RICHARD POWERS Read Online Free PDF Page B

We cast the floor onto a refracting mirror, through a hole in the ceiling.
    Liquid? Adie whimpered. Crystal?
    It's the only way. Trust me. The alternatives are all too crude.
    Her laughter battered him. She tried to squelch it. Sorry, Jackie. That does not compute.
    Sure it does, he said. So LCD streaks a little. It ghosts. So we don't get the brightness that we'd get out of a goosed-up electron beam. And the response speeds still aren't what you'd hope for. But don't forget: you can eliminate fade by simultaneous, multirow addressing ...
    Sure. Of course! Adie smacked herself on the forehead. What was I thinking? But tell me, Jackdaw. How do you get the pretty flowers to come off the wall like that? They just... float a few feet out into the room.
    The question stopped the boy short in mid-ratchet. He seized up, unable to pop all the way back off his internal stack. His conversation hung on that old scheduling puzzle beloved of multitasking programmers: the five dining philosophers who share four spoons. Some part of him forgot to put some other part's spoon down between courses, and the whole meal crashed to a halt.
    Jackdaw fell back, slack-jawed at what stood flushed out into the open. Adie saw herself through his eyes: a totally alien life-form. A frilly, intuitive blur. Some non-carbon-based, vegetative intelligence. She read the proof in the boy's face. They shared no mother tongue, nor any father either.
    Even at this point of derailment, Jackdaw refused eye contact. She spooked him, her loose, twill gaze worse than a Gorgon's. The boy quit his fiddling and stared off into the lab's black. He stroked the hood of a modular connector with thumb and forefinger. She watched a quorum of clear-thinking chip architects convene in his mind, debating what her question could possibly mean. How much they knew, these new children. How concentrated their knowledge of every mechanism, except for life.
    Jackdaw slogged back into the breach. You mean the stereoscopic effect?
    Maybe. She felt herself a brat in braids, prevailed upon to show her prize puree.
    The stereoscopic effect comes from the glasses. Shuttered lenses. We've settled on a hundred-and-twenty-hertz oscillation. Alternate left-eye and right-eye views, each flashing sixty times a second. We sync the projected images to the shutter rate. Your eyes put the two back together. That's where you get the sense of depth. The stereo 3-D.
    Oh God. You mean, like a big View-Master? That's what you're saying? I'm going to live the next several years of my life inside a giant View-Master?
    That depends. What exactly is a View-Master?
    She yelped. You're kidding me. You never had ...? You never saw ... ? Those round white paddle-wheel disks with the paired squares of Kodachrome at opposite ends? Old Faithful and Half Dome? Inside the Vatican Library? Goofy and Mickey on Holiday?
    A look stole across Jackdaw's face. The 3-D representation for Scared Shitless. This woman was infected. Something viral. Something contagious.
    A look stole across Jackdaw's face. The 3-D representation for Scared Shitless. This woman was infected. Something viral. Something contagious.
    Forgive me, she explained. Гт being silly.
    Huh. I see. His head jerked back, resetting the input stream. Whatever. Anyway, our rendering rates don't come near to sixty frames a second yet. But as it turns out, the eye only needs about a dozen frames a second to trick it into fusing discrete images into continuous motion. Film is only twenty-four. So anything over thirty is more than adequate. His eyebrows went up. For now.
    Can you explain something else to me? What exactly is the difference between you and that Spider?
    Which spider? Jackdaw clicked away at his keyboard, as if transcribing the whole conversation. Oh. You mean Lim? He's mostly hardware. Гт mostly software.
    That's a difference?
    He's like, Korean. Гт what you call Italian?
    You're his baby brother, aren't you? You suck out his soul and use it in your