wife. He might even have had a child. But my Lentz could never have known them with such hopeless intimacy.

"And you're still…?" I didn't know what I was asking.

"There is no 'still,' Marcel. 'Still' is for unravished brides of quietness."

The open lens trapped these two in terror at the slightest move. The panic in those eyes was the pose of cognition itself. The look of awareness seeing itself going down, drowning in the depths of its own simulation.

I had, the photo told me, half a dozen months in which to remember, once and for ever, what it felt like to be able to remember at all. My own craft calendars had all been swallowed up by the wraparound virtual future my era was intent on inventing. My days and weeks, the saving particulars of Here were already gone. And I, having forgotten them, was almost past caring.

The young Lentz, in a plaid shirt the likes of which will never again be sold on this earth, even secondhand, in countries that live off our discards, clamped his arm around the shoulder of his mate. She returned the stiff grip from underneath. Perhaps they were shivering. Rigorous. However they touched each other in private, this was not it.

This embrace already succumbed to terminal affection. They propped one another up, as if each had just had a mild stroke. They grasped at each other, two people out on a ledge forty stories up in the night's icy wind, having second thoughts even as their feet start to flex.

The wind off winter water made them clutch at each other like that. The chill from the child with the camera. They looked on in advance horror at the cut-and-paste project, the child urgently constructing a craftwork life preserver. Stick this on your refrigerator if you dare, to break eternity's heart and sap the will of time's worst-case scenario.

One ought to be able to hold on to anything. Anyone. It did not matter who, so long as they were there. Yet the first one, this picture said, the generative template for all that you might come to care for in this place, your buddy, your collaborator in plying life: that is the one you recognize. You learn that voice along with learning itself. You can only say, "Yes, to everything," once. Once only, before your connections have felt what everything entails.

This shoulder was the lone one that could have held that man up. That waist, the only one that could steady the woman. These two chose each other, their charm against the world's weighted vectors. Anything else but that helpless, familiar grip pinning them in place would be a push into randomness. Would tear the net.

Some scrap of holdover, supervised training told me this is the way one was supposed to end up. The way I should have ended. But even as I felt it, the desire seemed arbitrary, laughable, regressive. Marriage for life belonged to those cultural tyrannies now in the process of being shed. In another hundred years, it would seem as archaic as animism, as "thou."

If the plaid shirt was really Lentz, then this woman was truly his wife. In this clasp, the couple graduated to inseparable, mutual foreigners. Love is the feedback cycle of longing, belonging, loss. Anti-Hebbian: the firing links get weaker. C., after a decade, grew stranger to me than that college girl who had comforted me on the Quad the day after my dad died. At the end, we shocked each other in the hall of our overlearned apartment, 911 material, intruders. And we'd gotten there without a child to make us wall calendars, to arrest in scissors and glue the secret of who we once were.

I looked at the young Lentz's blueprint expression, the advance word of crevasses that would range across those facial wastes. I stared at those two shivering bodies, gone half-insubstantial already. I looked up at the real Lentz, studying the grackle dragnet outside. I measured the size of the mistake that had found him out.

Someone had failed someone else. Someone had messed with destiny. A frightened kid with an Instamatic on a frozen beach had watched love capitulate to the very air. Furious cutting and pasting split off the eternal from what always becomes of it, hung an outdated, permanent January to the back of this man's office door. This was the last couple on earth to whom the inevitable wasn't supposed to happen. The last who, by fate's oversight, were to have made it through together into frightened old age.

I crashed Imp E in complete innocence. The version had grown up on patterns and questions about patterns. It organized itself on such challenges as "What comes next in this sequence?" and "Which item in this list doesn't belong?"

One day, provoked by boredom, I asked it, "What do you want to talk about?" The question of volition trapped the rolling marble of its will into an unstable local minimum. The machine that so dutifully strove to answer every interrogation ground to a halt on that one.

Lentz needed to reset the entire run-time module, which did not endear us to the National Supercomputing Site. The connection monster was as expensive to run as it was difficult. They only gave us time in the first place because of the lack of people who could hack the massive parallelism. They thought they might get a testimonial at the end of the project. Lentz had misled them. They thought we were doing science.