“You could get lucky. It’s nothin we wrote. There could be links to somewhere else. You could also spend your life dowsing the Void and never getting much of anywhere.”
“And this ship—it isn’t on the way to DeepArcher, is it?”
“More like out on an expedition. Exploring. When the earliest Vikings started moving into the northern oceans, there’s one story about finding this huge fuckin opening at the top of the world, this deep whirlpool that’d take you down and in, like a black hole, no way to escape. These days you look at the surface Web, all that yakking, all the goods for sale, the spammers and spielers and idle fingers, all in the same desperate scramble they like to call an economy. Meantime, down here, sooner or later someplace deep, there has to be a horizon between coded and codeless. An abyss.”
“That’s what you’re looking for?”
“Some of us are.” Avatars do not do wistful, but Maxine catches something. “Others are trying to avoid it. Depends what you’re into.”
MAXINE CONTINUES TO WANDER corridors for a while, striking up conversations at random, whatever “random” means in here. She begins to pick up a chill sense that some of the newer passengers could be refugees from the event at the Trade Center. No direct evidence, maybe only because she has 11 September on her mind, but everywhere now she looks, she thinks she sees bereaved survivors, perps foreign and domestic, bagmen, middlemen, paramilitary, who may have participated in the day or are only claiming to’ve done so as part of some con game.
For those who may be genuine casualties, likenesses have been brought here by loved ones so they’ll have an afterlife, their faces scanned in from family photos,… some no more expressive than emoticons, others exhibiting an inventory of feeling ranging from party-euphoric through camera-shy to abjectly gloomy, some static, some animated in GIF loops, cyclical as karma, pirouetting, waving, eating or drinking whatever it was they were holding at the wedding or bar mitzvah or night out when the shutter blinked.
Yet it’s as if they want to engage—they get eye contact, smile, angle their heads inquisitively. “Yes, what was it?” or “Problem?” or “Not right now, OK?” If these are not the actual voices of the dead, if, as some believe, the dead can’t speak, then the words are being put there for them by whoever posted their avatars, and what they appear to say is what the living want them to say. Some have started Weblogs. Others are busy writing code and adding it to the program files.
She stops at a corner café and has soon fallen into conversation with a woman—maybe a woman—on a mission to the edge of the known universe. “All these know-nothings coming in, putting in, it’s as bad as the surface Web. They drive you deeper, into the deep unlighted. Beyond anyplace they’d be comfortable. And that’s where the origin is. The way a powerful telescope will bring you further out in physical space, closer to the moment of the big bang, so here, going deeper, you approach the border country, the edge of the unnavigable, the region of no information.”
“You’re part of this project?”
“Only here to have a look. Find out how long I can stay just at the edge of the beginning before the Word, see how long I can gaze in till I get vertigo—lovesick, nauseous, whatever—and fall in.”
“You have an e-mail address?” Maxine wants to know.
“Kind of you, but maybe I won’t come back. Maybe one day you’d look in your in-box and I won’t be there. Come on. Walk with me.”
They reach a sort of observation platform, dangerously cantilevered out from the ship into high hard radiation, vacuum, lifelessness. “Look.”
Whoever she is, she’s not carrying a bow and arrows, her hair isn’t long enough, but Maxine can see she’s gazing downward at the same steep angle, the same space-rapt focus at infinity, as the figure on the DeepArcher splash page, gazing into a void incalculably fertile with invisible links. “There’s a faint glow, after a while you notice it—some say it’s the trace, like radiation from the big bang, of the memory, in nothingness, of having once been something…”
“You’re—”
“The Archer? No. That one is silent.”
BACK IN MEATSPACE, needing somehow to talk to somebody about the new, and soon she guesses unrecognizable, DeepArcher, Maxine calls Vyrva’s mobile number. “I’m just headed down into the subway, I’ll get back to you when I have reception again.” Maxine is not an old hand at cell-phone shenanigans but knows nervous when she hears it. A half hour later Vyrva, allegedly just back from the East Side, shows up at the office in person dragging a heavy-gauge trash bag stuffed full of Beanie Babies. “Seasonal!” she cries, pulling out one by one little Hallowe’en bats, grinning jack-o’-lanterns in witch hats, ghost bears, bears in capes done up as Dracula, “Ghoulianne the Girl Ghost, see, with the little pumpkin, isn’t she cute!”
Hmmm yes something slightly manic about Vyrva this morning, the East Side to be sure can have this Munchkinetic effect on people, but—retro-CFE circuits now fully kicked in—it occurs to Maxine that the Beanie Babies could have been a cover all the time, couldn’t they, for activities less in the public interest…
Phatic how’s Justin, how’s Fiona, all fine thanks—a shifty flicker of the eyeballs here?— “The guys… I mean, we’re all stressed lately, but…” Vyrva putting on a pair of lavender-lens wire-rims, five dollars on the street, any number of reasons why right now, “We came to New York, we all did, so innocent… Back in California it was fun, just write the code, go for the cool solution, the elegance, party when you can, but here, more and more it’s like—”
“Growing up?” maybe a little too reflexive.
“OK, men are children, we all know that, but this is like watching them give in to some secret vice they don’t know how to stop. They want to hang on to those old innocent kids, you can see it, it’s this terrible disconnect, the childlike hope and the depravity of New York meatspace, it’s becoming unbearable.”
Dear Abby, I have this friend with a big problem…
“You mean, unbearable for you… somehow… emotionally.”
“No,” Vyrva with a rapid flash of eye contact, “for everybody, as in a-little-goes-a-long-way, pain-in-the-ass unbearable.” Chirpy yet snarling delivery, all too familiar in Maxine’s line of work. Maybe also an appeal for understanding, hopefully on the cheap. This is how they get when the audit hooks start pulling up evidence they thought they’d deep-sixed forever, when the tax man sits there across the desk with his office thermostats cranked all the way up, stone-faced, puffing on an IRS-issue stogie, waiting.
Careful to keep it subtext-free for the moment, “Maybe it’s business that’s getting to them?”
“No. Can’t be pressure about the source code, not anymore, they’re out from under all that now. You can’t tell anybody, but they’re going open source.”
Pretending not to have heard the news already, “Giving it away? Have they looked at the tax situation?”
According to Vyrva, Justin and Lucas were out one evening at the brightly lit bar of some tourist motel way over in the West Fifties. Huge-screen TVs tuned to sports channels, fake trees, some of them twenty feet tall, long-haired blond waitresses, an old-school mahogany bar. A lot of convention traffic. The partners are drinking King Kongs, which are Crown Royal plus banana liqueur, and reviewing the room for familiar faces when they hear a voice to which time has been at best disrespectful going, “A Fernet-Branca, please, better make that a double, with a ginger-ale chaser?” and Lucas does a spit take with his drink. “It’s him! That crazy motherfucker from Voorhees, Krueger! He’s after us, he wants his money back!”