Richard Powers - Galatea 2.2

But I did not know A. at all. All I knew was her name.

I still worked at times from the computer lab housed in the bowels of English. Helen and I could talk anywhere. She did not care where on the campus backbone I logged on. She seemed perhaps marginally stiffer over the ASCII link than she was in conversation. But that was Helen's lone grudge against the remote humanities. The lab swarmed at all hours with students trying to coax paper assignments out of recalcitrant keyboards. I entered the fray one afternoon, almost spinning around and leaving when I saw her. She perched over a stack of Henry James novels, pushing the hair from her eyes and leaning into her typing.

I took the terminal behind hers, short of breath, as if I'd sprinted there. I considered turning myself in to the campus police to spare her the bother. My telltale heart had to work flat out to be heard over the machines' chorus of cooling fans.

I telnetted over to the Center, managing to make the link, to hit the right keys by accident. A., six feet in front of me, hacked in agitation at her writing. I threw her off somehow, sitting this close. The scent of my pheromones.

Of course, I represented nothing to this woman, not even agitation. Her trouble was real, mechanical. She aimed her exasperation at the keyboard. Server lag held up the show, and her client computer failed to respond. She suffered a network virus, the brainchild of some software prodigy who would not have defaced the decal on a stranger's car but who thought nothing of malicious destruction of stored idea.

A. fumed in analog rage. She thrashed at the command and control keys, using the mouse cruelly. She snorted like a bull. She threw one hand up in the air. To no one at all, she called out, "What's the waiting period on handguns in this state?"

I'd heard her so often in my sleep that the sound of her voice shocked me. No one stopped typing even long enough to chuckle.

She couldn't kill me more than once. I leaned forward, matching her tone. "Shorter than the wait on network response." I looked down and saw myself from a distance, quaking like a sixteen-year-old.

She swung around to register me, distracted. "I thought as much." She turned back to her screen. I lived out that life where those were the only words we would ever exchange.

Another aggravated minute and she looked around again. "You're not, like, digitally literate by any chance, are you?"

I mumbled something so doped it belied any claim to competence. But I stood, walked over, and despite the attack of palsy, helped her retrieve her afternoon's work from the ether.

"Magic," she declared. She gathered her printout and disk. She stuffed them, along with the pile of James, in a black rucksack. "Thanks! I gotta run." And she abandoned me to the endless process of revision.

I saw her some days later at the department mailboxes. It took two beats to convince myself I could greet her legitimately.

She took three to respond. "Oh, hi." She reached out a hand, not to touch, but to affix me in space. Her wrist went down and her fingers up, pointing at me. A confiding gesture, a cross between a fifties hand soap commercial and a brass-extended Thai classical dancer. "From the computer lab, right?"

I introduced myself.

Her mouth made a cipher of uninterested surprise. "Oh. You're the Parasite-in-Residence, aren't you?"

"Yep. That's me." Yep? I heard Lentz whisper to me. Yep?

"I heard you were arrogant." I thought it might be worth telling Helen: the various names for isolation.

"I–I have an image problem."

She gave her name. I tried to look as if I were committing it to at least short-term memory.

"How old are you?" she asked.

"I was just heading for a coffee," I answered. My first since the age of fourteen. "Care to join me?"

She looked up. The hand again, calculating. Worth it, not worth it? She would have bolted in an instant if she knew I wanted her company.

"I guess I could use a cup. I've this deadly seminar at two, and I need all the help I can get."

I maintained myself on the way to the café. If not Garrick or Gillette, I at least avoided utter nitwittery. I felt disembodied. Detached. Steeped in emergency-room calm. War coverage with the sound turned off.

We talked shop, the one shop we had in common. Grad school was her life. I'd lived through it recently enough to pretend I remembered it. I told her the story of my existence, or at least the radio mix. Everything but the essentials. I told her how I'd always thought I'd be a physicist, until I heard Taylor interpret texts.

"Where was that?"

"Ai! I'm sorry. Here. All here."

"Professor Taylor? I don't think I've heard of him."

"He died. A couple of years before you arrived." Traceless in her generation.

"And you never finished?"

"Not in so many words, no. I guess I wrote my first novel instead."

She laughed. "Probably more worthwhile than the diss." The way a person might say that stamp collecting might be worth more to the race in the long run than, say, investment banking. "What made you leave?"

I told her how specialization left me parochial. I told her that theory and criticism had shaken my belief in what writing might do. I told her about my father's death and the seminar where we counted the feet of that Robinson sonnet on mercy killing.

I was talking too much. "How about you? How far along are you?"

She grew restive and subdued all at once. "Not as far as I thought."

"You've taken the master's exam?"

"Yeah." Miles away.

"When?"

She laughed. "Who wants to know?" She took a slow sip. "It seemed like such a landmark while I was doing the run-up to it. I worked so hard to prepare. Then two days, a few questions. They say okay, you know this stuff. It's over. You don't even get a chance to flex."

"But now it gets fun, right?"

"You think? I'll be middle-aged by the time I get the doctorate. No offense."

I hiked up a grin. "None taken."

"And no matter how good I am, I might be waiting on tables afterward, like all the other Ph.D.s in literature. They lied to us, you know. By accepting us into the program. They implied we'd have jobs when we were done."

"Nobody gets work?"

She snorted. "One in four, in a good year. And some of those who get jobs are repeats, out for their third or fourth time. The whole profession is a total pyramiding scheme."

"And by the time you guys get the chain letter. ."

"It'll take more new bodies to finance the payoffs than there are undergraduates in the galaxy."

A. stopped to greet a passerby and to wave at someone seated two tables away. She knew half the people in the café. I, too, now fit somewhere in her star system's outer orbits.

"I wouldn't feel like such a sucker if the whole process weren't such a bilking. This is the most class-conscious society I've ever been part of. The department superstars lord it over their minor tenured colleagues, who saddle all the junior faculty with shit work, who take it out on the senior grads, who have no time for the master's candidates, who hold the undergraduates in contempt. That's not even mentioning the nonacademic staff."

"Is it that bad? I'm out of the loop." So far out that I could not even pick up her rhythm.

"Worse. We carry the same teaching load as faculty, and get paid maybe a seventh what you do. Socially, we're pariahs. I doubt the turf wars in business are half as bitter."

"How can the fight be so ugly over so small a piece of pie?"

A. grunted. "It's ugly because there's nothing to fight over."

We could buy a house. She'd never have to worry about making a living again. I could call New York, tell them I had another book in me after all. She could spend all day living, recovering the pleasure of the text.