RICHARD POWERS Read online

  Inevitably, there arose graphics. At first the pictures were a rush, each panorama ever more glorious than the last. But the pretty picture adventures came, within a year or two, to sadden Jack past saying. He could not explain it, explanations only saddening him all the more. Some richness, some open-endedness had been crushed under the inescapable visible.

  His father sympathized. "I felt the same way when TV killed off radio. Hearing about creatures from the eighth dimension beat having to look at them." His father's wisdom rating had somehow soared in the years since Jack was a kid.

  Whatever else they spoiled, graphics threw open portals all their own. The visual interface launched habitations faster than anyone could click through them. Any eleven-year-old who'd ever touched a video game was way out in front of the scientists on that score. Scientific visualization was born in the first wave of Space Invaders.

  They came in rapid succession, games neither adventure nor role-playing, creatures unique to this infant medium. The sandbox games, with their feedback growth and their open-ended tool chests. The God games, with no victory except survival, no goal but to steep yourself in ever more elaborate playing.

  Adolescent Jack governed his own surging metropolises. He assembled whole Utopian societies of shifting, conflicting needs. He hauled hops across the British Midlands, returning to London with trainloads of finished beer. He nursed branching ant colonies and interplanetary mining enterprises. He hired quarrymen and masons and carpenters to build him a castle that allowed him to cultivate the surrounding countryside, then tax it for every turnip he could squeeze out of it.

  He sailed his sloops and pinnaces around the Caribbean, raiding Nevis and St. Kitts, buttressing the economy of Curaзao. He trained botanists and missionaries and game hunters and sent them up the Nile in makeshift canoes. He brought a peace-loving subcontinental Stone Age tribe up through the Renaissance, into the Industrial Revolution, and on into space. Then he repeated the journey in another neck of the random earth, spewing carnage and mayhem as he advanced.

  He spent his teens alone, sealed in his bedroom, voyaging. All the while, he held on to that first hint, hoping to locate the fecundity that he'd wrongly thought already inhabited that first adventure. Each new release, each innovation in design, produced in him the sliver of recovery. But Closer only stoked the fire of Not Quite.

  Life's turn-based game led Jack Acquerelli into programming, less to make ends meet than to bring about those playgrounds that did not yet exist. College provided him with the silicon sandbox of his dreams. He worked alone and in teams, the line between the two progressively blurring. He collaborated with coders he never met, people he wouldn't have known had he passed them on the street, guys who went by tags like SubClinical, TopX, and BotTot. He built his share of dungeon crawls, each populated with increasingly more anatomically correct homunculi. He helped write a primitive multiuser talk channel, code that allowed his fellow undergrad designers to collaborate at all hours and paved the way for multiplayer spaces.

  His senior honors project was called Development, a resource management game with a twist. Randomly generated world maps laid down reserves of various resources—coal, iron, gems, and soil. The Hittites, Cretans, and Phoenicians of this archaic Earth set to the usual task of discovering, extracting, and refining the hidden treasure, then selling off the finished goods. The capital they amassed they plowed back into new technologies, new levels of goods created from out of the storehouse of further raw finds.

  But then came Jack Acquerelli's special contribution to smart games. The available research paths—the papyrus you could press from your fibers, the metals you could smelt from your coal and ore— varied from game to game, depending upon the proficiency and research of the pursuing tribe. All skills expanded, contingent on their honing. No two races ever followed the same path. No two games of Development ever developed the same way. And of course—the holy grail of strategy gaming—no session of Development ever needed to end. It could spin itself out forever, unpredictably, to any of an infinitude of never-to-be-reached outcomes.

  In the spirit of the digital age's gift economy, Acquerelli gave his masterpiece away, free for the downloading. The cheaper the game, the more players it gathered. And the more players that played, the more ingenious the strategies. Strategies proliferated, each one a complex program in its own right. And the more unanticipated strategies that poured into his game, the closer Jackdaw came to that sense of total liberty he hadn't felt since the age of eleven.

  The game went cult, producing its own spin-offs. In his act of hacker's generosity, Jackdaw lost his chance to retire by the age of twenty-two. But the success did write him a ticket to any of the game-design outfits just then capitalizing on the housebroken PC. TeraSys discovered his work just as Jackdaw began sending around his rйsumй. In the summer of 1987, a rash of Development addiction at TeraSys brought in-house applications productivity to a standstill. The game had exactly that deep, replayable economics that all good simulation craved. TeraSys put in a bid for Jackdaw's services, one that, as always, preempted the competition.

  From the instant that Jackdaw stood in the first prototype Cavern, no other bids existed. For the second time in one lifetime, he'd stumbled upon pure potential. Here was a story one could walk around in, only life-sized, this time for keeps. He would have signed on for half what they offered him. He would have given everything to be able to fly his father up to this mountain, stand him inside this play fort strung from blank white sheets. Would have given the world to tell him, You're standing in front of the sky-blue future. Here's the wand. Do something. Anything. What do you want to do?

  But his father was through with doing. His father was six months beyond wanting anything. Adventure had taken him beyond the need for machines. His father had ported off somewhere where parsers weren't required, over a border where all the checkpoints of disembodied imagination stood flung wide open.

  And Jackdaw had lost all chance of ever repaying the man. No way to thank him aside from submersion in the new project. Even among colleagues who slept and breathed the Cavern, Jackdaw stood out. Steve Spiegel joked about having the kid's mail forwarded here. Sue Loque suggested he go on a monthly pizza plan. Jon Freese rode him about stepping into the sunlight now and then, if only to refresh his personal hit points.

  But the truth was, no outward life compelled Jackdaw half as much as the life inside. In a footrace against the hardware clock, every realtime hour counted. He endowed the Crayon World with depth. He scented its flowers as a labor of love, one that left him with more energy than he expended. He taught the paper bees their acts of floralocation, showing all the patience of a Trappist honey farmer. He worked with the biochemist Dale Bergen, tirelessly parking massive 3-D enzymatic molecules with all the skill of a veteran valet tearing down the corkscrew ramp of a multideck car park.

  He lived to breathe life into the Cavern. The lamp, the food, the brass keys, all led him deeper into the labyrinth, from one state-of-the-art implementation to the next. Each line of his code inched toward that higher library of manipulable Forms. Each control structure and array assignment further eked out the shape of this new biome's indigenous life.

  He felt himself out on the leading edge of the thing that humanity was assembling—this copious, ultimate answer to whatever, in fact, the question was. How much time had passed, how many Saturdays since the one when his father had led him here? No time at all. A day. Yet here was this wide-area token ring connecting scores of users up and down the coast, assembled from hardware that made the Televideo and Tymeshare look like the crudest flint. Here was this community of visionary cavers, hours past midnight, hacking away on whatever sequel to discovery that discovery allotted them, shooting off nostalgic messages into the broadband, their elegies for the end of adventure's opening chapter. He'd watched the leapfrogging machine design itself, every year more potent and incredible. He'd tuned his bootstrapping algorithms beyond the best debugger's ability to backtrace
until at last he found himself here, in pitch-darkness, not at the end of that valley road but at its start, reading the semaphore sent by his circle of colleagues, few of whom he'd ever met face-to-face, typing out his own contribution to the group quest into the compliant keyboard — Go north, go north, go north — the joint goal receding Zenoesque in front of them, down vistas twisting in all directions.

  Somewhere over the course of playing, the underground adventure had gone mainstream, had come aboveground, warlocks taking to the surface without a single, unsuspecting non-gamer quite knowing the shape of the new rules or the size of the global coup. Digital toys came alive, every living soul's life history and health and bank account now a comprehensive Save Game file. Moore's law—performance doubling every eighteen months—fell from being civilization's pace rabbit to a drag on the exploding system. Some days, the digital revolution seemed to poke along too slowly ever to bring Jackdaw into his inheritance. He and his people rode a geometric increase that outpaced all things except the appetite for more performance, the need to reach escape velocity.

  Boys who came alive on a fantasy game had launched an entire planet-shattering industry. Boys solitary and communal, dispossessed and omnipotent: remote avatars in a wizard's romp of their own devising. Each month, the combined anarchy of invention made more brute headway on the final ascent than had all of history up until Hollerith. And still the revolution had not yet filled more than a thimble of its potential. The latest virtual engines were still nowhere near to delivering what the terrified, yearning boys' collective needed them to deliver. Yet out of these walk-in caves had come a game as attentive, as robust, as responsive as life should have been. At long last, in this lucky lifetime, coders would succeed in constructing the place that the brain had first mistaken the world for: the deep, accountable, pliant, original adventure that Jackdaw, for his eager audience, now labored to complete.

  He perched over the wan light of his terminal, as over the heat of a desert campfire. He tapped out his private contribution, as yet a secret kept from everyone else on the Cavern project. Across the wires, his remote, ghostly fellowship continued to recite its litany of lost landmarks:

  You are in the Hall of Mists…

  You are in a complex junction…

  You are on the edge of a breathtaking view…

  Lured out by the topic, the contributors perched over workstations as distant as six hundred miles and as near as just down the hall. But each participant might as well have been in another galaxy far, far away. Filled with commemorative desire, Jackdaw typed:

  Anybody ever make it through to the end?

  Silence flashed across the broadband. Silence turned into more silence, a coaxial glitch, a pileup in the packet traffic. Then the lag grew too long to be anything but these faceless agents, each deferring to the others to go first. Eighty-six boys—give or take the stray girl who'd stumbled in among them—each waited for someone to send back word of the ultimate solution.

  Comic, then embarrassing, the silence lengthened into strangeness. Like one of those lulls in the party conversation that snaps all the diners into an embargoing self-consciousness. Like the silence of ship-board refugees, out on the top deck, looking up at the hollow stars. Your night is so great and our network so small, О Lord.

  You kidding? someone typed, followed by a spurt of expletive-laced negatives. A hundred points short. Fifty. Ten. The confessions poured in, and the broadband conference drifted into static, releasing its system resources, relinquishing the moment of brief coalescence, dispersing all participants to chip away again at their various private galleries, their maze of tunnels spreading through the unmappable hive.

  17

  Summer approached across the mountain. Tendrils of warmth and light, accumulating news, linked up for a month or two to drive the rains back out to sea. Days lengthened under the sky's stained egg. Scrubbed clean, the coast air refreshed itself with each high tide. The whole Sound seemed a bee-loud glade.

  The hive hummed, like so many scraps of animated paper. Lim and company quadrupled the pipelines and octupled the graphics-processing arrays that ran each wall. Da Vinci, Claude, Hsieh Ho, Rembrandt, and Picasso wordlessly endured their brain surgeries, returning from their trips to digital Italy with more painting ability in their spinal cords than they previously enjoyed in their entire cerebella. And so the project moved forward, recapitulating the quattrocento assault on plastic realism.

  Kaladjian screwed down the calculation of Euler angles so tightly they began to scream. Loque tuned the hidden-line removal, speeding up the z-buffer algorithm. Da Vinci and friends, now faster in discarding all the points invisible to the eye, had that much more processing power to spare for the visible planes.

  Rajan Rajasundaran worked on foveal concentration. Only the smallest fraction of the eye actually saw with any degree of resolution— say 5 percent of the full field of vision, with the rest shading off into soft focus. If the human eye could get away with that massive shortcut, why should the Cavern have to work any harder? Like everything else at the RL, head tracking doubled its performance every other month. Pupil tracking followed in its wake, suffering only from occasional bouts of the Midas touch, where everything that the user looked at triggered an unwanted mouse click. Minor kinks aside, the Cavern knew, at any instant, just what the user looked at. It even opened a comprehensive log file of the retina's itinerary. Monitoring the glance, the Cavern could concentrate its growing rendering power on the center of that slice, sliding around a high-resolution insert in front of the moving gaze. The trick grew impossible for multiuser expeditions. But Rajan felt alive only when pitting himself against what others discarded as impossible.

  For a few weeks, the Cavern's capabilities outpaced the demands of its suite of chameleon rooms. Software struggled to keep pace. Reserving time in the grotto to prototype a new environment became tougher. Slots filled up weeks in advance, all hours spoken for by a queue of researcher squatters, giddy with the pace of forward motion.

  The drabbest of new rooms hid the most awesome software drivers. Stance's and Kaladjian's microclimate test bed looked like a passel of stained Popsicle sticks poorly glued together. The user floated omni-sciently above a stylized eastern Washington, zoomable from a hundred miles per yard down to about ten. The view could pitch and roll and yaw, peering straight down on the map or swooping tangent to the surface to expose a crude topographical relief that resembled piled-up

  pillbox hats.

  But the map was just the placeholder for the real pizzazz. Under the hood lay all the region's nooks and crannies, the details of local soil albedo and solar radiation, air pressure and water current domesticated into mathematics. Alongside these, compacted into the same code, lay the full scope of physical law—thermal convection and conduction, hydrologic processes, turbulence. The simulation played on the chief insight of the Information Age: the interchangeability of data and command. The Cascades were a set of data points, elemental elevations, rules in their own right, programming the air where to split and rise. By the same token, the laws of adiabatic cooling produced their own data set in the shape of the Cascade Glacier.

  A click of the left wand button colored the air in a temperature gradient from rose to cobalt. Each shaded band stood for an isobar. A click of the middle button toggled a hailstorm of vectors—pulsating Aeolian arrows whose curl and thickness, like so many coasting petrels, revealed the caprice of wind. The right button placed and removed centers of pressure, adjusted the sawtooth fronts, painted in cloud banks, and otherwise granted control over the palette of meteorological events. With time, patience, and a satellite weather map, Kaladjian and Stance could reproduce the prevailing conditions of the previous day. Then, like the best of Deist deities, they stood back and let their clockwork turn.

  The whole round of the bruised horizon then went grandly processional. Over grim Olympus, across the straits of Juan de Fuca, the lanes of atmosphere released their own vital throes. Points of storm an
d sunburst smeared outward, spreading like time-lapse microbes. Local conditions reciprocally persuaded their neighbors, rippling outward along a weighted average. Temperatures flumed. Rains fell and rose again to fall. The weather map became the weather. From east to west, projectors spread a panorama wider than any glance could consume. The wand's thumbwheel fast-forwarded the live-in movie or slowed it to a frozen frame. Spun past zero, the film ran in reverse. Floods got sucked back up into whitening cumulus. Winds unsplit, reconstituted themselves, backing off the mountain's wedge.

  As a predictor, the Weather Room was worthless. Noise crept in at the edges, for the simple reason that the would-be world had edges. They dropped off like the incognitas of old cartography, the blank spaces filled in with the guesswork variable: Past this point, monsters. Across the map's center, fronts spread well, feeding off the turbulence around them. But at the extremes of the compass, data ran out. Storms on the simulation's boundaries ran aground on the nothingness adjacent to them. Weather grew contaminated by its opposite, and flaws spread through the dataset until clouds and rains and winds and temperatures lapsed into pure fiction.

  But as a test, the Weather Room passed with flying colors. Oceans of air could be mounted and hung, made to behave credibly in a display that beat any other attempt to visualize them. The maps would grow, expanding the length of time that these weather pockets preserved their real-world referent. The day would come when a Cavern navigator might reach the east by wanding off at a healthy clip to the west. Then this room, like the one it stood for, would wrap back onto itself and lose its contaminating boundaries.