RICHARD POWERS (26 page)

Spiegel's futurist vision nagged at her for days afterward. He was mad, of course. But certain of his formulations made Adie wonder just what program she was, in fact, working on. For her, the electronic doll-house's sheer inconsequence had returned her to pleasure. And now pleasure
—it shamed her to admit—intensified in the suggestion that it might be headed somewhere.

From the scorpion-tailed branch of one of her digital mango trees, she hung that fluid, flaming Munch painting of three northern women, hands behind their backs, midway between aesthetic transport and anxiety attack. And on the flip side of the bitmap, for anyone who walked around to the far side of the picture, she penciled a calligraphic quote from the painter: "Nature shows the images on the back side of the eye."

Jon Freese e-mailed her, asking for a jungle open house.

It's not ready
yet
, she cabled back.

He insisted.
Jus
t for the other in-house groups.
So you can get some formal feedback.

The open house turned into a group show. Loque demoed a major new concept for writing paintbox filters.
Got the idea from working with the artsy chick.

All hers,
Adie objected.
Don't look at me.

Instead of starting with bit-fiddling algorithms and trying to match them to artistic styles, we scan in a dozen examples of a given artist and make the edge-detection and signal-processing routines build up a catalog of stylistic tics.

Not tics,
Adie said.

Pardonnez-moi. Mannerisms.

Love it,
Spiegel said.
Sort of the opposite of paint-by-numbers?

Ari Kaladjian stewed in place.
You mean that you are giving up on the idea of formulating those functions that
—?

We're not giving up on anything, Ari. We just thought we'd explore a new angle and see where it leads.

I ask you again: Does it do us any good to produce a cute little parroting routine, without learning how to formalize its behavior?

We're just letting the machine do the formalizing,
Sue said.

Adie's turn came. Her colleagues kept together as a group down the twisting paths in the undergrowth, stumbling over each new visual quote as if by accident. They gasped at the nativities, oohed and aahed at the animated still lifes, and laughed at the illuminated monks embroidering their scrolls with vegetation that spilled off the vellum and grew into the jungle all around them.

On a path near the back edge of the forest, Kaladjian attacked.
Will someone please tell me the point of this whole peculiar exercise?

Freese rose to Adie's defense.
Come on,
An. Its
a demo. No more
than everyone else's.

Yes. But what exactly does it demonstrate? It has no real three-dimensional modeling or ray tracing. The image field remains planar. There's no interaction to speak of. Aside from a few charming animal animations, the sprites are static. And the depicted data mean nothing at all. Hardly a state-of-the-art demonstration of what the environment might do.

The group fell silent, scuffing their collective feet on the forest floor. Spider Lim stood guard over his divan woman, as if the mathematician might attack her.

It struck Adie that the others were waiting for her to defend herself.
Well, I don't know. I thought it was kind of nice to look at.
Only Rajan laughed.

Spiegel rushed into the gap, covering for his recruit.
Come on, Kaladjian. Who are you to tell potential clients how they should use a Cavern? It's just as interesting to build a room to visualize inspiration as it is to build one to visualize long hydrocarbon chains.

This "inspiration." Can you tell me where, in all these
—snippets— we are supposed to find it? Can you give me one little proof by induction, one simple rule for telling it from non-inspiration?

He's kind of right.
Jackdaw looked away as he spoke. I
mean, sure, it's beautiful and all. But it doesn't do anything. It's basically a flat gallery. The user can't really
...
make anything happen.

Adie's face shrank from him in a crooked smile. You. You child. What did I ever do to you?
What do you mean, "cant" ...?

It's not really what I'd call interactive.

Of course it's interactive. You go down this path or you go down the other. You see something interesting, you go closer. What more interaction do you want?

Well, see, I mean: as far as the little artworks are concerned? They don't even know the user is there.

If a masterpiece bloomed in the forest,
Rajan began,
and no one was there to appraise it, would it still be a
—?

And after the user leaves?
Jackdaw said.
There's no trace in the database of anyone having ever been there. The jungle just keeps carrying on as if
—

Exactly,
Adie interrupted.
And thank God.

Spiegel tried to interface between the races.
What Jackie means, Ade, is that you need more collaboration between the humans and the data structures. More of the dance that is unique to this medium.

I still don
'
t get it. It's not like this place could exist anywhere else.

She's right.
Freese
stepped back in.
This is a legitimate virtual environment. And it's unlike any that I've seen anywhere else.

Jackdaw shrugged.
Oh, it's fine as far as it goes. But it doesn't transform the ordinary.

Sue Loque put her arm around the world's creator.
It's just not the future's transcendental art form yet. You can throw something like that together for us, can't you, babe?

My God. Last month they were raving about it. Now they're bored.

Motionless, downwind, Kaladjian hit his sprint from out of the crouch. I
would just like to know what this teaches us? Either about the hardware, the software, or the exercise of European painting? I want to know what we learn here.

That we couldn't learn in a good museum,
Jackdaw said.

I'll go further,
Kaladjian added.
What of any real consequence can we learn, even from the best of museums?

The hook lodged deep in Adie's gills.
You obviously aren't in any danger of having to learn anything.

Art is not capable of teaching. This is my point. It contains no formal knowledge about the world. No predictions. Nothing falsifiable. Nothing
repeatable. It's not about anything except itself. Other art. And even about that, it's at best equivocal

Adie took off her shuttered glasses and stared at him.
Mathemati-cian, has anyone ever told you that you're a very unpleasant man?

Well, the pleasure is mutual. But at least you say what you mean. Which is more than most artists bother to do.

Гт
not an artist. I haven t made any art for more than—

Too late, Freese resorted to authority.
This is neither the time nor the place to air personality conflicts.

This has nothing whatsoever to do with personality,
Kaladjian shouted.
This is about certain, definitive
—

Can someone please give me one simple rule for telling personality from non-personality?
Rajan said. And the gathering degenerated into a free-for-all. Art and math skulked away from the spitting match, both gangs compromised.

But out of the ugly exchange, the virulent parasite of Cavern innovation took up a new carrier. Inspiration passed through the tracts of its unwitting sponsors, using them and moving on. Now the virus lodged in Dale Bergen, the mousy University of Washington biochemist who lived by the iron precept of never attracting attention. Bergen's Large Molecule Docking Room threatened the next step in human mastery over matter. The user stood in microscopic space, among galaxies of enfolded polymers, zooming in on docking sites now large enough to walk inside and poke around. Shape and charge dictated this representation's behavior, just as they did in the physical world. The graphical atoms took up their available bonds, obeying the pull of electrostatics built into their data structures.

In the Cavern's viewing chamber, the giant molecules calculated their own obligatory behaviors on the fly. Classroom became laboratory. Bergen dreamed that his Tinkertoy docking simulator would one day drive the actual mechanisms it symbolized. In the cybernetics of enzymes, the mousy, invisible man saw the basic switching and feedback networks of natural selection. In these shape messages telegraphing among their senders he heard whole counterpointing choirs, choruses untestable in isolation.

Bergen stood in the Cavern, watching Ms. Klarpol's hallucinatory fronds brush up against the faces of this wayward safari. What if each of these static botanies could be made to grow, obeying internal curves like those that governed his graphic molecules? What if these plant genomes were allowed to compete with one another, egg each other on, converting the resources of simulated soil, air, water, and light into ever more convoluted conversations?

The Cavern as crucible for simulated evolution: it was just a thought. The implementation lay, for the moment, well beyond Bergen. But the idea tickled him. One learned to build the rooms one wanted to visit. And ecology was a room that wanted visiting.

He snagged Adie on her way out.
Could I borrow your rubber trees sometime?

She blossomed at his words. My
flora and fauna are your flora and fauna. Just be sure to tell Dr. Calculus where you got them.

She hunted down the traitor Jackdaw in his lair, where she rabbit-punched him in the sternum until he called out for mercy.
What's the big idea? You betrayed me.

What are you talking about?

Total ambush. You turned me in to the authorities. Left me swinging in the breeze.

What? I didn't do anything.

Stale? Flat? Not very interactive?

His fingers cast about anxiously for a keyboard to stroke.
Well? You let people walk through the jungle.
But you dont let them walk into it.

What in the hell is that supposed to mean?

I can show you. Come on.

She followed Jackdaw into the Cavern, where he gave up the secret of his recent labors. She watched him from outside the open mouth of the cube, behind the fourth wall. He stood alone in the chamber, taped with body sensors. The room came to life in a gray penumbra. Jackdaw raised one palm. Off to the east rose a roseate sunrise. He shifted his weight to one leg, lifted an arm, and turned his head. The forward portion of the room slid down the rainbow into a band of violets.

He cycled through a suite of gyrations, wiggling like a traffic cop pegged to a busy intersection. His joints conducted the walls in a swirling Kandinsky, airbursts of color chords synched with an atonal MIDI accompaniment. He held up two fingers, and jagged lines lengthened across the horizon, thickening with the dove-flights of his
hands.

He stopped just as suddenly. You
get the idea.
He took off the glasses and joined her outside the cave opening.

Adie stared into the gap between them.
I'm sure it's very interesting, from a technological standpoint.

But?

Don't think I'm just trying to get back at you. It's
... a
little tedious to watch, after the first fifteen seconds? You say our jungle is flat? Unless I missed something, you don't create any depth here at all. Sure, it's neat that you can get the color washes to back your body movements. But they're still just color washes.

Try it. Here. Just try it for a minute.
She donned the tracking glasses, skeptical.

Keep your motions clean and distinct. Mark the starts and stops. Use your whole body, all the degrees of freedom.

She started small. Commas with her fingertips. At first she tried to register what each motion produced. But the Pollock feedback came so thick and furious, so hard upon any plan her heels hatched, that she stopped thinking of her movements as causing the explosions ripping all around her. Her body
was
the sound and light.

Nods became auroras. Angry lightning bolts loosed themselves with a shake of the head. She composed with her posture and drew by drawing breath. The uterine lining of color swallowed her
—the breakthrough sensation she'd heretofore only read about. She passed into the walls, coming out on the far side, encrusted in light, her skin hovering
huge around her.

She forgot herself. Or she remembered. Dancing inside her dance, she could not say which. She embarked on a spiritual aerobics, the leap that sex never quite freed itself from self-consciousness to make. She decamped into pigment, molded, molding.