RICHARD POWERS (41 page)

He spread his hands to indicate the projectors, the modular office furniture, all the ugly bundles of cable and molded-plastic printed circuits that filled the space around them. It dawned on her. His days of true research were over. He had done no useful math, no
beautiful
math, for years. He, too: banished to industry. Wherever the
there
that the colored marble game whispered of, this man could no longer

reach it.

Words left Adie, to sound across inconceivable distances.
That is no
country for old men?

That is no country for old men.
He measured the line, liked it. Perhaps he thought she'd made it up.
Clever of a young woman to see that.

Not clever at all, in fact. Clever were those who had not seen, yet still perceived.

That was no country for refugees of any age. Some nights, when Spiegel knew Adie was home in her island hermitage, he would call, chatting away happily to her answering machine. He'd hold rambling conversations on her tape, knowing full well she was in the room screening and could hear every word.

Can I try something out on you? It's a Personals ad: "Carbon-based life-form seeking same to help fill the chilly immensity of existence." What do you think?
I
know,
I
know—the dictions a little off. How about this: "The universe is fifteen billion years old. I'm pushing forty. Looking for Solar System-based female in similar temporal predicament."

At first she listened in real time. After a while, she turned off the speaker, checking the backlog of messages only at long stretches. Finally, she pulled the machine's plug.

Early one morning in Aries, she at last hit upon the concealed hope that bound all these messy exiles to the same project. She stood in a room-sized cartoon among four men, each with his own agenda, each terrified that the breakneck pace of technology would prove too little, too late, each desperate to turn the Cavern into something more than a prohibitively expensive, slow, grainy, cold, monstrously cumbersome stereoscope. She looked through the windows of her provisional Mediterranean summer cottage, down along the fabricated path to the coast, out to the invented sea, and the farther sea beyond that one. And she saw, at last, what these men had been for so long gazing at.

The Cavern was irrelevant. The Cavern was not even a flip-card deck compared to the Panovision it pointed at. The Cavern would shrink, year after rate-doubling year. Its carapace would wither away until all the pipes and projectors and reality engines fit into a gym bag. Steady improvement would knit belief-quality graphics into the living-room walls of every middle-class condo. Pin-sized lasers lashed to the stems of reading glasses would etch conviction directly onto living retinas.

The technology meant nothing. The technology would disappear, go transparent. In a generation or two, no one would even see it. Someone would discover how to implant billions of transistors directly into the temporal lobes, on two little squares of metal foil. If not in Klarpol's lifetime, then soon enough —just around the bend of this long, logarithmic curve. The clumsy mass of distracting machine would vanish into software, into the impulse that had invented it. Into pure conception.

Something gelled, and Adie saw this primitive gadget morph into the tool that humans have lusted after since the first hand-chipped adze. It seemed the prize at the end of a half-million years of provisional leapfrogging. It was not even a tool, really. More of a medium, the universal one. However much the Cavern had been built from nouns, it dreamed the dream of the unmediated, active verb. It lived where ideas stepped off the blackboard into real being. It represented humanity's final victory over the tyranny of matter. She'd mistaken this variable room for a high-tech novelty. Now Adie saw it as the thinnest first parchment, a thing that rivaled even speech in its ability to amplify thought. Time would turn it into the most significant jump in human communication since the bulking up of the cerebellum.

The mature Cavern would become the body's deep space telescope; the test bed for all guesses; a programmable, live-in film; the zoom lens of the spirit; the umbilical cord for remote robot control; a visualization lab as powerful as human
fancy; a tape deck capable of playing back any camera angle in history; a
networked web of matter
transporters where dispersed families would meet and greet as holographic specters. It promised the wishing lamp that all children's stories described. It was the storybook that once expelled us and now offered to take us back in.

All this Adie Klarpol saw in a single, smooth glance. The men she worked with meant to assemble all these things, and then some.

Aries gleamed. The Mediterranean morning shone from out of the electronic scrap heap of the lab surrounding it. She watched the programmers test the latest audio algorithms. Video edge-detection routines tracked all movement in the room, punctuating any action that might generate sound. Jackdaw Acquerelli slipped off his shoes. He nudged them with a toe, under the lip of the bed. They scraped across the floor of the Cavern, a noise half actual, half synthetic. The elaborate basketball shoes sat like two hollowed-out white lab rabbits, visible through the illusion of the bed, but still beneath it.

Pretty soon,
Jackdaw said,
any year now, this room will be good
enough to live in.

That, finally, was the hope. To live in the room that the painter's suicide vacated. The soul simply wanted better accommodations. Something more spacious to fasten to. Something more like itself than
that dying animal.

It had taken Adie a year and a half to see what she was working on. The rest of the lay world made the same leap in the space of a single Memorial Day weekend. Overnight, an explosion of interest rocked the RL, as if the mountainside they hugged chose that moment to simulate St. Helens. Media latched wholesale upon this thing that it refused to call anything else but virtual reality. The public took so quickly to the fantasy that it must have recognized the contour from something it already knew.

The press launched a full-frontal assault. Journalists closed in on virtual reality as if on a celebrity murder. The luxury of monastic tinkering dissolved under the onslaught. Freese found himself devoting half his time to fielding reporters' questions. Disruption reigned supreme. The RL's mountain hideaway began to appear in speculative magazine accounts and TV news spots, reports that turned the lab's jerky,
wire-frame
predictions into gleaming, ray-traced chrome.

No one could say why, after thirty years of research in obscure labs across the Northern Hemisphere, VR overnight became 1990's cover girl. A couple of research outfits let the ghost out of the machine before it was time. Here and there, universities began to demo projects that suddenly had the whole world talking as if full-body dives into wraparound LSD, robotic prostitution, and long-distance teledildonics would hit the toy store shelves by Christmas. Two or three start-up firms, eager to appease their serial venture capitalists, began to sell cheap telegloves, stripped-down head-mounted displays, and even body suits whose performance amounted to little more than faint holograms of their hinted potential.

In the Santa Barbara Sheraton, at March's research conference for virtual environment and telerobotics interfaces, Freese stood at the back of a packed grand ballroom. Just looking out on the sea of charged participants rearranged his viscera. His cobbled-up cottage craft had graduated beyond an esoteric discipline. Ready or not, reality engineering was about to become a full-fledged industry.

A world begging for deliverance cared nothing for a porcelain jug sitting on a rickety wooden bed stand. But the inexorable market machine that had, just the previous year, swallowed up the globe's last holdout nations already knew what it wanted from virtuality. It wanted holophonic videoconferencing. It wanted the Ferris wheel-cum— feature film. All-talking, all-singing, incarnate sex fantasies. Interplanetary mining from the comfort and safety of our own back yard. But the market craved something more significant as well. Something more fundamental.

Industry saw, in the Cavern and comparable virtual vistas, the race's next launchpad. The first commercial use of virtual space would be as a three-dimensional workbench for designing every physical trinket from saucepan to space station. In that lucid crucible, any conceivable device could be probed from all angles before incurring the expense of manufacture. Even the components for the next generation of Cavern itself could be taken for a 3-D test drive, revealing, in conceptual space, their optimal form before coming into the world. The amount of cash waiting to be thrown at the magic workbench, the sums waiting to be made could swallow the Rl, budget many times over, for generations
upon generations. For the human project had many more goods to make, before its final triumph over goods.

It was here already: the Pong of Things to Come. Downtown, a dozen blocks from Pioneer Square, where Spiegel and Adie had strolled only months before, a technopalace opened up where, for ten bucks, University of Washington kids and frustrated Boeing execs could sit in networked cubicles and blast deep-animated representations of one another out of the infinite vacuum of space. And the month after that arcade opened, Hollywood released the first of several feature-length spawn—a heavily chromed rendition of the new Aladdin and his wonderful data glove. The grand future vision that the RL pioneered was rapidly being left in collective imagination's dust.
Must you Americans oversell everything?
Rajasundaran asked. Freese liked the aggressive ones.
Oversell? You can't oversell this. We're engineering the end of human existence as we know it. Not as
I
know it, White Man.

Still, Freese insisted: it was the end. The end of something. An end to the limits of symbolic knowledge. Beyond the hype, past the immediate feeding frenzy, the press had gotten at least that much right. But even in the thick of the current mania, no one had yet guessed how big this thing was going to get. No one.

The Cavern threatened the final disappearance of interface. Future operators would engage simulation in the same way that humanity's current version engaged material existence: using all the degrees of freedom built into their sovereign bodies. The right way to grasp the planet's mounting sandcastles of data was to step inside and poke around.

As the scramble for funds broke out everywhere, Freese took his ideas on the lecture circuit. The computer would go transparent, more invisible than all its crude, qualified precursors in representation. Talking to data would be like talking to a friend over the phone. Explorers would move through a literal forest of numbers, strolling through their woody representations and singling out by sight or sound or smell the significant trees, the hidden arbors.

Freese's techno-evangelizing carried a strong dose of private salesmanship. No other start-up in the fledgling reality industry had yet
shown anything remotely in the league of the prototype Cavern. The Cavern, Freese teased, would make head-mounted displays and cumbersome gloves seem like Smell-O-Matic, SensaVision, or any other doomed evolutionary backwater. He always ended his speeches with the coy suggestion that everyone stay alive long enough to see the thing that their imaginations couldn't quite visualize yet.

But privately, back at the mountain, he fretted. He sent off an anxious e-mail to the brass at TeraSys.
The whole fad may quite simply fade before we get the real thing to market- In the current climatei potential clients for genuine immersion environments could well feel burned by their own expectations and sour on all subsequent demos-i once the bubble bursts...

As project administrator, Freese managed a delicate balancing act between come-on and kiss-off. He could say nothing of the project and risk being lost in a sea of false claims. Or he could promise the world and risk failing to satisfy. Already, knots of prospective cyber-nauts were queuing up in the RL's parking lot, cash in hand. But the Realization Lab was worlds away from showing anything that resembled a finished product. All they had was proof of concept.

Freese called a general meeting. Programmers, hardware jockeys, scientists, and designers assembled in the central atrium, the only nonvirtual auditorium large enough to contain them all.

This may be the first time I've seen some of you in the daytime,
Freese said.
I'm surprised at how healthy you all look in natural light.

Those are called monitor tans,
Sue Loque called out from the gallery.

I figured it wasn't the diet. First off, I want to applaud every member of this group for the distance we've already come. When I think of our technical and aesthetic advances in the two years since we put together the Crayon World, it feels
...
He breathed in slowly and rolled his eyes.
It feels as if I'm watching a film about evolution on fast-forward. Those of you who spend night after night chained to the workstation may have started to take monthly or even weekly breakthroughs for granted. I
don't,
I
assure you. If this project were to move any faster, I'd be unable to keep up.

He's about to tell us that it's time to pick up the pace,
Rajan stage-whispered. The room exploded in laughter.

Freese screwed up his mouth.
It's time to pick up the pace.
The room erupted again.
Well, not so much the pace. I doubt any one of you could work any harder or more
...
happily than you already do. What we need
to
accelerate,
I
suppose, is the release schedule.

Vulgamott raised a hand. Run
that one by us again, Chief?
More, quieter laughter.

Don't sweat the details, Michael. Here's the problem. We're all over ourselves, shattering yesterday's landmarks. We've gotten the polygon budget up from—what?—a couple of thousand per second?
He looked at Spider Lim, who gave an infinitesimal nod. To ...
what are we running now? I can't even keep track anymore.

Spider cleared his throat.
Over a hundred thousand per wall.

From ten to the third to ten to the fifth. In two dozen months. I'd call
that impressive.

Lim, sensing the blow, stood up.
Actually, we'll have to step up just as many more orders of magnitude before we can start to deliver believability without a lag.

I agree.
Jackdaw addressed his calculator watch.
Reality demands something on the order of a hundred million. Reality
... is
ten to the eighth surface-filled polygons a second.

Minimum,
Spider agreed, and sat down. Freese nodded.
You see? This is the problem. Reality is always a problem,
Spiegel said.

The question is: when does the show stabilize and our act hit the road? At our current rate of change, the answer is never. The product would be forever obsolete before we got it out the door.

O'Reilly raised his hand.
It sounds like you're saying that Deep Pockets is wanting to see some more near-term return?

I'm afraid they want a public press conference for the spring. By next year's SIGGRAPH convention, we're to do a grand rollout. The popular press between now and then will be whipping the public imagination into a frenzy. We'll need to show
something,
just to compete with the rumors.

Hardware, Software, and Design all took the floor to lodge their official reservations. But by the time the party broke up, the rules of the game had changed.

Freese saluted them as they left.
March of'91, then. Delivery Day.

He wants us to be salesmen?
Adie asked Ebesen, back in the cubicles.
This is all just about selling iron?

The old guy hunched his flannel shoulders.
You knew it had to happen someday.

No, I didn't,
she said.
It never occurred to me.

Know what you should make?
Lim told her. He was gutting Rembrandt again, tossing the machine's outdated entrails into cardboard boxes full of priceless scrap. A RAM
room. You know: a huge blow-up representation of everything happening inside the real computer down at silicon level, right as it's running the simulation.

She gave the notion three seconds.
Bad idea. Am I to take it, from this mound of scrap metal, that we are obsolete again?

They say that the Great Wall was obsolete before it was halfway finished. Your average printed circuit hoard is obsolete before it's even begun.

Someone should go through all these junk piles,
she said.
It's getting hard to walk in here.

Lim looked up, horrified.
We can't throw any of that away. We might have to ... refer to it.

Why? Why?
She picked up a shoebox-sized assembly, once a miracle of miniaturization, a whole interplanetary system. Now incompatible with everything. She dropped the chunk of parts.
Worthless.