RICHARD POWERS (56 page)

One morning, on your bathroom run, you take off your blindfold in the common sty to find yourself staring at freedom. Square on the shelf above the septic squathole, atop the months of uncleaned scum, the smears of shit both terrorist and hostage, sits a shiny black machine.

You can't even guess at the make or model. You know only that you can put your index finger down its throat without touching metal. You pick up the evil
and cradle it, the first time you've held one in your life. You wait for the rush of power, but feel only heavy pain. All expectation has died in you, months ago. You've fallen away from all faith in the future. The faзade is down and civilization's carpe
nter ants have come crawling out of the woodwork. God or some self-destructive guard has set this thing in your lap to use with impunity, to go out blazing, the last breakout, with no hope of anything except to retaliate.

Your hand hovers, paralyzed by obsolete decorum. Pointless beliefs that you cannot shake. The habit of morality cows you, even in the face of morality's full collapse. You set the black device back down on the shelf. Your last chance of escape disappears forever.

You come from the bathroom without your blindfold. Nothing matters any longer. The face of Sayid returns your look, first with shock, then fear. He puts on anger and charges you. One casual wave of the palm stays him.

"You left your gun in the toilet."

He blanches whiter than almond. He freezes and bows his head, as if your magnanimity in not blasting your way out obliges him to you. Forever, you stand and face one another. Then he sidles off, dashes for the bathroom to get there before the angel of the Lord. You head back to your cell, lock yourself in, and don your blindfold.

From that moment, you wear your blindfold at all times. If for an hour, then forever. No one can ever again punish you for having it off. And blindness strengthens you against the world's trick.

From down the corridor, you can hear the sounds of the others being forced in and out of their cells. Once or twice, in the shared cesspool, you detect what must be secret, wordless messages left behind by these other lives—parings on the floor tile, or wadded-up bits of new stream of taps against your wall forces you back. Thrill and despair fight inside you for the upper hand. Life will not relent.

Against your will, your mind organizes the incoming flow of bits into words. The new occupant spontaneously reinvents the same code you once used with the short-lived Frenchman, Junot. One tap equals A. The underground alphabet of first resort.

The taps say they come from an American journalist, grabbed before you. When you tap him back your name, he cuts you off:
We know.
He claims that others share the room with him, and names them for you. The announcement floats somewhere between joke and hallucination. Your thoughts flit about you like bees. The thread of conversation grows impossible to hang on to. You lose count of letters or forget what word you were tapping out. The things the journalist types back don't make sense. He claims that the guards let him read an Arabic newspaper from time to time. He spins out bizarre, elaborate, journalist's delusions: the Berlin Wall has fallen. Apartheid has come to an end. The Soviet Union is holding free elections.

He tries to tell you that several Western hostages have already gone home. Clearly, his need to believe has led him over the edge. And you so badly need to believe these taps of your countryman that his hopeful madness threatens to take you with it. However cruel, you break off contact. You can't make him any better. But he has the power to make you much worse.

More time passes than you can comprehend. There is nowhere on earth it could have gone. You pull yourself inward and wait. Wait for nothing. Wait for the one possible release. Your soul smashes up its last human furnishing for firewood. When that is gone, the elements can take you.

You always thought that you loved your Gwen, that you might model a care that would wear down her suspicion, teach her the feel of gladness, that glimpse of how you might, together, steer your days to a harbored end. Only now you see it, in this bombed-out emptiness, how all along your love coerced her, manipulated, failed to credit her hurt, to legitimate her confusion, simply by demanding that she live the one scenario of shared happiness you were able to imagine ...

Your love itself was the dictate she could not surrender to. All she had was sovereignty, her unilateral freedom to maneuver, to save herself from your demand for allegiance. You were her oppression, her tyranny, and whatever else she may have turned you into no longer matters. You always thought she pushed away, when, in fact, she only stood still against your pulling. All that your love could ever do for her was spare her.

So it is with your ruined life. All wars might end tomorrow and your capture would not. Kidnap is your keepers' only power, their lone proof that the future hasn't swallowed them alive. There is but one small difference: where love could not survive its cling, this hatred cannot let go and still live.

In the fall of 1990, your teeth begin to break off in your mouth. Something evil happens to them, some vast, advancing disintegration that chunks off bits of molar each time you chew anything harder than pita. You fight the throbbing, clamp down harder, grind the pain into a steady-state background of agony until, in one instant of delirium, you bite through an eighth-inch piece of the tip of your tongue.

You stand in blinding anguish. Grope your way to the length of your chain. You arch your back slowly, then spring forward, slamming your forehead into the wall.

Your head bounces off the concrete. Something issues from the impact. Your back arches and slams forward again, building your leverage. The drinking toy duck. Again and again. Your forehead slips against the viscous wet spot building up on the stone.

"Make it stop," you hear yourself scream. "Make it stop. Make it—"

And then it does.

For years, you've hung by your nails over this drop. Now your fingers straighten, their strength gone. All life has been a fight against this slide into chaos, and here at the end, you feel the slide win. You look down into the abyss, give up your grip, and drop.

4
1

This room is dark, and without dimension.

It has no door. Or any window where you might have entered.

4
2

Something doesn't want us doing this.

Antecedent?
Spiegel asked his mate. If not his mate, then at least the woman who slept beside him.
What is this "this" of which you speak?

Images. Look. A thousand years of mosaics. Every few hundred years they'd fill the place, floor to dome. And every couple of centuries they'd cover them over or rip them out again.

Persistent little suckers, them they. And more than a little conflicted. Conflicted is not the half of it. Waves of iconoclasm. Waves of repainting. It's never-ending.
Worse
than the abortion debate. An all-out war for our eternal souls.

So who wins finally? I've a vested interest in knowing. Depends on where you stop the clock. Check in one century, and the walls of the church are completely gutted. Check the next, and it's your worst billboard nightmare.

Wait. You're telling me that this figure you're working on was done in the thirteenth century and this other one in the ninth? There's no difference. Exactly the same style.

That's what the Byzantines would like you to believe. But it's the Byzantines doing the ripping?

The Byzantines. The Roman Catholics. The Ottoman Turks. The modern secularists. Name your idol basher. And it's not just images. People die over this. Lots of people.

I don't see ... I mean, what... what possible difference ... ?
Spiegel's lover looked up from her expensive study plates, betrayed. He should know. He shouldn't have to ask. Form mangled the truth it housed. Every fixed image crucified the divinity it tried to copy.

Adie's tone grew chill.
Well. After all. God told us not to.
Burlesque skidded up against its own electric fences.
The second rule He ever gave us. Uh, right. And remind me. What was the first one again? We're playing with the ultimate fire here. The one true prohibition. It's like God knew that if we ever got started drawing ...
She trailed off, conscience-stricken, in the face of the hi-res evidence.

That?

That we'd keep at it until the picture was done.

Something in him wanted her off the topic. Away.
So where does that leave us? I mean, we have a millennium and a half of possible interiors, ranging from figure-clogged to buck naked. Which moment are we supposed to re-create?

She held her mouse up to her chest, a numbed virgin holding up her child victim for target practice again.
That's the only question.

The container unfolded, as light bent in air. The eye, wandering through at ground level, slipped into so many slant archways, secret niches, and aisle forests, so many hints at further space that it could not make out the exact floor plan. All the action flew up—up into paradise's central dome and its flanking hemispheres.

Spiegel worked on the code that would move the pilgrim through so much sculpted emptiness. He turned the visiting body into its own joystick, accelerating down any arrow of the compass it leaned into. And he added a crowning stroke, so right it seemed a given. One raised index finger swept the visitor off the floor up into the soaring vaults.

No matter how often he tested the routine, Spiegel succumbed to the euphoria of flight. Here was the levitation all children dream of, the easy uplift of birds that the soul feels entitled to, brought weight-lessly to life. He pointed his digit skyward. The ground fell away. The upper arcades drew close. He hovered in place, twenty meters above the church floor, drafting on the currentless air like one of those miraculous medieval monks who repeat the Ascension on faith alone.

The RL lined up to try. Even hardened hackers could not get enough of flying. Hagia Sophia was fast becoming the biggest thing since bull jumping. Neither Ebesen nor Vulgamott would take part. Lim did, and paid for his ride with a gushing nosebleed.

Adie insisted on including every flourish: the Theotokos, hovering in the eastern apse; the Deesis, harsh in its second-story south gallery. A single overarching volume arose from her anthology of parts. But her flight toward sanctuary played out as the most secular of footraces: her push for transcendent detail versus spring's public demo deadline.

She labored for longer than she could afford over each tile in the southwest narthex tympanum: Justinian and Constantine presenting the church and city to the seated Christ. Each mosaic emperor held up his gift of a scale mosaic model: tiny domed cosmos inside the tiny domed cosmos they decorated.

Stevie watched her work, excited by the stillness that consumed her.
So this is the dream of VR?
he asked.
Be of the world
...
?

She smiled and nodded.
But not in it.

You know what we need?

Tell me what we need, Stevie.

Code that will crumble at the same rate mortar does. Stone that compresses. Joints that break. Bits of rubble that accumulate around the piers after the simulation has been running for a few hundred years. Rubble that no one actually programmed
...

Oh,
she said.
We already have that.

They had the space sufficiently fleshed out in time to celebrate a simulated Christmas Mass. Klarpol and Spiegel spent the last few minutes of 1990 together, placing tiny stones into the vault of heaven.

Then came the New Year.

She could not say, later, that she hadn't seen. But she'd never once believed. For months she'd withstood the glut of informationless data issuing from the latest desert showdown, following without following. O'Reilly and Kaladjian had even placed angry bets on which side would blink first. But the age of blinks was past. The world's interface no longer responded to blinking.

Two weeks into the demo year, that electronic storm, so long in simulation, at last broke. Adie witnessed the opening shots by accident, on a television the size of a picture postcard that her Jordanian greengrocer stared at robotically as she tried to buy endive to bring home for dinner.

Two delirious American reporters trapped in a high-rise office babbled on, over satellite uplink, about the phantoms screaming across Baghdad's dome. She hurried back to her island, and Stevie. He knelt there on his haunches, on the bare living-room floor, three feet in front of the tube.

She set her plastic sacks of vegetable down in the doorway.
What is it?
she asked, knowing already.
What's happening?
As if that question ever had an answer.

"Baghdad was lit up like a Christmas tree," one pilot explained to the camera. "It was tremendous!"

"It looked like the Fourth of July down there," another boy said. "Just like in the movies."

"No," she said. Louder. Again. Hysterical. But no one paid her any attention.

The whole planet descended into the flicker of shared delirium. Scores of countries came onto the coaxial cable, just to get the twenty-four-hour feed. The Northern Hemisphere embarked on a winter of perpetual broadcast. On signal, by mass, silent agreement, an unbroken umbrella of full coverage stitched itself together.

No hiding place could escape continuous update. Wherever Adie went, she stood looking through the crosshairs. Her colleagues poured over every scrap they pulled off the cable feed. Downhill from the labs, gas stations and delis inundated her for free—aerial bombardment, like green stamps, supplied as a public service. Stevie, addicted from the start, would hit the Mute button and drag about the house, pretending not to look. A dozen times a day, Adie ingested the same Kabuki footage: slow-motion replays of sky-strewn annihilation, lit in the eerie palette of video infrared. She stopped eating. She began to throw up, at odd hours, behind the closed bathroom door.

Smart bombs beamed back video to even smarter bombers. Nose-cone shots documented their descents all the way up to the moment of deliverance. One missile steered itself down the midline of a twenty-foot-wide bridge. Another threaded the chimney of a suspected command-and-control center. Laser beams guided their cruise pay-loads for hundreds of miles over the wrinkled earth to land on a square smaller than the Cavern's front wall.

Pinpoint delivery turned evidence so intoxicating that no one who once looked at it could look away. The race had achieved the precision of its earliest dreams. Coverage worked to keep up with the apotheosis. But the more Adie watched, the less actually took place.

Event disappeared down the chute of choreographed news. She grasped at the accounts and came up empty-handed. People died without a sound, bloodless, thousands of feet below the all-seeing eye.

Overnight, yellow ribbons sprang up everywhere—tourniquets twisted around wounded trees—and no one could say exactly where they'd come from. Scores of mega-celebrities banded together to record a radio hit, their caring voices abstracting any hint of political stance into a general message of hope and ecumenical well-wishing.

At timed intervals, tuned to the perfect intermittent reinforcement schedule, the Joint Chiefs gave press conferences, explaining their multimedia clips in careful play-by-plays. A riveted Realization Lab tuned in to the course of the war's master narrative, its purposes as long and obscure as its means were swift and expedient. Violence seemed ready to expend even its viewers as collateral damage.

Babylon became a bitmap. Pilots took its sand grains apart, pixel by pixel, their soldier bodies tied to weapons systems by electronic umbilical, their every joystick twitch duplicating moves overlearned in years of now-consummated simulation. Nightscopes revealed minute movements, at impossible distances, in pitch-dark. Robot stalkers chased living targets. Formal edge-detecting algorithms told heat from cold, friend from enemy, camouflaged caches from empty countryside. Human intelligence migrated wholesale into its artifacts.

It was the perfect operation: the kind you carried out deep in enemy territory. It told no story, finally, aside from these abject images. Adie and Stevie stared nightly at a mute set, from under their bedcovers, forced to watch the upshot of everything they'd put their hand to.

We
did this?
she whispered to him.
It's us?

He stared straight ahead, afraid to miss a scrap of acquitting evidence.
Of course not. Don't be nuts.

The bombs with depth perception? The ones that can tell our vehicles' silhouettes from the Iraqis'? The cruise missiles with a whole digital map of the world inside them, so that they know exactly where to explode?

His shoulders dismissed her. Too defensive to mount a defense.

Stevie, I need to know.
Her voice lay just this side of its own smart violence.
What have we been doing here? Are they using the same electronics as us? Are they taking our code?

He smiled at the near-total naivete".
The military? The Air Force invented virtual reality half a century ago. Mission trainers, flight 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, 1 know we're all under a lot of stress here. I'm going to forget you said this.