PLOWING THE DARK

by Richard Powers

  Most nights between ten-thirty and quarter to eleven, Karl Ebesen checked in to say good night. Or so Adie assumed, for on these visits, the senior visual designer mostly said nothing at all. He'd show up in a streaked trench coat, a prop out of some Mitchum film noir, his ratty portfolio of the day's digitizing under one arm. He'd heave himself into the corner across from Adie's workstation, capitulating to the gravity he'd fended off for five decades, wheezing through his mouth and scowling.

  She'd ask him about the architectural fly-through that he and Vulgamott were assembling. Ebesen would answer snidely or just wave her off. Over the course of several evenings, Adie settled into returning the man's morose silences with the mirror of her own. The idiom had for Adie a comforting familiarity. The silent conversation of her childhood. The absence she was raised in.

  Ebesen would sit mute for anywhere from five minutes to an hour, then shuffle off like one of those benign street people down by the ferry docks who accept all offered change without once asking for any. She came to think of Ebesen as her guardian bagman. Any sign of human drama caused him to slink off to whatever Presbyterian soup kitchen had coughed him up. When Karl was around, she could talk out loud without worrying about anyone answering. Drawing into a digital graphics tablet seemed less displacing, in the shadow of this odder interface.

  Then one night, the derelict talked back. She was chattering, just making noise while her hand moved around the bits on her electronic palette, a little verbal dribbling, spinning through sentences the way some people spin through radio stations on the car dial, with no real intention of landing anywhere.

  All these creatures, she said. All these animal eyes. What are they all looking at? An elephant, a snake, two birds, two lions, two monkeys ...

  How many monkeys? Ebesen sneered. A barking seal after the emergency tracheotomy.

  Adie whipped around from her workstation. She stared at the man in the corner, the one she'd stopped looking up at half a dozen visits ago. He had his head down, circling ads in an old travel magazine with a red felt pen. She looked back at the twenty prints of the painting taped over every free corner of her cubicle. And saw the third monkey.

  Bit by bit, bouquet by bouquet, she reconstructed the painted Dream. Every six days, she took her week's handiwork into the Cavern for a road test. Spiegel found her there one night, passing dismayed through a stand of Rousseau's head-high, alien anemones.

  Stevie, help me. Nothing has depth. All the pieces are so planar. I want real furniture in my dollhouse. Not just cardboard flats.

  He crafted her a solid lozenge, a blank batten upon which to paste her petals' surfaces. For each new blossom, now, she invented those sides hinted at but hidden in the plane of paint. Front folded seamlessly to back, and the flower stayed bulky from all points of the compass. Not much—and yet, dimension. All the axes that we're given to live in.

  The vessel took form, piece by piece, each separate square of hull arc-welded onto the mold of the master scaffolding. Klarpol became a tourist in her own Eden. Her wand and glasses did more than bring the jungle to her eyes. They spied back on her, gathering the data streams released by her every glance. The lenses that tracked her head also logged her glances into saved tables, files of code detailing the angles her eyes subtended, the time she spent focusing on each leaf, the errors her glimpse made in selecting its target, the tries she took in moving through these blooms that, even here, in her infant clumsiness, had already commenced using her ...

  9

  She would come from the Cavern recharged, in search of new techniques. Desire forced her out into the halls of the RL, that commonwealth beyond her cubicle, looking for new repertoire. In such a state, on a rainy spring evening, she found Spider Lim slumped over his workstation in a baby coma. He sat still, intent upon the screen, but dazed. Frothy, arrested, viscid, like someone in the first stages of hypo-glycemia. His fingers no longer clacked at their keys. He'd gone off elsewhere, lost down the successive iterations of a nested loop.

  Adie called him. Spider just sat there, holding the keyboard, sub-audibly humming some catchy MIDI pop-synth arrangement. She bolted down the hall for the nearest live body. She found Steve and Rajan Rajasundaran, deep in conversation.

  It 's Spider, she said. There's something wrong with him.

  The two men exchanged looks. Spiegel patted her. It's OK, Ade. Sometimes when he's working at a screen? He forgets to breathe.

  The three trotted back to Spider's cubicle. Stevie and Raj stood above Lim and rubbed him gently. Their colleague sat numbed, a Seattle grunger dozing off for the afternoon in the entrance to the Space Needle.

  Spider! Raj called. Snap out of it, man. You're system-crashing again.

  Breathe in, Spider, Spiegel encouraged. Come on, buddy.

  I'm breathing, Spider called back, irritated at the interruption. Still a little out of it, some tangled knot tying up his processor cycles. Some puzzle of fluid flow, of air convection wrapping its turbulence around a sculpted wing. Adie touched his forearm. His temperature had dropped, like a lizard caught in a shadow.

  Spiegel harassed the returning patient. What's with you, Spidey? This is some kind of meditation effect, isn't it? Something to do with your Qi?

  Spiegel, man, Rajasundaran warned. Don't mess with the inscrutable East. Don't even try to scrute it. There are mysteries that the people of bologna and yellow mustard are not given to understand.

  I'm from Korea, Spider objected. He'd lived long enough in the States to speak with a slight Okie drawl. We don't do Qi in Korea. That's a California thing.

  Keep breathing, Spidey. Spiegel urged him. We need your expertise.

  Raj seconded. Yes, man. Keep on working for Chairman Gatt. To get rich is glorious.

  Korea, Spider said. Korea, you stupid Tamil.

  Asian transplants had no corner on weird physiological responses to the man-machine interface. All of this virtual country's immigrants tended to maze out on silicon's sub-micron boulevards, tranced over their keyboards, their carpal tunnels hollowed out for maximum brain-finger throughput. But Spider's body tracked the machine especially steeply. He could generally catch himself overheating, hyperventilating as he tested an overclocked processor or a heat-stressed IC. But a hang could snag him, pull him down under consciousness's event horizon.

  We're going to find you crashed like that someday, Spiegel scolded. Completely stalled. Like a token ring that's lost track of its packets. Like some student infinite do-loop. And we won't be able to spring your processes.

  Rajasundaran wagged his digit. Not a team player. Does not work and play well with others.

  That's not true, Adie demurred. He 's more sociable than most of you crazies.

  Oh, right, Raj said. As if you starving artistes get a clean bill of health in the social interaction department?

  Spider waved his hands for peace. No biggie, guys. My Boolean-blood barrier is just a little weak.

  And that was the only possible diagnosis. Lim was like one of those sing-along car drivers whose speed halved whenever the tune on the radio slowed from boogie to ballad. He'd never done well in the Cavern for extended periods. Simulator sickness got him every time. When the simulation plunged from great heights, his ears popped. A simple projection of the winter constellations against the ceiling gave him hypothermia. He couldn't work on a circuit without simulating it in his own circulatory system. The same data traversing the chutes of gated arrays invariably ported over to that other platform, to bang around inside the test bed of Spider's cells.

  The health scare subsiding, Adie exploited the gathered experts. My jungle is a ghost. I pass right through every plant in it. I should bounce off the rubber trees. At least rustle the ivy.

  Spiegel nodded. You need collision detection. Yeah, give me one of those. Are they expensive? Collision had already cost the team a tidy sum of man-months. It wasn't enough for a garden-variety mushroom sprouting in the Cavern simply to look like one. Even a toadstool needed heft and weight and
resistance. A simulated object had to bend or droop or bruise or any of several dozen other verbs that real things did when bumped up against in the grotto that the Cavern stood for.

  Multiple coders had already implemented a reasonable fraction of collision's class library. They wrote out methods for a whole host of impacts. Each calculated aftermath got its own mongrel differential equations, trajectories mocking the ones that nature invented. Various variables toted up mass and speed and English, calculating the thresholds between bounce and break, between shatter and slide and spin.

  Spiegel showed her how, from out of this catalogue of cases, to assign verbs for each set of possible contacts: hand on vine, vine on bird, bird on monkey, monkey on tree limb, limb on hand. In the course of several weeks, Adie watched as software turned her jungle into a gym. The forest became a vast calculator, a gnarled orchard of countless parallel computations. Over the run of days, any pair of objects learned to calculate what to do when they met one another in space.

  But calculation cost; the display code carried so much overhead that it ran too slowly to keep up with its events. Adie released a gingko ball in the air above her canopy. The seedy mace slid down the slope of its infinitesimal accelerations until it struck some surprise tendril or trunk. Contact produced a pop, then seized up. That wall's graphics buffer promptly dropped several frames while its reality engine did the myriad integrals needed to determine the respective obligations of striker and struck. The gingko pod hung in space, waiting for math to decide its fate.

  Such a hiccup was not acceptable. Any jerk in the animation and the game was up. Material reality's supreme Cray never dropped frames. That's how you knew you were in the real world: all the flicker-free, smooth scrolling. The Cavern's goal—believability through total immersion—could not survive an image that sputtered.

  Spiegel and Jackdaw worked up provisional fixes, clever step-saving approximations that shortcut the Cavern's calculations, cheats that would cover until Spider and the hardware boys could bring in more firepower. Continuous collision detection arrived after two triple-shift weeks during which, when Spider slept at all, he slept on a bed of fan-fold paper spread two inches deep on the stockroom floor. He woke on that pallet one morning, the socket of his right eye richly black-and-blue, three shades deeper than his sepia skin.

  O'Reilly, the Ulster economist, took one look and whistled. Jays. Some shiner. I wasn't aware that you were currently involved with anyone.

  The glossy maroon smear entranced Sue Loque. Ooh. That's a beauty. Can I touch it?

  No, of course you cant touch it. You're perverts. All of you.

  Christ on a crutch, Spider, Sue said. Don't be such a prude.

  Spider laughed, one of those single-syllable, apologize-for-existing laughs, still intact from his first few years of Korean existence.

  When Adie saw the black eye, she lost it. Oh no. God help us. Look at I've done.

  You? You haven't done anything. I've been sleeping on a hard mattress, is all.

  You don't remember? Yesterday? Testing the back layers?

  What are you talking about?

  You dont remember running into that tree branch? She'd seen him wince.

  Oh no, no, no. Dont be crazy.

  A sympathetic fall in blood sugar lay within the realm of material possibility. But a virtual bruise ... It fell too far outside his world model. Yet no real day's accident explained the shiner any better.

  Maybe this Klarpol woman is right, Raj said. He milked the lilt of Hindu eschatology. We've seen such things produced from out of your brain before.

  Spiegel piled on. Why not? Impale the brain with something believable, and belief will leave its record in the skin.

  That's nuts, Lim insisted. A black eye needs a real impact. Spoken with a true hardware bias.

  I have to agree with Spiegel, Rajasundaran said. True, the switches execute the code. But also true, the code still sets the switches.

  Loque fingered the wound, over Lim's objections. You boys are making some real progress in veridicality.

  Spider Lim, Spiegel said. The man who became his own collision algorithm.

  At these words, Lim's whole body blushed so deeply that his bruise vanished into the general background rose.

  In the privacy of their own workstations, each player in the game mounted a run at that same threshold of belief. The heart of the Realization Lab beat to a single paradox. It hoped to mechanize any brute incident that existence offered. But imitation was itself just the first step in a greater program, the final escape from brute matter: the room that would replace the one where existence lay bound.

  Spider's bruise prompted the Rousseau Room's first working demo. Artists and engineers alike turned out to see just how palpable Adie's mythic branches—the product of collective fiat—had in fact become. Color met number, fact chased invention through the shadows of an undergrowth past evolution's power to imagine.

  All was yet still. The python hung slung in mid-slither. The birds held open their beaks to caw. The elephant readied to trumpet and the monkeys to scamper. The lions cocked their quizzical heads at this mass tourist intrusion. And spreading vegetation bent the white, oil-paint moonlight into as many greens as the viewing mind could grasp.

  Spiegel presided, showing off the luscious prototype, their object lesson in objects. He took all parties on a walking tour as deep into the jungle as the jungle went. He pointed out the details of stalk and stamen, all spelled out in structured data—the crazy Frenchman's mother-in-law tongues turned tropical Egyptian. He popped the hood and revealed the diorama's underpinning gears. He laid out every effect they'd managed to produce. But he did not know what he was looking at until Adie told him.

  We did this, the woman said. She clapped her hands together in what only Karl Ebesen recognized as a proof-perfect knockoff of St. Theresa's ecstasy. We made this! It's so beautiful.

  The word lay beyond the rest of the team's list of formal descriptors. It seemed to have a real referent; the new woman apparently meant something when she used it. Beauty might even have had some physical reality, some selective advantage conferred over the last billion or so years. But what formal rules the quality adhered to, what behaviors it meant to elicit, not even Spider Lim's body could begin to guess.

  Time for the people, Adie declared. Are we ready to start populating this place?

  They went back to the color reproductions. They took the measure of the rain forest's two inhabitants: black and white, vertical and horizontal, male and female, player and listener... And the vegetative kingdom surrendered to its human sovereigns, those shapes that gave first green its order.

  Then Spider's body began to specify, began to execute that unde-cidable function. However arbitrary, however recently contrived, beauty turned real inside him. It grew legible, a script as unambiguously phonetic as Korea's upstart Hangul.

  For the woman began to invade him. Her inroads grew so wide they even upset his sleep. Not the living woman: he left Adie to the others, to the bit jockeys who ranked her overgenerously in the local hierarchy of desire purely on the basis of novelty. He left her to Spiegel, who saw in her some ghost of a lost shared life. He left the real woman to those who knew how to interact with such things. And he took up nightly with the imaginary one, the woman on the crested divan. The one who organized this profligate Eden and named it.

  He watched art and science conspire to float that full, stuffed body among the foliage. Out of the electronic paintbox, she emerged, rising from the wedge of face, the coils draping her neck, extending through the crescent of almond opening just above her knees and down to those

  curious, stub toes.

  Spider donned a pair of glasses and walked clear around the couch where she lay. She remained remote, aloof, still, exuding the hint of something he could not figure. We did this. It's beautiful.

  Their first successful leaf, twirling in the Cavern darkness, had led to this—this pale, lentil body turning in his mind's dark. This s
capular profile, these tow-line braids. Her hips fell somewhere on the limaзon of Pascal. The squares of her breasts' abscissas and ordinates summed to an integer. This was the math of women, a field he'd given up studying, female equations whose complexities had long ago surpassed his ability to differentiate. The flawless chestnut manikins, their grade-school desks fastened to the front of his, whose strands of brunette hair he'd once tried to number. The white film enigmas, beckoning to him to join them behind the projection screen. The cycles of magazine sirens, that March Cosmopolitan cover from his second year at Stanford, the anemic, skewed-thigh, dazed-eye vision he'd preserved for ongoing reference, the visible deed to this land of American license he'd somehow landed in. He rebuilt her in detail at nights, on his drive home down the mountain, through the newly air-dropped communities where no one could tell him apart from any of the thousands of other thirty-year-old transpacific immigrant virgins with pronounced epicanthic folds wandering around the Greater Seattle area. Her crude constructedness tapped some secret in him, a figure beckoning at the entrance to the impenetrable undergrowth that fringed his life. A texture map that lay on a couch just past recall, prodding his body from its long forgetfulness.

  Where does she come from? he asked Adie.

  From the mind of a supremely bizarre customs officiai in a cold Paris atelier.

  No. I mean ... the way she looks. Where did he get her?