PLOWING THE DARK

by Richard Powers

  Among your friends, the plan produces only stunned hilarity. "You're going where? Don't they shoot people in the street there, without even asking whose side they're on?"

  "No," you shit them back. "You're thinking of D.C." At last they realize, these friends who've witnessed your worst whiplash for years now. You mean it, and it blows them away.

  You rush to assure everyone. The school you'll teach for is a virtual armed compound. Tensions are nowhere near what they were this time last year. The civil war is ending; all sides are talking compromise. The foreign armies have left. Their president has finally taken the reins. All that old insanity is a thing of the past.

  And it's only for two terms, anyway. Eight months. Safer than a daily commute on the Edens Expressway.

  You sleep well on the long flight, crushed up against the window with one of those squares of cotton gauze the stewardesses pass off as pillows. In your sleep, you already speak fluent Arabic. Even your dream marionette is struck by the strangeness: these guttural rapid bursts issuing from you, part nonsense, part gift of tongues.

  Over the cabin speakers, the pilot warns that he must take the standard evasive maneuvers upon approach. Passengers are not to panic. The plane will simply lose a few thousand feet in a matter of seconds. Many on board seem used to the procedure.

  You Stuka to a landing, safe, even exhilarated. The guard at the baggage claim totes a machine gun resembling an haute couture coat hanger. The school bursar is waiting in the terminal to meet you. The metropolis lies dark and quiet. You cock your ears toward the south suburbs, but can hear nothing except traffic. The chauffeur from the school laughs: What did you expect? Grenade-toting crazies lurking behind every street vendor?

  In the morning, you tour the compound. The school buildings are mostly intact. They sit up on a bluff, with a view down to the Corniche and the sea beyond. Your office balcony looks out on precarious pyramids of rubble being bulldozed into the water. You search for the Green Line, the vegetation growing up through the cracked concrete that divides the city. You see only a stand of high-rises, their pockmarks blending into this day's dappled shadows.

  It's better than you imagined. All white and marine and accepting. A recovering place. A good place to recover. The resinous air, the olive mountains. Arid, azure, clear. Your sinuses haven't been this open since childhood. This city is returning. You can live here.

  And as with all key conclusions you've reached in your thirty-three years, you're wrong.

  5

  She could not leave that room as easily as she entered. The Little Italy that Adie Klarpol flew back to now seemed a nostalgic, second-rate Bellows or Marsh. One visit to that high-tech wonderland and her old urban cityscape collapsed into back projection. Her friends shrank to animated sprites; her daily obligations, items to be clicked through with the wave of a wand.

  The third night after her return, she dreamed of a shoebox-sized bungalow on an island in the Sound just off Seattle. In the morning, she flipped through the atlas, searching for possible culprit spots. The house that she'd dreamed of had dripped with gingerbread and its yard had sprouted bushels of cartoon beans. The island had sat in a ravishment of surrounding water, a private moat between her and the manufactured world. She could find nothing in the atlas that remotely

  resembled the spot.

  That afternoon, while carrying two gallons of fake Maine springwater home from the corner grocery, she bumped into a groper. That is, he raked her, each hand cupping one of her defenseless breasts. The creep ran off before she could drop the gallon manacles and slug him. Four days later, a mugger on Houston grabbed her loose shoulder bag, and like an idiot, she pulled back. He slammed her into a street sign, cracked her on the cheek, and ran off screaming, You fucking crazed bitch. What do you think you're doing?

  Panhandlers began to hiss at her with impunity. Clerks of both sexes handed over her purchases, wrapped in ambiguous offers. Something had gotten away from her. Some instinct, some cadence of survival. After a dozen years, New York turned on her, expelled her like an amateur. One more accosting, this one by a pack of grade-school thrashers in Chelsea using her as a crash-test dummy, and Adie realized what was happening. She'd started to make eye contact. Fallen back into that old, bad habit of looking up at people. And to look, in this place, was to beg for erasure.

  She called Spiegel and asked him to send out some rental listings. And there it was, on page 4 of the second Rentals column: Cozy Island Home, with garden. The gingerbread cottage she'd seen in her sleep.

  She called Steve right away, unable to wait a decent interval. Is the offer still good?

  The cackle at the other end of the line seemed to be a yes.

  She rented the house over the phone, sight unseen. She took possession on one of those rare Pacific crystalline afternoons, thick with the scent of white pine resin, when the Earth felt as freshly scrubbed as on the day it sat for its first formal portrait. The place was all she'd dreamed, and then some. She settled in on the Sound, forty minutes by ferry from town. Within a week of her moving into the cottage, she stopped dreaming of the city she'd abandoned.

  She sat on her porch those first nights, wrapped in the brackish tidal air. The future's breeze split across her face and joined up again behind her. She felt herself a spinster whose sudden new suitor must be either sadistic, blind, or a confused fortune hunter. She'd read all the cautionary fairy tales and knew the one inevitable outcome. Still, she consented to this courtship, and even decided to court it back.

  Seattle exceeded all expectation. She painted her gingerbreading a lovingly researched rainbow of maroons. She bought a chocolate Labrador and named him Pinkham, the trusting companion that a New York apartment had always denied her. She put in a dozen mailorder rosebushes, each one tagged with a tin octagon embossed with the warning "Asexual reproduction of this plant without license is prohibited by the Plant Patent Act." She found that she could live on wild blueberries, honey, and crabs from the crab pot she sank off the neighborhood slip.

  The sole catch was the corporate sponsor across the Sound, the one she had to report to, the one that footed the bill for this midlife summer bungalow. She rode over on the ferry, steeping herself in the blasted fifths of its foghorn. She freighted her secondhand, banged-up banana-colored Volvo across the Sound faster than it used to take her to get past the first pylon of the Verrazano Narrows.

  A perky personnel officer took Adie on the formal TeraSys welcoming rounds. They toured the expensive new glass and polished sandstone headquarters that coiled itself like so much self-replicating luxury mall, five miles down the road's clear-cut from the Realization Lab. Preoccupied specialists of all stripes paused in mid-coffee-room brain-storming to give her hand distracted shakes. Workstation designers, systems-software adepts: scores of names she promptly forgot and faces she couldn't keep from remembering.

  After a few hundred handshakes, Adie began to understand the hyena highlights in that phone cackle Spiegel had given her, when she asked if the offer was still good. Like the worst of number-dumb paintbox dabblers, she'd failed to guess the weight of this latest silicon thyroid case. Failed to gauge the size of the master hive, or just how many jobs it needed to fill.

  She'd once freelanced for a software vendor, the makers of a time management product whose marketers commissioned from her a hideously cheery pastel mouse and keyboard, each made to look as if it were stitched out of taffeta. Now, on an office wall plastered with sales brochures, she saw her faux-folksy logo among those of a dozen other subsidiaries buried in the TeraSys tree structure. An adjacent brochure described the test bed of the hour, the Realization Lab, with its prototype Cavern: "a second-generation, experimental, total-immersion environment modeler."

  TeraSys seemed to be seeking all manner of nightstands upon which to empty its deep-pocket change. These people could fund Adie's midlife crisis and keep her on fellowships for years without feeling the least pinch. They offered her an unlimited fantasy sandbox, perfect for
a girl to get lost in.

  She made her way back up the mountain, to the Realization Lab and its magic room in question. The look of the low-slung, clean-lined building nagged at her for several days, until she pegged it: an upscale group dental practice in, say, Westchester County. Inside the RL, the redwood and river rock gave way to long olive corridors and linen-lined cubicle partitions that teemed with the same jittery bee-loud buzz that had seduced her out here in the first place.

  For the first two weeks, the look of her co-workers reduced her to giggles. Their sun-starved skin, their sparse but luxurious facial hair, their corduroy slacks and untucked flannel lumberjack shirts, their sandals over socks, their joyous, cause-filled eyes behind the silver-rimmed John Lennon glasses reduced them to so many industrious gnome battalions. It took her a month to learn to tell the hardware engineers from the hackers, the orcs from the elves.

  These shaggy dungeon creatures had managed to turn their airy park ranger's roost into a subterranean wonderland. Hallway walls were everywhere taped over with flowcharts, logic listings, parodies of user documentation manuals, and autographed publicity photos of Yoda, Mr. Spock, and Steve Jobs. The earth-toned moldings reeked of cedar, fresh latex, and tennis shoes worn too long in a damp climate. Even the copious indoor plantings could not entirely soften the feel of chrome, steel circuit-card cages, and CRT screens. Here and there, squares of acoustical ceiling tile fell jimmied open, spilling out the snakes' nest of cabling they hid. Hardest of all on her, the place whirred. A perpetual low-grade hum hung in the air, the spin of disk drives, the clack of keys, the high-pitched metal ping of blocks of data being manipulated.

  What made all this? Who supplied the hand-eye coordination? Who brought this team together and told each person what to do? How did the machines turn electrons into steerable pictures? Adie could not see herself painting the walls of this Cavern until she saw—if only in shadow—how the mechanism worked.

  Spiegel assigned her a prodigy to call her own. A boy called Jackdaw—Jack Acquerelli. Jackdaw came fresh from California's largest computer science factory, although he looked barely old enough to mail in his own software registration forms. He was just her height, one of the reasons he'd taken up with computers in the first place. He might have been attractive, except for the steady diet of Doritos and the inability to abide much direct human contact without flinching. Adie took to him at once, if only for his mocking last name. Each time she met him she unbuttoned the top button of his habitual plaid flannel shirt, until she trained him to do so, all by himself.

  Jack, she badgered him. Why do those bees buzz? What holds that house up? Could one make the grass grow under a visitor's feet? Conjure up some kid to come mow it for a silver-gray two bits? She grew worse than a five-year-old who'd just learned that every question bred another.

  Jackdaw struggled mightily to address the barrage. But he could not parse her. Their interface was makeshift, the cable between them noisy, and their throughput limited to the intermittent burst.

  Think of it all as a kind of trick, he said. He could not both look at her and address her at the same time. He wasn't comfortable talking to living things. Living female things. Their firmware algorithm eluded him.

  I knew it. I knew it had to be a trick. But, but, but: how does the trick work?

  We do it all with liquid crystal back projection. One Electrolamp Luminox projector throwing alternating double-buffered images onto each of the five walls. We cast the floor onto a refracting mirror, through a hole in the ceiling.

  Liquid? Adie whimpered. Crystal?

  It's the only way. Trust me. The alternatives are all too crude.

  Her laughter battered him. She tried to squelch it. Sorry, Jackie. That does not compute.

  Sure it does, he said. So LCD streaks a little. It ghosts. So we don't get the brightness that we'd get out of a goosed-up electron beam. And the response speeds still aren't what you'd hope for. But don't forget: you can eliminate fade by simultaneous, multirow addressing ...

  Sure. Of course! Adie smacked herself on the forehead. What was I thinking? But tell me, Jackdaw. How do you get the pretty flowers to come off the wall like that? They just... float a few feet out into the room.

  The question stopped the boy short in mid-ratchet. He seized up, unable to pop all the way back off his internal stack. His conversation hung on that old scheduling puzzle beloved of multitasking programmers: the five dining philosophers who share four spoons. Some part of him forgot to put some other part's spoon down between courses, and the whole meal crashed to a halt.

  Jackdaw fell back, slack-jawed at what stood flushed out into the open. Adie saw herself through his eyes: a totally alien life-form. A frilly, intuitive blur. Some non-carbon-based, vegetative intelligence. She read the proof in the boy's face. They shared no mother tongue, nor any father either.

  Even at this point of derailment, Jackdaw refused eye contact. She spooked him, her loose, twill gaze worse than a Gorgon's. The boy quit his fiddling and stared off into the lab's black. He stroked the hood of a modular connector with thumb and forefinger. She watched a quorum of clear-thinking chip architects convene in his mind, debating what her question could possibly mean. How much they knew, these new children. How concentrated their knowledge of every mechanism, except for life.

  Jackdaw slogged back into the breach. You mean the stereoscopic effect?

  Maybe. She felt herself a brat in braids, prevailed upon to show her prize puree.

  The stereoscopic effect comes from the glasses. Shuttered lenses. We've settled on a hundred-and-twenty-hertz oscillation. Alternate left-eye and right-eye views, each flashing sixty times a second. We sync the projected images to the shutter rate. Your eyes put the two back together. That's where you get the sense of depth. The stereo 3-D.

  Oh God. You mean, like a big View-Master? That's what you're saying? I'm going to live the next several years of my life inside a giant View-Master?

  That depends. What exactly is a View-Master?

  She yelped. You're kidding me. You never had ...? You never saw ... ? Those round white paddle-wheel disks with the paired squares of Kodachrome at opposite ends? Old Faithful and Half Dome? Inside the Vatican Library? Goofy and Mickey on Holiday?

  A look stole across Jackdaw's face. The 3-D representation for Scared Shitless. This woman was infected. Something viral. Something contagious.

  A look stole across Jackdaw's face. The 3-D representation for Scared Shitless. This woman was infected. Something viral. Something contagious.

  Forgive me, she explained. Гт being silly.

  Huh. I see. His head jerked back, resetting the input stream. Whatever. Anyway, our rendering rates don't come near to sixty frames a second yet. But as it turns out, the eye only needs about a dozen frames a second to trick it into fusing discrete images into continuous motion. Film is only twenty-four. So anything over thirty is more than adequate. His eyebrows went up. For now.

  Can you explain something else to me? What exactly is the difference between you and that Spider?

  Which spider? Jackdaw clicked away at his keyboard, as if transcribing the whole conversation. Oh. You mean Lim? He's mostly hardware. Гт mostly software.

  That's a difference?

  He's like, Korean. Гт what you call Italian?

  You're his baby brother, aren't you? You suck out his soul and use it in your own body when he's not around, don't you?

  She shocked him into looking almost at her. He shook his head gravely: huh-uh. Honest injun.

  You're all clones of the same experimental genetic material. Admit it.

  At last Jackdaw smiled. But she still couldn't tell if he smiled at her inanity or at something on his monitor that his typing had produced.

  She saw in the smile some spark of software loyalty. This boy would always do things for her. Small, stray errands and favors, whatever happened in the lab between them. And the seed of his devotion made her feel safe, here in this precarious new world. Safe, knowing t
hat she would never ask anything from him but the smallest of favors.

  Jackdaw, she said. Jackie. He flinched at the familiarity on her lips. You still haven't answered my question. What makes the pictures?

  What makes the pictures? His face labored at the cipher. It squeezed itself through every real-time translation algorithm that he possessed. What makes the pictures?

  Yeah.

  Uh, we do? Not even hoping that he'd guessed right.

  No! Not that! She pictured herself stamping on the floor, the spade-footed kick of a dwarf whose secret name has just slipped out. You know what I mean.

  You mean, what hardware do we use to generate the graphics? What computers?

  Yes. Probably.

  Jackdaw took her back for her first look at the monsters. The Cavern's graphics engines filled a room at the far end of the RL's long central artery. Jackdaw and Adie threaded down this hall, past knots of flannel and corduroy that stood around volubly sharing their latest discoveries in a language entirely foreign to her. Those who noticed them waved, taking Adie in as if she'd been among them for years, laboring away on her few square inches of the common canvas.

  Some unseen whole was taking shape here: a gargantuan corpse, hauled in chunks along this animated ant trail. Each worker they passed carried an integral piece of the spoils many times his own body weight, part of a prize orders of magnitude larger than all of them combined. Hey, her new colleagues called to her. Hey. The quick facial dip of acknowledgment: you're creating, I'm creating. We're at the peak of our assembled powers, joined together, about to set in place civilization's crowning capstone. Each distracted knowledge engineer exuded a happy preoccupation, needing no words. The whole picture scared the daylights out of her.