Fast Forward

by Lou Anders

  “But it's boring talking about myself,” she remarked over the wine. “What about you? People say you're famous.”

  “Not famous. I do static art, Iris. No one who does that gets really famous, not famous the way video stars and lurid novelists are famous. Well-known in certain circles, you could say.”

  She smiled coquettishly. “Certain circles. Huh. You paint pictures?”

  “No. I create objects.”

  “What kind of objects?”

  “I'm a transrepresentationalist. You must know what that means.”

  “Doletown people talk about it. I never paid much attention. You make things that represent other things.”

  “I re-represent data as a pleasing abstraction.”

  That was the dictionary definition, and it was true enough if you allowed a certain latitude to the word “pleasing.” What was important was that the original dataset should be drawn from the physical world—from sunspot cycles, say, or the microwave radiation generated by variable stars, or (as in the case of his parents’ Mt. Merapi installation) the seismic waveforms of a simmering volcano. The artist's job was to reconfigure the data in a fashion that was striking in a visual or tactile sense, to reconfigure it as art. To find patterns in it, even (or especially) meaningless patterns: accidental deviations from randomness, without scientific value but enormously useful when employed as a line or a contour or a color. To chisel abstract beauty from the sullen rock of science.

  It was something aibots didn't do; thus it had the virtues of rarity and unrepeatability, a product as purely human as a pearl is purely oyster.

  “And,” Iris said, folding a hunk of injira around a dollop of curried goat, “this makes money for you?”

  “From time to time, it does.”

  “I wish I could see one of your, um, things.”

  “Maybe you can,” Gordo said, concealing his excitement. “My best-known piece is on display not far from here.”

  “What's it like?”

  “I can't really describe it. A column two feet wide by eight feet tall. Like glass or ice—but not glass or ice.”

  “What's it about? I mean, what's the dataset? What'd you base it on?”

  “That's a secret,” Gordo said, smiling in spite of himself.

  “Well, what's it called?”

  “YFL-500.”

  Therapy didn't work. Drugs didn't work. Dr. DuBois grew frustrated with Gordo's intractable dreamlessness. It was a frustration Gordo had lived with every day of his adult life.

  “Clearly,” the doctor said, “all the physiological functions of sleep are being adequately performed. There are even what you might call traces of dreams, the brain doing the sort of nocturnal dusting and cleaning that keeps us all sane. What you lack, Mr. Fisk, is the usual vocabulary of images and slipshod narrative that a layman means by the word ‘dream.’”

  “Figured as much,” Gordo said.

  He had been back to the clinic five times. Five times, sleep had been induced and his sleeping brain monitored in substantive detail. Five times, the result had been the same: undifferentiated neurological murk.

  And each time, by way of contrast, Gordo had asked to see the kaleidoscopic flash and gnarl of the file marked YFL-500. And Dr. DuBois had indulged him, perhaps sensing that this was all the satisfaction Gordo was going to get from his costly consultation. “Is this typical?” Gordo asked.

  “More typical than your productions, Mr. Fisk, but actually it's close to the opposite end of the scale—if you can imagine a linear scale for intensity of dreaming.”

  He had imagined just such a thing. “Who did it come from?”

  “A volunteer. It was part of our baseline study.”

  “What volunteer?”

  “I can't say. I'm constrained by confidentiality protocols.”

  “May I have a copy of it?”

  “I can't see how that would be useful to you. What's on the file is really just numbers. To see it this way you'd need to sort the data according to an appropriate algorithm.”

  “That's not a problem.”

  Gordo imagined the wheels turning in Dr. DuBois's head. “What are you saying, Mr. Fisk—that you want to make art of it?”

  “I collect datasets of all kinds,” Gordo said humbly.

  “Well, but again, the question of confidentiality—”

  “You can scrub any notation regarding the individual source. I don't want names or circumstances. Just the anonymous raw material.”

  “I see. Irregular. But, hm, harmless, I suppose, as long as you don't publish the raw data or use the name of the clinic.” Perhaps thinking, as before, that it would be at least a souvenir, something to carry away from an expensive course of treatment that had not yielded a cure or anything close to one.

  “I'll be very careful,” Gordo said.

  He had not yet taken the full measure of Iris Seawright, but he had seen enough to know she was something he couldn't ever be—spontaneous, simple, and on some level visionary. She looked at him admiringly as they rode a crowded masslift to the gallery where several transrepresentationalist works had recently been mounted for display. Not a prestigious venue, because he was no longer an especially prestigious artist, but respectable enough that it cost money to get inside the vast and luxurious hall. Gordo had begun his career as a disappointment and he had peaked with YFL-500, which everyone admitted was a masterpiece. There had been some interest in the pieces that followed, but if you charted his career as a graph it would have displayed but a single spike, and he still wasn't sure whether the inspiration was his or, ultimately, hers.

  “Oh my God,” Iris whispered when they entered the Corridor of the Static Arts, a glass-ceilinged cathedral enhanced by moonlight and patrolled by child-sized aibots with formal clothing and enormous eyes. “This is so fucking nice!”

  There were no class barriers in these days of the Rationalization—snobbery of all sorts, but no lines one literally couldn't cross. Iris could have come here (or to any number of similar galleries or museums) at any time. Many of her Doletown friends did, although as aspiring and unsuccessful artists, the attitude they brought with them was usually disdainful and dismissive. Gordo was pleased that Iris was an exception.

  Here were displayed items of transrepresentationalist statuary, sculpture, and painting of varying degrees of sophistication. The enormous room was dominated by Moses Bolden's Voices of Time, distilled from a map of variations in the cosmic background radiation. A couple of nocturnal visitors stood at the foot of it, gawking. Much admired, that piece, although to Gordo it looked like nothing more than a series of arcane symbols carved into a luminescent half-dome, more idiosyncratic than beautiful, and trite in its labored sense of mystery. But Iris's lovely eyes widened when the structure radiated semitones of blue and azure. If he did not much care for the art, he enjoyed her enjoyment of it. And was briefly jealous. She asked, “Did you do this?”

  “No.”

  “So which one is yours? Show me yours.”

  “That's why we're here, Iris.”

  He escorted her down the arched and curving corridor. Except for the spaces where works of art were appropriately lighted, the entire gallery was dim. The early-evening rainfall had passed, and beyond the glass wall on the right a crescent moon shone over the city's peaks and canyons. Iris was impressed by the politeness of the custodial aibots. “I guess that's the difference between Uptown and Doletown. Up here the aibots keep their distance.”

  “This is it,” Gordo announced, suddenly nervous.

  Iris stopped short. He had steered her this way purposely, so that she would be surprised by YFL-500 rather than absorbing it from a distance. It had been placed at a curve in the corridor for that very purpose, a challenge to the glassy ceiling and the stars.

  Gordo discovered he could not speak. This was a moment he had long contemplated—long hoped for, long feared. And now that it had arrived he found himself seizing up like a faulty machine.

  “Huh!” Iris
said at length.

  What did he want from her? Praise? No. No praise was due him. What he had hoped was that she might recognize the piece, might feel some unconscious kinship with it.

  She moved around YFL-500 slowly, following its internal lace and filigree and the boldness of its structure. She extended her hand as if to touch it, then pulled back. “Wow…how'd you make this?”

  “It's a question of, of—well, technically, each micron-layer of crystals, and every crystal in each layer, is polarized so that it refracts or absorbs light. The polarization is binary…it's code, and the span from top to bottom is a timescale. It's a portrait of an event—”

  “What event?”

  He hesitated. He hovered on the brink, it seemed to him, of a vast abyss. “I've never told anyone—”

  “Well, you don't have to tell, if you want to keep it secret.”

  “It's a dream,” he said, almost gasping at his own audacity.

  “A dream? Really? Someone's real dream?”

  “A dream as recorded by very sensitive neurological machinery. But what makes it art is that I found the narrative in the data. Do you see it, Iris? Caught in the crystal? Like a shadow hidden by a rainbow. It begins at the top, that ghost of clarity, and it pulses, it expands and contracts according to its own logic, and it vanishes, down below, into chaos, into fractured light.”

  “Like a prism,” Iris said.

  “Yes, like a prism, in a sense, but—”

  “Is it your dream? A dream you had?”

  “I don't dream,” Gordo said aloud for the second time in his life. He felt numb, weightless.

  “That's too bad,” Iris said, and she gave YFL-500 another thoughtful look. “Anyway,” she said. “It's very pretty.”

  There was no way to tell her how difficult, how exacting the work had been.

  He had taken the binary file YFL-500 to his studio with fierce anticipation. What he had seen on the display panel of Dr. DuBois's analytical engine had already been a crude act of transrepresentation—raw and ridiculously literal as it was, it hinted at the riches the file might contain. The data was complex, but (like a dream) not entirely random, and to Gordo it was a mute command: Carve my beauty out of this stone of numbers. Make tangible what lies beyond the power of words.

  He hacked at the data for six months before he began to recognize the major and minor chords embedded in it. The stacked, polarized crystals were his own idea. He had commissioned his tools from an aibot prototyper, three times attempted a rendition, and three times failed to achieve the effect he was aiming for.

  As he worked he could not help speculating about the source of the data, the dreamer of the dream. Dr. DuBois had said this was a “particularly rich and vivid” dataset, but might not any dream yield some similar strange beauty? (Excepting the products of his own gray sleep.) Gordo suspected not. And it was as he envisioned this hypothetical dreamer—a woman, he was almost certain—that the work finally attained the coherence it needed.

  In due time the finished piece was debuted. He called it YFL-500 after the numbered Bonnuit file and refused to publicly divulge the source of his data. At first the piece aroused no particular attention, but word quickly spread among the community of critics and opinion makers and, in time, the art-literate public. It was called a remarkable departure for an artist who previously had been considered too pedestrian to create anything of lasting worth. By such faint but real praise his name was once more elevated, and before long Gordo began to think of himself as a genuine artist.

  In time he went back to see Dr. DuBois.

  “I have no new therapy for the dreamless,” the doctor said, “unless something else is bothering you? Insomnia, perhaps?”

  “Actually,” Gordo said, “what I want is more data.”

  More dreams. More raw material. The more intricate the better, he explained.

  “But this is unethical,” Dr. DuBois protested.

  “No more unethical than the first time you did it.”

  “Even so—even with the names and details deleted, these measurements were given to us in trust. They were donated for a specific purpose, for research. Contracts to that effect were signed. If anyone were to discover that they had been manipulated for mass entertainment—”

  “Hardly mass,” Gordo said. Hardly entertainment, he thought.

  “The piece you created must have been lucrative, though, yes?”

  “It made some money for me. But more important—”

  “In this context, shouldn't I decide what's important? What you're looking for, it seems to me, is a kind of silent partner.”

  “I suppose so.”

  Dr. DuBois waited. Gordo measured the pause and then said, “You want to be compensated for the risk.”

  “We can work out the details later,” the doctor said.

  As they left the gallery, Iris asked him where he lived.

  “Couple levels up,” Gordo said. “Not far. Come for a drink?”

  “Yeah,” Iris said, “I'd like that.”

  He keyed the door and let her in with mounting excitement. Not just sexual excitement, though that was definitely an ingredient. She seemed willing, and the thought of making love to the woman who was the source of YFL-500 was almost unbearably tantalizing. But he took nearly as much pleasure simply in being near her, in a place as private as his home. Gordo was a private man, by and large. Only his most intimate friends had visited him here. Was Iris an intimate friend? Not yet. But there was a kind of unspoken intimacy between them, the shared space of her unconscious mind, with which he had long since fallen in love—not that she was aware of that, of course.

  And in time he might ask other intimacies of her.

  “Super nice place,” Iris said, tossing her rain cape over the back of a sofa.

  “I like it,” Gordo said. “Mostly for the view.”

  She went to the window that constituted one wall of the apartment. In sunlight it would have rendered the exterior world as a shadowy forest of clifflike habitats, roof gardens, turbines, blunt concrete aibot hives. By night the window was clear as fine crystal. Here was the crescent moon again, pale against the glistening vertical lightscape of the city. Firefly aibots darted between tall buildings; cargo drones cruised above the city with weightless ease.

  Iris gave the city a cursory glance and paced the room, stopping to admire this or that of his possessions.

  Gordo owned a few antiques, a few valuable contemporary pieces. She paused by a mahogany table on which was displayed the only object he owned that had been crafted by his father. She picked it up—a little cavalierly, Gordo thought—and inspected it.

  “A seashell,” she said.

  “Not exactly. The root dataset was a recording of wave impacts on the shore of a beach somewhere in the Pacific. It was rendered as a Fibonacci series—that's why it looks like a conch shell. A little joke.”

  “It's a joke?”

  “In a way. Hold it up to the light.”

  She did, and a faint sound emerged from the bell-like opening.

  “It stores photonic energy and rereleases it as mechanical vibrations. The sound reflects the original data.”

  “The sea!” Iris said, grinning.

  Gordo nodded. The piece had always struck him as painfully obvious, almost a novelty item. But even as a minor work of Fisk pere it would command a large sum at auction—more than any work of his own except YFL-500.

  She put the shell back in its place and looked, in turn, at a glass sculpture by Bekaa, a two-hundred-year-old Tiffany lamp, and a framed Eberhardt.

  “You must be fucking rich,” she said.

  He shrugged.

  “You're cute, too. Do you have anything to drink?”

  Good idea. His mouth was dry. “Glass of wine?”

  “Is the wine an antique too?”

  “The word is ‘vintage.’”

  “Good vintage?”

  “Not bad.”

  “I'd like that,” she said, settling dow
n on the sofa, loosening a button on her blouse.

  There had been other dreams, other works. YMG-004. YFX-037. EMG-200. Pick of the files, Dr. DuBois assured him. Dreams gaudy and vivid, dreams subtle and complex. Gordo had made art of them, and the work was good, it was professional, it was attractive.

  But—despite his best efforts—none of these pieces possessed the verve and color of YFL-500.

  “Perhaps,” Dr. DuBois offered, “it's the dreamer, not the dream.”

  Gordo had already considered that possibility. “I would love to meet the woman who was the source for YFL-500.”

  “What makes you think the subject was a woman?”

  “Intuition. Wishful thinking.”

  “A waking dream?”

  Gordo smiled wanly. “You could say that.”

  “Well, you're right. It was a woman.”

  Gordo's pulse sped up. “I thought that information was confidential.”

  “Anything I tell you,” Dr. DuBois said, leaning over his desk and giving Gordo a meaningful look, “I tell you in confidence. Correct?”

  Gordo nodded.

  “And will stay that way?”

  “Of course.”

  “Frankly, our partnership to date hasn't been as lucrative as I'd hoped.”

  “I've done everything I can—”

  “Oh, I understand, Mr. Fisk.” They were still “Mr. Fisk” and “Dr. DuBois” to one another, despite the intimacy of their financial arrangement. “I don't blame you at all. Still, I can't help thinking that if we had access to the original source of YFL-500, we might recover some momentum.”

  “What are you saying? That you want to contact her? Get her back in the clinic?”

  “No! I don't want to have any contact with her at all. That would make me legally vulnerable…and I'd like to hang on to my medical license. No; I think you should contact her.”

  “And then what?”

  “See what happens. Aren't you curious?”

  Achingly curious. The only reason he hadn't proposed this to DuBois was that he had imagined the physician would be shocked. He should have known the doctor's ethics were flexible. That fact had been pretty firmly established.