PLOWING THE DARK

by Richard Powers

  Until then, the Weather Room remained a triumphant tease. Its sea breezes blew in, reeking of strong mathematics. Red skies at night: analytic geometer's delight. Despite the primitive block graphics, the panorama of heat and cold showed off the hardware to maximum advantage. And in its spiderweb algorithm—each point on the map calculating all the others—the Weather Room became a microcosm of the world machine at large.

  Only O'Reilly's Economics Room rivaled it. But Ronan worked by himself, as yet unwilling to trot out his rough drafts in front of the critical public. His displays remained abstract shows of hue and contour, smashing as theater, but as thesis, illegible—a Labanotation readable only by the enlightened novitiate. His multiagent economies were like brilliant autistic children. They had answers, but could not speak them. It took some months for him to admit it, but for any coherent macroeconomic display, O'Reilly needed a simplified interface.

  A guided tour of the Weather Room, from which he emerged shaken, inspired Ronan to write one. The choice all but made itself: a world globe, the whole geopolitical pizza pie, sliced down to subna-tional regions, the slightly pear-shaped sphere spinning on its canted axis, with its chance tilt of 23.5 degrees off the ecliptic sufficing to decide the entire human cycle of decline and renewal, the variations in latitudinal destiny that rendered one soul implacably Hindu and another an evangelical Protestant. But even a globe, projected by the Cavern, was no mere globe. Focused in space by five convergent projectors, this one came down off the front wall to float freely in space, in the volume of vacant air.

  The first time he coaxed the spinning marble down into the room, even O'Reilly, its nominal author, could not keep from swiping at it. A little wrist action on the wand—something that those from less charged regions of said globe insisted on calling body English—and he learned how to bat the thing around the room like a glorified beach ball. While engaged in a private match of planetary jai alai, he failed to notice Adie Klarpol's Labrador nosing its way in through the Cavern door. Mistaking the ghostly orb for a moon gone violently wrong, Pinkham went off the doggy deep end, baying uncontrollably, until Adie dragged him away and chained him up.

  Pinching from Stance and Kaladjian, O'Reilly assigned the wand's thumbwheel to a zoom function. A little scrolling and the Earth swelled to a medicine ball or imploded into an atom. With the rub of a thumb, Afghanistan, as it had lately in the world imagination, ballooned from an invisible speck to a billboard that filled the field of view.

  When the globe grew large enough, O'Reilly simply stepped inside. The Cavern knew where his head was at all times, and rehung its coordinates accordingly. The crust of countries that the projectors served up looked even better from the underside than from the out. Inside, from the vantage of the earth's core, O'Reilly could inspect the whole theater at one glance, with no hidden hemisphere on the far side of a projection. The unbroken surface spread out above him in all directions, like the constellations of the night sky.

  He set the wand's buttons to throw various layers over his planetarium display. The slices of tonal register tracked the range of a variable as it wrestled its way through the proving grounds. Armed with canned data, O'Reilly took the globe out for a test spin. Per capita GDP, in single-year time frames. As a function of energy consumption. As a function of consumer spending. All the classical formulae, for which he had only clinical patience, ran as ten-second, color-strobing short subjects before Our Feature Attraction.

  To this clean, coherent display, Ronan fused his ten-dimensional recursive cellular automata. All the furious systems, the flex and tension of abductors and carpals clasped together in an invisible hand to rock a cradle now eminently observable. On the surface, sunsets and dawns illuminated the familiar jigsaw of the world's nations. Underneath, a seething snake's nest of cooperation and competition rippled through the global markets, deciding them.

  O'Reilly plagiarized Stance and Kaladjian for one more essential component. Their backward-running breezes inspired him to flip the vector heads on time's arrow. The simplest possible test for any futures game consisted in finding out whether it could predict the past.

  He created three dozen interdependent variables, each chained recursively to the others, a multivoiced conversation about per capita petrochemical consumption. He initialized his starting point to mimic the data for 1989. His seed numbers came straight out of definitive industry tables. He assigned the range of output values to the visible spectrum. North America read out as a hot red, Europe more magenta. China languished down in the aquamarines, but clearly coming on strong.

  The touch of a button set the film in motion upon inexorable sprockets. He let the simulation run for a few years. From the still point of the turning world, O'Reilly watched the colors craze like maples in a Vermont October. The foliage exploded with all the glorious look and feel of fact. The passage of three real months seemed to vindicate his three-month trial runs. But did small errors of assumption—miscues in the continuous conversation—propagate through the system, breeding phantom spikes and dives, nonsensical artifacts, spurious squalls from out of the blank boundaries of forecast?

  Ronan had no way to say with any certainty. Short-term success implied nothing at all about the long run. And just because a simulation worked once or twice or even a thousand times under divergent circumstances, that said nothing about the ever-irreducible next time. The future had this tenacious way of turning a pebble in the streambed into a continent-sculpting meander.

  No amount of success proved that the gears in O'Reilly's box bore any relation to the great gears that he hoped to model. The world at large had no gears. Nothing in it knew how the futures market would work out. Regarding crude oil sales, the world at large knew only last year's numbers.

  So be it: O'Reilly had last year's figures as well. Past would be his entree into posterity. While not rigidly deterministic, his iterative democratic negotiations were still reversible. If modeling could spill the milk, modeling could just as easily unspill it. O'Reilly reset his simulated world to his own moment. He took up his viewing post at the planetary core and ran the history of petroleum consumption in reverse. He rewound in slow motion, eyeballing each region's patina of color as it eased back down the rainbow. After a year, he froze the frame and toggled to the numeric display. The values fell within acceptable thresholds of error.

  He threaded back another three years. The transcript coughed up a bubble here or there, but nothing that seriously undermined data's likeness. The readout's colors hove remarkably tightly to the curve of actual shortage and glut. Session after session, Ronan laid into the rewind button. He lifted a decade off the world's life, then a dozen years, reversing the effects of global aging with his fast-acting wrinkle cream.

  Then he arrived back at the middle 1970s, the great oil crisis. There he and history abruptly parted company. His numbers hit that geopolitical slick patch, and the loss of traction sent them skidding off into an alternate universe. From there on back, all resemblance between estimate and fact broke down.

  For the span of a month, Ronan himself hit the skids. He reverted to a rate of alcohol consumption that matched the worst of his Belfast days. Work had come to nothing. How could math—even the innovative math of multiagent dialogs—ever hope to factor in such a wild card? It seemed that, in order for simulation to cope with the shocks of radical sheik, it would have to contain as many interdependent variables as the Arabian Peninsula had grains of sand.

  Rajasundaran found him at The Office, defeated. What's your problem today, Irishman?

  The bloody Arabs.

  And what have they done this time? It's never-ending with those chaps, isn't it? You'd think that your Crusaders would have long ago taught them to mind their manners.

  They've messed up the world of rational multivariable extrapolation, is what they've done.

  Oh. I thought that was your Adam and Eve.

  Desperate, O'Reilly took Rajan and Spiegel into the Cavern. To show them the extent of the lea
k and to enlist their help in bailing.

  Rajan thrust his head into the spinning globe. Oh my beautiful word. This is amazing. Pardon me, Ronan baba, but I'm never coming out of here.

  Spiegel whistled. Nice stuff, Ronan. Freese is going to pop with pleasure.

  Yes, you apes. But it doesn't mean anything. It's a piece of pretty gibberish.

  Hey, Spiegel said. That's what the nineties will be looking for.

  My code couldn't reverse-calculate the last oil crisis. How in the hell is it going to predict the next one?

  May I ask the possibly obvious question? Rajan said. Why, in fact, do you want to know these things?

  The future? Why do I want to know the future? You must be kidding me. That's the grand prize, friend. The end of the tunnel. The great escape.

  These people. These white people. They're truly dangerous.

  I don't get it, Spiegel said. What's with all this backward prediction stuff?

  It's just a calibration tool. A convenient way of seeing how reliable the simulation engine is. Since I can't very well test my numbers by peeking forward.. .

  No. I mean, if you want to see if you can predict 1973, why don't you just start in 1968 and—

  Oh bloody Christ. That's brilliant. Utterly brilliant. That never would have occurred to me in a million years.

  Rajan cackled like a banshee. Yours is a wilderness mind, Ulster-man. A true wilderness mind.

  O'Reilly returned to them a week later, even more dejected. No luck. 1 queued up a simulation, setting all the starting variables to three years before the embargo. And the program blew right through the decade without so much as a hiccup. Oh, it managed a tiny spike, I suppose. But according to my little digital men, oil never rose more than a few dollars a barrel.

  Put me down for a Valdez's worth, Rajan ordered.

  Well, Spiegel said. Time to make a better model. What actually did cause the oil embargo?

  Rajan raised his hand. I believe it had something to do with a little Arab boy sticking his finger in the—

  Shut up, Raj. I'm serious. Listen, Ronan. If your multiagent negotiations can really model the processes behind macroeconomic events, then they ought to be able to do political events as well. Expand the dialog. Include the missing contingencies. It seems to me that if patterns of petroleum consumption depend upon oil price, and oil price depends upon Western-Arab relations, and Western-Arab ...

  O'Reilly wandered away in mid-clause, his wilderness mind already laying the groundwork for the vast expansion.

  I love it. The teen cashiers down at the Redi-Mart are throwing around the name Erich Honecker like he's one of their Saturday-night doper buddies.

  We need a TelePrompTer here. Just tell me who to cue on this week. Still Poland?

  Czechoslovakia. Poland's halfway to personal camcorders by now.

  Something was under way, too wide to be astigmatism, too persistent to be the usual, fleeting, collective hallucination. Millennial developments began popping up in doses massive and frequent enough to string along any event addict.

  Freese played spokesman for his hushed team. Almost makes one believe in a Zeitgeist.

  It's all electronics, Spider said. Those Chinese students? That couldn't happen without satellite dishes. Cell phones. Faxes and photocopy machines. Notebooks and laser printers.

  Machines, bringing to the earth's backwaters word of their dispossession, leaving them hungry to join the informational integration.

  Not just an idea whose time has come. A time whose tech has come. Lim scanned the images of teeming students, as if looking for someone.

  Adie took to patrolling the RL's central atrium, calling out idiotic Cory Aquino parodies to anyone she passed. People Power! People Power!

  Spiegel laughed to see her, more gangly and unguarded than the girl she'd been at twenty-one. People Power? Isn't that being a little anthropocentric?

  His old friend had come alive in this great awakening, more manic than he could have hoped for when he'd lured her out of her early retirement. The abdicated craftswoman, who'd sworn off any art beyond paint-by-numbers, who'd renounced all pleasures of the retina, now became the first to run down the halls, recidivist, proclaiming the world's latest Renaissance.

  Nor could Spiegel say exactly what had tipped her back into the camp of the living. Something in the Cavern's proving grounds had prepped her for these global velvet uprisings. Some hybrid possibility, laid down in Rousseau's walk-in jungle, brought to life in each night's newscast of delirious Beijing students camped out under the Gates of Heavenly Peace. This miracle year, not yet halfway done, conspired to salve art's guilty conscience and free it for further indulgence.

  The Adie that Spiegel had loved, the poised, potent undergrad who'd believed in the pencil's ability to redraw the world, was long dead the night he'd called to recruit her, a casualty of adulthood. He'd invited her out anyway, fantasizing that some lost fraction of her might revive at a glimpse of the prodigious world-redrawing pencil the RL was building. But for the world at large to choose this moment to collaborate in redrawing itself: he'd never been so mad as to count on that.

  Maybe Lim was right. Maybe the spreading world machine was catalyzing this mass revolution. Maybe silicon seeds had planted in the human populace an image of its own potential. After ten thousand years of false starts, civilization was at last about to assemble the thing all history conspired toward: a place wide enough to house human restlessness. A device to defeat matter and turn dreams real. This was what those crowds of awakened students demanded: a room where people might finally live. Every displaced peasant would become a painter of the first rank. Every crippled life a restored landscape.

  On Tuesdays and Thursdays, the extent of Spiegel's puerile, wishful thinking embarrassed him. Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, he was ready to put money on it. But whatever the cause, whatever the outcome, collective life was undeniably igniting. And Spiegel had his private, world-blessing Adie back.

  It's sad, though, Stevie. Wouldn't you say?

  Sad, woman? How do you figure?

  Suppose that... ah, it's crazy even to think it. But it is crazy, isn't it? Everything that's happening.

  Adie gestured to her terminal, as if the gathering worldwide protest were occurring there, in a background window, through the cable of headline news.

  Suppose that peaceful world pluralism really is breaking out. What happens next?

  What do you mean, what happens next? Next, we live it.

  Live peace? Live arrival?

  Sure. Sounds pretty good to me.

  I don't know. Maybe this is just perversity. But something about complete consensus would just... sadden me. Think of art, all the shockers and rule breakers. Masaccio, Hals, Turner, Manet, Duchamp. All the guys up on the barricades: Caravaggio, David, Rodchenko, Siqueiros, Rivera ... A// of them! All the good ones were either iconoclasts or revolutionaries. We need something to take up arms against. I'm not sure I want to live in a time when all battles have already been fought and won.

  I cant believe you re saying this. It's like something I would have come up with, back in our school days. Back at Mahler Haus.

  Oh, probably.

  First you say that art doesnt count for anything. Then you try to make it out to be the elitist conscience of the whole heedless race. Silly me.

  Make up your mind, hey?

  OK. It doesnt count for anything. That's better.

  I feel strangely relieved. Here's to global peace and a common style. To the age of wallpaper. Bottoms up!

  But Adie Klarpol could not stand under the coaxial cable's shower-head, the spray of pixels pouring down from bobbing satellites, and keep from feeling that the race's picture-making was only now beginning. A quorum of scribbling children had gotten loose, taken their pastel chalks out onto the sidewalk, over the curb, into the street beyond. Images from this group show of refuses streamed in on the continuous electron feed, images blunter and more impudent than the streetwalking Demoisel
les. Images poured out in black-and-white into the next morning's print, then peeled off of four-color presses for the weekend highlights roundup.

  Those pictures worked Adie's visual transference. Their portal swallowed her. They seized her by the neck hairs, held her gaze, and returned it. That crowd gathering in the world's largest public square— the student camp, the swelling hunger strike—touched off her sympathetic candlelight vigil in a chrome and molded-plastic corporate cafeteria perched on the American coast, ten thousand miles across a

  spreading seafloor.

  Look at that, Adie told her hypnotized colleagues. Beyond belief. The largest army in the world, brought to a complete standstill by a bunch of college kids.

  A lot of bunches of college kids, Spiegel said.

  A lot of lot of bunches, Rajan added.

  Kaladjian scowled, dismayed by this latest proof of human irrationality. But the math intrigued him. Day after day. Spontaneous globular clustering.

  Freese could say nothing these days without shaking his head. I'm sorry, Spider, but there's something more than cell phones causing all this.

  Spider scanned the nearest screen for evidence. They do seem to have reached a critical mass.

  Incredible, Adie said. The largest government on earth forced to back down. Nothing else to do. They waited too long.

  Hang on, hang on. Spiegel waved his arms at the television tableau of protesters. Can everybody just relax and regroup for a few months? I cant do things at this speed. This is not my postwar world. Little boy from La Crosse learning how to hide under his school desk from the atom bombs.

  Even Ebesen stood and stared. I cant believe Yve lived long enough to witness this.