RICHARD POWERS Read online

  He toured it first on a junket to the Northwest, a whirlwind dog-and-pony show up the Pacific Coast, peddling a set of economic modeling tools to American statistical package resellers. No vendor in the U.K.— leave off the Republic or the Continent—could go to market against the kind of distribution that the Ecotopians were just then ramping up. He hoped to make a few quick quid by licensing his algorithms before North American brute force rendered the whole idea quaintly obsolete. He planned to return with whatever modest profit a sale might net and use the proceeds to rescue the Queen's University's School of Social Sciences from hardware decrepitude. With a new generation of decent iron, O'Reilly might hand-roll a new generation of future-modeling tools. Remind his countrymen that there still was a future.

  Ronan landed in Washington armed with a solid prediction package and an accent that the tone-deaf locals mistook for some Public Television Edwardian English monstrosity. He ran a tight slide show, with enough reheated Bernard Shaw cracks to keep the audiences entertained. American venture capitalists seemed ready to throw money at anything that ran on silicon. And the Erse slant on visual econometrics was just different enough to frighten his American competitors into interest. Only after he entered the glass palace of TeraSys, the Solution Builders, did O'Reilly get his first significant offer—a bid outstripping his most reckless projections. TeraSys had little interest in the goods he peddled. They were after the peddler himself.

  It took just a glance to see that the Ecotopians were up to some kind of major madness. But O'Reilly failed to guess the extent of it—the source of that vibrant organic fascism, their sunny assumption of omnipotence. Only on entering the Cavern did he grasp the scale of the hubris. The Americans were launching an out-and-out frontal attack on electronic transcendence. Mankind's next migration.

  Jesus Christ Made Seattle Under Protest: the guidebook's mnemonic for the downtown streets stayed with him after he returned home to his own flawed emerald. Under protest: apt dismissal of the entire Puget Sound. It was as if the Creator had spent eons developing the setting, then botched the city itself, under the project's deadline. The crabs, the salmon, Rainier, Olympus: all postcard perfect, when you could see it through the rain. Even the ice-cold beer wasn't bad, although the hapless microbreweries couldn't thicken a stout to save their souls. But the natives: gluts of aerospace secret-weapons contractors; technohip-pies with too much cash, clinging to the last stretch of Arcadia that Boeing hadn't yet denuded; philanthropic tele-solicitors who crucified themselves over the spotted owl while denying the massive subsistence economy that begged for a buck or grubbed for rotting lettuce heads down at Pike Place Market.

  Odious, he reported back to his fellow Dismalists in University Square. The whole Northwest coast. Hirsute, illiterate, and malodorously enthusiastic. Blinded by their birthright, which they stole in the first place from more tribes of Indians than even the inane guidebooks care to mention. Adding: I'm afraid I've agreed to join them.

  O'Reilly's fellow lecturers forgave him with contemptible haste. No excuses necessary. Part of the general exodus. We'd join you on the life raft, if we could.

  He felt the self-defeating need to disabuse them. Now don't go making me out to be just another evacuator.

  A nice side benefit, though, no? Not having to worry about getting gunned down for having a Republican name or a Unionist employer?

  Oh for Christ's sake, he ranted at them. Everything in creation does not boil down to the bloody Troubles. My decision has absolutely nothing political about it.

  Strictly a question of lucre, then?

  Had his colleagues but known the figures involved. O'Reilly would never again need to muck about in the wilderness, piddling together bits of elastic and sticking plasters in heroic attempts to get his creations to run. Yet the cash per se wasn't the half of it.

  How parochial home had grown, how imprisoning, in just his few weeks away. Belfast air choked him now, acrid and stifling. Bad for the lungs, and everything else that depended on them.

  His beloved Maura refused even to consider a visit. What am I supposed to do there, Ronan? Tell me that It's not my country. I don't even understand the fuckin' language.

  You aren't suggesting that intelligibility is exactly our island's strong suit?

  It's home, Ronan.

  Well, woman, we'll bring the welcome mat.

  How can you possibly want to live in such a place? You don't understand, Mau. We're all paralyzed here. Rotting. Stagnant and cynical. Stuck in ancient history. Flogging a dead horse, for as long as anyone can remember, and it's never going to change, because nobody here even remotely believes that it can.

  Oh, the Americans own belief now, do they?

  Yes, they do. You have to see what they're doing. Those people are changing the rules of creation over there, month by month. They are bringing something absolutely new into existence.

  New, sure. But you can't call anything on that continent existence.

  They fought for weeks, at a pitch that made their previous five years of warfare seem a friendly match. Each had drawn a line down the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, and neither was budging.

  Maura, listen to me. We have one another. What difference in hell does it make where we live?

  If hell makes no difference to you, by all means go on and live there. I'll trim you up some pretty sulfur-colored curtains for your breakfast nook.

  Damn your curtains. I can't believe you're going to insist on signing our death warrant.

  You're the one who's doing the insisting, Ronan. I need to join this thing, Mau. I need to know where the race is going. I want to see what happens next.

  Stay here, Ronan. I'll tell you what happens next.

  Christ help me, woman. I'm going to miss scrapping with you.

  But the pace of American innovation left O'Reilly little time to miss anything older than six weeks. Even doing without televised club football hurt less than he anticipated. Work swallowed him, leaving no space for anything else. For months, he had to digest ten new ideas for every one he coughed up. In fact, he brought only a single fresh dish to the banquet, but one that multiplied faster than that original all-you-can-eat loaf-and-fish-fry. His idea was simple, but lay at the heart of practical prediction. He'd found a way to broker econometric modeling's compromise and arrive at that eternal oxymoron, the accurate approximation.

  The problem was deep. The more parameters one added to a model, the more accurately the model predicted actual outcomes. But each variable multiplied the complexity of the solution. When would an eternally refined estimate become real enough? When would approximation suffice?

  Economic theory stopped too soon, reducing the world's mad exchange to mere Supply, Demand, and Price. The result resembled the Budapest Quartet nobly sawing away at a transcription of Mahler's Eighth. But more practical modeling snagged on the opposite sin of profusion. In the real world, no set of simultaneous equations ever really worked out. The classical economist's answer to his functions' functional impotence consisted of adding an infinite series of ever-smaller local factors to the mix, calculated to ever-higher levels of ex post facto multidimensional exactitude. And still the experts couldn't put the dart inside the bull's-eye any more often than your average Thursday night side-slinger down at the local. Predictive economics crashed and burned with the frequency of a turn-of-the-century air show. The market? It will fluctuate.

  Hilarious, really. Like one of those Weather Wizards standing up in front of his back-projection map of the New World: hot and humid over Panama, chillier throughout much of the Northwest Territories. Warming gradually toward August, and likely to cool off somewhat again as we head toward winter.

  Now reality, at eye level, fell closer to sociology than it did to physics. A child stands in the back yard and hurls a ball. Where will the globe land? Newton trotted out mass and velocity, slow decelerations against gravity yielding a mirroring parabolic slip back down to ground. Close, but no Castro. Then out came all the elaborations: t
he coefficient of friction, the eddying wind, the spin of the ball off the wrist, the wobble of the Earth on its axis, the wobble of the child on his own pins ...

  Worse, the physicist conceded that the smallest change in the tyke's throwing posture could cascade out of control and land the projectile anywhere between here and Katmandu. This took the heirs of the infinitesimal calculus four centuries to come up with. Lower Kingdom Egyptian dads tossing around dried crocodile guts with their sons on Saturday afternoons down by the Nile had figured that one out six millennia ago.

  The answer was awful. Let the child throw the ball two thousand times and make do with statistics. Chance perturbations canceled each other out, and the running average gave those who lived in the day's maelstrom their lone limited access to prediction. The compromise satisfied everyone except engineers, truth seekers, and the ball-chasing

  parent.

  But when it came to predicting fishery yields five years down the causeway, no one was allowed two thousand throws. God wouldn't even spot you two. Extrapolating the graph worked for the first dash or two of the dotted line. But once one began extrapolating upon extrapolation, the whole bloody curve collapsed into fiction.

  O'Reilly's idea lay in discarding the search for a set of predictive operators. The realm of real fact did not result from cranking through static functions, no matter how many variables those functions included. The world's events emerged as a resonance, the shifting states of mutually reshaping interactions, each fed back into the other in eternal circulation.

  He convinced the Ecotopians with a simple propagation simulation, one that showed just how small the limiting case of complexity could be. He built an island world, sovereign inside its diminutive boundaries. Its entire populace consisted of just two kinds of agents that operated on only two entities, each existing as nothing more than two-dimensional arrays. Each entity came in four flavors and each of the two agents had four possible actions.

  Such a market model seemed too brain-dead to generate real interest. But each change in a variable's state updated all the variables that prompted it. Entities influenced agents, and agents created or destroyed entities. Moreover, the application of these feedback loops over time altered the way that variables affected other variables. Not only did the elements of the simulation alter one another. So did the rules of alteration.

  Out of this meager sea of ingredients, there issued amazingly lifelike phenomena. Segments of data spoke of saturation, conditioning, habituation, fads, cravings, lemming drop-offs, crash diets, lowest-common-denominationalism, prime time, rushes to the bottom, spontaneous altruism, unsponsored innovation, gratuitous novelty, brand loyalty, brand aging, arms races of acumen and finesse, co-optation, preemption, addiction, dumping ... A few iterative, independent, self-modifying procedures created markets as complex as those run by the world at large.

  Life was not algorithm. It was ongoing negotiation, a spreading series of overtones. But O'Reilly's cunning simulation presented a problem as large as its promise. Under its simple surface there flowed tide tables of deep intricacy, plumes of intelligence, surges of avarice and hunger that churned in turbulent eddies through the pool of data. How could even the simulation's designer see any one of them in real time? With his static-charting business graphics, O'Reilly could do no more than dredge his dipper into the vat and extract a few test ladles. He foundered on the problem of visualization, snarled at that old investigative impasse like a nineteenth-century neurologist stymied by how to study human thought without slicing into the living brain.

  He needed a way to see into four- or six- or eight-dimensional space, even as those several simultaneous data streams unfolded. He needed color, texture, and motion laid on top of the traditional height, width, and depth. O'Reilly even sketched out a fantasy in which musical pitches and timbres let a user track the states of a dozen concurrent agents and actants.

  And then he learned of the prototype's existence. Once he discovered the Cavern, no other spot on Mercator's botched projection would do. He needed the tool that only TeraSys could offer him. And the Cavern needed someone who saw what it might be used for. To be able to stand among the lights and sounds, inside the skeins of regenerating prediction too complex to take in any way but viscerally, in one surrounded glance: for such a chance, O'Reilly would give up most anything. And did.

  He took the vow of cultural poverty gladly, throwing over his Neanderthal country without a backward glance. Even the vow of silence— the forfeiture of intelligent conversation—cost him little, in light of the potential payoff. Celibacy alone gave him pause. On nights of cold rain, O'Reilly cast about in the sphere of his sleep for the thermally generous Maura, and found only an empty half bed. He cursed her roundly and dug in, waiting for her to see what she was missing.

  Meanwhile, his son et lumiиre show played across the walls of the Cavern as marvelous pure abstraction: a ravishing cityscape at night, seen from miles above, where the eye could pan and zoom through the concerted flares of halogen down to the smallest blush of a back-yard Japanese lantern. It took him weeks to learn how to read the gorgeous, motile tapestry. He forced himself to remember that each of these fantastic, fusing, fractal ice floes meant something—a transaction, an update, a changing variable in the world being modeled. Only when standing in this n-space flux, flanked on all sides by continuously updated data, reading the revelations with his body, thigh to math's thigh, neck-deep in simulation's Humboldt Current, only fully immersed could he begin to sense the cold, delineated meanings that coursed through these oceans of prediction.

  This was the work O'Reilly was born for. Mankind's tenure here had come of age. All the Earth's land masses lay prostrate, mapped out to nau-seatingly fine detail. We'd filled the map with knowledge. Now we had a tool with which to look inside. Now the real exploration could begin.

  But to date, O'Reilly remained the lone living human who knew how to read this disco-stroboscopic lab report. Everyone else saw little more than an astonishing fireworks show. No matter; the real fireworks weren't yet ready. Much work remained before O'Reilly's pyrotechnic display could lift the veil and lay the future bare.

  He'd made some attempt to initiate Rajan Rajasundaran: fellow member of the Decimated Neocolonial Island Club, Sri Lankan by way of Canada, coauthor of ORB, the simulation scripting language that O'Reilly employed to throw his arrays up against the walls of the Cavern. O'Reilly depended on Rajan, invaluable ally, to make the graphics code jump through ever-higher hoops. He kept Rajan on perpetual call for everything from emergency consults to simple sociological shit-shooting.

  O'Reilly sought the man out at his favorite haunt, that poor excuse for a pub half a click down the mountain. The place whose inspiration peaked with its choice of name: The Office. As in, "Honey, I'm at The Office." The name worked, in a world that took names for the things they named.

  He found Raj sitting in a corner booth, watching a talk show, partaking of the public arena's favorite therapy.

  Thank God you've come, Ronan, man. Have a look at this exercise in dissociative schizophrenia, please. Women who tell their husbands, live on camera, that they have lesbian lovers, as brought to you by the Family Ties video salesmen of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. I'm afraid I must ask you: who invents all this?

  Ah well, Rajan, my son. The Creator's ways are mysterious.

  Please explain this phenomenon to me. You are the social scientist, after all.

  Has it ever struck you that anyone with the word "scientist" in his job description probably isn't one?

  We're all scientists, no? Rajasundaran waved his arms to encompass The Office at large. I mean, every person running this little experiment in being alive?

  O'Reilly ordered a beer and a refill for the Sri Lankan. An interesting formulation. But let's start with you. Do you count yourself an empiricist?

  Krishna destroy us. You don't really want to know. I'm dead serious, man. What do you believe?

  Rajasundaran held
out his left hand. His index finger traced a clockwise circle in the air. Then another, quick, counterclockwise. Now what's that supposed to mean? Some sort of mystic Ceylonese bit twiddling?

  Rajan shrugged. The breath in the mouth and the breath of the sun are both similarly hot.

  Translate, for Christ's sake.

  The form seen in the eye is the same as the form seen in the sun. The joints of the one are the joints of the other.

  Vulgamott appeared at their boothside.

  Michael, O'Reilly greeted the architect. Thank God for another Westerner. Have a seat, man. Would you say that you're a materialist at heart?

  Can this wait until I've gotten my blood-alcohol content to a respectable level?

  O'Reilly ordered the American a Trappist Trippel. Out with it now.

  What do you believe?

  Vulgamott looked around suspiciously. I believe that God created the world one high-resolution frame at a time. And on the seventh frame, he rested.

  Rajan smiled. And then he said, "You mean I'm supposed to do thirty of these things a second for the next ten billion years?"

  Thank you both, O'Reilly snapped. I'll just tell you what you believe in, then.

  That'd be easier, Vulgamott agreed.

  You both believe—as all good lab rats do—that reality is basically computational, whether or not we'll ever lay our hands on a good, clean copy of the computation. At the core of your deepest convictions about the universe lies a Monte Carlo simulation. Sounds about right, Vulgamott said.

  Even miracle-preaching evangelists, God love them, make their point statistically. Every modern mind is out there with a yardstick, a stopwatch, and a chi-square.

  Hang on. You're not saying there's a hidden order behind all this? Vulgamott cast his eyes abroad. Something bigger than statistics?