Hieroglyph (25 page)

The sun was straight overhead, the air-conditioning wheezing as we crept along, and even though the sprawling, circular shape of Black Rock City was only 10 percent full, we could already make it out against the empty desert-scape. In the middle of it all stood the Man, a huge, angular neopagan idol, destined for immolation in a week's time.

Pug had been emailing back and forth with the Borg—the Burning Man Organization, a weird cult of freak bureaucrats who got off on running this circus—all summer, and he was assured that our little paddock had been left undisturbed. If all went according to plan, we'd drop off the van, unpack it and set up camp, then haul bike-trailers over to the paddock and find out how the Gadget had fared over the summer. I was 90 percent convinced that it had blown over and died the minute we left the desert and had been lying uselessly ever since. We'd brought along some conveniences that could convert the back of the van into a bedroom if it came to that, but we were absolutely committed to sleeping in the yurt. Igloo.

We set off as quickly as we could, in goggles and painter's masks against the light, blowing dust. Most of the campsites were empty and we were able to slice a cord across Black Rock City's silver-dollar, straight out to walk-in camp, where there were only a few tents pitched. Pug assured me that it would be carpeted in tents within a couple of days.

Just past walk-in camp, we came upon the Gadget.

It had changed color. The relentless sun and alkali dust had turned the ceramic/polymer legs, sails, and base into the weathered no-color of driftwood. As we came upon it, the solar panels flickered in the sun and then did their dust-shedding routine, spinning like a drum-major's batons and snapping to with an audible crack, and their dust sifted down into the feedstock hoppers, and then over them. They were full. Seeing that, I felt a moment's heartsickness—if they were covered with dust, there'd be no power. The Gadget must not have been printing.

But that only lasted a moment—just long enough to take in what I should have seen immediately. The Gadget's paddock was
mounded
with tiles.

“It's like a bar chart of the prevailing winds,” Pug said. I instantly grasped what he meant—the mounds were uneven, and the hills represented the places where the wind had blown the Gadget most frequently. I snapped several photos before we swarmed over the Gadget to run its diagnostics.

According to its logs, it had printed 413 tiles—enough for two yurts, and nearly double what we'd anticipated. The data would be a delicious puzzle to sort through after the Burn. Had the days been longer? The printer more efficient?

We started to load the trailers. It was going to take several trips to transport all the tiles, and then we'd have to walk the Gadget itself over, set up a new paddock for it on our site, and
then
we'd have to start assembling the yurt. Yurts! It was going to be punishing, physical, backbreaking work, but a crackle of elation shot through us at the thought of it.
It had worked!

“MASTER, THE CREATURE LIVES!” I bellowed, in my best Igor, and Pug shook his head and let fly with a perfect mad-scientist cackle.

We led the Gadget back by means of a pair of guide ropes, pulling for all we were worth on them, tacking into the wind and zigzagging across the Playa, stumbling over campsites and nearly impaling ourselves on rebar tent pegs. People stopped what they were doing to watch, as though we were proud hunters returning with a kill, and they waved at us and squinted behind their goggles, trying to make sense of this strange centaur with its glinting single eye high above its back.

We staked it into the ground on our site on a much shorter tether and dusted it off with stiff paintbrushes, working the dust out of the cracks and joints, mostly on general principle and in order to spruce it up for public viewing. It had been running with amazing efficiency despite the dust all summer, after all.

“Ready to get puzzling?” Pug said.

“Aye, Cap'n,” I said.

We hadn't been sure how many tiles we'd get out of the Gadget over the course of the summer. They came in three interlocking sizes, in the Golden Ratio, each snapping together in four different ways. Figuring out the optimal shape for any given number of panels was one of those gnarly, NP-complete computer science problems that would take more computational cycles than remained in the universe's lifetime to solve definitively. We'd come up with a bunch of variations on the basic design (it did look more like an igloo than a yurt, although truth be told it looked not very much like either) in a little sim, but were always being surprised by new ways of expanding the volume using surprisingly small numbers of tiles.

We sorted the printouts by size in mounds and counted them, plugging the numbers into the sim and stepping through different possibilities for shelter design. There was a scaling problem—at a certain height/diameter ratio, you had to start exponentially increasing the number of tiles in order to attain linear gains in volume—but how big was big enough? After a good-natured argument that involved a lot of squinting into phone screens against the intense glare of the high sun, we picked out two designs and set to work building them.

Pug's arm was pretty much back to normal, but he still worked slower than me and blamed it on his arm rather than admitting that he'd picked a less-efficient design. I was half done, and he was much less than half done, when Blight wandered into camp.

“Holy shit,” she said. “You did it!”

I threw my arms around her as she leaped over the knee-high wall of my structure, kicking it slightly askew. She was wearing her familiar sleeveless overalls, but she'd chopped her hair to a short electric-blue fuzz that nuzzled against my cheek. A moment later, another pair of arms wrapped around us and I smelled Pug's work sweat and felt his strong embrace. We shared a long, three-sided hug and then disentangled ourselves and Pug and I let fly with a superheated sitrep on the Gadget's astounding debut performance.

She inspected the stacks of tiles and the walls we'd built thus far. “You guys, this is
insane
. I didn't want to say anything, you know, but I never bought this. I thought your gizmo”—Pug and I both broke in and said
Gadget,
in unison and she gave us each the finger, using both hands—“would blow over on its side in a windstorm, break something important, and end up buried in its own dune.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I had nightmares about that, too.”

“Not me,” said Pug. “I knew from day one that this would work. It's all so fault tolerant, it all fails so gracefully.”

“You're telling me that you never once pictured yourself finding a pile of half-buried, smashed parts?”

He gave me that serene look of his. “I had faith,” he said. “It's a gadget. It does what it does. Mechanism A acts on mechanism B acts on mechanism C. If you understand what A, B, and C do, you know what the Gadget does.”

Blight and I both spoke at the same time in our rush to explain what was wrong with this, but he held his hands up and silenced us.

“Talk all you want about chaos and sensitivity to initial conditions, but here's the thing: I thought the Gadget would work, and here we are, with a working Gadget. Existence proofs always trump theory. That's engineering.”

“Fine,” I said. “I can't really argue with that.”

He patted me on the head. “It's okay, dude. From the day I met you, I've known that you are a glass-half-empty-and-maybe-poisonous guy. The Playa will beat that out of you.”

“I'll help,” Blight said, and pinched my nipple. I'd forgotten about her pinches. I found that I'd missed them.

“I hate you both,” I said. Pug patted me on the head again and Blight kissed me on the cheek.

“Let me finish unpacking and I'll come back and help you with your Playa-Tetris, okay?”

Looking back on it now, I think the biggest surprise was just how
hard
it was to figure out how to get the structure just right. If you fitted a tile the wrong way in row three, it wasn't immediately apparent until row five or six, and you'd have to take them all down and start over again. Pug said it reminded him of knitting, something he'd tried for a couple years.

“It's just that it's your first time,” Blight said, as she clicked a tile into place. “The first time you put together a wall of Lego you screwed it up, too. You've been living with this idea for so long, you forgot that you've never actually dealt with its reality.”

We clicked and unclicked, and a pile of broken tiles grew to one side of the site. As we got near the end, it became clear that this was going to be a close thing—what had started as a surplus of tiles had been turned into a near shortage thanks to our breaking. Some of that had been our fault—the tiles wanted to be finessed into place, not forced, and it was hard to keep a gentle approach as the day lengthened and the frustration mounted—but some was pure material defect, places where too many impurities had ganged up along a single seam, waiting to fracture at the slightest pressure, creating a razor-sharp, honeycombed gypsum blade that always seemed to find exposed wrists above the glove line. A few times, chips splintered off and flew into my face. The goggles deflected most of these, but one drew blood from the precise tip of my nose.

In the end, we were three—three!—tiles short of finishing; two from mine, one from Pug's. The sun had set, and we'd been working by headlamp and the van's headlights. The gaps stared at us.

“Well,
shit,
” Pug said, with feeling.

I picked through our pile of postmodern potsherds, looking for any salvageable pieces. There weren't. I knew there weren't, but I looked anyway. I'd become a sort of puzzle-assembling machine and I couldn't stop now that I was so close to the end. It was the punch line to a terrible joke.

“What are you two so freaked out about?” Blight said. “Just throw a tarp over it.”

We both looked at each other. “Blight—” Pug began, then stopped.

“We don't want to cover these with
tarps,
” I said. “We want to show them off! We want everyone to see our totally awesome project! We want them to see how we made bricks out of dust and sunshine!”

“Um, yeah,” Blight said. “I get that. But you can use the tarps for tonight, and print out your missing pieces tomorrow, right?”

We both stared at each other, dumbfounded.

“Uh,” I said.

Pug facepalmed, hard enough that I heard his glove smacking into his nose. When he took his hand away, his goggles were askew, half pushed up his forehead.

“I'll get the tarps,” I said.

THEY CAME. FIRST IN
trickles, then in droves. Word got around the Playa: these guys have 3D printed their own yurt. Or igloo.

Many just cruised by, felt the smooth finish of the structures, explored the tight seams with their fingernails, picked up a shard of cracked tile to take away as a souvenir. They danced with the Gadget as it blew back and forth across its little tethered paddock, and if they were lucky enough to see it dropping a finished tile to the desert, they picked it up and marveled at it.

It wasn't an unequivocal success, though. One old-timer came by, a wizened and wrinkled burner with a wild beard and a tan the color of old leather—he was perfectly naked and so unself-conscious about it that I ceased to notice it about eight seconds into our conversation—and said, “Can I ask you something?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Well, I was just wondering how you turn these bricks of yours back into dust when you're done with them?”

“What do you mean?”

“Leave no trace,” he said. His eyes glittered behind his goggles. “Leave no trace” was rule number eight of the ten hallowed inviolable holy rules of Burning Man. I suppose I must have read them at some point, but mostly I came into contact with them by means of Burnier-Than-Thou dialogues with old-timers—or anxious, status-conscious noobs—who wanted to point out all the ways in which my Burn was the wrong sort of Burn.

“Not following you,” I said, though I could see where this was going.

“What are you going to do with all this stuff when you're done with it? How are you going to turn your ceramics back into dust?”

“I don't think we can,” I said.

“Ah,” he said, with the air of someone who was winning the argument. “Didn't think so. You going to leave this here?”

“No,” I said. “We'll take it down and truck it out. Leave no trace, right?”

“But you're taking away some of the desert with you. Do that enough, where will we be?”

Yep. Just about where I figured this was going. “How much playa dust do you take home in your”—I was about to say
clothes
—“car?”

“Not one bit more than I can help bringing. It's not our desert to take away with us. You've got sixty thousand people here. They start doing what you're doing, next thing you know, the whole place starts to vanish.”

I opened my mouth. Shut it. Opened it again.

“Have you got any idea of the overall volume of gypsum dust in the Black Rock Desert? I mean, relative to the amount of dust that goes into one of these?” I patted the side of the structure—we'd started calling them
yurtgloos
.

“I knew you'd say that,” he said, eyes glittering and beard swinging. “They said that about the ocean. Now we've got the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. They said it about space, and now Low Earth Orbit is one stray screwdriver handle away from a cascade that wipes out every communications satellite and turns the Lagrange points into free-fire zones. Anywhere you go in history, there's someone dumping something or taking something away and claiming that the demand'll never outstrip the supply. That's probably what the first goat-herder said when he turned his flock out on the Sahara plains. ‘No way these critters could ever eat this huge plot down to nothing.' Now it's the Sahara!”