The Overstory

by Richard Powers

  He sits in front of a giant screen at a work surface high enough for him to slip the chair under. Past the screen, a plate-glass panorama reveals the top of Monte Bello. That view, and the starscapes shining through the night skylight, make up most of Neelay’s voyages abroad. His forays now are like today’s—expeditions down the coasts of landmasses that start out shrouded in fog and open into discovery. He designed the game’s foundations, wrote a fair portion of the code, and spent months working through its possible paths. Mastery should have no more power to surprise him; yet it never fails to quicken his pulse. A click of the mouse, a few keystrokes, and he’s face-to-face again with the next virgin continent.

  In truth, the game is pathetic. It’s two-dimensional—no smell, no touch, no taste, no feel. It’s tiny and grainy, with a world model as simplistic as Genesis. Yet it sinks its teeth into his brainstem whenever he fires it up. The maps, climates, and scattered resources are new, each time in. His opponents may be Conquistadores, Builders, or Technocrats, Nature Worshippers, Misers, Humanitarians, or Radical Utopians. Nothing quite like the place has ever existed. Yet going there feels like coming home. His mind has been waiting for such a playground since long before he fell from his betraying tree.

  Today he chooses to be a Sage. Rumor is spreading across dial-up bulletin boards from around the globe, about an overpowered victory strategy players are calling Enlightenment. Top-ranked leaders are pushing for the whole approach to be banned. But even as a Sage, he must acquire sufficient coal, gold, ore, stone, wood, food, honor, and glory to pay for his population growth. He must explore unknown terrain, form trade routes, and raid neighboring settlements, working his way along branching trees for Culture, Craft, Economics, and Technology. The game presents almost as many meaningful choices as Real Life, or, as his staff has taken to calling it, a little derisively: RL. This morning the graphics look a little jagged compared to Mastery 2, already in the works. But graphics have never meant much to Neelay. The visible is only a placeholder for real desire. All he and half a million other Mastery players need is easy and endless shape-shifting, in a kingdom forever growing.

  Something twists in him. He takes a few minutes to recognize the feeling as hunger. He should eat, but eating is such a process. He rolls to the mini-fridge and grabs an energy drink and something that turns out to be a chicken puff, which he downs without even microwaving. Tonight he’ll make a real meal, or tomorrow. He’s assembling a stack of cypress planks from his best team of woodcutters into a mammoth ark when the phone rings. His morning appointment with a journalist who wants to interview the infant industry’s rising star, the boy still in his twenties who has made a home for so many homeless boys.

  This reporter sounds not much older than his subject, and petrified. “Mr. Mehta?”

  Mr. Mehta is his father, whom Neelay has tucked away in a tiny palace outside Cupertino complete with pool, home theater, and pond flanked by a rosewood mandir, where Mrs. Mehta does weekly puja and prays to the gods to bring her son happiness and a girl who’ll see him for who he is.

  A reflection in the plate glass looks up to challenge him: a brown, scrawny praying mantis with bulbous joints and enormous, tight-skinned skull for a head. “Call me Neelay.”

  “Oh, gosh. Okay. Wow! Neelay. I’m Chris. Thanks for talking. So, first I want to ask: Did you know that Mastery was going to be such a hit?”

  Neelay did know, long before the game was released into the wild. He knew from the moment he had the idea, under the giant, spreading, pulsing tree at night, up on Skyline. “Kind of. Yes. The beta release stopped my workforce dead. My project manager had to enforce a ban.”

  “Holy crap. Do you have sales figures?”

  “It’s selling very well. In fourteen countries.”

  “Why do you think that is?”

  The game’s success is simple enough. It’s a reasonable facsimile of the place Neelay envisioned at seven, when his father first lugged an enormous cardboard box up the apartment stairs. Now, Neelay-ji. What might this little creature do? What the boy wanted the black box to do was innocent enough: return him to the days of myth and origin, when all the places a person could reach were green and pliant, and life might still be anything at all.

  “I don’t know. It has simple rules. The world responds to you. Things happen faster than in life. You can watch your empire grow.”

  “I’m . . . I confess to you. I’m totally in love! Last night, when I finally stopped playing, it was like four a.m. I just needed to see what would happen with one more move. And when I stood up from the screen, my whole bedroom was bobbing and jittering.”

  “I know what you mean.” And Neelay does. Except for the part about standing up.

  “Do you think it’s changing the brains of the people who play it?”

  “Yes, Chris. But so does everything, I think.”

  “Did you see the article in last week’s Times about game addiction? People spending fifty hours a week on video games?”

  “Mastery isn’t a video game. It’s a thought game.”

  “Okay. But you must admit, a lot of productive time is going to waste.”

  “The game is definitely chronophagic.” He hears a little question mark pop up in a thought bubble on the other end of the line. “Time-eating.”

  “Does it bother you, to be such a destroyer of productivity?”

  Neelay gazes out on a patch of mountain shaved bare half a century ago. “I don’t think . . . It might not be so bad, to destroy a little productivity.”

  “Huh. Okay. The game’s killing my little life, anyway. I keep coming across things that aren’t in the hundred-and-twenty-eight-page gamebook.”

  “Yes. That’s part of what keeps people playing.”

  “While I’m in the game, I feel I have a goal. Always something more to do.”

  Yes, oh, yes, Neelay wants to tell him. Safe and comprehensible, with no swamps of ambiguity to suck you down, no human-on-human darkness, and your own will receives its rightful land. Call it meaning. “I think a lot of people feel more at home, in there. Than they do out here.”

  “Maybe! A lot of guys my age, anyway.”

  “Yes. But we’re planning all kinds of new roles for the next release. New ways of playing the game. Avenues of possibility for all kinds of people. We want it to be a beautiful place for everyone.”

  “Wow. Okay. That’s wild. So what will the company do next?”

  The company is slipping out of Neelay’s control. Teams and managers populate an organizational tree he can’t keep track of. The best developers in the Valley knock on the door every day, wanting to play. Software engineers on Route 128 around Boston, recent grads from Georgia Tech and Carnegie Mellon—brains shaped from infancy by the games Neelay used to give away—beg him for the chance to help engineer the wholesale exodus now well under way.

  “I wish I could tell you.”

  Chris whimpers. “How about if I beg?”

  His voice has all the confidence of a healthy, ambulatory male. Probably white and good-looking. The charm and optimism of a guy who does not yet know what people will do to other people, to other living things, once terrors and hurts and needs set in.

  “Just a hint?”

  “Well, it’s simple, really. More of everything. More surprises. More possibilities. More places, filled with more kinds of creatures. Imagine Mastery, after it doubles in richness and complexity forty times. We don’t even know what such a place might look like.” All from a seed this big.

  “Oh. That’s so amazing. So . . . beautiful!”

  Something stabs at Neelay. He wants to say: Ask me again. There’s more.

  “Can I ask about you?”

  Neelay’s pulse spikes, like he’s trying to lift himself on his set of exercise rings. Please, no. Please don’t. “Of course.”

  “I’ve read quite a few stories about you. Your own employees call you a hermit.”

  “I’m not a hermit. It’s just—my legs don’t work.”
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  “I read about that. How do you run the company?”

  “Phone. Email. Online messaging.”

  “Why are there no pictures of you?”

  “It isn’t pretty.”

  The answer flusters Chris. Neelay wants to say: It’s all right. It’s only RL.

  “Do you feel that growing up as the child of immigrants—”

  “Oh, I don’t think so. Probably, no.”

  “No, what?”

  “I don’t think it had much of an influence on me.”

  “But . . . how about being Indian-American? Don’t you feel that—”

  “Here’s what I think. I’ve been Gandhi and Hitler and Chief Joseph. I’ve wielded plus-six great swords while wearing little chain mail thong bikinis that, frankly, didn’t give me all that much protection!”

  Chris laughs. It’s a beautiful, confident laugh. Neelay doesn’t care what the man looks like. He doesn’t care if he’s four hundred pounds and covered in cold sores. Desire rushes him. Would you like to go out together sometime? But going out would have to be going in. Nothing needs to happen. Nothing could happen, in fact. That’s all gone. We could just . . . sit together somewhere, talk about all things, no fear, no hurt, no consequences. Just sit and talk about where people are going.

  Impossible. One look at Neelay’s grotesque limbs and even this confident, laughing journalist would be disgusted. Yet this man Chris—he loves Neelay’s game. He plays it all night, and into morning. The code Neelay wrote is changing this other man’s brain.

  “It’s just this. I’ve been lots of things. I’ve lived all over. In Stone Age Africa and on the outer rim of other galaxies. I think that soon enough—not right away, but soon—if software keeps getting better and giving us more room, I think that we’ll be able to make ourselves into anything we want.”

  “That . . . sounds a little out there.”

  “Yes. Maybe it is.”

  “Games aren’t . . . People will still want money. They’ll still want prestige and social status. Politics. That’s forever.”

  “Yes. Forever? Maybe.” Neelay stares into his screen, a world coming on hard, where social status will accrue entirely by votes in a space that is at once instant, global, anonymous, virtual, and merciless.

  “People still have bodies. They want real power. Friends and lovers. Rewards. Accomplishments.”

  “Sure. But soon we’ll carry all of that around in our pockets. We’ll live and trade and make deals and have love affairs, all in symbol space. The world will be a game, with on-screen scores. And all this?” He waves, as people do on phones, even knowing Chris can’t see him. “All the things you say people really want? Real life? Soon we won’t even remember how it used to go.”

  A CAR HEADS NORTH on Highway 36. Impala, going too fast by ten as it crests the rise. Down the long incline, a dozen black crates in the road block the way forward. Coffins. The driver brakes and brings the car to a stop a few feet in front of the mass funeral. In the air above the coffins, on a traverse line cabled between two trees as stout as lighthouses, a mountain lioness climbs. A harness hugs her tawny waist, clipped by carabiner to a safety cable. Her tail swishes between sleek hind haunches, and her noble, whiskered head lolls on her neck as she inspects a snagged banner.

  A second car comes from the south. Rabbit, skidding to a stop in front of the coffins. It honks twice, before the driver notices the cougar. The sight is odd enough, even here in ganja-land, that the driver is happy for a minute just to gawk. The animal is young, lithe, and clothed only in a body stocking, with the words A change is gonna come on her shoulder, peeking out from under the leotard. The cat fights with the banner; the drivers wait, curious. Another car gets trapped behind the northbound one. Then another.

  On a roadside platform, a bear tugs on a leader, trying to pull the snagged bedsheet across its guy wire. The grizzly’s snout and sunken eyes are gloriously painted papier-mâché. His eyeholes are so small that the bear must wag its great muzzle to see anything. In a few more minutes, traffic starts to back up in both directions. Two guys get out of their cars. They’re irate, but can’t help laughing at the megafauna. A swipe of the cougar’s paw and the sheet finally drops, catches the wind, and flaps above the highway like a sail:

  Stop Sacrificing Virgins

  The borders teem with fronds and flowers from the margins of a medieval manuscript. For a moment the blocked commuters can only look. A few trapped drivers break into spontaneous applause. Someone calls from a rolled-down window, “I’ll help you with your virginity problem, honey!” High above the roadway, the cougar waves. The hostages gesture back, thumbs or middle fingers. Her wild mask, gazing down from above, stirs some ancient hoo-ha into the spectators’ viscera.

  One of the drivers charges the coffins. “My timber job pays for your welfare checks. Get the hell out of the road!” He kicks at the black boxes, but they don’t budge. From a choker around her neck, the cougar produces a whistle and toots three blasts. The crates open all together, and bodies rise like it’s the Last Day. The bear adds to the chaos by tossing smoke bombs. Creatures emerge from each coffin, decked out in the colors of creation. There’s an elk whose antlers arc outward like angel wings. A Sonoma chipmunk with giant chopstick incisors. An Anna’s hummingbird flashing hot pink and iridescent bronze. A Dalí nightmare of Pacific giant salamander. A sunny-yellow blob of banana slug.

  The blocked drivers laugh at the animal resurrection. More applause, and another round of profanity. The animals break into a wild dance. It unnerves the motorists; they’ve seen this bacchanal before—animals scampering in crazy circles—holdover memory from the illustrated pages of the first books they ever rubbed their fingers across, back when all things were possible and real. In the distraction of the animal dance, the bear and cougar unhook their harnesses and scramble down from their perches. When a police siren whoops from the rear of the backed-up cars, it sounds at first like another sideshow. The police slink up the blocked road’s shoulder, giving the animals plenty of time to scatter into the understory. As they do, an older woman and a man with a video camera strapped to his palm disappear into the woods behind them.

  Two days later, the film hits the national news. Reaction runs the living spectrum. The banner-slingers are heroes. They’re grandstanding criminals who ought to be locked up. They’re animals. Animals: yes. Big-brained, altruistic, animal con artists who managed to block a state highway for a while and make it seem like wild things might have their way.

  FOUR YEARS at Fortuna College come down to one afternoon: Adam, in his spot in the front row, Daniels Auditorium. Professor Rubin Rabinowski at the podium—Affect and Cognition. Last lecture before the final exam, and the Rabi-Man is surveying all the experimental evidence that suggests—to the delight of the oversubscribed class—that teaching psychology is a waste of time.

  “Now I’ll show you the self-evaluations of people asked how susceptible they think they are to anchoring, causal base rate errors, the endowment effect, availability, belief perseverance, confirmation, illusory correlation, cuing—all the biases you’ve learned about in this course. Here are the scores of the control group. And here are the scores of people who’ve taken this course in previous years.”

  Lots of laughs: the numbers are pretty much the same. Both groups confident of their iron will, clear vision, and independent thought.

  “Here are the performances on several different evaluations designed to conceal what they were testing. Most of the second group were tested less than six months after they took this course.”

  The laughter turns to groans. Blindness and unreason, rampant. Course grads, working twice as hard to save five bucks as they would to earn it. Grads fearing bears, sharks, lightning, and terrorists more than they fear drunk drivers. Eighty percent thinking they’re smarter than average. Grads wildly inflating how many jelly beans they think are in a jar, based purely on someone else’s ridiculous guesses.

  “The psyche’s job is to keep us
blissfully ignorant of who we are, what we think, and how we’ll behave in any situation. We’re all operating in a dense fog of mutual reinforcement. Our thoughts are shaped primarily by legacy hardware that evolved to assume that everyone else must be right. But even when the fog is pointed out, we’re no better at navigating through it.

  “So why, you may ask, do I go on talking, up here? Why go on, year after year, cashing the college’s checks?”

  The laughs are all sympathy now. Adam admires the brilliant pedagogy. He, at least, he vows, will remember this lecture years from now, and its revelations will make him wiser, no matter what the studies show. He, at least, will defy the indicting numbers.

  “Let me show you the answers you yourselves gave to a simple questionnaire I had you fill out at the beginning of the semester. You’ve probably forgotten you ever took it.” The professor glances at the average answers and grimaces. His lips tighten in pain. Snickers across the room. “You may or may not recall that I asked you then whether you thought you’d . . .” Professor Rabinowski fiddles with his tie. He windmills with his left arm, grimaces again. “Excuse me one minute.” He lurches off the dais and out the door. A murmur passes through the auditorium. Thuds come from the down hall—a stack of boxes tipping over. Fifty-four students sit and wait for the punch line. Faint, swallowed sounds fill the hallway. But no one moves.

  Adam scans the seats behind him. Students frown at each other or busy themselves with notes. He turns to look at that magnificent woman who always sits two seats to his left. Premed, fawn-colored, pretty without knowing it, binders full of neat handwritten notes, and he thinks again how glorious it would be to sit in Bucky’s over a beer with her and talk about this astonishing class. But the semester ends in two days, and the chance is as good as lost.