RICHARD POWERS (10 page)

It 's Spider,
she said.
There's something wrong with him.

The two men exchanged looks. Spiegel patted her.
It's OK, Ade. Sometimes when he's working at a screen? He forgets to breathe.

The three trotted back to Spider's cubicle. Stevie and Raj stood above Lim and rubbed him gently. Their colleague sat numbed, a Seattle grunger dozing off for the afternoon in the entrance to the Space Needle.

Spider!
Raj called.
Snap out of it, man. You're system-crashing again.

Breathe in, Spider,
Spiegel encouraged.
Come on, buddy.

I'm breathing,
Spider called back, irritated at the interruption. Still a little out of it, some tangled knot tying up his processor cycles. Some puzzle of fluid flow, of air convection wrapping its turbulence around a sculpted wing. Adie touched his forearm. His temperature had dropped, like a lizard caught in a shadow.

Spiegel harassed the returning patient.
What's with you, Spidey? This is some kind of meditation effect, isn't it? Something to do with your Qi?

Spiegel, man,
Rajasundaran warned.
Don't mess with the inscrutable East. Don't even try to scrute it. There are mysteries that the people of bologna and yellow mustard are not given to understand.

I'm from Korea,
Spider objected. He'd lived long enough in the States to speak with a slight Okie drawl.
We don't do Qi in Korea. That's a California thing.

Keep breathing, Spidey.
Spiegel urged him.
We need your expertise.

Raj seconded.
Yes, man. Keep on working for Chairman Gatt. To get rich is glorious.

Korea,
Spider said.
Korea, you stupid Tamil.

Asian transplants had no corner on weird physiological responses to the man-machine interface. All of this virtual country's immigrants tended to maze out on silicon's sub-micron boulevards, tranced over their keyboards, their carpal tunnels hollowed out for maximum brain-finger throughput. But Spider's body tracked the machine especially steeply. He could generally catch himself overheating, hyperventilating as he tested an overclocked processor or a heat-stressed IC. But a hang could snag him, pull him down under consciousness's event horizon.

We're going to find you crashed like that someday,
Spiegel scolded.
Completely stalled. Like a token ring that's lost track of its packets. Like some student infinite do-loop. And we won't be able to spring your processes.

Rajasundaran wagged his digit.
Not a team player. Does not work and play well with others.

That's not true,
Adie demurred.
He 's more sociable than most of you crazies.

Oh, right,
Raj said. As
if you starving artistes get a clean bill of health in the social interaction department?

Spider waved his hands for peace. No
biggie, guys. My Boolean-blood barrier is just a little weak.

And that was the only possible diagnosis. Lim was like one of those sing-along car drivers whose speed halved whenever the tune on the radio slowed from boogie to ballad. He'd never done well in the Cavern for extended periods. Simulator sickness got him every time. When the simulation plunged from great heights, his ears popped. A simple projection of the winter constellations against the ceiling gave him hypothermia. He couldn't work on a circuit without simulating it in his own circulatory system. The same data traversing the chutes of gated arrays invariably ported over to that other platform, to bang around inside the test bed of Spider's cells.

The health scare subsiding, Adie exploited the gathered experts. My
jungle is a ghost. I pass right through every plant in it. I should bounce off the rubber trees. At least rustle the ivy.

Spiegel nodded.
You need collision detection. Yeah, give me one of those. Are they expensive?
Collision had already cost the team a tidy sum of man-months. It wasn't enough for a garden-variety mushroom sprouting in the Cavern simply to look like one. Even a toadstool needed heft and weight and resistance. A simulated object had to bend or droop or bruise or any of several dozen other verbs that real things did when bumped up against in the grotto that the Cavern stood for.

Multiple coders had already implemented a reasonable fraction of collision's class library. They wrote out methods for a whole host of impacts. Each calculated aftermath got its own mongrel differential equations, trajectories mocking the ones that nature invented. Various variables toted up mass and speed and English, calculating the thresholds between bounce and break, between shatter and slide and spin.

Spiegel showed her how, from out of this catalogue of cases, to assign verbs for each set of possible contacts: hand on vine, vine on bird, bird on monkey, monkey on tree limb, limb on hand. In the course of several weeks, Adie watched as software turned her jungle into a gym. The forest became a vast calculator, a gnarled orchard of countless parallel computations. Over the run of days, any pair of objects learned to calculate what to do when they met one another in space.

But calculation cost; the display code carried so much overhead that it ran too slowly to keep up with its events. Adie released a gingko ball in the air above her canopy. The seedy mace slid down the slope of its infinitesimal accelerations until it struck some surprise tendril or trunk. Contact produced a pop, then seized up. That wall's graphics buffer promptly dropped several frames while its reality engine did the myriad integrals needed to determine the respective obligations of striker and struck. The gingko pod hung in space, waiting for math to decide its fate.

Such a hiccup was not acceptable. Any jerk in the animation and the game was up. Material reality's supreme Cray never dropped frames. That's how you knew you were
in
the real world: all the flicker-free, smooth scrolling. The Cavern's goal
—believability through total immersion—could not survive an image that sputtered.

Spiegel and Jackdaw worked up provisional fixes, clever step-saving approximations that shortcut the Cavern's calculations, cheats that would cover until Spider and the hardware boys could bring in more firepower. Continuous collision detection arrived after two triple-shift weeks during which, when Spider slept at all, he slept on a bed of fan-fold paper spread two inches deep on the stockroom floor. He woke on that pallet one morning, the socket of his right eye richly black-and-blue, three shades deeper than his sepia skin.

O'Reilly, the Ulster economist, took one look and whistled.
Jays. Some shiner. I wasn't aware that you were currently involved with anyone.

The glossy maroon smear entranced Sue Loque.
Ooh. That's a beauty. Can I touch it?

No, of course you cant touch it. You're perverts. All of you.

Christ on a crutch, Spider,
Sue said.
Don't be such a prude.

Spider laughed, one of those single-syllable, apologize-for-existing laughs, still intact from his first few years of Korean existence.

When Adie saw the black eye, she lost it.
Oh no. God help us. Look at I've done.

You? You haven't done anything. I've been sleeping on a hard mattress, is all.

You don't remember? Yesterday? Testing the back layers?

What are you talking about?

You dont remember running into that tree branch?
She'd seen him
wince.

Oh no, no,
no.
Dont be crazy.

A sympathetic fall in blood sugar lay within the realm of material possibility. But a virtual bruise ... It fell too far outside his world model. Yet no real day's accident explained the shiner any better.

Maybe this Klarpol woman is right,
Raj said. He milked the lilt of Hindu eschatology.
We've seen such things produced from out of your brain before.

Spiegel piled on.
Why not? Impale the brain with something believable, and belief will leave its record in the skin.

That's nuts,
Lim insisted. A
black eye needs a real impact. Spoken with a true hardware bias.

I
have to agree with Spiegel,
Rajasundaran said.
True, the switches execute the code. But also true, the code still sets the switches.

Loque fingered the wound, over Lim's objections. You boys
are making some real progress in veridicality.

Spider Lim,
Spiegel said.
The man who became his own collision algorithm.

At these words, Lim's whole body blushed so deeply that his bruise
vanished into the general background rose.

In the privacy of their own workstations, each player in the game mounted a run at that same threshold of belief. The heart of the Realization Lab beat to a single paradox. It hoped to mechanize any brute incident that existence offered. But imitation was itself just the first step in a greater program, the final escape from brute matter: the room that would replace the one where existence lay bound.

Spider's bruise prompted the Rousseau Room's first working demo. Artists and engineers alike turned out to see just how palpable Adie's mythic branches
—the product of collective fiat—had in fact become. Color met number, fact chased invention through the shadows of an undergrowth past evolution's power to imagine.

All was yet still. The python hung slung in mid-slither. The birds held open their beaks to caw. The elephant readied to trumpet and the monkeys to scamper. The lions cocked their quizzical heads at this mass tourist intrusion. And spreading vegetation bent the white, oil-paint moonlight into as many greens as the viewing mind could grasp.

Spiegel presided, showing off the luscious prototype, their object lesson in objects. He took all parties on a walking tour as deep into the jungle as the jungle went. He pointed out the details of stalk and stamen, all spelled out in structured data
—the crazy Frenchman's mother-in-law tongues turned tropical Egyptian. He popped the hood and revealed the diorama's underpinning gears. He laid out every effect they'd managed to produce. But he did not know what he was looking at until Adie told him.

We did this,
the woman said. She clapped her hands together in what only Karl Ebesen recognized as a proof-perfect knockoff of St. Theresa's ecstasy.
We made this! It's so beautiful.

The word lay beyond the rest of the team's list of formal descriptors. It seemed to have a real referent; the new woman apparently meant something when she used it. Beauty might even have had some physical reality, some selective advantage conferred over the last billion or so years. But what formal rules the quality adhered to, what behaviors it meant to elicit, not even Spider Lim's body could begin to guess.

Time for the people,
Adie declared.
Are we ready to start populating this place?

They went back to the color reproductions. They took the measure of the rain forest's two inhabitants: black and white, vertical and horizontal, male and female, player and listener... And the vegetative kingdom surrendered to its human sovereigns, those shapes that gave first green its order.

Then Spider's body began to specify, began to execute that unde-cidable function. However arbitrary, however recently contrived, beauty turned real inside him. It grew legible, a script as unambiguously phonetic as Korea's upstart Hangul.

For the woman began to invade him. Her inroads grew so wide they even upset his sleep. Not the living woman: he left Adie to the others, to the bit jockeys who ranked her overgenerously in the local hierarchy of desire purely on the basis of novelty. He left her to Spiegel, who saw in her some ghost of a lost shared life. He left the real woman to those who knew how to interact with such things. And he took up nightly with the imaginary one, the woman on the crested divan. The one who organized this profligate Eden and named it.

He watched art and science conspire to float that full, stuffed body among the foliage. Out of the electronic paintbox, she emerged, rising from the wedge of face, the coils draping her neck, extending through the crescent of almond opening just above her knees and down to those

curious, stub toes.

Spider donned a pair of glasses and walked clear around the couch where she lay. She remained remote, aloof, still, exuding the hint of something he could not figure.
We did this. It's beautiful.

Their first successful leaf, twirling in the Cavern darkness, had led to this
—this pale, lentil body turning in his mind's dark. This scapular profile, these tow-line braids. Her hips fell somewhere on the
limaзon
of Pascal. The squares of her breasts' abscissas and ordinates summed to an integer. This was the math of women, a field he'd given up studying, female equations whose complexities had long ago surpassed his ability to differentiate. The flawless chestnut manikins, their grade-school desks fastened to the front of his, whose strands of brunette hair he'd once tried to number. The white film enigmas, beckoning to him to join them behind the projection screen. The cycles of magazine sirens, that March
Cosmopolitan
cover from his second year at Stanford, the anemic, skewed-thigh, dazed-eye vision he'd preserved for ongoing reference, the visible deed to this land of American license he'd somehow landed in. He rebuilt her in detail at nights, on his drive home down the mountain, through the newly air-dropped communities where no one could tell him apart from any of the thousands of other thirty-year-old
transpacific immigrant virgins with pronounced epicanthic folds wandering around the Greater Seattle area. Her crude constructedness tapped some secret in him, a figure beckoning at the entrance to the impenetrable undergrowth that fringed his life. A texture map that lay on a couch just past recall, prodding his body from its long forgetfulness.

Where does she come from?
he asked Adie.

From the mind of a supremely bizarre customs
officiai
in a cold Paris atelier.

No. I mean
...
the way she looks. Where did he get her?

She showed him the river flowing through this figure. All the prone female flesh, up on one elbow, turned three-quarters to face the plane of paint. Those countless, recumbent, thinly veiled Renaissance mistresses, passed off as Venus. Titian's Urbino goddess, Madame
R
йcamier,
the naked Maja, ripe
Olympia ...
She showed him the long genealogical tree, art's ancient bloodline: this fetishizing, fawning, degrading, loving, lurid intimacy played out in front of centuries of voyeurs, these canvases like mirrors on the ceiling of the race's collective motel room, rented, as always, this evening, by the hour.

As the spinning leaf programmed the light, so this strange almond algorithm programmed Spider Lim's body to take up some history too long to understand. The female nude wanted something from him, something commanded in a lost language, something Spider Lim hadn't the visual vocabulary to comprehend.

He took to avoiding the Cavern while the jungle group worked there. But his cure produced the symptoms it worked against. His policy of containment only multiplied the woman's nighttime visits. Soon, she came to him as regularly as a cross-sound ferry, demanding that he examine her every surface, gaze on her where she lay wrapped in a long, self-extending pageant, a
tableau
vivant
he'd never dreamed himself capable of seeing
...