RICHARD POWERS (57 page)

She did not even bother to give him the finger.

She sought out Karl Ebesen. She found him and Michael Vulgamott manning their cubicle, watching SCUDs and Patriots proxy-battle in the upper air. She put her finger to the screen they gazed at, where a trail of refugees streamed north. Her voice sounded almost level.
Did we do this?

They looked at her, afraid to move.

This? Is this our fault?

Ebesen turned to look at her.
Everything
...
everything we ever do is our fault.

She sat down by the side of his desk and broke down. He slid his chair toward her, baffled. For one brief moment, he seemed actually to touch her.

Since I was born?
she said.
For as long as I can remember. All I ever wanted? All I wanted to do was make something beautiful. Something that wouldn't hurt anyone.

He nodded. He knew already: to make something good of our work and days. That was the place all guilt came from. She couldn't want anything that hadn't already burned him.

She shook her head, enraged. Her sobbing sounded like a tearing veil.
Why didn't you tell me?

He frowned. Scowled at her. Held up his helpless hands.

I
know,
she wept.
I know. I never asked.

Her fault: her own doing, all along, from the very first crayon smear. She must have wanted it, somehow, to have gotten in this deep, without once seeing the size of the betrayal she so lovingly enabled. Death from the air would win out in the end. Remote and ingenious, all piloted by absent fathers, the warcraft were flying again, despite the gifts she'd drawn to distract them. Once before, the Air Force had thrown away her handmade bribes. Now, worse: they took all her pretty pictures and put them to use.

The Parasite Room had lodged inside her. The RL, the Cavern—all smart weaponry—were just first sketches for the next, larger assembly.

simulators. The Army made the first computer, back when the game was still about beating the Nazis. They've been hip-deep into VR from the beginning.
ARPA
built the Net. They ordered the first microprocessor. You sow the Whirlwind, you reap SAGE.
He went on, numbly, dull. On automatic pilot.
If you want to know the truth, we're stealing their code. The whole runaway century, living off military spin-offs.

She got out from under the covers and shut off the signal.
I'm sorry. I can't watch anymore.

No. Of course. You're right.

They curled up against each other for protection, warmth, sleep. But each other wasn't enough. She could not lay still, but turned every two minutes, on truth's spit. Of course the Joint Chiefs wanted what art promised: to break the bonds of matter and make the mind real.

You
didn't know?
he asked, in darkness, too small a voice to want a real answer. You
really didn't know?

She howled at the words, and he could not calm her.

She went to Jonathan Freese.
Who are we doing this for?

Well, I've been doing this for myself. Who are you doing this for?

Jonathan. Don't jack with me. Not now. Who's buying what we're selling?

He studied her, deciding whether to laugh or fire her. He showed her the list of interested parties who'd already signed up for Cavern demonstrations in the spring. He couldn't very well refuse to show her. Disney, yes. Sony, yes. Half a dozen research universities, yes. But among the rest of the roster were other agencies, groups whose upbeat acronyms could not disguise their affiliation. Slaughter was a free rider, a virus using them, using the RL, using the Cavern as a way of spreading its genome.

You
fucked me over, didn't you? Just like you wanted to, from the day I signed on.

Sweetheart, I know we're all under a lot of stress here. I'm going to forget you said this.

She did not even bother to give him the finger.

She sought out Karl Ebesen. She found him and Michael Vulgamott manning their cubicle, watching SCUDs and Patriots proxy-battle in the upper air. She put her finger to the screen they gazed at, where a trail of refugees streamed north. Her voice sounded almost level.
Did we do this?

They looked at her, afraid to move.

This? Is this our fault?

Ebesen turned to look at her.
Everything
...
everything we ever do is our fault.

She sat down by the side of his desk and broke down. He slid his chair toward her, baffled. For one brief moment, he seemed actually to touch her.

Since I was born?
she said.
For as long as I can remember. All I ever wanted? All I wanted to do was make something beautiful. Something that wouldn't hurt anyone.

He nodded. He knew already: to make something good of our work and days. That was the place all guilt came from. She couldn't want anything that hadn't already burned him.

She shook her head, enraged. Her sobbing sounded like a tearing veil.
Why didn't you tell me?

He frowned. Scowled at her. Held up his helpless hands.

I know,
she wept.
I know. I never asked.

Her fault: her own doing, all along, from the very first crayon smear. She must have wanted it, somehow, to have gotten in this deep, without once seeing the size of the betrayal she so lovingly enabled. Death from the air would win out in the end. Remote and ingenious, all piloted by absent fathers, the warcraft were flying again, despite the gifts she'd drawn to distract them. Once before, the Air Force had thrown away her handmade bribes. Now, worse: they took all her pretty pictures and put them to use.

The Parasite Room had lodged inside her. The RL, the Cavern—all smart weaponry
—
were just first sketches for the next, larger assembly.

Her work here was just a rough draft for technology's wider plan. The world machine had used her, used them all to bring itself into existence. And its tool of choice —its lever and place to stand, the tech that would spring it at last into three dimensions—was that supreme, useless, self-indulgent escapism. The thing that made nothing happen. The mirror of nature. Art.

The war needed drawing, after all. The conflict had drafted Adie, made her its draftsman. She'd become death's seeing-eye dog, leading on into that place it could not navigate unaided. This she saw in full, even before the ground assault started. That girl's supreme paintbox had done its work. Everything that imagination had fashioned would

now go real.

You're never here anymore,
Spiegel chastised her.
Even when you're here. When I talk to you, when I touch you? It's like I pass right through you.

I'm sorry,
she faked, as calmly as she could.
I'll be better.

Life outlasts this, he wanted to say. It outlives its portrait.
Look,
he said instead.
Are you trying to punish me for bringing you out here? Do you want to stop working at this? Do you want us to take off? Blow this peanut stand? I'm game, you know. I'll go anywhere. Just so long as we stay together.

While they spoke, the road to Basra turned into a hundred-mile-long human ash. Helicopters filmed it in detailed pan, from a thousand attentive angles.

Can you give me root directory access?
she asked, stroking him.

What do you ... ? Can I ask what... ?
But trust could ask nothing.
Is there anything I can help with?

She smiled and kissed him, deep, past the lips.
Let me surprise you.

He gave her all the system's passwords. He was love's dupe, its software engineer, ready to barter for any scrap of real-time connection he

might get.

She destroyed the backup copies first. That much she'd learned, in her years of becoming digital. One by one, she mounted the archived volumes. And file by file, directory by directory, she erased her handiwork. It was not much, this retaliatory strike. It did not answer to what had been done. But in her own small way, Adie vowed to kill what she could.

Those projects to which she'd contributed nothing, she left intact. The Weather Room, the Large-Molecule Docking simulation: each maker would have to be responsible for his own designs. She passed over O'Reilly's Futures Room, the one that had predicted the Gulf War, the one that predicted the war beyond the Gulf. She left Kaladjian's wonderland of pure math unscathed.

Even in the worlds she'd helped to make, she picked around the others' contributions. She tore up her Arlesian floorboards but left behind Raj's ethereal creaking. She torched her dreamworld jungle, sparing those bits of vegetation that Karl had nurtured. Growth vanished into the void of zeroed data: the ebony flutist, the third monkey flushed from the undergrowth, the dreaming, almond woman that Spider Lim recognized ...

She disposed of each redundant copy, as quickly as she could type the Kill command. Then she turned to the working master files, the living originals. How could delight have misled her so baldly? That illusion of purpose, the giddy sense of answering a call, of doing urgent work that only her hands could do ... She could not send her portfolio back to randomness without a final peek. Fact had rendered her immune to the seduction. All she needed was five minutes, to see what that illusion looked like, stripped of belief.

She booted up the cathedral and stepped back in. She leaned into the nave's great hollow, feeling herself move despite her better sense. She pointed one finger straight up, hating herself even as she gave in to the soar. She let herself rise into the hemisphere apse, then farther up, all the way into the uppermost dome, now inscribed with its flowing
surah
from the Qur'an.

She spun her body in the invented volume, the largo ballet of an astronaut repairing failed equipment far off in the infinite vacuum. She twisted and looked down into the breach below. The God's-eye view: in the simulation, but not of it. And deep beneath her, where there should have been stillness, something moved.

She dropped her finger, shocked. The winch of code unthreaded. She fell like a startled fledgling, back into the world's snare. The mad tiling swam into focus: a man, staring up at her fall, his face an awed bitmap
no artist could have animated.

4
3

The room of the Cave is one continuous chasm.

Its chambers all connect. They run together, the way old Greek was written: no spaces, no commas, no periods, just one long flow without dams or rapids, a single subterranean stream that never changes its course. But never the same stream twice.

Here you have lived since childhood, facing the darkness, taking shadows for the things that cast them. On the walls of this room, a story unrolls. In it, someone just like you gets miraculously sprung. He turns to the light, which instantly blinds him. You cheer for him to run, but he turns back from the glare to the safety of this room.

Your eyes adjust to the light of this hypothetical. What you take to be the boundless world may be no more than just this underground spring. You make out the peep show to be just a peep show, but only through the clip projected in front of you. The clunkiest of puppets say
shadow,
say
story.
And in that tale—continuous, no spaces—the tale you've been chained to since birth, you make out the room you live in.

But even while trapped in that old scroll's closed O, the storytelling race has been busy. Millennia pass in the war against matter. Every invention bootstraps off the next. The tale advances; thought extends its grasp over things until it arrives at the final interface. The ultimate display, the one that closes the gap between sign and thing.

In this continuous room, images go real. You come to rest at last, in no more than the idea of a bed. The mere mention of love brings on the fact. The word "food" is enough to feed you. A carved-soap gun can kill your enemies. And a quick sketch of the Resurrection suffices to raise the dead.

The room of the cave is something more than allegory. But the room of the cave is something less than real. Its wall shadows ripple with an undercurrent of substance, more than representation, but not yet stuff. Notion springs to life from the same, deep source in which the outdoors is scripted—what the run-on Greek once called the Forms.

In this room, before this play of fire, you feel the deeper freeze just outside the cave's mouth. From here you can make out those more turbulent axioms, chill forces you couldn't feel until you touched your fingers to this coded pane.

You breathe in. You lean forward, and the images advance toward you. You look up and rise, or gaze down and sink. You materialize on a stony cliff, ruined streets cutting switchbacks through a grove of olives. You fly to the end of the cliff and lift off, careful to stay, this time, above the ocean but below the sun.

You learn to steer your fragile machine. You skim above the surface of a dark sea. You dive beneath these scattered reefs and float in your birthright air. The flight feels like reading, like skimming a thousand exhilarated pages, but without the brakes and ballast of an ending.

Everywhere you look on the horizon, there are more islands. You fly past them, but always more appear. Desire moves you through them, down toward their surfaces. You've found your way back to the cradle where this project started. Here and there, against the sun-bleached shores, an amphitheater emerges, or a temple to that same bleaching sun that trails you overhead. One minute the air is thick with autumn, the next, a sweet-sapped spring. The seasons track that kidnapped goddess through the year, wandering to and from her underground prison.

You fly too freely, or the land's geometry is wrong. Some titan fails to hold up his corner of the air's tent. Or you simply reach the edge of a story that, even at this final stage, remains eternally under construction. An embankment, pitch-white and blinding, looms up in front of you, too fast for you to take evasive action.

The scene crashes before you do. The room of the cave slams to a breakpoint and empties itself into error's buffer. There on the wall where the oceans and olives and temples were, where the marble crags ran from their spine down into their unbroken chasm, the machine seizes up, the faulty allegory crumbles, the debugger spits out a continuous scroll of words.

Only through this crack can you see where things lead. You step through the broken symbols, into something brighter.