Hieroglyph

by Ed Finn

  Pug sprawled in the dust beside me, his blond hair splayed around his head like a halo. “Now the work begins,” he said. “How you holding up?”

  “Ready and willing, Cap’n,” I said, speaking with my eyes closed and my head flung back.

  “Look at you two,” an amused female voice said. Fingers plucked the flask out of my hands. I opened my eyes. Standing over us was a tall, broad-shouldered woman whose blue Mohawk was braided in a long rope that hung over her shoulder. “You just got here and you’re already pooped. You’re an embarrassment to the uniform.”

  “Hi, Blight,” Pug said, not stirring. “Blight, this is Greg. He’s never been to the Playa before.”

  “A virgin!” she said. “My stars and garters.” She drank more whiskey. She was wearing overalls with the sleeves ripped off, showing her long, thick, muscled arms, which had been painted with stripes of zinc, like a barber pole. It was hard to guess her age—the haircut suggested midtwenties, but the way she held herself and talked made me think she might be more my age. I tried not to consider the possibilities of a romantic entanglement. As much of a hormone-fest as the Playa was supposed to be, it wasn’t summer camp. “We’ll be gentle,” she said.

  “Don’t worry about me,” I said. “I’m just gathering my strength before leaping into action. Can I have the whiskey back, please?”

  She drank another mouthful and passed it back. “Here you go. That’s good stuff, by the way.”

  “Fighting Cock,” Pug said. “I bought it for the name, stayed for the booze.” He got to his feet and he and Blight shared a long hug. His feet left the ground briefly.

  “Missed you, Pug.”

  “Missed you, too. You should come visit, sometime.”

  They chatted a little like old friends, and I gathered that she lived in Salt Lake City and ran a goth/alternative dance club that sounded familiar. There wasn’t much by way of freak culture out in SLC, so whatever there was quickly became legendary. I’d worked with a guy from Provo, a gay guy who’d never fit in with his Mormon family, who’d spent a few years in SLC before coming to L.A. I was pretty sure he’d talked about it. A kind of way station for Utah’s underground bohemian railway.

  Then Pug held out his hand to me and pulled me to my feet and announced we’d be setting up camp. This involved erecting a giant shade structure, stringing up hammocks, laying out the heavy black rubber solar-shower bladders on the van’s roof to absorb the day’s heat, setting out the grill and the bags of lump charcoal, and hammering hundreds of lengths of bent-over rebar into the unyielding desert floor. Conveniently, Pug’s injured arm wasn’t up to the task, leaving me to do most of the work, though some of the others pitched in at the beginning, until some more campers arrived and needed help unloading.

  Finally, it was time to set up the Gadget.

  I’d been worried about it, especially as we’d bashed over some of the deeper ruts after the turnoff onto Route 34, but Pug had been awfully generous with the bubblewrap. I ended up having to scrounge a heavy ammo box full of shotgun shells to hold down the layer after layer of plastic and keep it from blowing away. I drew a little crowd as I worked—now they weren’t too busy!—and Blight stepped in and helped toward the end, bundling up armloads of plastic sheeting and putting it under the ammo box. Finally, the many-legged Gadget was fully revealed. There was a long considering silence that broke when a breeze blew over it and it began, very slowly, to walk, as each of the legs’ sails caught the wind. It clittered along on its delicate feet, and then, as the wind gusted harder, lurched forward suddenly, scattering the onlookers. I grabbed the leash I’d clipped to its rear and held on as best as I could, nearly falling on my face before I reoriented my body to lean away from it. It was like playing one-sided tug-of-war. I whooped and then there were more hands on the leash with mine, including Blight’s, and we steadied it.

  “Guess I should have driven a spike for the tether before I started,” I said.

  “Where are you going to spike it?” Blight asked.

  I shrugged as best as I could while still holding the strong nylon cable. “I don’t know—close enough to the shade structure that we can keep tools and gear there while we’re working on it, but far enough away that it can really get around without bashing into anything.”

  “Stay there,” she said, and let go, jogging off toward the back forty of our generous plot. She came back and grabbed our sledgehammer and one of the longest pieces of rebar, and I heard the ringing of a mallet on steel—sure, rhythmic strokes. She’d done this a lot more than me. She jogged back a moment later, her goggles pushed up on her forehead, revealing dark brown eyes, wide set, with thick eyebrows and fine crow’s-feet. The part of me that wasn’t thinking about the Gadget was thinking about how pretty she was and wondering if she was single, and wondering if she was with Pug, and wondering if she was into guys at all, anyway.

  “Let’s get it tied off,” she said. We played out the rope and let it drag us toward the rebar she’d driven nearly all the way into the hardpack, the bent double tips both buried deep, forming a staple. I threaded the rope’s end through and tied a sailor’s knot I’d learned in the one week I’d attended Scouts when I was nine, the only knot I knew. It had never come loose. If it came loose this time, there was a chance the Gadget would sail all the way to Reno over the coming months, leaving behind a trail of interlocking panels that could be formed into a yurt.

  The sun was starting to set, and though I really wanted to go through my maintenance checklist for the Gadget, there was dance music playing (dubstep—I’d been warned by Pug in advance and had steeled myself to learning to love the wub-wub-wub), there were people milling about, there was the smell of barbecue. The sun was a huge, bloody red ball on the horizon and the heat of the day was giving way to a perfectly cool night. Laser light played through the air. Drones flew overhead, strobing with persistence-of-vision LED light shows and doing aerobatics that pushed their collision-avoidance routines to the limit (every time one buzzed me, I flinched, as I had been doing since the accident).

  Blight dusted her hands off on her thighs. “Now what?”

  I looked around. “Dinner?”

  “Yeah,” she said, and linked arms with me and led me back to camp.

  SOMETIME AROUND MIDNIGHT, I had the idea that I should be getting to bed and getting a good night’s sleep so I could get the Gadget up and running the next morning. Then Pug and I split a tab of E and passed a thermosful of mushroom tea back and forth—a “hippie flip,” something I hadn’t tried in more than a decade—and an hour later I was dancing my ass off and the world was an amazing place.

  I ended up in a wonderful cuddle puddle around 2 A.M., every nerve alive to the breathing chests and the tingling skin of the people around me. Someone kissed me on the forehead and I spun back to my childhood, and the sensation of having all the time in the world and no worries about anything flooded into me. In a flash, I realized that this is what a utopian, postscarcity world would be like. A place where there was no priority higher than pleasing the people around you and amusing yourself. I thought of all those futures I’d read about and seen, places where everything was built atop sterile metal and polymer. I’d never been able to picture myself in those futures.

  But this “future”—a dusty, meaty world where human skin and sweat and hair were all around, but so were lasers and UAVs and freaking wind-walking robots? That was a future I could live in. A future devoted to pleasing one another.

  “Welcome to the future,” I said into the hollow of someone’s throat. That person chuckled. The lasers lanced through the dust overhead, clean multicolored beams sweeping the sky. The drones buzzed and dipped. The moon shone down upon us, as big as a pumpkin and as pale as ancient bone.

  I stared at the moon. It stared back. It had always stared back, but I’d always been moving too quickly to notice.

  I AWOKE THE NEXT day in my own airbed in the back of the van. It was oven hot inside and I felt like a stick of beef je
rky. I stumbled out shirtless and in jeans and made it to the shade structure, where I found my water pack and uncapped the hose. I sucked it dry and then refilled it from a huge water barrel we’d set up on a set of sawhorses, drank some more. I went back into the van and scrounged my shades and goggles, found a T-shirt, and reemerged, made use of the chem toilet we’d set up behind a modesty screen hammered into the playa with rebar and nylon rope, and then collapsed into a hammock under the shade structure.

  Some brief groggy eternity later, someone put a collection of pills and tablets into my left hand and a coffee mug into my right.

  “No more pills, thank you.”

  “These are supplements,” he said. “I figure half of them are harmless BS, but the other half really seem to help with the old seratonin levels. Don’t know which half is which, but there’re a couple neuroscientists who come out most years who could argue about it for your amusement if you’re interested. Take ’em.”

  Pug thrust a paper plate of scrambled eggs, sausages, and slices of watermelon into my hands. Before I knew it, I’d gobbled it all down to the watermelon rind and licked the stray crispy bits of sausage meat. I brushed my teeth and joined Pug out by the Gadget. It had gone walking in the night, leaving a beautiful confusion of footprints in the dust. The wind was still for the moment, though with every gust it creaked a little. I steadied Pug as he climbed it and began to tinker with it.

  We’d put a lot of energy into a self-calibration phase. In theory, the Gadget should be able to tell, by means of its array of optical sensors, whether its test prints were correct or not, and then relevel its build plate and recenter its optics. The unfolded solar collectors also acted as dust collectors, and they periodically upended themselves into the feedstock hopper. This mechanism had three fail-safes—first, it could run off the battery, but once the batteries were charged, power was automatically diverted to a pair of servos that would self-trip if the battery ran too low. They each had enough storage to flip, shake, and restore the panels—working with a set of worm-gears we’d let software design and had printed off in a ceramic-polymer mix developed for artificial teeth and guaranteed not to chip or grind away for years.

  There was a part of me that had been convinced that the Gadget just couldn’t possibly work. Too many moving parts, not enough testing. It was just too weird. But as Pug unfurled the flexible photovoltaics and clipped them to the carbon-fiber struts and carefully positioned the big lens and pressed the big, rubberized ON button, it made the familiar powering-up noises and began to calibrate itself.

  Perfectly.

  Dust had sifted into the feedstock hopper overnight and had blown over the build plate. The sun hit the lens, and smoke began to rise from the dust. The motors clicked minutely and the head zipped this way and that with pure, robotic grace. Moving with the unhurried precision of a master, it described a grid and melted it, building it up at each junction, adding an extra two-micron Z-height each time, so that a tiny cityscape emerged. The sensors fed back to an old phone I’d brought along—we had a box of them, anticipating a lot more failure from these nonpurpose-built gadgets than our own—and it expressed a confidence rating about the overall accuracy of the build. The basic building blocks the Gadget was designed to print were five-millimeter-thick panels that snap-fit without any additional fixtures, relying on a clever combination of gravity and friction to stay locked once they were put together. The tolerances were fine, and the Gadget was confident it could meet them.

  Here’s a thing about 3D printing: it is exciting; then very, very boring; then it is exciting again. It’s borderline magic; when the print-head starts to jerk and shunt to and fro, up and down, and the melting smell rises up off the build platform, and you can peer through that huge, crystal-clear lens and see a precise form emerging. It’s amazing to watch a process by which an idea becomes a thing, untouched by human hands.

  But it’s also s-l-o-w. From the moment at which a recognizable object begins to take shape to the moment where it seems about ready to slide off, there is a long and dull interregnum in which minute changes gradually bring the shape to fruition. It’s like watching soil erosion (albeit in reverse). This is the kind of process that begs for time-lapse. And if you do go away and come back later to check in on things, and find your object in a near-complete state, you inevitably find that, in fact, there are innumerable, mysterious passes to be made by the print-head before the object is truly done-done, and once again, you wish that life had a fast-forward button.

  But then, you hold the object, produced out of nothing and computers and light and dust, a clearly manufactured thing with the polygonal character of everything that comes out of a 3D-modeling program, and once again—magic.

  This is the cycle that the spectators at the inauguration of the Gadget went through, singly and in bunches, on that day. The Gadget performed exactly as intended—itself the most miraculous thing of the day!—business end floating on a stabilization bed as its legs clawed their way across the desert, and produced a single, interlocking shingle made of precision-formed gypsum and silicon traces, a five-millimeter, honeycombed double-walled tile with snap-fit edges all around.

  “That’s what it does, huh?” Blight had been by to see it several times that day, alternating between the fabulous dullness of watching 3D paint dry and the excitement of the firing range, from which emanated a continuous pop-pop-pop of gleeful shooting. Someone had brought along a junker car on a trailer, covered in improvised armor, rigged for remote control. The junker had been lumbering around on the desert while the marksmen blasted away at its slowly disintegrating armor, raising loud cheers every time a hunk of its plating fell away, exposing the vulnerable, rusted chassis beneath.

  “Well, yeah. One after another, all day long, so long as the sun is shining. We weren’t sure about the rate, but I’m thinking something like five per day in the summer sun, depending on the dust storms. It’ll take a couple hundred to build a decent-sized yurt on Labor Day, and we should easily get that many by then.” I showed her how the tiles interlocked, and how, once locked, they stayed locked.

  “It’s more of an igloo than a yurt,” she said.

  “Technicality,” I said. “It’s neither of those things. It’s a 3D-printed, human-assembled temporary prefabricated experimental structure.”

  “An igloo,” she said.

  “Touché.”

  “Time for some food,” Pug said. It could have been anywhere between three and seven P.M. None of the burner phones we were using to program and monitor the Gadget had network signal, so none of them had auto-set their clocks. I wasn’t wearing a watch. I woke when the baking heat inside the van woke me, and ate when my stomach rumbled, and worked the rest of the time, and danced and drank and drugged whenever the opportunity presented itself.

  My stomach agreed. Blight put a sweaty, tattoo-wreathed arm around each of our shoulders and steered us to the plume of fragrant BBQ smoke.

  I AM PROUD TO say I administered the killing shot to the target car. It was a lucky shot. I’d been aiming for center mass, somewhere around the bullet-pocked midsection, staring through the scope of the impossibly long rifle that a guy in cracked leathers had checked me out on. He was some kind of physicist, high energy at JPL, but he’d been coming out since he was a freshman and he was a saucer-pupiled neuronaut down to his tattooed toes. He also liked big hardware, guns that were some kind of surrogate supercollider, like the rifle over which I’d been given command. It was a sniper’s tool, with its own tripod, and he told me that he had to keep it locked up in a gun club over the Nevada state line because it was radioactively illegal in sweet gentle California.

  I peered down the scope, exhaled, and squeezed the trigger. Just as I did, the driver jigged the toy wheel she was using to control it, and the car swung around and put the middle of its grille right in my crosshairs. The bullet pierced the engine block with a fountain of black smoke and oil, the mighty crash of the engine seizing, and a juddering, shuddering, slew
ing cacophony as the car skidded and revved and then stopped, flames now engulfing the hood and spreading quickly into the front seat.

  I had a moment’s sick fear, like I’d done something terrible, destroying their toy. The silence after my shot rang out couldn’t have lasted for more than a second, but then it broke, with a wild whoop!, and a cheer that whipped up and down the firing line.

  The car’s owner had filled it with assorted pyro—mortars and Roman candles—that were touched off by the fire and exploded out in every direction, streaking up and out and even down, smashing into the playa and then skipping away like flat stones. People pounded me on the back as the car self-destructed and sent up an oily black plume of smoke. I felt an untethered emotion, like I’d left behind civilization for good. I’d killed a car!

  That’s when my Fourth of Juplaya truly began. A wild debauch, loud and stoned and dangerous. I slept in hammocks, in piles of warm bodies, in other people’s cars. I danced in ways I’d never danced before, ate spectacular meals of roasted meat and desserts of runny, melted chocolate on fat pancakes. I helped other people fix their art cars, piloted a drone, got a naked (and curiously asexual) massage from a stranger, and gave one in return. I sang along to songs whose words I didn’t know, rode on the hood of a car while it did slow donuts in the middle of the open desert, and choked on dust storms that stung my skin and my eyes and left me huddled down in total whiteout while it blew.

  It was glorious.

  “How’s your windwalker?” Blight said, as I passed her back her water bottle, having refilled it from our dwindling supply.