Plowing the Dark

6

Adie Klarpol and Sue Loque stood shoulder to shoulder, facing the front wall of the Cavern. Each sported a pair of those ridiculous shuttered glasses. A loud sprig of rhinestones studded the corners of Adie's, a giddy display brought on by the usual overexertion. Sue wore the head-tracking glasses, the ones with the cable conduit that recorded exactly what her eyes were doing at all times.

On the front wall, a wreath of laurel materialized out of an expanse of bridal white. It hung there, blowing in an invisible breeze. On the left wall, menus cascaded out of one another. The other cave walls darkened to a contrasting black, the soot of countless digital campfires. The wreath in front of them had grown from a seed in Adie Klar-pol's mental window box. The Crayon World had thawed the sap of images inside her. It left her needing to see a new bud germinate from scratch. To that end, she and her design colleagues had assembled for a series of tutorials, to learn the ways that virtual leaves might be made.

Grow me a rubber tree, she'd asked Spiegel. Give me a philodendron tendril. She had in mind a surface as rich and convoluted as the solar surf that shaped it. But anything more than a jagged crayon smear would have satisfied her.

Here, she told her fallen poet Stevie. Something like these. And she held out to the softwarewolf a picture in a book.

The color plate she held out was a supremely clumsy representation. Leaves everywhere: a veritable jungle of them. But no leaf that grew on any tree in any country Spiegel or Adie had ever lived in. A rash of stems, fruits, and flowers — all native to the republic of invention. And among the blooms, a naked white woman sprawled upon a jungle-violating sofa, listening to the tune of an ebony flute player from deep in the undergrowth.

Spiegel stared at this hemophiliac sunbather — lenticular, wrong— in a trance of memory. At last he looked away, breaking the picture's spell. He glanced up at his circle of apprentices and said, as if no one were naked: We can make a leaf in several different ways. The simplest of all is to use basic trig.

Spiegel hacked several quick expressions into a terminal. The points of a curve percolated up from out of the algebraic shorthand. He sliced off a conic section and roughed up its edges. He wrote out a well-behaved polynomial to describe the range and rise and run. The X of the thing, the willing Y, the demure Z.

Frame buffers then threw his results upon a screen for the design group to witness. Artists and engineers drifted through the room as Steve's shapes spun in space. Each time his right pinkie hit the Enter key, the screen turned into a luscious spirograph, pouring forth a

petaled profusion.

Lunettes, Michael Vulgamott, the architect, called. Spandrels. Tracery. Adie heard, in the man's voice, a fellow displaced Gothamite. Vulgamott's manic, twitching fingers ticked off the terms as if he were stepping into a crowded midtown intersection to hail a thesaurus.

The words he used made the mathematician Ari Kaladjian's bushy eyebrows balkanize. They're properly called cardioids and tricuspids and folia. Limagon of Pascal. Plane algebraic geometry has been making these curves for at least two hundred years. Kaladjian had fled the globe's chaos for the safety of mathematics, and he did not care to surrender his sanctuary to fuzzy-mindedness.

Spiegel quit his keyboard jabbing long enough to shrug. Call them what you want. They're graphics primitives. All art is Euclid's baby.

I can think of at least a couple of dubious paternity suits, Adie said.

I love my wife, Sue Loque stage-whispered. But oh, Euclid!

What's the point of starting with equations? Vulgamott wanted to know. What do we gain?

Kaladjian grunted. Everything starts with equations. Spiegel spoke with the distraction of the engrossed encoder. Plane curves are the fastest, easiest artifacts in the world to implement. And you can make trillions of them with just a few iterated expressions.

Streams in the desert? Adie mocked. Orchards from out of the arid places?

Something like that. Yes. Spiegel smiled at her, immune to her aggression. Knowing it, of old.

She frowned at his geometric petals. But where's the leaf? I see nothing that even faintly resembles the Rousseau I showed you. At best, they look like victims of a hit-and-run Calder mobile.

That's what you lose when you generate leaves by algorithm. Everything's a trade-off. In this case, you trade off natural complexity for something that's easier and faster… and much too geometrical. Much too perfect.

Too perfect! Kaladjian shouted. You cannot get too perfect. Where are the shadows and gradations? Adie sounded betrayed.

We'd have to add them. Spiegel demonstrated. A few calls to a shading routine produced a rough, pencil-sketched idea of surface.

Huh, Adie said, as the cardioid went crosshatched. Huh. That puts us about three baby steps toward a Miro. Wait! Go back a little bit. There. Try the feathered edges with the Bonnard orange.

Numbers and art both fell silent at how quickly Spiegel pulled a crepe carnation out of code's silk hat.

A pout stole over Adie's face. She extended her arm to slow things down, one palm out to break her fall.

You're trying to tell me that… math… is enough to get fake leaves to look real?

Math, Kaladjian snarled, is enough to get real leaves to look real.

Spiegel defended her. I don't think that's what she means.

What the hell does she mean, then? Kaladjian flicked one hand through the air, a disgusted scythe.

Spiegel turned to Adie. Well, she? What the hell do you mean?

God only knows. I was hoping someone here could tell me. I mean: are these equations — these cosine things — inside real plants?

Kaladjian's Of course rammed in midair into Spiegel's Not really.

The younger man, from the younger discipline, demurred. Well. That all depends on what you mean by "inside." Something in Spiegel's tone implied that no massively parallel array of processors short of the planet itself could hope to extract the perfect equation from out of imperfection's green.

Let's see some veins, Karl Ebesen said. He scrutinized the test leaves from the graphic designer's eye view. How about a few burns and insect bites? The ragged scars that silk imitations never bother to imitate.

Spiegel pressed on, coating the synthetic surface with ever-finer nubs and nuances. Boosting realism required forgoing simple polynomials and embracing a runaway explosion of polygons. Here, he told his charges, pointing at the color plate of the original jungle. Here: trying to keep his finger a safe distance from that woman's chalk-white breasts. Here, this cluster of…

Figs, Adie offered. Figs, I think.

That's supposed to be a fig tree? That? OK. Let s say fig. We turn this cluster of fig leaves into a thousand little trapezoids We manufacture every one of its kinks and blips out of tiny triangles, tilted to lie in every plane that interests us.

What they call a wire frame? Vulgamott, in his former life as an architect, had worked with endless screen-based blueprints — pale Pei imitation monoliths exploded into more tiny CAD corbels than a person could shake a French curve at.

Wire frame. Skeleton. Whatever. Groups of graph primitives: triangles, polygons. Hidden-line removal creates the sense of three-space. Lots more verisimilitude. But tons slower. Tons harder to draw.

Adie cleared her throat. Drawing shouldn't be a problem. I thought that's why we clueless Bohemians are on the payroll.

Oh, not harder for you. I meant harder for the graphics boxes. For… Rembrandt and Claude and Hsieh Ho. Ten video channels, in real time. Were talking real rendering overhead. Every object that we want to paint is an entire community. A whole ecosystem of polygons for each light-face. The better you want it, the smaller your polygons have to get, until your complex object is nothing but vertices. Hundreds of thousands of vertices, smack up against what the hard-cores call your polygon budget.

Couldn’t we just go out and shoot 360 degrees of film around some actual leaf?

Could. But youd still want to translate the picture back into data points. And youd have to do that by hand, or something like it.

Why? Adie asked. Why turn a continuous image of the real thing back into jagged little chunks?

Because, Spiegel began, running the logic through his own internal simulation, like sunlight through foliage. Because well want to give your leaf real qualities. Behaviors. Well want to run operations against it. To subject it to gravity, fire, wind. A photo of a leaf wont ooze when cut. We want a clone that will do everything the original does. Catch rain or shrivel up in heat. Turn gold in a cold snap.

The Cavern would settle for nothing less. Every community of polygons needed its catalogue of affordances: pliant, pulpy, wet, burnable, breakable, taut… And that behavioral catalogue itself decided how the described object glinted in twilight, how it aged and altered, how it floated on the sea of wider rules all around it.

Every fully modeled object became a machine. And every change in an object's catalogue altered the way that machine ran. Leaves programmed the light that fell on them. And every scar of light that leaves accumulated along their way fed back into the living inventory. A branch in the air modeled the wind that waved it, and wind bent that bough through the arc of its own prediction. For there was no real difference, finally, between property and behavior, data and command.

How smart an image was — how much it embodied. Whole volumes of words could not contain the information locked up in one road map. The art and design people knew this instinctively, from a lifetime of looking. The heft and feel of a thing, its list of nicks and bruises, the deed of its actions and of all the actions upon it: in the long lens, these rays met at a single focus, the Maker's outline. But art knew these facts only by other names, other procedures, methods lost in translation…

Spiegel came clean. There's another way we can make you a leaf. The oldest process going, even though we're still pretty new to it. We can build the leafs description the way a real leaf gets built. We can grow it.

Over the course of more makeshift sessions, he showed them how. He drew up genetic algorithms: fractal, recursive code that crept forward from out of its own embryo. He worried over their sapling, a RAM-cached Johnny Appleseed. He spread the best iterative fertilizer on the shaded texture until it flung itself outward into a living branch. His commands no longer called for products but processes. They ceased to stipulate the stipule. The leaf grew itself, from the self-organizing rules arising along its lengthening blade.

Physical law alone laid down this palisade layer. The push of petiole, the stomata's maw, the closest-cubic packing of chloroplast and cuticle and conducting tube: the whole serrated sprig sprung its surprise from out of hidden inevitabilities.

The ad hoc committee of artists and technicians tested their successive grafts in the Cavern greenhouse. The blackness that these graphics primitives floated in was not yet the air. The planes of the confining flower box did not yet compose a volume. The Cavern walls were not even empty. They were whatever came before empty. But in that flat void, just below the front screen's midline, a leaf hung twirling.

And there Klarpol and Loque stood, shoulder to shoulder in the simulator, where their sprig of laurel turned on the mute breeze. Adie stared at the spinning wreath while Sue navigated through a menu waterfall with a tilt of her head, selecting from commands with a blink of her laser-tracked eye.

Loque blinked twice, choosing "Brightness" from a menu labeled "Chroma Tuning." A beveled representation of a knob sprung into existence, out of nothing. It acted exactly like the knob it represented, except that it slid back and forth in its track simply as Loque shook her head.

She slid the knob all the way to the left. In a literal eye blink, the laurel went dark. Each wrinkle and vein deepened into shadow. Dusk swept across the face of the plant. With another head wag Sue swung the slider to its opposite pole, bathing the branch in the overhead glare of midday.

How's that for turning over a whole new leaf?

Crikey, Adie answered. I cant take it What do all the numbers mean? How much is minus 170? What 's a plus 190?

They're arbitrary. The scale runs from zero to 255.

Two hundred and fifty-five? You people are truly occult.

It's a binary thing, babe. Give me this one on faith.

Sue shook her fuchsia head and twitched her ruby-studded eyebrow, dragging the knobs through their paces. She called up sliders for contrast, saturation, and hue. The laurel wreath metamorphosed into supersaturated narcissi and hyacinths. It hardened to a turn-of-the-century black-and-white lithograph. It ignited in a lurid laundry soap commercial.

We can tweak each color channel separately. Or we can nudge around points on a histogram or an active compensation curve.

Adie looked on her colleague in awe. Loque's own aggressive Papagena plumage began to make sense. That's OK. I trust you.

Big mistake. Here. Watch this. From out of a menu labeled "Transforms" came a choice called "Vortex." Sue blinked, and the laurel sprig descended into a Cartesian maelstrom. It wrung itself out like a topologisfs spent dishrag. And still it twirled in the mythic blackness.

Wait. God. What have you done? You've wrecked it. It looks horrible.

Easy, sweetie. Haven t you heard? What's done can always be undone.

With a single click, Sue returned the spinning branch to mint condition. There you are. Unblemished. Untouched by human tinkering.

The idea grazed Adie, like a pile of bricks falling off a scaffold and killing the pedestrian in front of her. She saw why the mind raced to convert to digital. Why it needed this place where ingenuity could always hit the Undo button.

Sue Loque warped and bulged and folded the innocent sprig until it was no longer fit to grace a wilted salad. Laurel twisted into oak into maple. Each derangement offered its own custom parameters, permutations too numerous to investigate.

Adie watched her expert pilot steer them into "Shadows and Edges." On the Cavern wall, the leaves fell away to a penciled outline. The mottled surface of a thousand greens vanished into mere contour flapping in the invented breeze. Surface reduced to a ghostly mold, a pipe-cleaner sculpture that Adie reached out and poked her fingers through.

This isn't right. I cant cope…

Hang on. It gets worse.

We're not meant to be able to do all this. It's not good for us.

Loque turned her attention to the archaic creature. She fiddled with the chains dangling from her studded skirt. I don't get it. You've never used a computer in your work?

Adie shot her head back, horrified.

All those little pastel magic princess thingies of yours?

Thanks, Sue. By hand. Every one. You remember the human hand, don't you?

Do you? Sue asked, and reached out. Adie, despite herself, stepped back. Sue laughed, and snorted again at the color she brought to the artist woman's cheeks. You've never seen Monday Night Football? Saturday cartoons? This stuff is all over every prime-time fifteen-second commercial spot that—

Another horrified head shake. I don't own a TV.

Well. Aren't we precious? Wait until the baddies at TeraSys learn who they've hired.

Adie regrouped. What they don't know can't hurt them.

Oh, they know everything, finally. And nothing hurts them.

Sue popped backward through the Undo catalogue, the history of their voyage here. She retrieved the original plant from its pipe-cleaner outline. The thousand greens returned from their brief banishment to transparency, now deepening, by contrast, their mimicry of the living.

OK, doll. Pull up your virtual La-Z-Boy and kick back. Are you ready for this?

I severely doubt it. You want a minute?

I want a lifetime.

Sue tsked. Chill out, girl scout. Here goes. Let's start with "Water-color."

She blinked the word, and the fact followed. The result did not resemble a watercolor of a laurel sprig. It was one, down to the fibers in the moistened idea of rag paper. Down to the simulated color-bleeding, the dribbled imperfections of a gummed-up camel-hair brush, although the brush that painted it never existed outside this software library.

Everything was perfect: the palette, the semitransparent matte, the fuzzy borders, the splotchy jade inks running into each other like broken yolks in a crooked skillet. All the kinks and cutaneous leaf landmarks still laced this revamped image. Only now they appeared as manhandled, hand-mangled parodies of the original. The leaf bobbed on its stalk in front of Adie, a copy of a copy, a debasement of the debasement of the Forms.

Help me, Adie whimpered, appalled and euphoric at once. Ãò drowning.

No prob. Heading for dry land here, boss. What'll it be? Chalks? Colored pencil? Dry point? Conte? Here's something a little offbeat: stained glass. At a blink, the laurel fractured into the leaded lozenges of a free-floating lancet, hued in cool Chartres blue.

They played like girls stumbling upon a rolltop desk in an attic, all the pigeonholes intact. Oil and Quilt; Paper Scrap and Tapestry; Putty Knife, Aluminum Foil, Fresco.

Agitated Cave Painting? What in creation…?

As in Lascaux. I named that one. That's one of mine.

Yours? Hang on a minute. You wrote…?

Sure. What'd you think? You think Ãò just some Turbo Pascal farm-team stringer?

Math does all this, Adie chanted. All some kind of— The greatest paint-by-numbers kit in the universe.

Princess, Ãò ready to love you, and all that. But you gotta pull it together a little, or we'll never manage to drag you over the finish line.

You mean there's more?

Always. "More" is what we do. "More" is this outfit's end product.

Always another level down, always another branch led off from the branch where they stood, until the spreading tree grew to fill all the available arbor. Submenu Art Effects. Submenu Filters. Submenu Artist Styles. Pointillism. Seurat. Their grafted leaves speckled into something from the Grande Jatte. The imitation was uncanny — an exact running average, stained on the mottled leaf, of every dot that the dead painter ever applied to canvas.

Oh Jesus. I cant believe this. God help me.

Sue dragged her stunned apprentice through a pantheon of styles. They tried on painters like teens trying on jeans at a factory outlet. Giotto bent the green into chalky sapphire chunks. The Caravaggio leaf darkened to tenebrismo. Van der Weyden glistened, hard-edged and luminous. Rothko bled a whole woodland of greens out of one monotone block. Artists who'd never dreamed of painting a leaf now did so in a perfect parody of their leafless life's work.

Adie stood still in the Cavern, straddling rapture and despair.

Who made all these things?

What do you mean who made them? We just did. Didnt you just see us?

No. I mean, who made the routines. Who made.. Rothko? Caravaggio?

Oh. Yeah. That was us too.

Us?

Us. Me, Acquerelli, Rajasundaran, Spiegel…

Spiegel? My Spiegel? Does every one of you know more about painting than I know about computers?

Watch this, Sue commanded. As if Adie could help but watch. Sue blinked onward, narrow and accurate. We can take a Rubens palette and put it on top ofPoussin shrubbery. Using Mary Cassatt's brushstrokes.

Don't. Please. You realize that what makes these people great is…?

That you cant reduce them to a statistical average? Yeah, yeah, we've looked into all that. But still, Sue wheedled. I bet you know who this is.

Adie did, at a glance. And the one after that was even more obvious. A little aura began to glow, just behind the globe of her left eye. The harbinger of an out-of-this-world migraine that would prostrate her for the next ten hours.

Gauguin, she called out. I need to see Gauguin.

Why? Guilty favorite or something? Was he so hot with foliage?

Adie didn't explain. Her need had nothing to do with the man's technique. She needed to see the colors behind that grimly named panorama, its name as long as the painting itself: Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?

They did Gauguin, blessedly not all that convincing. I've seen better Gauguin imitations on cruise-line brochures.

Sue brayed. Tell me about it. We wrote this great filter. But we didnt know who in the hell it looked like.

Marc, Adie declared. Franz Marc.

You're the expert. Sue pulled up à Ñ shell and jiggled the label of the offending menu. Gauguin became Marc, even more easily than he had in real life.

You want to write a decent Gauguin? We can start with this one and monkey with the parameters.

You mean to tell me I can be anyone? That every conceivable style…? That everyone's hand in the history of Western…?

Princess. Chill. Whatever we can describe, we can reproduce.

They played out the remainder of their reserved time slot, until Sybil Stance's climate modeling group came and kicked them out. By the time Klarpol and Loque left the Cavern, their laurel had become the spitting image of that bouquet just behind the sofa in Rousseau's Dream. A bouquet that never existed, until they plucked it and placed it there.