PLOWING THE DARK

by Richard Powers

  Jackdaw led her to the end of the corridor, and let her into a window-less back room. Between its dropped ceiling and raised floor, the space felt almost as cramped as the Cavern. Inside the sanctum, a woman in her mid-twenties, her hair the color of a Faberge egg, paced between the machine furrows, chattering back at the murmuring chrome.

  Hey, Jackdaw said. Sue Loque. What's a software type doing down among the nuts and bolts?

  The woman's ambiguous splay of signals—biker leather trimmed with ratty lace—would have intimidated Adie, even back in blase New York. Out here, in this flood of new rules, they left her feeling shamefully normative.

  Sue Loque threw up her hands, the icon for distress. If the hardware types would keep these things tweaked, we software types wouldn't have to get our hands dirty. Why do you think I went into coding in the first place? So that I wouldn't have to touch any printed circuits. What's the problem? Adie asked. They're ugly and septic. No, I mean with the machines.

  Oh. Well, they're none too pretty either. And they just stopped polling. Jackdaw shook his head. What do you mean, they stopped polling? I mean they stopped polling.

  Whatever it meant, Adie stopped polling, too. Or at least she stopped existing for the two professionals, who set out to backtrace their way into the heart of logic's arctic crystal. The Loque woman and Jackdaw called in Spider Lim, and all three of them disappeared into the

  printed-circuit thicket.

  Adie glanced around the room. Its likeness had never once been painted. It glowed, an eerie, mechanical hatchery, replete with all the secret trip levers of an ingenious Max Ernst frottage. But all this complexity felt stunningly sterile: as still and smooth and sinister as a turquoise Hockney swimming pool.

  Shame and amazement did a two-step inside her. This room was this present's wildest accomplishment, its printing press, its carrack and caravel, its haywain, hanging gardens, and basilica. These demure, humming boxes contained the densest working out, the highest tide of everything that collective ingenuity had yet learned how to pull off. It housed the race's deepest taboo dream, the thing humanity was trying to turn itself into. Yet for all that Adie had seen, art had fled headlong from it, in full retreat, toward some safe aesthetic den of denial, where it could lick its wounds in defeat.

  She tried to picture the Arcadian landscapes hiding inside these boxes. But she could form no clearer picture than streams of signals, waves and troughs rushing down narrow silicon sluices, each one setting off another massive cascade of signals. Somehow these signals all lined up, countless dots in a cosmic halftone process, the hammers of a trillion player pianos, the programmed nubs on the drum of a galaxy-sized music box. The voltages performed their megabit marching-band ballets, lining up to stand for anything in creation: a bank balance, an airline ticket, a photo, a song, a letter from a friend, all fully portable, all convertible, one into the other.

  Several clock cycles later, hardware and software emerged triumphant, the offending bug squashed between them. Got it? Adie polled them.

  We always get it, eventually, Lim said. And he disappeared into the next time-share emergency.

  Who was that masked man? Sue asked.

  Jackdaw grinned at some safe face in the air between the two women. Sorry for the interruption. Here they are, anyway. The brains behind the operation.

  The Cavern's cavern, Sue added.

  You mean, all the pictures come from ... here? You're trying to tell me that the entire Crayon World is inside these five machines, somewhere? Sue snorted.

  Don't snort at me, Adie warned.

  Sue traced a wave in the air, half apologetic, half dismissive. She squeezed Adie's shoulder, a reassurance that came off like somebody pumping Windex onto a bathroom mirror. Adie fought the urge to punch this woman, for if it came to blows, this woman could pummel her and Jackdaw put together.

  They're all in there, sweetie. Every picture in existence. Every last image ever imagined or imaginable. We just have to figure out how to get them out.

  What are they called? These machines?

  Jackdaw saw his chance. They're all proprietary TeraSys graphics boxes, of course. They start out life as 3-D accelerated Power Agate servers, running one reality engine for each—

  I mean, what are their names?

  Their... names?

  Adie shook her head: all the commonsense groundwork left undone.

  OK, how's about we call this one Da Vinci? He was pretty technological, huh? Inventing submarines, writing backwards, and all that. This one can be Claude. After all, we're going to be cranking out landscape by the gross hectare. Then here's Hsieh Ho, giver of the Six Principles ...

  Jackdaw cleared his throat. Is that anything like the six degrees of freedom?

  And we'll need a Rembrandt. For a lifetime devoted to the play of light against dark. And the last one ought to be Picasso, because—

  Because he fucked everything that moved for the better part of a century? Sue suggested.

  Jackdaw jerked at the profanity. He lurched for the door, and safety. Uh, maybe we'd better vacate. Gotta get back to that Z-order filter...

  Sue fell in behind him. Let's just hope that Rembrandt here doesn't decide to wig out again before the recompile, tomorrow.

  You see? Adie said. It’s useful to know their names, isn't it?

  Sue made her noise again, the one Adie warned her not to. Deeper in her sinuses, this time. I love you art school chicks. I really do. You give the whole female race a little—how to say?—йclat.

  They might join forces, this female race. A woman who knew how to extract any one of imagination's images from these boxes. And another who knew just which images to extract.

  Sue, Adie petitioned her fuchsia-haired colleague. Can you show me how to make these suckers draw?

  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 p
olynomial 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?