PLOWING THE DARK

by Richard Powers

  Oh, she said. We already have that.

  They had the space sufficiently fleshed out in time to celebrate a simulated Christmas Mass. Klarpol and Spiegel spent the last few minutes of 1990 together, placing tiny stones into the vault of heaven.

  Then came the New Year.

  She could not say, later, that she hadn't seen. But she'd never once believed. For months she'd withstood the glut of informationless data issuing from the latest desert showdown, following without following. O'Reilly and Kaladjian had even placed angry bets on which side would blink first. But the age of blinks was past. The world's interface no longer responded to blinking.

  Two weeks into the demo year, that electronic storm, so long in simulation, at last broke. Adie witnessed the opening shots by accident, on a television the size of a picture postcard that her Jordanian greengrocer stared at robotically as she tried to buy endive to bring home for dinner.

  Two delirious American reporters trapped in a high-rise office babbled on, over satellite uplink, about the phantoms screaming across Baghdad's dome. She hurried back to her island, and Stevie. He knelt there on his haunches, on the bare living-room floor, three feet in front of the tube.

  She set her plastic sacks of vegetable down in the doorway. What is it? she asked, knowing already. What's happening? As if that question ever had an answer.

  "Baghdad was lit up like a Christmas tree," one pilot explained to the camera. "It was tremendous!"

  "It looked like the Fourth of July down there," another boy said. "Just like in the movies."

  "No," she said. Louder. Again. Hysterical. But no one paid her any attention.

  The whole planet descended into the flicker of shared delirium. Scores of countries came onto the coaxial cable, just to get the twenty-four-hour feed. The Northern Hemisphere embarked on a winter of perpetual broadcast. On signal, by mass, silent agreement, an unbroken umbrella of full coverage stitched itself together.

  No hiding place could escape continuous update. Wherever Adie went, she stood looking through the crosshairs. Her colleagues poured over every scrap they pulled off the cable feed. Downhill from the labs, gas stations and delis inundated her for free—aerial bombardment, like green stamps, supplied as a public service. Stevie, addicted from the start, would hit the Mute button and drag about the house, pretending not to look. A dozen times a day, Adie ingested the same Kabuki footage: slow-motion replays of sky-strewn annihilation, lit in the eerie palette of video infrared. She stopped eating. She began to throw up, at odd hours, behind the closed bathroom door.

  Smart bombs beamed back video to even smarter bombers. Nose-cone shots documented their descents all the way up to the moment of deliverance. One missile steered itself down the midline of a twenty-foot-wide bridge. Another threaded the chimney of a suspected command-and-control center. Laser beams guided their cruise pay-loads for hundreds of miles over the wrinkled earth to land on a square smaller than the Cavern's front wall.

  Pinpoint delivery turned evidence so intoxicating that no one who once looked at it could look away. The race had achieved the precision of its earliest dreams. Coverage worked to keep up with the apotheosis. But the more Adie watched, the less actually took place.

  Event disappeared down the chute of choreographed news. She grasped at the accounts and came up empty-handed. People died without a sound, bloodless, thousands of feet below the all-seeing eye.

  Overnight, yellow ribbons sprang up everywhere—tourniquets twisted around wounded trees—and no one could say exactly where they'd come from. Scores of mega-celebrities banded together to record a radio hit, their caring voices abstracting any hint of political stance into a general message of hope and ecumenical well-wishing.

  At timed intervals, tuned to the perfect intermittent reinforcement schedule, the Joint Chiefs gave press conferences, explaining their multimedia clips in careful play-by-plays. A riveted Realization Lab tuned in to the course of the war's master narrative, its purposes as long and obscure as its means were swift and expedient. Violence seemed ready to expend even its viewers as collateral damage.

  Babylon became a bitmap. Pilots took its sand grains apart, pixel by pixel, their soldier bodies tied to weapons systems by electronic umbilical, their every joystick twitch duplicating moves overlearned in years of now-consummated simulation. Nightscopes revealed minute movements, at impossible distances, in pitch-dark. Robot stalkers chased living targets. Formal edge-detecting algorithms told heat from cold, friend from enemy, camouflaged caches from empty countryside. Human intelligence migrated wholesale into its artifacts.

  It was the perfect operation: the kind you carried out deep in enemy territory. It told no story, finally, aside from these abject images. Adie and Stevie stared nightly at a mute set, from under their bedcovers, forced to watch the upshot of everything they'd put their hand to.

  We did this? she whispered to him. It's us?

  He stared straight ahead, afraid to miss a scrap of acquitting evidence. Of course not. Don't be nuts.

  The bombs with depth perception? The ones that can tell our vehicles' silhouettes from the Iraqis'? The cruise missiles with a whole digital map of the world inside them, so that they know exactly where to explode?

  His shoulders dismissed her. Too defensive to mount a defense.

  Stevie, I need to know. Her voice lay just this side of its own smart violence. What have we been doing here? Are they using the same electronics as us? Are they taking our code?

  He smiled at the near-total naivete". The military? The Air Force invented virtual reality half a century ago. Mission trainers, flight simulators. The Army made the first computer, back when the game was still about beating the Nazis. They've been hip-deep into VR from the beginning. ARPA built the Net. They ordered the first microprocessor. You sow the Whirlwind, you reap SAGE. He went on, numbly, dull. On automatic pilot. If you want to know the truth, we're stealing their code. The whole runaway century, living off military spin-offs.

  She got out from under the covers and shut off the signal. I'm sorry. I can't watch anymore.

  No. Of course. You're right.

  They curled up against each other for protection, warmth, sleep. But each other wasn't enough. She could not lay still, but turned every two minutes, on truth's spit. Of course the Joint Chiefs wanted what art promised: to break the bonds of matter and make the mind real.

  You didn't know? he asked, in darkness, too small a voice to want a real answer. You really didn't know?

  She howled at the words, and he could not calm her.

  She went to Jonathan Freese. Who are we doing this for?

  Well, I've been doing this for myself. Who are you doing this for?

  Jonathan. Don't jack with me. Not now. Who's buying what we're selling?

  He studied her, deciding whether to laugh or fire her. He showed her the list of interested parties who'd already signed up for Cavern demonstrations in the spring. He couldn't very well refuse to show her. Disney, yes. Sony, yes. Half a dozen research universities, yes. But among the rest of the roster were other agencies, groups whose upbeat acronyms could not disguise their affiliation. Slaughter was a free rider, a virus using them, using the RL, using the Cavern as a way of spreading its genome.

  You fucked me over, didn't you? Just like you wanted to, from the day I signed on.

  Sweetheart, 1 know we're all under a lot of stress here. I'm going to forget you said this.

  She did not even bother to give him the finger.

  She sought out Karl Ebesen. She found him and Michael Vulgamott manning their cubicle, watching SCUDs and Patriots proxy-battle in the upper air. She put her finger to the screen they gazed at, where a trail of refugees streamed north. Her voice sounded almost level. Did we do this?

  They looked at her, afraid to move.

  This? Is this our fault?

  Ebesen turned to look at her. Everything ... everything we ever do is our fault.

  She sat down by the side of his desk and broke down. He sli
d his chair toward her, baffled. For one brief moment, he seemed actually to touch her.

  Since I was born? she said. For as long as I can remember. All I ever wanted? All I wanted to do was make something beautiful. Something that wouldn't hurt anyone.

  He nodded. He knew already: to make something good of our work and days. That was the place all guilt came from. She couldn't want anything that hadn't already burned him.

  She shook her head, enraged. Her sobbing sounded like a tearing veil. Why didn't you tell me?

  He frowned. Scowled at her. Held up his helpless hands.

  I know, she wept. I know. I never asked.

  Her fault: her own doing, all along, from the very first crayon smear. She must have wanted it, somehow, to have gotten in this deep, without once seeing the size of the betrayal she so lovingly enabled. Death from the air would win out in the end. Remote and ingenious, all piloted by absent fathers, the warcraft were flying again, despite the gifts she'd drawn to distract them. Once before, the Air Force had thrown away her handmade bribes. Now, worse: they took all her pretty pictures and put them to use.

  The Parasite Room had lodged inside her. The RL, the Cavern—all smart weaponry—were just first sketches for the next, larger assembly.

  simulators. The Army made the first computer, back when the game was still about beating the Nazis. They've been hip-deep into VR from the beginning. ARPA built the Net. They ordered the first microprocessor. You sow the Whirlwind, you reap SAGE. He went on, numbly, dull. On automatic pilot. If you want to know the truth, we're stealing their code. The whole runaway century, living off military spin-offs.

  She got out from under the covers and shut off the signal. I'm sorry. I can't watch anymore.

  No. Of course. You're right.

  They curled up against each other for protection, warmth, sleep. But each other wasn't enough. She could not lay still, but turned every two minutes, on truth's spit. Of course the Joint Chiefs wanted what art promised: to break the bonds of matter and make the mind real.

  You didn't know? he asked, in darkness, too small a voice to want a real answer. You really didn't know?

  She howled at the words, and he could not calm her.

  She went to Jonathan Freese. Who are we doing this for?

  Well, I've been doing this for myself. Who are you doing this for?

  Jonathan. Don't jack with me. Not now. Who's buying what we're selling?

  He studied her, deciding whether to laugh or fire her. He showed her the list of interested parties who'd already signed up for Cavern demonstrations in the spring. He couldn't very well refuse to show her. Disney, yes. Sony, yes. Half a dozen research universities, yes. But among the rest of the roster were other agencies, groups whose upbeat acronyms could not disguise their affiliation. Slaughter was a free rider, a virus using them, using the RL, using the Cavern as a way of spreading its genome.

  You fucked me over, didn't you? Just like you wanted to, from the day I signed on.

  Sweetheart, I know we're all under a lot of stress here. I'm going to forget you said this.

  She did not even bother to give him the finger.

  She sought out Karl Ebesen. She found him and Michael Vulgamott manning their cubicle, watching SCUDs and Patriots proxy-battle in the upper air. She put her finger to the screen they gazed at, where a trail of refugees streamed north. Her voice sounded almost level. Did we do this?

  They looked at her, afraid to move.

  This? Is this our fault?

  Ebesen turned to look at her. Everything ... everything we ever do is our fault.

  She sat down by the side of his desk and broke down. He slid his chair toward her, baffled. For one brief moment, he seemed actually to touch her.

  Since I was born? she said. For as long as I can remember. All I ever wanted? All I wanted to do was make something beautiful. Something that wouldn't hurt anyone.

  He nodded. He knew already: to make something good of our work and days. That was the place all guilt came from. She couldn't want anything that hadn't already burned him.

  She shook her head, enraged. Her sobbing sounded like a tearing veil. Why didn't you tell me?

  He frowned. Scowled at her. Held up his helpless hands.

  I know, she wept. I know. I never asked.

  Her fault: her own doing, all along, from the very first crayon smear. She must have wanted it, somehow, to have gotten in this deep, without once seeing the size of the betrayal she so lovingly enabled. Death from the air would win out in the end. Remote and ingenious, all piloted by absent fathers, the warcraft were flying again, despite the gifts she'd drawn to distract them. Once before, the Air Force had thrown away her handmade bribes. Now, worse: they took all her pretty pictures and put them to use.

  The Parasite Room had lodged inside her. The RL, the Cavern—all smart weaponry—were just first sketches for the next, larger assembly.

  Her work here was just a rough draft for technology's wider plan. The world machine had used her, used them all to bring itself into existence. And its tool of choice —its lever and place to stand, the tech that would spring it at last into three dimensions—was that supreme, useless, self-indulgent escapism. The thing that made nothing happen. The mirror of nature. Art.

  The war needed drawing, after all. The conflict had drafted Adie, made her its draftsman. She'd become death's seeing-eye dog, leading on into that place it could not navigate unaided. This she saw in full, even before the ground assault started. That girl's supreme paintbox had done its work. Everything that imagination had fashioned would

  now go real.

  You're never here anymore, Spiegel chastised her. Even when you're here. When I talk to you, when I touch you? It's like I pass right through you.

  I'm sorry, she faked, as calmly as she could. I'll be better.

  Life outlasts this, he wanted to say. It outlives its portrait. Look, he said instead. Are you trying to punish me for bringing you out here? Do you want to stop working at this? Do you want us to take off? Blow this peanut stand? I'm game, you know. I'll go anywhere. Just so long as we stay together.

  While they spoke, the road to Basra turned into a hundred-mile-long human ash. Helicopters filmed it in detailed pan, from a thousand attentive angles.

  Can you give me root directory access? she asked, stroking him.

  What do you ... ? Can I ask what... ? But trust could ask nothing. Is there anything I can help with?

  She smiled and kissed him, deep, past the lips. Let me surprise you.

  He gave her all the system's passwords. He was love's dupe, its software engineer, ready to barter for any scrap of real-time connection he

  might get.

  She destroyed the backup copies first. That much she'd learned, in her years of becoming digital. One by one, she mounted the archived volumes. And file by file, directory by directory, she erased her handiwork. It was not much, this retaliatory strike. It did not answer to what had been done. But in her own small way, Adie vowed to kill what she could.

  Those projects to which she'd contributed nothing, she left intact. The Weather Room, the Large-Molecule Docking simulation: each maker would have to be responsible for his own designs. She passed over O'Reilly's Futures Room, the one that had predicted the Gulf War, the one that predicted the war beyond the Gulf. She left Kaladjian's wonderland of pure math unscathed.

  Even in the worlds she'd helped to make, she picked around the others' contributions. She tore up her Arlesian floorboards but left behind Raj's ethereal creaking. She torched her dreamworld jungle, sparing those bits of vegetation that Karl had nurtured. Growth vanished into the void of zeroed data: the ebony flutist, the third monkey flushed from the undergrowth, the dreaming, almond woman that Spider Lim recognized ...

  She disposed of each redundant copy, as quickly as she could type the Kill command. Then she turned to the working master files, the living originals. How could delight have misled her so baldly? That illusion of purpose, the giddy sense of answer
ing a call, of doing urgent work that only her hands could do ... She could not send her portfolio back to randomness without a final peek. Fact had rendered her immune to the seduction. All she needed was five minutes, to see what that illusion looked like, stripped of belief.

  She booted up the cathedral and stepped back in. She leaned into the nave's great hollow, feeling herself move despite her better sense. She pointed one finger straight up, hating herself even as she gave in to the soar. She let herself rise into the hemisphere apse, then farther up, all the way into the uppermost dome, now inscribed with its flowing surah from the Qur'an.

  She spun her body in the invented volume, the largo ballet of an astronaut repairing failed equipment far off in the infinite vacuum. She twisted and looked down into the breach below. The God's-eye view: in the simulation, but not of it. And deep beneath her, where there should have been stillness, something moved.

  She dropped her finger, shocked. The winch of code unthreaded. She fell like a startled fledgling, back into the world's snare. The mad tiling swam into focus: a man, staring up at her fall, his face an awed bitmap no artist could have animated.

  43

  The room of the Cave is one continuous chasm.

  Its chambers all connect. They run together, the way old Greek was written: no spaces, no commas, no periods, just one long flow without dams or rapids, a single subterranean stream that never changes its course. But never the same stream twice.

  Here you have lived since childhood, facing the darkness, taking shadows for the things that cast them. On the walls of this room, a story unrolls. In it, someone just like you gets miraculously sprung. He turns to the light, which instantly blinds him. You cheer for him to run, but he turns back from the glare to the safety of this room.

  Your eyes adjust to the light of this hypothetical. What you take to be the boundless world may be no more than just this underground spring. You make out the peep show to be just a peep show, but only through the clip projected in front of you. The clunkiest of puppets say shadow, say story. And in that tale—continuous, no spaces—the tale you've been chained to since birth, you make out the room you live in.