RICHARD POWERS Read Online Free PDF

modeler."
    TeraSys seemed to be seeking all manner of nightstands upon which to empty its deep-pocket change. These people could fund Adie's midlife crisis and keep her on fellowships for years without feeling the least pinch. They offered her an unlimited fantasy sandbox, perfect for a girl to get lost in.
    She made her way back up the mountain, to the Realization Lab and its magic room in question. The look of the low-slung, clean-lined building nagged at her for several days, until she pegged it: an upscale group dental practice in, say, Westchester County. Inside the RL, the redwood and river rock gave way to long olive corridors and linen-lined cubicle partitions that teemed with the same jittery bee-loud buzz that had seduced her out here in the first place.
    For the first two weeks, the look of her co-workers reduced her to giggles. Their sun-starved skin, their sparse but luxurious facial hair, their corduroy slacks and untucked flannel lumberjack shirts, their sandals over socks, their joyous, cause-filled eyes behind the silver-rimmed John Lennon glasses reduced them to so many industrious gnome battalions. It took her a month to learn to tell the hardware engineers from the hackers, the orcs from the elves.
    These shaggy dungeon creatures had managed to turn their airy park ranger's roost into a subterranean wonderland. Hallway walls were everywhere taped over with flowcharts, logic listings, parodies of user documentation manuals, and autographed publicity photos of Yoda, Mr. Spock, and Steve Jobs. The earth-toned moldings reeked of cedar, fresh latex, and tennis shoes worn too long in a damp climate. Even the copious indoor plantings could not entirely soften the feel of chrome, steel circuit-card cages, and CRT screens. Here and there, squares of acoustical ceiling tile fell jimmied open, spilling out the snakes' nest of cabling they hid. Hardest of all on her, the place whirred. A perpetual low-grade hum hung in the air, the spin of disk drives, the clack of keys, the high-pitched metal ping of blocks of data being manipulated.
    What made all this? Who supplied the hand-eye coordination? Who brought this team together and told each person what to do? How did the machines turn electrons into steerable pictures? Adie could not see herself painting the walls of this Cavern until she saw —if only in shadow—how the mechanism worked.
    Spiegel assigned her a prodigy to call her own. A boy called Jackdaw —Jack Acquerelli. Jackdaw came fresh from California's largest computer science factory, although he looked barely old enough to mail in his own software registration forms. He was just her height, one of the reasons he'd taken up with computers in the first place. He might have been attractive, except for the steady diet of Doritos and the inability to abide much direct human contact without flinching. Adie took to him at once, if only for his mocking last name. Each time she met him she unbuttoned the top button of his habitual plaid flannel shirt, until she trained him to do so, all by himself.
    Jack, she badgered him. Why do those bees buzz? What holds that house up? Could one make the grass grow under a visitor's feet? Conjure up some kid to come mow it for a silver-gray two bits? She grew worse than a five-year-old who'd just learned that every question bred another.
    Jackdaw struggled mightily to address the barrage. But he could not parse her. Their interface was makeshift, the cable between them noisy, and their throughput limited to the intermittent burst.
    Think of it all as a kind of trick, he said. He could not both look at her and address her at the same time. He wasn't comfortable talking to living things. Living female things. Their firmware algorithm eluded him.
    I knew it. I knew it had to be a trick. But, but, but: how does the trick work?
    We do it all with liquid crystal back projection. One Electrolamp Luminox projector throwing alternating double-buffered images onto each of the five walls.