by John Updike
The fifth floor is mostly devoted to Ferrari’s pet project, the development of adaptive brainlike hardware silicon chips for artificial intelligence—though what benefit might be brought to mankind, already possessed of so many disastrous intelligences, by the mechanical fabrication of yet more is less clear than the immaculate, feral smile of approval and encouragement that the boss bestows on all sides when he visits his favorite department. His happiness, perhaps, is that of Pygmalion, of Dr. Frankenstein, of all who would usurp the divine prerogative of breathing life into clay.
The sixth floor holds the guts of the place—the massed ranks of CPUs—VAX 785s, Symbolics 3600 LISP machines, and the Cube’s own design, the MU—churning and crunching through calculations twenty-four hours a day; thunderous fans keep them from overheating, and a floor of removable segments protects yet renders accessible the miles of gangliated cable connecting their billions of bytes with not only the floors of display-processing units above and below but also, through high-speed modems and satellites, with terminals as remotely, strategically placed as Palo Alto, Hawaii, West Berlin, and Israel. Dale, to cool his mind, sometimes likes to wander around in here on the shuddering floors, up and down the aisles of encased circuits and racked spools of magnetic tape, amid the gigantic hum of something like spiritual activity, yet an activity mixed with the homely leakiness and vibration of a ship’s engine room, complete with the reassuring human curses of grimy-handed mechanical engineers wrestling with cables and hand-tightened connections.
The seventh and eighth floors hold the cubicles of the lesser minions of the Cube, and the ninth holds the air-conditioning equipment—the ninth-floor windows are dummies, installed to satisfy the architect’s post-modern need for insincerity, for empty symmetry. Dale gets off at floor 7, which also holds the cafeteria, closed after five o’clock, and a hall of rather weary machines that at any Godforsaken hour will accept coins and supply coffee, tea, bouillon both chicken and beef, candy bars, potato chips, cans of soft drinks, and even triangulated, bubble-wrapped sandwiches, all by encoded number. Working soldiers in the computer revolution, these big scarred boxes operate at a level of dogged, fumbling reliability interrupted by sudden spurts of rebellious malfunction—the coffee that will not stop pouring from its limp white nozzle, the bulb-lit red legend claiming OUT OF STOCK even though the desired bag of Fritos is in plain sight behind the plastic pane.
This seventh floor is also a realm of refuse, of paper cups and discarded wrappers, of posters overlaid one upon another like raster-display windows that cannot, oddly, be moved at the touch of a button but need fingernails to pry loose the thumbtacks and pressure to push them back in. There is, on the bulletin boards and the office doors of these seventh-level computer wizards, an atavistic population of comic-strip animals, of Snoopy the blobby white dog and Garfield the chunky striped cat, of Booth’s bull terriers and Koren’s gleeful shaggy anthropomorphs, as if a certain emotional arrest has been the price of the precocious quickness of these young minds. Few of Dale’s peers are at their posts at this in-between hour; also, spring and its holiday have called many of them home. Allston Valentine, an Australian roboticist, can through two doorways be glimpsed, as it were in clipped image, amid the rickety wreckage of a disassembled many-elbowed arm, while its leverage schematics patiently glow in vector sketch on the display terminal. Isaac Spiegel, who has been struggling since his junior year at MIT with the unreachably deep structures of computerized translation, sits with a bronze can of Michelob in a cubicle lined with dictionaries and grammars and Chomskyite charts branched like impractical antlers. Language, that spills from every mouth as naturally as saliva, turns out to be even more resistant to analysis than enzymes. Spiegel is growing bald in the service of his specialty; he looks hairy everywhere but wears on the back of his head a bald spot the shape and size of a yarmulke. He is overweight; his stretched shirt shows pumpkin seeds of skin between each pair of buttons. He looks up at Dale suddenly in his doorway and says, “Don’t scare me. You look like a ghost. Where’ve you been, Fuck-off?”
“Around,” Dale says.
“Not like you used to be around. What’s the distraction? Where’s the old dedication? Frontiers of reality, and all that?” Dale’s mouth gropes for the answer, and Ike supplies, “It’s gotta be a cunt. Or an asshole; but I don’t think you’re into those.”
In truth Dale’s desire, with Esther’s connivance, to possess her completely, her slender perishable body, has led them lately in their lovemaking to that smallest, tightest orifice as well. Dale remembers the grip of the cold greased sphincter and the sight of the nape of her dear neck tense at the other end of her spine and blushes and marvels at Spiegel, the fat man’s nonchalant clairvoyance, his fearlessness in the face of nature, his groundedness. God’s anointed. The blacks and the Jews are the magical people in America, and our blanched, gentile, protesting race the dead weight, the ancient chafe, the persisting saddle sore. “Something like that,” he confesses.
“Come on in later, I have some jokes for you.” Spiegel pivots in his swivel chair back to his overloaded desk, the unchartable morphemes swimming in their sea of human ambiguity, of multiple signification.
Dale goes to his own cubicle, which he shares with a blonde, poignantly breastless graduate student called Amy Eubank. Her project in computer graphics concerns a quantitative approach to pattern recognition, from bird and insect markings to the bizarre individuality of human beings, each one of which can be recognized by family and friends from distances at which all quantifiable markings and proportions should have quite broken down. We can spot an acquaintance from the back, swaddled in clothes, a block away. How? From Amy Dale has disturbingly learned that insects see farther into the ultraviolet end of the spectrum than we do and that flowers accordingly are marked with nectar guides that we cannot see, as are moth wings with courtship signals; an entire angelic conversation transpires invisibly all around us. This revelation disturbs him—irrationally, for of course there are languages Dale cannot speak, and it is a standard item of Christian faith that there are realms of knowledge beyond us, that God’s ways are not ours. Dogs smell and hear worlds more; migrating birds somehow read the Earth’s magnetic lines: yet the thought of flowers striped in patterns that only insects see insults him. The eye is the soul’s window, and we atavistically trust its information to be complete. Percipi est esse.
Like Dale with his animation graphics, Amy needs to use the Venus, the VAX 8600, which costs four hundred thousand dollars; to have undivided access to the machine, he and she must schedule away from each other, in four-hour slots, so they rarely are in the cubicle together. This suits Dale well, since Amy’s fragile femininity, though she is six inches taller than Esther, reminds him—especially around the wrists and in the sudden anxious way she tilts her head, as if listening to sounds he cannot hear—of his mistress and agitates him with both the resemblance and the possibility, suggested by this resemblance, of other women, women not ten years older than he and not awkwardly married to a professor of divinity. Even Amy, stripped of her blouse at one in the morning up here on the quiet seventh floor, might show something to suck, if not exactly Esther’s surprisingly substantial, downward-conical breasts with their bumpy mud-colored nipples, the left one of which has around it a few unnecessary hairs. She likes, Esther, to thrust her breasts alternatingly into her young lover’s mouth while her wet nether mouth stretches around his prick; with Esther it all becomes a matter of mouths, openings interlocking and contorted like the apertures and intersections of hyperspace, Veronese surfaces graphed in more colors than nature can normally hold and that not even insects could see. Dale feels at times, intertwined with her, caught up in an abnormal geometry, his body distended on a web of warping appetite. Were he to make love instead to Amy (her body shyly immobile under his, in the conventional missionary position), she could afterward calmly discuss with him such blameless technicalities as hidden line algorithms and buffer refresh times, cabinet versus cav
alier projections and Hermite versus Bezier parametric cubic curve forms, instead of lying there smoking, as Esther does, with an exhausted wry air of foreseen tragedy and, beyond the tragedy, boredom, boredom of a privileged, professor’s-wife sort. Amy would seem a kind of sister afterwards, lightly mussed and sweaty as if after jogging, and Dale would not have that disturbing sense of being—his bony young body, his obedient and astonished ardor—a luxury deliberately enjoyed on the edge of death, on the edge of a long sliding down into death.
The sky, he sees from his window, now is indigo. A single star shines in it as upon a jeweller’s felt. Bevelled planes of the big sandy-gray pebbles of the Cube’s texture frame the view. Down below, sections of other science buildings and of tenements owned by the university thrust up murky rectangles lightly loaded with perspective; there are gravel roofs and water tanks and ducts and sluggishly twirling fans. The lumberyard where he sometimes works is a black hole, but for weak night lights by the office and the saw shed. A notched gulf in the middle distance, a snippet of Sumner Boulevard, glows with the neon signs, like flowers in their tender beckoning, of a Chinese restaurant, a bowling alley, an adult cinema.
The pastrami in his sandwich is so tepid now, so nakedly greasy, that Dale has no appetite; instead he tears open the milk carton and dunks the oatmeal cookies. He punches his log-in name and password followed by a call to his program, DEUS. He taps the keys that conjure up the menu of transformations, each with its little symbol and viewport along the screen’s left edge, each available to the bright triangular cursor controlled by the electro-optical mouse under his right hand. Another phrase on the keyboard causes to appear, with a quick yet not imperceptible electronic scrolling, a list of objects—Tree, Armchair, Water Mite, Carbon Molecule—that he or other students of computer graphics have modelled in wire-frame, vector by vector, angle by angle; some are pure polygon meshes, constructed of points and straight lines, while in others curved 3-D surfaces are patched together with polynomial equations whose transformations in 2-D space involve calculations large relative even to the CPU’s oceanic capacity. In every case a complete, mathematically specified representation, an application-dependent solid, is stored in an ideal space that physically exists only as a huge string of OS and IS, closed or open switches, full or empty electronic pockets, within the gigantic RAM to which Dale, threading his way through the requisite keyboard strokes and processor commands, gains access.
The world, in stylized and specimen form, exists at his fingertips. Awe, or fear, touches him as his hands hesitate. He has no precise intention, no program of manipulations to produce the end result spelled out in his program’s Promethean title; he proceeds by faith, trusting his prayerful intuition to guide him ever deeper into this maze fabricated to duplicate, in its essentials, created (can it have been uncreated?) reality. He knows that the graphics procedures available to his program represent a paltry number of objects as against the objects that exist on Earth, let alone in the universe; but his hopeful sense of it is that the number of bits involved in his representations and his transformations of them already approaches a number so high that, though infinitely (of course) short of infinity, it nevertheless cannot be regarded as a special case. The odds approach the infinitesimal that a conclusion true of a sample set so large will be untrue of the grand set, the enclosing and all-inclusive and divinely appointed set.
To warm himself up, Dale sets his luminous, nervously responsive triangle-pointer at Carbon Molecule and, setting his view volume at 10.0 × 10.0 × 10.0, rotates it parallel to the screen’s y axis, through x = 100. He taps out:
Slowly, recalculated every thirtieth of a second, the leggy luminous molecule twirls, spidering on the invisible filament of the y axis. Cruelly, Dale calls for perspective projection and moves the viewpoint closer in, so that the calculations, the rapidly and tabularly approximated cosines and sines, arrived at tortuously through loop after loop, begin to excel the image refresh time and to impart a jerky, perceptibly effortful motion to the altering vector lines: the spider’s limbs are creaking, the atoms composing carbon, represented as vertices, space themselves across the docile gray screen widely as stars—stars, those scattered, raging proofs of cosmic madness, those sparks in the velvet void of the overarching brain!
Next, to work himself into the program and its blasphemous (I say) attempt, Dale calls up from Memory the model labelled Tree, generated fractally—that is, “grown” by certain implanted principles of random subdivision tuned as closely as possible to the principles of organic arboreal growth. With a few rudimentary adjustments of parameters, indeed, the branching pattern of the Tree can be made to resemble the upward reaching of an elm or a Lombardy poplar, the downward droop of a willow or a pin oak, or the stately sideways spread of a dogwood or a beech. A tree, like a craggy mountain or a Gothic cathedral, exhibits the quality of “scaling”—its parts tend to repeat in their various scales the same forms. By an ingenious algorithm that Dale himself supplied in a bygone, more tranquil epoch (before Lambert! before Esther!!) the trunk and lower branches proportionately thicken as the twigs, tracing the fine lines of their branching, multiply. This Tree once its growth has been terminated and its mathematical specifications have been stored, can be conjured up from any angle, in part or (with much detail lost in screen resolution) as a whole, and submitted to yet further lightning-swift ingenuities that the computer depths can trigger. Dale tilts the Tree perpendicular to the plane of the screen, along the z axis, and slices it in section with a plane, simply by setting the front and back clipping planes to the same depth. At z = 300, a roundish pool of dots appears—the topmost twigs in transverse section. Moving the setting of z higher, Dale moves down the Tree to where circles and ovals—thicker branches intersected at various angles—appear, and then to where the twigs—dots, black on gray, and segments of lines where these happen to lie exactly on the display plane—retreat to the edge of the screen, whose center now is occupied by blobs that enlarge and merge as forks are encountered and their copulating outline impassively relayed to the CRT. At last there is only the single, fractally irregularized trunk to be sliced across.
Dale on his plastic keyboard, its electrically supplied patter as delicate as the scrabble of rats, moves back into the viewing space, away from the plane of the screen, up again into the Tree, where dots and small ovals indicate the height to which small boys, if projected into the mathematical woods, might safely climb. Each element of the array has its equation, which the machine can be made to disgorge in hexadecimal form, and which the dot-matrix printer on the other side of the cubicle—where Amy Eubank sits when Dale is absent and where she leaves her lipstick-stained Styrofoam coffee cups like love letters in another system of notation—will obediently print, in what is called a “dump.” Dale takes readings at z = 24.0, z = 12.4, z = 3.0, and z = 1.1, and the machine—another rat-noise, a terrible terrified high-pitched chattering—spews out, with a syncopated, somehow irritable bumping rhythm of rapid platen rotation, line after line of figures: these Dale scans for an abnormal, a supernatural pattern of recurrence. He especially checks the long accordion-folded sheets for 24 or any striking incidence of 2 or 4, which he has half decided are the sacred numbers in which God will speak to him—higher powers of the machine’s brute 0 and 1, astraddle the traditional weary trinity, and one short of the ominous 5 we find grafted onto our hands and feet.
He encircles in red felt-tip 24s as they occur in the hundreds of polynomials and coördinates the computer has supplied. He cannot decide if the dancing activity of the red marks—the sense of a subliminal message activating mysterious connective currents—in the periphery of his vision flows from a transrandom statistical anomaly or from his own fatigue. He starts sweating, from the probable futility of it all. Since receiving his grant he has slept poorly. Some deep trespass yearns to reveal itself to him in the dark. In the affair with Esther, her demands have become more rapacious, and her manner, simultaneously, less courteous. A fretful, disappoi
nted impatience has been extruded by her into the heated mix of their mutual passion, and several times he has registered this uncongenial element with impotence. Sexually, she seems bent on performing stunts, rolling up new records, and his body has protested its mechanical role as her partner in these feats. Its refusal has surprised him as well, for beneath his intellectual and spiritual aspirations Dale has since adolescence harbored a sly genital pride: he thinks his erect penis rather beautiful, its marble pallor and royal-blue veins and dusky-rose bulbous glans, and the way its tapering shape curves slightly backward as if to nestle that suffused, single-eyed head in his navel. He feels, erect, split into two creatures, of whom the much smaller has much the greater share of vitality, even of spirituality. Esther’s power over him is nowhere felt more strongly than in her spontaneous and frequent discovery, within his witness, of a phallic beauty that up to now he has always admired alone, with a sense of shame, mostly by touch, beneath the covers, on the edge of dreaming. Esther has brought his furtive beauty boldly into the waking world and made him stand before the mirror of herself.
What is she, the question always arises in these heterosexual matters, getting out of it? She wants him, Dale’s feeling is, to rescue her from the dour, tweedy villain who hangs like a dark cloud with his oppressive eyebrows and melting eyes over every luminous and acrobatic encounter, a sullen husbandly nimbo-cumulus that at any moment may release a chilling outpour. Though he deeply needs to rescue somebody from something—witness his extravagant plan to redeem mankind from the intellectual possibility that God is not there, or his feebler-minded dancing of attendance upon poor stoned Verna—Dale wonders, vis-à-vis Esther, if this particular package of redemption is not too cumbersome, with too many sharp corners, for him to handle. He cannot help observing that she, however dwindled her love for her cuckolded husband, is securely attached to the social role and domestic furniture that come with her wifery. She has tended to avoid Dale’s own minimal, Kim-flavored apartment, with its faint underscents of jogging sneakers and soy sauce, after a few experiments there, and again insists on entertaining him in the upper reaches of her house on Malvin Lane, where the leafy signs and birdy sounds of early spring now infiltrate through the third-floor windows, left open a crack as if to simulate winter’s invigorating drafts; at their lightstruck attic height the lovers, as they wade into each other with a hearty smack of secretions, are serenaded by the hesitant warble of lovely Miriam Kriegman, in bikini top, practicing her flute on our neighbors’ sun deck. The prim neighborhood, its fences and greening yards, murmurs and coughs beneath them like an awed circus audience while they do their acrobatics. Dale has sensed, at times, that his mistress’s passionate contortions have something in them of exhibitionistic defiance, of “showing” an invisible third party, of effecting a balance involving factors that preceded his arrival on her scene. He figures, in short, as part of an ongoing transaction. He resents this; but could pallid Amy Eubank (say) lift him so far up the spiralling interlaced tracks of sex, the dizzying double helix at the center of things carnal? Would her mouth and eyes be anything like as avid, her ass so paradoxically tight yet pliant and penetrable?