Plowing the Dark

32

Wiring the Cavern for sound made more difference than Adie could have imagined. More than it should have. The Arlesean Room designers brought in Rajasundaran, who'd done a stint down at NASA/ Ames in Mountain View, to give the sunny South a tongue. Every event in Jackdaw's cabinet of interactions now came into its audible inheritance. Chairs learned to creak, floorboards to pop. The wind outside the window began to hiss a stereo mistral.

The key is spatiality, Raj said. We creatures evolved to believe in space, and that's about all you can say for certain about belief. We're binaural. Binocular. These are evolution's tricks for getting us to think in 3-D, and we can't help falling for them every time. 3-D is a trick? Adie asked. She sounded hurt. Sure. What isn't, finally?

They set to work voicing Aries, teaching the rented bed-sit to sing. To their arrays for texture and surface and dimension, they added sonority. The drawer coughed softly as it slid open. The pitcher pinged with the perfect pitch of porcelain. Off in the distance, past the edges of the casement, southward toward the invisible bay, gulls called.

Even the earliest results unnerved them. Six channels run through five speakers implanted in each wall face sufficed to raise the neck hairs on the most sophisticated visitor. They put Spider Lim, the human litmus, alone in the room. They flew a sonic pigeon through the rafters. He tracked the arc of the flapping bird, a fuller, more physiological belief than had he actually seen one. They broke a pane of glass in the center of the left-hand window. Spider jumped, a full-scale startle. He slammed his fist against his chest.

Don't ever do that to me again.

Sound is better than visual, Steve decided. It's more immediate. More virtual to begin with. It hangs in space, getting sharper in memory.

Adie ignored his invitation. She spoke to him now only when work required.

Raj sailed through the subaudible battlefield, unaware. Every modality that you can add will square the level of believability. Every new affordance, every connection we can lay down between out here and in there increases the sense of immersion geometrically.

Spiegel paced in place. We need some haptic device. Some kind of force-feedback jumpsuit that'll resist when you try to walk into things. Pressure-hammers that'll bruise your legs when you scrape against

the bed.

Not necessary, Lim said. And showed them his shins.

Raj grinned. At bottom, you know? At bottom, the mind wants to be

taken in.

Poor Jackdaw went back and affixed a new element to every data array, a variable pointer that would hold the clicks and pocks that Adie wanted to add to every plunkable object in the room. But he worked gladly. Rajasundaran's audio — the lowing and keening of it — had something of the innermost eerieness, something a visitor assimilated into her tissue before even noticing.

It knocked Adie out. The sounds are so present! Better than the real thing. It's as if the noises are going off inside my brain.

Oh, they are, Raj said. They are! We do our real-time signal processing right inside those flaps of twisted cartilage of yours. He wiggled his own flaps in question. We put a microphone in a subject's ear canal, capture the chaos, and reverse-engineer the sampling. Waves crashing into waves, nodes and antinodes wiping themselves out all over the place. Sounds like the Lower East Side, Adie said. You ought to try Jaffna. That's where you lived? Oh no no. Jaffna came to me.

Her hands dry-pointed the air in front of her, talking before her words could catch up. They scuttled, flustered, like the hands of library patrons at the five-minute warning, gathering together their materials and carrying their quarry up to the charge desk before it shut down for

the night. Explain.

What is there to explain, really? Raj spoke in the subcontinental, singsong inflection of Imperial English, whose practitioners outnumbered all of England several times over. My family and I were living our lives in Colombo. The Tigers made some high-profile power plays up in the peninsula. Our Sinhalese aunties and uncles decided that the Jaffna deaths required some symmetrical mischief to put them right. They voted to set fire to the hundred nearest Tamil houses, no matter that these belonged to their dear friends and neighbors. We beat a hasty retreat to Vancouver. A lovely city, by the way.

What do your parents do for a living?

You mean before our move or after?

Both… Both.

A familiar story. You don't really want to know.

How… how did you end up living here?

Here? He cast a gaze back at the Cavern, where windows broke, floorboards popped, and pigeons flew about the eaves. You mean Seattle? The idea amused him. I don't really live here. I'm just renting.

Raj wanted to develop a high-level audio programming language to match the visual one that Jackdaw and Loque were assembling. He wanted fast filter transforms that would change a frog to a choirboy with a few typed commands. He wanted to spin the aural sources in space, make them wheel about with each turn of the head.

But as with images, acoustic precision exacted its price in responsiveness. Milliseconds loomed huge. Latency killed the sense of presence. Only the tightest virtuoso chorus of sounds would flush the ear into belief. Spatializing the noisy universe and synchronizing it with sight involved a bit of higher mathematical modeling called the Head-Related Transfer Function.

We should get the Armenian in on this, Rajan said. Adie balked. Is that really necessary? Nothing is really necessary. Not really.

He's so incredibly unpleasant. The man has raised ugliness to the level of haute art. He's ugliness's high priest.

They brought in Kaladjian. He started out on his best behavior, which consisted of not saying anything at all. He walked into the Van Gogh bedroom and shrugged. He tapped the shutters and rapped the porcelain with a hand-gripped Polhemus sensor, unhappy with the delayed pocks and pings. He stepped out of the room and removed the stereo glasses.

Why would anyone want to build something like this?

Why does anyone want to build anything? Spiegel answered.

Kaladjian shrugged, more concession than contest.

Over the space of days, the quartet of males slowly squeezed Klarpol out. Form and warmth, rapture and azure all collapsed into engineering problems. The tasks at hand were well defined, formalizable. Why did they need an artist any longer? They had Adie's careful, hand-drawn surfaces. Once the authorities got their composite sketch, the artist was just ballast.

Adie went to Sue Loque. They're stealing my room.

Your room? Didn't you steal it from some Dutch guy?

My idea. My eye. I took everything off the flat plane and laid it out in three-space. I repainted all the surfaces by hand. Every inch of it is detailed enough to look good at life size.

Now they won't let you play?

Well, they let me sit in. But they're turning the whole thing into this

gigantic Rubik's Cube.

That's their thing. It's what they do, babe.

I know that's what they do. What am I supposed to do?

Sit in and listen, maybe? It's how I got into this racket

Serious? What did you do before?

Before what?

Before learning to program?

Oh, I taught myself to program when I was twelve. I had to cover for my parents. They couldn't even handle their dimmer switches. But before I started listening in on the boys — before I learned how projects worked — I was… just a programmer.

Adie went back and listened. She followed the four males as they invented problems, then invented solutions to throw at their problems. She watched them communicate by grunts and silences. She studied Jackdaw, Steve, and Raj as they hacked at their huge triple concerto for QWERTY keyboards, lost to a runaway pruning algorithm, while Kaladjian etched away on complex functions with a number-two pencil into yellow legal pads.

She sketched them in turn, capturing their shared trances in her own media. Their facial muscles reminded her of her father's, snoring on the sofa in any of a dozen Quonset living rooms, sleeping off the latest controlled R-and-R drunk, twitching in a dream of final, anesthetized escape. But the goal of these four men differed from her father's on one essential account. Her father retreated into a place that he hoped would silence the outside world. These four men, on the other hand, worked to build a mutual mirage that would match its source, noise for noise.

There's some kind of major tension there, Adie told Loque. / don't think any of them likes Kaladjian any more than I do. Bingo, babe. He's a nasty man.

Deeply creepy. But he knows a shitload. So everyone manages to make allowances for him, on strictly practical grounds.

Well sure. That's easy for them. They come from the same world as he does. They speak his language.

Not really. Not with any specificity. Anyway, that's not the real issue. They put up with him. They use him. The social contract, hon. They're getting something from him they can't get for themselves. I think he's masturbating over me.

He's what? You mean in private, right? Now how do you figure that? I'd really like to know.

Oh, I don't have any hard evidence. It's just this sixth sense. More like an eighth, if you're keeping count. I can always tell if there's somebody I'm working with who…? It's like radio waves. You can't ordinarily perceive them, but if you have the right equipment…

Uh, Ade? Sweetheart? I don't know how to tell you this. But any one of us might be putting out that channel.

Rajasundaran alone enjoyed going head-to-head with the team's problem child. Indifferent to the drama of human personality, he savored each clash with the Armenian as if it were a good cricket test match.

We ought to make it, he said one day, so that closing the shutters actually dampens all the ambient sounds coming from outside the bedroom windows.

Kaladjian went for the easy kill. A pointless exercise. A complete

waste of processing power.

No, it's interesting. What might damping do to create a sense of

inside and out?

Don't ask vapid questions, Kaladjian said.

What is your algorithm for telling vapid questions from their opposites? Jackdaw held up his hands in a T. Please, guys. We can't afford to start with the philosophy stuff, again.

Kaladjian ignored the chance for peace with honor. A vapid question is one that any mature researcher recognizes as fruitless. You are willing to be ruled by consensus? You? All right. Then it's one where the answer serves no end but itself. Raj studied Kaladjian's face, as if he were his own portrait. When you look at the Pythagorean theorem, when you draw it graphically…? When you actually build little squares on each side, why should the two smaller squares be equal in area to the largest one? Is that a vapid question?

Yes. Kaladjian smiled, even as the trap took shape.

But it is also a profound question as well?

Well. That depends.

Spiegel waved his arms, drawing fire. There are no vapid questions.

Only vapid questioners.

May I ask you one? Adie asked Kaladjian. Probably vapid? What exactly is your problem?

Kaladjian blinked condescension. His smile easily absorbed the attack. I suppose you find me largely contemptuous.

Pretty much, Adie chirped.

The kind of mutual flaming that enlivened a good Multi-User Dimension turned Jackdaw's stomach when it occurred face-to-face. Maybe we should put all this human stuff back in the box and get on with our work?

The others humored him. Hours later, with the project scattered for the day, Adie cornered Kaladjian in his immaculate cubicle. So tell me.

Kaladjian looked up, waiting. And what exactly would you like me to tell you?

Why you're at war with the rest of creation.

The Armenian appraised her for the length of a short syllogism. Is that what I am?

Yes.

He thought for a minute. You wouldn't understand.

Adie swallowed the stream of ready profanity that welled up in her throat. Try me with the dumbed-down version.

Something in the challenge appealed to him. He gestured for her to sit, then turned his back on her and gazed out his window into the rain-dripped woods. You know what I do for a living?

Something to do with numbers.

His laugh condensed to a bitter nib. I've told you already, young woman. Everything has something to do with numbers.

Not young, she said.

The silence lasted long enough for Adie to think she'd been dismissed. Then he broke it, addressing the plate glass.

Say the thing that gives you more pleasure than anything in existence is to arrange a set of colored marbles according to strict and surprisingly sparse rules. God knows why, but the pastime fascinates you. So long as you're not hungry or cold or otherwise impaired, you want to devote yourself to it.

Painting, she said. Something like painting.

The hardest kind of painting. The most accountable. The more you push the marbles around, the harder it is to get them into interesting configurations. But you're not alone in the pursuit. A handful of other devotees have the same obsession. Everyone looks over one another's work, fixing and extending. You memorize all the beautiful moves of the grand masters. This goes on for a few thousand years. Every so often, someone stumbles onto a hidden wrinkle, one that puts the marbles into a surprise configuration, special, pleasing, something no one expected.

Each of them stared off at an altarpiece the other couldn't see.

Then, out of the blue, someone discovers that the marble game is a profound reformulation of an interlocking canister game, unknown to you, played by another circle of monks centuries ago on the other side of the world and shelved as a useless curiosity. These two unrelated, formally beautiful pursuits turn out to be, in a deep, singular, and unsought way, synonymous.

She nodded toward some analogy. The concealed and ubiquitous

golden mean.

A truly shattering insight descends on some master practitioner. Colored marbles and interlocking canisters, taken together, form a perfect translation of phenomena in the physical world. The patterns of marbles and canisters compose a map of, say, the cycle of tides or the bends in a river. And this correspondence works, not only after the fact, but in advance of it The game makes it possible to predict all kinds of otherwise unknown, otherwise unlooked-for, otherwise immeasurable

events…

Her neck hairs rose up, obeying their own rules. Every repeated time without exception, the harmless, artificial game advances in absolute lockstep with measurable event. The implications are inescapable. The marbles and the canisters — the simple but rigorous rules — somehow embody physical reality.

The veil fell, and she stood looking on this abandoned man. She did not know how he managed to remain behind, in such pain.

These inconsequential games mimic the most grandiose patterns we can identify. Gravity, time, light: name your fundament. Creation keeps to a few simple rules of interlocking shape and color, patterns replicating themselves across impossible distances. This is what the mathematician calls beauty. An ever more elaborate edifice spun out of the sparest symmetries. A perfection that outstrips all attempts to capture it.

She put up her palms in puzzlement. This is a bad thing?

He turned to her, his edge of aggression again sharpening. He stood and beckoned for her to follow, out the room and down the hall. They reached the Cavern, where Sybil Stance was taking her rightful slot on

the sign-up sheet.

We have an emergency, Kaladjian said. We need the machine.

Aril I'm right in the middle of— Please. Ten minutes. You can have my hour tomorrow. He booted up an environment Adie had never seen. A shape like a Cycladic figure mushroomed in front of them. Kaladjian put the wand through an unaccompanied partita. The figure metamorphosed, its planes sliding upon itself, turning inside out in a virtuoso conjuring act of knotted space.

All legitimate topological transformations of one another, he said. Adie nodded, hooked. She saw a centaur. The torso of a naked Aphrodite. A wondrous stalactite. A nexus of ribbonlike tubes passing through their own surfaces. Proteus, unholdable. We're going in, Kaladjian announced.

The figure swelled in the air around them, and they passed inside. When they steadied out again, they found themselves riding along the inside edge of a secret junction of knotted expressway lanes, the deeply entangled passages of a decadent queen conch. Brace yourself.

Kaladjian hit a button on the wand. The waterslide surfaces fragmented into the mosaic of polygons that composed them. Shards flew in all directions, a shower of math-meteors. The community of screen phenomena — a capacious, fecund, and extraneous metaphor of the machine's internal states — revealed itself to be a bastard lingua franca where alien races could meet in compromise.

Adie's body grew large, galactic, her head wrapped in a cloud of stars. They zoomed out, pulling back to a distant vantage above what condensed into a spiral nebula. She looked out across a sweeping interstellar pinwheel, its slow spokes lapping around her midriff. Each wash of stars unfolded another billion years of cosmic evolution. She swelled to the size of God's recording angel, attending at the day of Creation.

It's… magnificent. I had no idea. She felt her eyes spilling over, and did not care. There was no foolishness, no vanity, no shame in anything a body felt, looking on this.

Yes. Now here is the math behind it. He pushed a button and the expanding universe fell away into a few polynomials, breathtaking in their slightness.

She tried to say his name: An. The tag soured inside her mouth. I don't… I still don't… The man's pettiness appalled her more than ever, after what he'd just let her see. Where's the problem?

The problem? The problem is that we still live here.

He spread his hands to indicate the projectors, the modular office furniture, all the ugly bundles of cable and molded-plastic printed circuits that filled the space around them. It dawned on her. His days of true research were over. He had done no useful math, no beautiful math, for years. He, too: banished to industry. Wherever the there that the colored marble game whispered of, this man could no longer

reach it.

Words left Adie, to sound across inconceivable distances. That is no country for old men?

That is no country for old men. He measured the line, liked it. Perhaps he thought she'd made it up. Clever of a young woman to see that.

Not clever at all, in fact. Clever were those who had not seen, yet still perceived.

That was no country for refugees of any age. Some nights, when Spiegel knew Adie was home in her island hermitage, he would call, chatting away happily to her answering machine. He'd hold rambling conversations on her tape, knowing full well she was in the room screening and could hear every word.

Can I try something out on you? It's a Personals ad: "Carbon-based life-form seeking same to help fill the chilly immensity of existence." What do you think? I know, I know — the dictions a little off. How about this: "The universe is fifteen billion years old. I'm pushing forty. Looking for Solar System-based female in similar temporal predicament."

At first she listened in real time. After a while, she turned off the speaker, checking the backlog of messages only at long stretches. Finally, she pulled the machine's plug.

Early one morning in Aries, she at last hit upon the concealed hope that bound all these messy exiles to the same project. She stood in a room-sized cartoon among four men, each with his own agenda, each terrified that the breakneck pace of technology would prove too little, too late, each desperate to turn the Cavern into something more than a prohibitively expensive, slow, grainy, cold, monstrously cumbersome stereoscope. She looked through the windows of her provisional Mediterranean summer cottage, down along the fabricated path to the coast, out to the invented sea, and the farther sea beyond that one. And she saw, at last, what these men had been for so long gazing at.

The Cavern was irrelevant. The Cavern was not even a flip-card deck compared to the Panovision it pointed at. The Cavern would shrink, year after rate-doubling year. Its carapace would wither away until all the pipes and projectors and reality engines fit into a gym bag. Steady improvement would knit belief-quality graphics into the living-room walls of every middle-class condo. Pin-sized lasers lashed to the stems of reading glasses would etch conviction directly onto living retinas.

The technology meant nothing. The technology would disappear, go transparent. In a generation or two, no one would even see it. Someone would discover how to implant billions of transistors directly into the temporal lobes, on two little squares of metal foil. If not in Klarpol's lifetime, then soon enough — just around the bend of this long, logarithmic curve. The clumsy mass of distracting machine would vanish into software, into the impulse that had invented it. Into pure conception.

Something gelled, and Adie saw this primitive gadget morph into the tool that humans have lusted after since the first hand-chipped adze. It seemed the prize at the end of a half-million years of provisional leapfrogging. It was not even a tool, really. More of a medium, the universal one. However much the Cavern had been built from nouns, it dreamed the dream of the unmediated, active verb. It lived where ideas stepped off the blackboard into real being. It represented humanity's final victory over the tyranny of matter. She'd mistaken this variable room for a high-tech novelty. Now Adie saw it as the thinnest first parchment, a thing that rivaled even speech in its ability to amplify thought. Time would turn it into the most significant jump in human communication since the bulking up of the cerebellum.

The mature Cavern would become the body's deep space telescope; the test bed for all guesses; a programmable, live-in film; the zoom lens of the spirit; the umbilical cord for remote robot control; a visualization lab as powerful as human fancy; a tape deck capable of playing back any camera angle in history; a networked web of matter transporters where dispersed families would meet and greet as holographic specters. It promised the wishing lamp that all children's stories described. It was the storybook that once expelled us and now offered to take us back in.

All this Adie Klarpol saw in a single, smooth glance. The men she worked with meant to assemble all these things, and then some.

Aries gleamed. The Mediterranean morning shone from out of the electronic scrap heap of the lab surrounding it. She watched the programmers test the latest audio algorithms. Video edge-detection routines tracked all movement in the room, punctuating any action that might generate sound. Jackdaw Acquerelli slipped off his shoes. He nudged them with a toe, under the lip of the bed. They scraped across the floor of the Cavern, a noise half actual, half synthetic. The elaborate basketball shoes sat like two hollowed-out white lab rabbits, visible through the illusion of the bed, but still beneath it.

Pretty soon, Jackdaw said, any year now, this room will be good enough to live in.

That, finally, was the hope. To live in the room that the painter's suicide vacated. The soul simply wanted better accommodations. Something more spacious to fasten to. Something more like itself than that dying animal.

It had taken Adie a year and a half to see what she was working on. The rest of the lay world made the same leap in the space of a single Memorial Day weekend. Overnight, an explosion of interest rocked the RL, as if the mountainside they hugged chose that moment to simulate St. Helens. Media latched wholesale upon this thing that it refused to call anything else but virtual reality. The public took so quickly to the fantasy that it must have recognized the contour from something it already knew.

The press launched a full-frontal assault. Journalists closed in on virtual reality as if on a celebrity murder. The luxury of monastic tinkering dissolved under the onslaught. Freese found himself devoting half his time to fielding reporters' questions. Disruption reigned supreme. The RL's mountain hideaway began to appear in speculative magazine accounts and TV news spots, reports that turned the lab's jerky, wire-frame predictions into gleaming, ray-traced chrome.

No one could say why, after thirty years of research in obscure labs across the Northern Hemisphere, VR overnight became 1990's cover girl. A couple of research outfits let the ghost out of the machine before it was time. Here and there, universities began to demo projects that suddenly had the whole world talking as if full-body dives into wraparound LSD, robotic prostitution, and long-distance teledildonics would hit the toy store shelves by Christmas. Two or three start-up firms, eager to appease their serial venture capitalists, began to sell cheap telegloves, stripped-down head-mounted displays, and even body suits whose performance amounted to little more than faint holograms of their hinted potential.

In the Santa Barbara Sheraton, at March's research conference for virtual environment and telerobotics interfaces, Freese stood at the back of a packed grand ballroom. Just looking out on the sea of charged participants rearranged his viscera. His cobbled-up cottage craft had graduated beyond an esoteric discipline. Ready or not, reality engineering was about to become a full-fledged industry.

A world begging for deliverance cared nothing for a porcelain jug sitting on a rickety wooden bed stand. But the inexorable market machine that had, just the previous year, swallowed up the globe's last holdout nations already knew what it wanted from virtuality. It wanted holophonic videoconferencing. It wanted the Ferris wheel-cum— feature film. All-talking, all-singing, incarnate sex fantasies. Interplanetary mining from the comfort and safety of our own back yard. But the market craved something more significant as well. Something more fundamental.

Industry saw, in the Cavern and comparable virtual vistas, the race's next launchpad. The first commercial use of virtual space would be as a three-dimensional workbench for designing every physical trinket from saucepan to space station. In that lucid crucible, any conceivable device could be probed from all angles before incurring the expense of manufacture. Even the components for the next generation of Cavern itself could be taken for a 3-D test drive, revealing, in conceptual space, their optimal form before coming into the world. The amount of cash waiting to be thrown at the magic workbench, the sums waiting to be made could swallow the Rl, budget many times over, for generations upon generations. For the human project had many more goods to make, before its final triumph over goods.

It was here already: the Pong of Things to Come. Downtown, a dozen blocks from Pioneer Square, where Spiegel and Adie had strolled only months before, a technopalace opened up where, for ten bucks, University of Washington kids and frustrated Boeing execs could sit in networked cubicles and blast deep-animated representations of one another out of the infinite vacuum of space. And the month after that arcade opened, Hollywood released the first of several feature-length spawn — a heavily chromed rendition of the new Aladdin and his wonderful data glove. The grand future vision that the RL pioneered was rapidly being left in collective imagination's dust. Must you Americans oversell everything? Rajasundaran asked. Freese liked the aggressive ones. Oversell? You can't oversell this. We're engineering the end of human existence as we know it. Not as I know it, White Man.

Still, Freese insisted: it was the end. The end of something. An end to the limits of symbolic knowledge. Beyond the hype, past the immediate feeding frenzy, the press had gotten at least that much right. But even in the thick of the current mania, no one had yet guessed how big this thing was going to get. No one.

The Cavern threatened the final disappearance of interface. Future operators would engage simulation in the same way that humanity's current version engaged material existence: using all the degrees of freedom built into their sovereign bodies. The right way to grasp the planet's mounting sandcastles of data was to step inside and poke around.

As the scramble for funds broke out everywhere, Freese took his ideas on the lecture circuit. The computer would go transparent, more invisible than all its crude, qualified precursors in representation. Talking to data would be like talking to a friend over the phone. Explorers would move through a literal forest of numbers, strolling through their woody representations and singling out by sight or sound or smell the significant trees, the hidden arbors.

Freese's techno-evangelizing carried a strong dose of private salesmanship. No other start-up in the fledgling reality industry had yet shown anything remotely in the league of the prototype Cavern. The Cavern, Freese teased, would make head-mounted displays and cumbersome gloves seem like Smell-O-Matic, SensaVision, or any other doomed evolutionary backwater. He always ended his speeches with the coy suggestion that everyone stay alive long enough to see the thing that their imaginations couldn't quite visualize yet.

But privately, back at the mountain, he fretted. He sent off an anxious e-mail to the brass at TeraSys. The whole fad may quite simply fade before we get the real thing to market- In the current climatei potential clients for genuine immersion environments could well feel burned by their own expectations and sour on all subsequent demos-i once the bubble bursts…

As project administrator, Freese managed a delicate balancing act between come-on and kiss-off. He could say nothing of the project and risk being lost in a sea of false claims. Or he could promise the world and risk failing to satisfy. Already, knots of prospective cyber-nauts were queuing up in the RL's parking lot, cash in hand. But the Realization Lab was worlds away from showing anything that resembled a finished product. All they had was proof of concept.

Freese called a general meeting. Programmers, hardware jockeys, scientists, and designers assembled in the central atrium, the only nonvirtual auditorium large enough to contain them all.

This may be the first time I've seen some of you in the daytime, Freese said. I'm surprised at how healthy you all look in natural light.

Those are called monitor tans, Sue Loque called out from the gallery.

I figured it wasn't the diet. First off, I want to applaud every member of this group for the distance we've already come. When I think of our technical and aesthetic advances in the two years since we put together the Crayon World, it feels… He breathed in slowly and rolled his eyes. It feels as if I'm watching a film about evolution on fast-forward. Those of you who spend night after night chained to the workstation may have started to take monthly or even weekly breakthroughs for granted. I don't, I assure you. If this project were to move any faster, I'd be unable to

keep up.

He's about to tell us that it's time to pick up the pace, Rajan stage-whispered. The room exploded in laughter.

Freese screwed up his mouth. It's time to pick up the pace. The room erupted again. Well, not so much the pace. I doubt any one of you could work any harder or more… happily than you already do. What we need to accelerate, I suppose, is the release schedule.

Vulgamott raised a hand. Run that one by us again, Chief? More, quieter laughter.

Don't sweat the details, Michael. Here's the problem. We're all over ourselves, shattering yesterday's landmarks. We've gotten the polygon budget up from — what? — a couple of thousand per second? He looked at Spider Lim, who gave an infinitesimal nod. To… what are we running now? I can't even keep track anymore.

Spider cleared his throat. Over a hundred thousand per wall.

From ten to the third to ten to the fifth. In two dozen months. I'd call that impressive.

Lim, sensing the blow, stood up. Actually, we'll have to step up just as many more orders of magnitude before we can start to deliver believability without a lag.

I agree. Jackdaw addressed his calculator watch. Reality demands something on the order of a hundred million. Reality… is ten to the eighth surface-filled polygons a second.

Minimum, Spider agreed, and sat down. Freese nodded. You see? This is the problem. Reality is always a problem, Spiegel said.

The question is: when does the show stabilize and our act hit the road? At our current rate of change, the answer is never. The product would be forever obsolete before we got it out the door.

O'Reilly raised his hand. It sounds like you're saying that Deep Pockets is wanting to see some more near-term return?

I'm afraid they want a public press conference for the spring. By next year's SIGGRAPH convention, we're to do a grand rollout. The popular press between now and then will be whipping the public imagination into a frenzy. We'll need to show something, just to compete with the rumors.

Hardware, Software, and Design all took the floor to lodge their official reservations. But by the time the party broke up, the rules of the game had changed.

Freese saluted them as they left. March of'91, then. Delivery Day.

He wants us to be salesmen? Adie asked Ebesen, back in the cubicles. This is all just about selling iron?

The old guy hunched his flannel shoulders. You knew it had to happen someday.

No, I didn't, she said. It never occurred to me.

Know what you should make? Lim told her. He was gutting Rembrandt again, tossing the machine's outdated entrails into cardboard boxes full of priceless scrap. A RAM room. You know: a huge blow-up representation of everything happening inside the real computer down at silicon level, right as it's running the simulation.

She gave the notion three seconds. Bad idea. Am I to take it, from this mound of scrap metal, that we are obsolete again?

They say that the Great Wall was obsolete before it was halfway finished. Your average printed circuit hoard is obsolete before it's even begun.

Someone should go through all these junk piles, she said. It's getting hard to walk in here.

Lim looked up, horrified. We can't throw any of that away. We might have to… refer to it.

Why? Why? She picked up a shoebox-sized assembly, once a miracle of miniaturization, a whole interplanetary system. Now incompatible with everything. She dropped the chunk of parts. Worthless.

We can use some of those old motherboards as souped-up serial ports.

Spider, these things are all dead. Killed by bigger, faster, better. Cartons of milk past the stamped expiration date. Tickets for last night's concert.

TeraSys might be able to sell them to places that are still back at earlier machine levels.

You mean that Bulgaria might be interested in running its own experimental virtual reality program, now that it's joined the Free World?

I was thinking more like, you know, Arkansas?

She mentioned the elephants' graveyard to Jackdaw and Rajan. This world digitization thing is the single most wasteful expenditure of effort

in history.

The kid bared his palms. You think the hardware side is wasteful? At least you can make those things into doorstops and paperweights. At least you can pirate last year's million-dollar state-of-the-art research tool for its edge connectors.

Rajan chuckled. Right. Smelt them down to reclaim the two dollars and fifty cents' worth of gold plating on the pins.

But software…? Jackdaw said. Nothing is more pitiful than Version I. The biggest sinkhole of human genius in existence. The average lifetime of a given release is now shorter than the time it takes to leam its features. And as soon as Version 2 comes out, Version 1 turns into a time bomb in the operating system, just waiting to foul up any improvements in other software that postdates it.

Let us put this in your terms, Rajan said. Suppose all of world art came down to the last three months of images. Every time an artist painted a painting, it invalidated all previous paintings of the same subject.

Sure. That's called commercial design. I did that for half a dozen

years.

It's worse than that, Jackdaw cut in. Most development has no coordination to speak of. The wheel gets reinvented a million times a day, even in the same company. Even at the same workstation. It took half a century of coding to come up with reusable objects. And even now, they're not all that reusable, because, you know, the APIs and the hardware standards are changing the ground underneath them by the

nanosecond.

Rajan's cranium went into sympathetic oscillations. Truly demoralizing. Every basket of subroutines has to be invented dozens of times, each one doing the same thing in slightly different ways. Then all of these maddening, incompatible variants are thrown into public battle to determine which one will become the de facto standard, and everyone who puts money on the wrong flavor has to throw it out and start over again.

Kaladjian came and stood nearby, cleaning off his glasses. Fortunately for all of us, waste is this culture's greatest engine.

The others looked up, snagged by some expansive departure from his usual tone.

Is that supposed to be ironic? Raj asked.

Kaladjian gave a victimized shrug. Progress is destruction with a compass.

Raj's nods accelerated a couple of hertz. It does make one wonder what the finish line looks like.

Adie dear, Spiegel said. You've come to a world where truth is stamped with its own expiration date.

Jackdaw grimaced. Not to mention the obsolete media. We still have these ancient tapes from before we ported to the Cavern? They can't be read anymore. The machines that used them have all been upgraded beyond compatibility. And even when we rebuild an antique drive from scratch? The tape has decayed; it spits out check-sum errors every three records.

The world is losing its memory. Raj toyed with a stack of printouts headed for the shredder. Whole areas of the collective brain are being wiped out as its storage degrades. We've contracted a slow virus. Global Alzheimer's.

Kaladjian lifted one shoulder. His tilted ear met it halfway. Perhaps. But look how far we managed to get, from flint to silicon, before the enterprise shut down.

The Cavern caved in for several days, while Lim and company finished debugging a new generation of graphics accelerators. Deprived of their magic testing chamber, imagination's prototypers hit a wall.

Maybe we should do a retreat or something, Vulgamott suggested to his fellow designers.

Adie snorted. Maybe we should do a full-scale rout.

Don't bail on me, please. I'm skidding out, here. Real deadlines. Real demos. No real place to test them. What's the imaginary world coming to?

Ebesen said nothing. He was ready to accommodate — always the path of least resistance.

Vulgamott got hold of a small cabin that TeraSys maintained up on the south fork of the Stillaguamish, near Mount Pilchuck. Art and Design booked the place for a forty-eight-hour stay. Ebesen's dirty flannel and corduroys, so squalid under fluorescent light, seemed almost indigenous, outdoors. Vulgamott, after two hours of the upland air, ceased twitching and began to breathe deeper. Adie went through a small sketch pad on the first afternoon. Thereafter she simply looked, with no more point than looking.

In wildness, description fell away into its parent density. The three of them walked out in the woods, into the network of living agents, rooted, burrowing, and airborne. They drifted their feet in the bone-mashing cold of the river current, the rushing fluid still imprinted with its past life as mountain snow. At night, the curl of their campfire smoke rose and obscured itself in the Milky Way's fainter smear. The haunt of owls on the hollow night turned the listening heart against all hope of representation.

They talked about what they had done, what they were doing, and what they would need to do before being anywhere near ready to release their work to the public. Months of mock-up had not yet even blocked out the floor plan of that furnished rec room of the cerebrum

they pictured.

The vines of Rousseau's Dream had spread, lovely and profuse. Its creatures had scampered in modest For-Next loops through the coded undergrowth. But the forest had remained a thought without a deed, a look without a behavior, flat and planar, less a living thing than a cadaver's cross section. A visitor could walk into the jungle moonlight, but only along fixed paths, strolling past the successive cardboard props of a tableau vivant.

Out of this dream, they'd awakened to perspective. Their tools had all scaled up: frame rate, color depth, resolution, vertices per second. And the Aries bedroom exceeded the sum of these leaps. It zeroed in on that longed-for locale that no one had yet seen but everyone knew by sight. Its bed lay thick with invitation. The sun streamed through its casements, swelling and decaying in the length of a single visit. The wood floor bent to the weight of the current tenant. And yet even that humming space was no more than a single stereo slide. The bedroom filled out its frame, but no farther, refusing to venture beyond the grotto that housed it.

Now Design had to plan its next escape. Under the sap-heavy trees, the chilled antics of a Cascade stream between their toes, the digital artists turned over the problem, less through talk than with shared scribbles. The task was obvious. They needed a way to wed inimical worlds, to combine the dream of these two chambers.

Half a dozen months, Vulgamott repeated, past the point when either of his colleagues heard him any longer. We're in a situation here, people. It's demo or die.

Or both, Ebesen said. "Both" remains a distinct possibility. In her mind, Adie wanded off down hinted-at ravines, lost in the extensions of sight, looking for the room they had to reach. The trick was how to find it without clues. How to resolve the place, without knowing what it looked like. In rapid succession, they torched each proposal put forward. All possible rooms either cloyed or curdled, too banal or too vaporous, too mundane or too incorporeal. Nothing both satisfied desire and yielded to available technique.

No more paintings, Adie said. We tried that twice. We want something that will break out of the frame.

All three knew the medium they would have to inhabit, already laid out for them. Vulgamott and Ebesen's architectural tool chest — now numbering in the hundreds of modular components, from the simple I beam to the ornate ogee molding — all but forced their hand. Their resizable image library had grown into an encyclopedia of smart architectural elements, one that made it possible for any reasonably patient person who could manage a pipe-cleaner sculpture or a box of Lincoln Logs to build her own pan-and-zoom Versailles.

With the suite of Palladian tools, prototyping a simple architectural fly-through shrank from months to weeks. The kit had never been meant as anything but its own demo, a proof of concept rather than a mission-critical development tool. Now it represented their only chance at hewing out a substantial show by press date. Even here, on the verge of the virtual, they were condemned by those absurd constraints, time and practicality.

They determined to build a dazzling building. But forty-eight hours in a remote, three-room cabin failed to produce a viable candidate. They were still tossing around possibilities as they packed to return to

civilization.

Vulgamott tried to rally them. We should do Vierzehnheiligen. An

amazing space. Mysterious, sensual, organic.

Adie jerked back, as if slugged. Oh God. God, no. We'd all be insulin-dependent diabetics within a week. How about something clean,

like… Fallingwater?

A total bear. I mean, it's a staggering building and all. But how in the

hell would we…?

Too innovative, Ebesen agreed. Too singular. The tool set wouldn't be

much of a help.

Well, Karl? Adie clasped her hands together in front of her face.

How about a time-lapse Troy?

Vulgamott howled. Ebesen, you maniac. 1 divorce you, I divorce you,

I divorce you.

All right, all right. Nobody get excited. I vote for the Temple of Diana

at Ephesus.

Oh terrific, Michael said. Why bother doing an existing structure when we can do a building that has disappeared without a trace?

Well, there is some basis for speculation…

How about the RL? Vulgamott proposed. The perfect compromise. We have all the data at our fingertips.

Kill me first, Adie said. It's bad enough that we have to live in the

place.

Whatever we model, Ebesen insisted, has to be well made.

It has to be beautiful, Adie said.

Vulgamott let loose a bat-pitched scream. It has to be doable. You people. I can't believe this. What a colossal waste, this whole hug-a-tree idea. Two days up here and we haven't figured out anything that we couldn't have come up with in fifteen minutes back in the gerbil-run. A beautiful, well-made building. For this we needed to eat Stemo-soaked vegetable kabobs and encourage chiggers in the joys of symbiosis?

Adie took her leave of the two men and headed back up into the woods for a last look, before returning to made existence. She followed the streambed awhile, to a narrowing that she figured had to exist. When she found the place, or a reasonable facsimile, she looked around, listening for any sounds larger than a muskrat. Hearing none, she stripped. She slipped into the water and sat in the eddy of her own naked body. She spun about in the numbing current, her length a lode-stone, until she faced upstream. Somewhere near this water's source lay the solution they needed.

She knifed in the water, a rose-brushed trout. She kept under for as long as she could bear. The liquid ran colder and denser than she'd thought. It contracted her arteries and hammered her head. She felt her ideas go soft, giving in to the snow-fed current. She worked back to the shore. It took her two tries to lift herself up on a boulder. As the glaze of water on her evaporated, her core temperature plunged still deeper. She huddled on the rock, hands around her knees, convulsing.

Adie? a voice twenty feet away called.

She screamed and splayed, grabbing the rock as she lost her balance. She fought to reach her stack of clothes, and she fell. She cowered, clasping her T-shirt against her nakedness. Down the path, through the skirt of trees, his back to her, his hands folded in a cowl over his head, stood Karl Ebesen. She closed her eyes, breathed out hard, and slugged herself in the chest, to restart her heart.

Ach, Ebesen moaned. Jesus. Sorry, sorry, sorry. Plaintive burlesque crept into his apology. She had to laugh. The most anguished she'd seen the man since meeting him.

Hang on. Give me two minutes.

Fright, at least, had killed the chill. Her clothes felt good going on, wicking the water off her skin.

She stepped out from behind the rock. All hid.

Ebesen lowered his hands and edged forward, shy caller in some overgrown game of tag. Forgive me. I figured it would be worse for you to hear me slinking away through the branches.

Not a big deal. My fault, really. She reached out to reassure his elbow, which withdrew from her touch as soon as politeness permitted.

That old spirit of noblouse oblige, he said. Susanna and the Elders. A genre subject that for some reason has fallen into neglect in the last few years.

May I?

She nodded. This man could do nothing she might object to. She looked into the metal surface while he pulled her hair back until it disappeared. He rested both hands against her jaw, as if feeling for swollen glands. He lifted slowly, with delicate pressure, like a potter at the wheel. Her whole lower face rose up into her cheekbones. He molded her skin, consulting no references. He needed none.

Adie studied the result in the mirror. She turned and complied, holding the metal so she could look out on the wall of photos. And she became the cameo she was looking at. She shuddered, spun away from the photos, and dropped the mirror, freeing her face and hair.

Ebesen stepped back and raised his hands. I'm sorry. Forgive me. Twice in one day.

No, no. It was just… creepy, is all.

That is the polite word for it.

I'm not really… I don't really look much like her, you know.

No?

I mean, Karl. Really. You have to push my face all around. If you maul a person's musculature, you can make anyone look like anyone.

Really? Think we could do up Mr. Gates the Third as a good Baroque John the Baptist on a platter?

She laughed, against her will.

Ebesen sipped from his water. Do you know her?

Adie turned back to the photos. Did she know her? The possibility had never crossed her mind. She combed the mosaic again for some spark of recognition. None.

Should I?

He looked at the gallery, as at a police lineup. Gail Frank?

The name was common enough to sound familiar, but too common to place. One four-by-six exposure showed the woman in the middle of what looked like Washington Square, adjusting a mannequin into a fetal position on the pavement, surrounded by a few curious

onlookers.

She liked to work outdoors, Ebesen said. "Outstallations," she called them. Closed studio spaces made her claustrophobic.

In the next shot, Ebesen's camera had caught Gail Frank in the act of binding the hands of the now-blindfolded mannequin behind its back. In adjacent Polaroids, she manipulated various other dolls, dummies, and human figures, stacking them up in shipping crates, loading them into mailers, packing them into constrained spaces in tight crystal lattices.

Gail… Frank. A performance artist? Something nagged at her. Some buried, peripheral thing.

Ebesen shook his head. Remember performance art? Remember the seventies? God, we sure do slash and burn our genres these days, don't we?

Something in the way he said these words opened the sluice of her memory. Adie's hand flew up to her mouth. Gail Frank. Of course. The story that had the whole of artistic New York bound and entranced. At least for a season. The woman who… Mark Nyborg's…?

At the name of the fallen icon of minimalist sculpture, Ebesen's head jabbed forward.

Adie chose her words. The woman he killed.

Ebesen shrugged. Maybe.

Karl. What do you mean, maybe? The man pushed her out of a thirteenth-story window.

Fourteenth. But who's counting?

Convicted by a jury. Put away. As far as I've heard, he's still doing time somewhere.

Ebesen cleared a coating of papers off the stuffed chair and sat. He swirled his glass, then drained down to the white lees of plumbing scum. He stroked the empty tumbler like Beuys stroking his dead hare. Wouldn't that be incredible, for all of us? I mean, if we could actually "do" time?

You knew her? Adie shrank from the anemic formulation. The man had an altar of pictures erected to the woman. His home's sole decoration, aside from the piles of rubbish. You were… close?

His mouth tightened into irony's thin mail slot. We were close. She … upgraded me for him.

Her every possible response became impossible.

Strictly a matter of portfolio improvement. Gail needed to associate herself with heavy hitters. Reputation, standing, influence. That kind of thing. She was a creative vampire. Her own work fed off the attention that others were getting. After a couple of years, she outgrew whatever meager attention I was ever likely to receive in this life. And she grew into Mr. Nyborg, whose fame was expanding without limits.

Not fame, Adie snapped. Notoriety. Surprised by the anger massing in her. A poseur. A salesman.

Not without talent. She definitely traded up.

Adie looked at this man with whom she'd worked for two years in the closest of quarters. Even objection seemed shut down.

I can't say her departure left my life entirely impoverished. Gail was a… complex personality. It took me some time to realize that even grief brought its own kind of relief.

Adie turned back to the picture anthology. The woman displayed every available facial expression from hostility to helplessness — the same unbridgeable spread that any life indulged in. Gail Frank's face exerted an eerie magnetism, the pull of the scared expression that knows you want to look at it. The beauty of narcissism. Her face looked nothing like Adie's. Adie looked nothing like the woman.

She heard herself talking, from across an echoing hall. And you don't think that man murdered her?

Well, you know, Mark went off to a double lifetime prison sentence swearing that Gail…. helped herself over the sill.

Adie studied the woman, her public shows, her private nondisclosures. She shook her head. Wasn't there something about repeated abuse?

Another thing that I'd fail to give her.

And the neighbors in that building, testifying that they used to hear him, drugged, threatening at the top of his voice that he was going to kill

her?

Adie swung around to face Ebesen. He was studying her with a quizzical expression. You've retained a surprising number of details about the case.

She shrugged. I was a young artist, living in New York City.

Ebesen stood up. So were we all, once.

He crossed the room without a word, walking away from her. The interview was over.

Karl. Please. I'm sorry.

He disappeared into his bedroom, behind the lacquer screen. She stood forever, wondering if she should let herself out.

Hang on, he called at last. It's around here somewhere.

When he returned, he was toting a cardstock portfolio like the one he carried around with him at the RL, only bigger and rattier. He laid it out on a plateau on top of the floor clutter. She came behind him as he flipped through the enclosed sheaves. With each riffled picture, she wanted to call out for him to stop and back up. But he was going somewhere, flipping so rapidly that every so often he tore one in his hurry. Every tear ripped into her.

At first glance, she took them for color photographs. My God, she said, after a handful went by. What's the medium?

These? They're just acrylics.

Holy shit. Did you use projection?

He dismissed her with a laugh. If I'd used projection, these things might have been fashionable. As it is, freehand, they're just curios.

She needed him to stop flipping, to stop talking, to give her eye a chance to correct the impression of perfection, see the blemishes, figure out how it was done. But Ebesen forged on faster. When he finally came to rest on the thing he sought, she wished he'd kept going.

The image jumped out at her, an obscene crime-journalism spread. Gail Frank lay clutching the sidewalk, with half the legs of a spider, but twice as disjointed. Karl turned the paper ninety degrees. Odd, no? This way, she looks like she's scaling the north face of a sheer rock drop.

Adie could only stare. Stare at the ungodly, omnipotent technique. Stare at the obscene subject matter, painted here as if it were the heart of tranquil eternity. A woman lay sprawled on the pavement, her mechanism smashed. Pressed up against the floor of the world, clutching it, as if sleeping at the bottom of a deep well. All she lacked was a chalk outline around her now-obsolete body.

You couldn't have seen this, Adie said. Adamant. Hoping.

He nodded in contradiction. I did.

In your imagination.

Oh, my imagination isn't that good.

She looked again, refusing the evidence. A hyper-real, lurid tabloid shot of the victim after impact. Adie's head tracked back and forth, a searchlight in denial. This is… You must have painted this from a photograph?

I painted everything from photographs. It's absurd, isn't it? I mean, what's the point? A photorealistic copy of a real photo. The camera can do everything the hand can do, a million times easier and more effectively. He picked up the sheet of paper, then let it fall. Except be the hand.

Karl. It's horrible. How could you…? Where did you get the photo?

I took it.

She recoiled from him. Her hands pressed up to receive her face, taking disgust's mold. When they came away, her face was still there.

You don't understand, he said. She's not dead.

Those three words came from a place she couldn't look at. Her colleague, the bagman, a victim of the quietest mental illness imaginable.

I mean here. She's not dead yet, in the picture. In the photo I took of her.

She wanted to take him and hold him in his delusion, a greedy pieta, however much his body dwarfed her own. She reached out and took his elbow, cradling what she could.

He pulled away. No. It's not what you think. I made this about ten months before her death.

She shook her head. No: no.

It's from a favorite performance piece of hers. She used to find a nice stretch of public sidewalk down in the Financial District, get a demonstration permit, and then lie out on it for as long as she could get away with it. Used to scare the shit out of the Wall Street crowd.

Oh Jesus. Oh God. She watched the picture dissolve under her eyes, every detail changing to some identical other. You're saying her death was a… piece?

He looked again at the subpoenaed exhibit. That s what her boyfriend told the jury.

And you? What did you tell the jury?

I think it must have been a collaboration. A workshop effort. Ebesen shut the portfolio with brutal finality. Mark, Gail, and me.

You? Oh, Karl. How can you blame yourself for something that… She trickled off, losing her way out of the idea.

I shouldn't have been tempting fate. A person should never represent anything that they aren't willing to have come true.

Wait. No. That picture… had nothing to do with her death. You weren't even painting. You were just documenting the woman's… How were you supposed to know?

We know what we paint. And everything we paint comes into the world somehow. That's why God put the kibosh on graven images, you know. He didn't want the minor leagues fooling around with something they couldn't control.

She crossed the gap between them. She put her arms around him, to silence him. He made no move either to conform or to quit the sentence. Like embracing a six-foot burlap sack of rice. She pulled away, blunted, holding on to his flank.

Karl, you can't carry this around with you. Your picture had no bearing on… You're not responsible. You didn't do this.

Oh, but I did. Everyone does what they do, finally.

She let go of him. She stepped back, staring. He would not look at her. It fit together now, what the man was doing here, what he wasn't doing. All the things he'd never do again.

And you? he said, reading her thoughts. How about you? What's your excuse?

She shook her head. I have no excuse.

Why did you give it up?

She held her hair back with one hand and reddened raw. Because. Because it was a racket. Because we might as well be in an honest business. Because art does nothing.

He took her water glass from out of her fingers and vanished into the kitchen, leaving her the dignity of isolation.

You still love her? she called to him, for no reason. So there wouldn't be silence.

He called back, invisible, from the ell. Still…? What makes you say that?

What makes you. She figured the reasons. Counted them up, syllo-gistically aloof. The pictures. Like some Central American grotto of gra-cias to the Virgin.

Oh, he called back. That. Step back.

It took her a moment to process. She stepped back. Yes?

Nothing? Step back again. Keep going.

She stepped back as far as she could, all the way to the opposite wall. She looked up again at memory's pastiche. Suddenly each individual picture — each discrete pattern of light and dark — diffused into the dithered dots of a newspaper halftone. Where there had been hundreds of images, there now was just one: a single, gaping composite of a female face. But exactly whose face, the composite lacked the resolution to disclose.

Something moved to the left of the illusion. She looked away. Karl had come back into room, watching her discovery. When he spoke, it was as if all life's ballots were already counted.

I had a box of photos lying around. Most of them were of her. And I had this idea. I don't get that many of them these days. It was just an experiment.

Art made nothing happen. Nothing but what had to.

By the way, he added, she loved your show.