Plowing the Dark

21

The world machine bore on, in the face of the unbearable. Its overburdened angel engine failed to overheat. Not right away, in any event. Not all at once. It survived the latest massacre of hunger-striking students. It absorbed the intimate documentation, the grainy aerials and close-ups, the midrange establishing shots that saturated video's every free market. Knowledge returned, civilization's bad penny, even this late in the scheme of things. It played and replayed the rote vignette: armies firing on unarmed crowds. Only the scale, the mechanical efficiency, the presence of cameras made this round seem in any way unique.

History and its victims kept their hands to the plow, broken, exhausted, like an old married couple trapped for life in love's death lock, unable to break through to that sunlit upland. The future, under construction, leveraged to the hilt, could only press forward, hooked on its own possibility. Hope not only persisted; it made a schoolgirl spectacle of itself, skirt in the air, all shame on view.

Fall was well into its return engagement. The rains signaled an early and long winter. Adie Klarpol grieved for current events until she could no longer feel them. Then another shame gripped her, more private and local. She'd lived here for the better part of a year and had not yet learned the first thing about this town. It was as if she'd had room in her for only one exploration at a go. Now the days began to lose their length and weight, heading to winter. She vowed to get out a little, while there was still time.

She laid out a box around the downtown, one of those numbered grids that archaeologists use to inventory a virgin field. She rode to the top of the Space Needle, fixing a shorthand map of the streets' layout. From that bird's-eye view, she picked out sights to acquire over the next half-dozen Saturdays. She turned over every inch of the City Center. She got the Woodland Park Zoo out of the way early, racing past the various forms of captivity. She paid her overdue pilgrimage to the Asian Art Museum and the Frye, blasting through them with the same guilty squeamishness.

Jefferson, James, Cherry, Columbia, Marion, Madison, Spring, Seneca… She clicked the streets off, climbing and diving with the strangest sensation, feeling as if she were wanding through them. As she walked, the high-resolution, water-lapped horizon swelled and filled, without pixilating or dropping frames. She swung her head side to side, and life tracked her pan seamlessly. The piers, Alki Point, Pike Place Market: all appeared to her astonishingly solid, with fantastic color depth, and no trade-off between realism and responsiveness. When the sun chiseled its way through a chink in the stratocumulus and, for fifteen seconds, blazed the cityscape into highest contrast, Adie discovered the real use of binary. The greatest value of the clumsy, inexorable, accreting digitization of creation lay in showing, for the first time, how infinitely beyond formulation the analog would always run.

She prowled, one blustery Saturday, up and down the four floors of the Mindful Binding, that fantastic, expanding, used-book universe perfect for getting lost in. She headed first for Architecture, searching for scannable plans that might be of interest to Ebesen and Vulgamott, peace offerings for having abandoned them. Then — old bad habit— Art. The oversized color coffee-table books just sat there on the shelves, past hurting anyone. And there was no one at all to catch her looking.

She moved on to Travel, Victoriana, and Local History. Then, decorously delayed, she paid the obligatory visit to her first love, Juvenile Fiction. And there in that most unlikely place, she ran into Stevie Spiegel. The last person alive she would have figured on meeting under that heading.

He saw her, and his eyes darted quickly away to check if he might slip off unseen. But they were both caught. Adia Klarpol! What brings you out into the light?

She laughed. Not a full-blooded vampire yet. Still just a novitiate, remember? Don't we get to venture abroad for short intervals during the first year?

Sure, sure. Whatever gets you through the night.

Besides, I could ask you the same thing.

Me? I like the light. I make it a point to get out in it. Once every other month or so, whether I need to or not.

She gestured to the motley-colored bindings. Kids' books, Stevie? You're not responsible for any illegitimate little charges that I don't know about, are you?

He blushed. Hope not. It's… He wrestled with expediency. It's just that I've been looking for this one story…

Since you were nine?

Well, seven, if you must know.

Called?

Oh. Now. If I knew what the damn thing was called, I wouldn't still be looking for it after all this time, would I?

Author? Subject?

Gone. All gone. My daughter, my ducats.

Hang on a minute. You've been trying to locate a book for thirty years, and you can't remember what it's about?

Oh, it was a fabulous story, if that's what you mean. This boy has the ability to make the things he imagines come into existence, just by — and here I'm a little shaky on the exact mechanism—

Stevie. You're hopeless. Was this an older book? American? English? Translated?

It was about so big. Amazing illustrations, mostly sepia and magenta. Oh. Why didn't you say so in the first place? That narrows it down

considerably.

He hung his head. They scoured the shelves together, separately, in silence. Each looking for a secret buried treasure. Neither of them finding.

She capitulated first. That's it I'm taking off.

You going somewhere? Or do you have a minute?

I have my whole life, she told him. Until Monday.

They wandered at random through the afternoon-soaked streets. The air thickened and expanded around them as they stirred it with their bodies. They talked shop, their only safe common denominator.

So how s Art s Greatest Hits going?

She shrugged. It's still a jungle out there.

They looked up: Pioneer Square. Sit for a minute? he asked. Expecting to be refused.

They found a vacant bench. Adie sat and exhaled. Unfolded. The sun ducked in and out through a scattering crowd of cloud.

God, she said. Damn. I feel like the Mole-Woman. You know? The one they've buried in that hermetic sunken shelter? The woman who lives in that Ramada Inn lab at the bottom of a mine shaft, with the flock of video cameras and microphones pointed at her around the clock? What's her name again?

Mmm… Doris.. Singlegate?

Stevie. You never cease to amaze me. How long has she been underground?

Good question. It has to be at least a year.

And what's the point, again?

Study her physiology. Changes in biological clocks and such. In the absence of all outside cues.

You science types are all sickos.

He laughed, a little offended. Since when do you lump your old fellow traveler with the science types?

Ever since you wired up your iambs.

Look who's talking. But I'll admit to a certain sick fascination with the Mole-Woman. I hear she's gone sidereal. That her body's reset itself onto a twenty-five-hour cycle. Can you imagine? Every four weeks, she loses a whole day.

What do you mean, "imagine"? How long have I been working for you thugs, anyway? I'ò ahead of schedule.

At least we let you come up for air now and then.

Spiegel produced a sack of slightly linted honey-coated peanuts from his jacket pocket. Adie ate the minimum that politeness dictated. Stevie swung his head east to west, a pivoting Minicam. Through his eyes, she saw the square unfold. A clump of people queued up for the next Seattle Underground tour. Knots of autonomous agents milled about the lost pergola, each holding to the hem of a private goal.

People school, Adie said. They flock. Have you ever noticed?

He nodded. They're looking for places of power. But they cant find them, because none exists anymore.

Places…?

You know. Stone circles. Barrows. Temples, cathedrals, mosques, pagodas. Even town halls, I suppose, once upon a time.

Stevie. I thought you'd graduated from poetry. I thought you were sticking to subroutines these days.

He flashed his can't-hurt-me-with-that smile. Not entirely incompatible, I've found.

And these places of power of yours…?

All dried up. Where's our Stonehenge these days?

What, they've moved it from Salisbury Plain? Those vandals.

Spiegel snickered. No, it's still sitting there. Behind a chain-link fence. Salisbury Cathedral, down the road, is no better. Two pounds for a peek, and a little numbered walking booklet demystifying all the high points.

Adie waved her hand outward. I don't suppose you'd be willing to count a colorful totem pole and a tasteful bust of Chief Seathl as magic lenses?

People don't even see those things. They blow right past them, on their way to the stores.

Well, the stores, then. The malls.

I'm talking about places where we can be subsumed by forces larger than ourselves.

You've obviously never run up a monolithic MasterCard tab at Bloomie's, have you?

Places where we can reconstruct ourselves and nature. Where people can share transforming experiences.

The Kingdome?

His lips tightened, without much mirth. All right. Adie sobered. Books, then. Who has time to read anymore? Little magenta books from your childhood. Lost. Broken.

Movies. Of course. Movies.

Too solipsistic. You sit there for an hour and a half, chained up in the dark. Immersed, sure, but eyes forward, on the screen. Your guts get turned inside out, completely manipulated, fine-tuned by the industry's latest big release. But two weeks later, you cant even paraphrase the plot. Adie threw a few honeyed peanuts to the birds. Every pigeon in the Pacific Northwest went into an all-points feeding frenzy. Why do I have this sneaking suspicion about where you're heading here?

He nodded. You got it I mean, the car, the airplane, even printing. They only changed the speed with which humans can do existing tasks. But the computer…

Ah ha! Adie said, slapping him on the thigh. The computer changes the tasks. Other inventions alter the conditions of human existence. The computer alters the human. It's our complement, our partner, our vindication. The goal of all the previous stopgap inventions. It builds us an entirely new home.

Hey? What's wrong with the old home? I liked living in the old home. Did you? He held her eye. She looked away first. Well, however you feel about the new one, you have to admit, it's out of this world. Oh, that much Ym sure of.

You know what we're working on, don't you? Time travel, Ade. The matter transporter. Embodied art; a life-sized poem that we can live inside. It's the grail we've been after since the first campfire recital. The defeat of time and space. The final victory of the imagination.

Whoa there, cowboy. It's four bedsheets and some slide projectors. Oh, you ain't seen nothin yet. Forget the technology for a moment. I'm talking about the raw idea. The ability to make worlds — whole, dense, multisensory places that are both out there and in here at the same time. Invented worlds that respond to what we're doing, worlds where the interface disappears. Places we can meet in, across any distance. Places where we can change all the rules, one at a time, to see what happens. Fleshed-out mental labs to explore and extend. VR rein-vents the terms of existence. It redefines what it means to be human. All those old dead-end ontological undergrad conundrums? They've now become questions of engineering.

Adie tilted her head, withholding and conceding at the same time. What makes you think…? Nothing else has ever worked. All the arts, all the technologies in the world have failed to placate people. Why should it be any different this time around?

First, because we're assembling them all into a total—

Na, na. That's Wagner. That's Bayreuth. And you see all the good that did.

But the Cavern blows opera out of the box. We're not just passive recipients anymore. We'll become the characters in our own living drama.

She shook her head. The problem isn't going to answer to technology, you know. The problem is inside us. In our bodies.

The Cavern is the first art form to play directly to that body. We're on the verge of immediate, bodily knowledge.

It doesn't work that way, Stevie. We habituate. Something in us doesn't want to stay sublime for very long.

We can be refreshed. Revitalized, by the sheer density…

She took in Pioneer Square in one glance: this palpable place, the master foil to Stevie's crazy vision. All at once, the tap of sunlight opened. Why not life, then? she said. Life itself, as our final art form. Our supreme high-tech invention. It's a lot more robust than anything else we've got going. Deeply interactive. And the resolution is outstanding.

But we can't see life. He gestured to include the world's tourists, rushing through the miraculous density of day's data structure without so much as a second glance. Not without some background to hold it up against. In order for the fish to know that it's swimming in an ocean-He has to jump into the frying pan?

Spiegel snorted. Something like that. Something like that.

Some cloud passed from off the face of the sun. The sky grew so briefly radiant that it forced Adie's face up. Something in the light felt so desperate for sharing that it stretched out the deficit in her heart and left it, for the length of that glint, fillable. Breezes were stronger than reason. They just didn't last as long.

Nothing, she said, nothing we make will ever match sunlight. A beautiful day beats all the art in the world.

He looked at her oddly. As if they were bound together. As if they had the luxury of the rest of their lives to come to terms with each other. I wouldn't know. I live in Seattle.

That reminds me, she said. Car. Ferry. Island. She stood and stretched. Garden. Dinner. Sleep. Wake. Work.

He stood with her. Where are you parked? I'll walk you.

They steered uphill, through the public sphere, avoiding by complex collision algorithm a throng of other autonomous agents loose on their own improvised routes. They pressed along Occidental, above the buried Underground warrens. A juggler to their left kept a small pastel solar system twirling in orbit. From the south floated the sound of a busker picking out "Will the Circle Be Unbroken?" Panhandlers of all races, colors, and creeds approached them with elaborate narratives— wives in vehicular distress, misunderstandings with employers involving salary moratoria, momentary misplacement of all worldly possessions— then retreated again, fifty cents richer, wishing them both the best of available afternoons.

They plotted a course through Occidental Park, midway between the totem pole and the knockoff pseudo-Greek plaster sculpture directly across the square from it. Adie threw repeated backward glances over her shoulder through the peopled fray.

It's bothering you, he caught her. Isn't it?

What is?

That statue. What's the matter? Can't name that tune?

Oh, I guess it's supposed to be an imitation of some kind ofkouros. One of the Apollos, maybe? Hard to tell. It's not a very good copy, to say the least

That's it? Don't look. What else?

She stopped and closed her eyes. Well, the size, for one thing. Too big. And it has all its limbs. I don't think any real ones are that intact.

That's all?

Can I peek again?

No.

The colors off. But I guess it's hard to make gypsum look like marble. And the face isn't right. More Roman than Archaic, I think.

And?

She shrugged.

Go ahead. Look.

Well, it bugs me that it's draped. I mean, really. Isnt the muzzling of the NEA bad enough? Next thing you know, the Met's going to be chipping off all the gonads with a chisel, like they did in the Middle Ages.

That's it?

She stamped in place. You tell me, Stevie. I give.

Come on. Let's go have a look.

They turned and doubled back. She stood in the prow of her step, watching the plaster statue swim into focus. Each step upped the resolution until she called out, My God.

Yep, Spiegel said. You got it.

She kept walking, as if additional evidence might overturn the obvious. They walked up to the threshold of the sculpture, its optimal viewing horizon. Close enough to see it blink, twitch, breathe.

Steve addressed the work. She thinks it's a disgrace that you're draped.

Adie dragged him away, trawling in her purse for some change to pitch into the inverted discus at the statue's feet.

She thinks that today's modern audience is mature enough to take their Classical antiquities without censorship…

She twisted his arm up behind his back, marching him. She cast another look over her shoulder, like Lot's wife. Like Orpheus. The statue refused to ripple so much as a crow's foot around its wet irises.

Across the square, she loosened her grip on his arm. So your eye is better than mine. Is that what you're trying to tell me?

He twisted free of her clamp. Their hands caught each other, holding on for a few awkward seconds.

Beginner's luck. Besides: I noticed him earlier, setting up.

Spiegel's futurist vision nagged at her for days afterward. He was mad, of course. But certain of his formulations made Adie wonder just what program she was, in fact, working on. For her, the electronic doll-house's sheer inconsequence had returned her to pleasure. And now pleasure — it shamed her to admit — intensified in the suggestion that it might be headed somewhere.

From the scorpion-tailed branch of one of her digital mango trees, she hung that fluid, flaming Munch painting of three northern women, hands behind their backs, midway between aesthetic transport and anxiety attack. And on the flip side of the bitmap, for anyone who walked around to the far side of the picture, she penciled a calligraphic quote from the painter: "Nature shows the images on the back side of the eye."

Jon Freese e-mailed her, asking for a jungle open house.

It's not ready yet, she cabled back.

He insisted. Just for the other in-house groups. So you can get some formal feedback.

The open house turned into a group show. Loque demoed a major new concept for writing paintbox filters. Got the idea from working with the artsy chick.

All hers, Adie objected. Don't look at me.

Instead of starting with bit-fiddling algorithms and trying to match them to artistic styles, we scan in a dozen examples of a given artist and make the edge-detection and signal-processing routines build up a catalog of stylistic tics.

Not tics, Adie said.

Pardonnez-moi. Mannerisms.

Love it, Spiegel said. Sort of the opposite of paint-by-numbers?

Ari Kaladjian stewed in place. You mean that you are giving up on the idea of formulating those functions that—?

We're not giving up on anything, Ari. We just thought we'd explore a new angle and see where it leads.

I ask you again: Does it do us any good to produce a cute little parroting routine, without learning how to formalize its behavior?

We're just letting the machine do the formalizing, Sue said.

Adie's turn came. Her colleagues kept together as a group down the twisting paths in the undergrowth, stumbling over each new visual quote as if by accident. They gasped at the nativities, oohed and aahed at the animated still lifes, and laughed at the illuminated monks embroidering their scrolls with vegetation that spilled off the vellum and grew into the jungle all around them.

On a path near the back edge of the forest, Kaladjian attacked. Will someone please tell me the point of this whole peculiar exercise?

Freese rose to Adie's defense. Come on, An. Its a demo. No more than everyone else's.

Yes. But what exactly does it demonstrate? It has no real three-dimensional modeling or ray tracing. The image field remains planar. There's no interaction to speak of. Aside from a few charming animal animations, the sprites are static. And the depicted data mean nothing at all. Hardly a state-of-the-art demonstration of what the environment might do.

The group fell silent, scuffing their collective feet on the forest floor. Spider Lim stood guard over his divan woman, as if the mathematician might attack her.

It struck Adie that the others were waiting for her to defend herself. Well, I don't know. I thought it was kind of nice to look at. Only Rajan laughed.

Spiegel rushed into the gap, covering for his recruit. Come on, Kaladjian. Who are you to tell potential clients how they should use a Cavern? It's just as interesting to build a room to visualize inspiration as it is to build one to visualize long hydrocarbon chains.

This "inspiration." Can you tell me where, in all these — snippets— we are supposed to find it? Can you give me one little proof by induction, one simple rule for telling it from non-inspiration?

He's kind of right. Jackdaw looked away as he spoke. I mean, sure, it's beautiful and all. But it doesn't do anything. It's basically a flat gallery. The user can't really… make anything happen.

Adie's face shrank from him in a crooked smile. You. You child. What did I ever do to you? What do you mean, "cant"…?

It's not really what I'd call interactive.

Of course it's interactive. You go down this path or you go down the other. You see something interesting, you go closer. What more interaction do you want?

Well, see, I mean: as far as the little artworks are concerned? They don't even know the user is there.

If a masterpiece bloomed in the forest, Rajan began, and no one was there to appraise it, would it still be a—?

And after the user leaves? Jackdaw said. There's no trace in the database of anyone having ever been there. The jungle just keeps carrying on as if—

Exactly, Adie interrupted. And thank God.

Spiegel tried to interface between the races. What Jackie means, Ade, is that you need more collaboration between the humans and the data structures. More of the dance that is unique to this medium.

I still don't get it. It's not like this place could exist anywhere else.

She's right. Freese stepped back in. This is a legitimate virtual environment. And it's unlike any that I've seen anywhere else.

Jackdaw shrugged. Oh, it's fine as far as it goes. But it doesn't transform the ordinary.

Sue Loque put her arm around the world's creator. It's just not the future's transcendental art form yet. You can throw something like that together for us, can't you, babe?

My God. Last month they were raving about it. Now they're bored.

Motionless, downwind, Kaladjian hit his sprint from out of the crouch. I would just like to know what this teaches us? Either about the hardware, the software, or the exercise of European painting? I want to know what we learn here.

That we couldn't learn in a good museum, Jackdaw said.

I'll go further, Kaladjian added. What of any real consequence can we learn, even from the best of museums?

The hook lodged deep in Adie's gills. You obviously aren't in any danger of having to learn anything.

Art is not capable of teaching. This is my point. It contains no formal knowledge about the world. No predictions. Nothing falsifiable. Nothing repeatable. It's not about anything except itself. Other art. And even about that, it's at best equivocal

Adie took off her shuttered glasses and stared at him. Mathemati-cian, has anyone ever told you that you're a very unpleasant man?

Well, the pleasure is mutual. But at least you say what you mean. Which is more than most artists bother to do.

Ãò not an artist. I haven t made any art for more than—

Too late, Freese resorted to authority. This is neither the time nor the place to air personality conflicts.

This has nothing whatsoever to do with personality, Kaladjian shouted. This is about certain, definitive—

Can someone please give me one simple rule for telling personality from non-personality? Rajan said. And the gathering degenerated into a free-for-all. Art and math skulked away from the spitting match, both gangs compromised.

But out of the ugly exchange, the virulent parasite of Cavern innovation took up a new carrier. Inspiration passed through the tracts of its unwitting sponsors, using them and moving on. Now the virus lodged in Dale Bergen, the mousy University of Washington biochemist who lived by the iron precept of never attracting attention. Bergen's Large Molecule Docking Room threatened the next step in human mastery over matter. The user stood in microscopic space, among galaxies of enfolded polymers, zooming in on docking sites now large enough to walk inside and poke around. Shape and charge dictated this representation's behavior, just as they did in the physical world. The graphical atoms took up their available bonds, obeying the pull of electrostatics built into their data structures.

In the Cavern's viewing chamber, the giant molecules calculated their own obligatory behaviors on the fly. Classroom became laboratory. Bergen dreamed that his Tinkertoy docking simulator would one day drive the actual mechanisms it symbolized. In the cybernetics of enzymes, the mousy, invisible man saw the basic switching and feedback networks of natural selection. In these shape messages telegraphing among their senders he heard whole counterpointing choirs, choruses untestable in isolation.

Bergen stood in the Cavern, watching Ms. Klarpol's hallucinatory fronds brush up against the faces of this wayward safari. What if each of these static botanies could be made to grow, obeying internal curves like those that governed his graphic molecules? What if these plant genomes were allowed to compete with one another, egg each other on, converting the resources of simulated soil, air, water, and light into ever more convoluted conversations?

The Cavern as crucible for simulated evolution: it was just a thought. The implementation lay, for the moment, well beyond Bergen. But the idea tickled him. One learned to build the rooms one wanted to visit. And ecology was a room that wanted visiting.

He snagged Adie on her way out. Could I borrow your rubber trees sometime?

She blossomed at his words. My flora and fauna are your flora and fauna. Just be sure to tell Dr. Calculus where you got them.

She hunted down the traitor Jackdaw in his lair, where she rabbit-punched him in the sternum until he called out for mercy. What's the big idea? You betrayed me.

What are you talking about?

Total ambush. You turned me in to the authorities. Left me swinging in the breeze.

What? I didn't do anything.

Stale? Flat? Not very interactive?

His fingers cast about anxiously for a keyboard to stroke. Well? You let people walk through the jungle. But you dont let them walk into it.

What in the hell is that supposed to mean?

I can show you. Come on.

She followed Jackdaw into the Cavern, where he gave up the secret of his recent labors. She watched him from outside the open mouth of the cube, behind the fourth wall. He stood alone in the chamber, taped with body sensors. The room came to life in a gray penumbra. Jackdaw raised one palm. Off to the east rose a roseate sunrise. He shifted his weight to one leg, lifted an arm, and turned his head. The forward portion of the room slid down the rainbow into a band of violets.

He cycled through a suite of gyrations, wiggling like a traffic cop pegged to a busy intersection. His joints conducted the walls in a swirling Kandinsky, airbursts of color chords synched with an atonal MIDI accompaniment. He held up two fingers, and jagged lines lengthened across the horizon, thickening with the dove-flights of his hands.

He stopped just as suddenly. You get the idea. He took off the glasses and joined her outside the cave opening.

Adie stared into the gap between them. I'm sure it's very interesting, from a technological standpoint.

But?

Don't think I'm just trying to get back at you. It's… a little tedious to watch, after the first fifteen seconds? You say our jungle is flat? Unless I missed something, you don't create any depth here at all. Sure, it's neat that you can get the color washes to back your body movements. But they're still just color washes.

Try it. Here. Just try it for a minute. She donned the tracking glasses, skeptical.

Keep your motions clean and distinct. Mark the starts and stops. Use your whole body, all the degrees of freedom.

She started small. Commas with her fingertips. At first she tried to register what each motion produced. But the Pollock feedback came so thick and furious, so hard upon any plan her heels hatched, that she stopped thinking of her movements as causing the explosions ripping all around her. Her body was the sound and light.

Nods became auroras. Angry lightning bolts loosed themselves with a shake of the head. She composed with her posture and drew by drawing breath. The uterine lining of color swallowed her — the breakthrough sensation she'd heretofore only read about. She passed into the walls, coming out on the far side, encrusted in light, her skin hovering huge around her.

She forgot herself. Or she remembered. Dancing inside her dance, she could not say which. She embarked on a spiritual aerobics, the leap that sex never quite freed itself from self-consciousness to make. She decamped into pigment, molded, molding.

She came out from behind the glasses and shuddered. She shook her head at the boy author, not wanting to talk about it. Aiy. She shook herself off, like her dog Pinkham, after a dousing. That's like drugs. Like being out in a stormy night on a hit of Windowpane.

I wouldn't know.

But it only works for the operator. The onlooker has no idea. You have to be at the steering wheel, even to imagine—

He nodded a little sadly. One of its big problems. The other big one is that the graphics are… what do you call them? Abstract. Sooner or later, something recognizable needs to happen. That, his voice hoped, was where she came in. Then we'll have the start of a real, live-in adventure.

She sat safe, outside the theater, staring back at the walls where her circulatory system's sonata had just debuted. If this is just the primitive Marconi version… Television isn't even child's play. People are going to walk into these rooms, and they're never going to walk out again. Even her laugh came out bewildered. They'll starve in there. Like rats in those Skinner boxes, pressing their own pleasure buttons until they drop.

Jackdaw perked up, pleased.

You sure we really want to go down this road? she asked. Do we really want to hand something like this to an already addictive age? Aren't we in enough trouble the way things are?

He squinted, not getting her. When had trouble ever been the issue?

She thought for a long minute. I'm going to have to start all over again. From scratch.

Sure, he said. Start small. We've found that it's not how many plates you get in the air at the same time. It's how well the plates spin.

Start… small?

Pick one thing. Your favorite place in existence. Something you connect to. Something you can go inside of.

She closed her eyes and made the old pilgrimage. OK, she said, opening them. I have it.

So what are we talking about, then?

A bed. A bed by the shore of the Mediterranean.