Adie arrived that first evening, after six hours trapped in the sealed hold of a 737. Stevie was there at the airport to Virgil her back to the Realization Lab. A dozen years. More. They hugged briefly at the arrival gate, laughed, started to falter over the baggage carousel, and drove straight out to his lair in the silence of small talk.
The RL baffled her. It resembled Stevie's description even less than he resembled the Wisconsin boy she'd gone to college with. It smelled faintly of ammonia and fake chemical lemon, the spoor of the late-night cleaning crew. She lingered in the central atrium, rubbing her hands along the redwood walls, trying to bring her image of the place into line with its real layout. She wanted to see the office he'd been sitting in when he'd called her. Steve gave her an impatient tour of the facility, under the compact fluorescent lights. Then he hurried her down the maze of runways, back into a room that opened onto a stalagmite-strewn pitch-blackness.
She knew black. Her friends in the downtown demimonde never deserted it, save for the sporadic bout of unavoidable nakedness. She did well around black. She understood it: one of the big two, not a true color, yet fraternizing with the deepest maroons, hoping to smuggle itself back over hue's closely guarded border.
But this ebony spooked her: the black of elaborate plans.
Gloom unfolded to her adjusting eyes. Stray, chaotic caches of chrome appeared on all sides of her, evil little Duchamp originals. Banks of lights blinked out of the pitch, like the beady red eyes of robotic rats. Connectors and controllers littered the floor, the metallic droppings of those circuit creatures.
She bobbed in a sea of digital serpents. VCRs on steroids, microwaves pumped up on growth hormone murmured at her. She wanted to hack at the silicon swarms — Michael driving off the fallen angels. Who had let these devices into the world? Who could possibly hope to track their various agendas? Adie, whose eidetic eye once re-created the putti, garlands, and cornucopias of a garish Baroque communion rail from memory, could not have sketched these consoles, even as they hissed at her.
If this was the fabled Cavern, then no. Absolutely not. She couldn't work here. Not in this room. No matter what these people hoped to make. No matter what they needed from her.
This is it? she said. This is it?
Stevie chuckled. Almost there. He pointed toward a luminous opening, a glowing white shoebox, shining like a lit stage set in the general
dark.
That? The Cavern? No room ever less resembled its name. A hardware guy, Spider Lim, ran the tour for them that first night. The room's been crashing a lot for the last several days, Lim apologized. Remember, it's just a prototype.
Yeah. Steve smirked at her in the glow of the projectors. You'll have to use your imagination. You know how to do that, don't you, Ade?
The two men led her through the mess of electronic umbilical cords. Spiegel touched her arm in the darkness. Adie flinched, despite herself, despite years of unlearning. But he only meant to steer her through the nested clutter on to the Cavern's mouth.
They stepped together through the missing rear wall, into the glowing room. Just like that: the audience, walking through an invisible proscenium, onto a floor-level stage. Adie found herself standing in an empty space, six by eight by ten feet, made from five large rectangles of white sandpaper. Even the floor and ceiling were movie screens.
This? You're joking. This is nothing but a glorified walk-in closet. Put these on, Spider Lim answered. Plastic glasses: lightweight, tinted, wraparound. A high Hollywood fashion statement teetering between fabulously futuristic and ridiculously retro.
But they have wires coming out of them. She tweezed them at arm's length, between thumb and pinky.
Spider's face crimped. So? Years later, she would sketch him like that: the young Rembrandt scrunching up, incredulous, in the light of the mirror's report.
So I don’t want wires anywhere near my head.
You're kidding me. Spider laughed. Get out of my life.
Doesn't… don’t wires make a magnetic field or something?
Stevie reasoned with her. You've used a Walkman, haven't you?
I've never let my head anywhere near a Walkman. I don't even like saying the word.
Spider answered with a marvelous sound: a rapid click of the tongue against hard palate. The sound the neighborhood boys' baseball cards made once, rubber-banded to bicycle spokes. The noise of the industrious world engine, impatient for its next run.
She put the glasses on and waited for the view, like a Louisville deb holding tight after her first hit of acid, her virgin sight about to be forever despoiled. Her eyes looked through the tinted lenses, not knowing what to expect. And they saw nothing at all.
Hold it. Hang on. Spider stood between her and Spiegel, sporting his own set of glasses. He swayed, waving and clicking a thing that looked like a TV remote. We're snagged on something.
The trio stood staring at a blank wall. Spider Lim made the ratchet noise. Adie had to keep from slugging him with pleasure. Do that again!
What? Do what? Nothing's started yet.
That thing with your tongue.
Spider, lost to the problem, ignored her. His life's work: already to be someplace else by the time anyone else got there.
He temporized. We've gone over to a new configuration. Just this week. A separate graphics engine for each wall. It's causing us some sync problems.
The white is pretty, Adie offered.
Here we are. Here goes.
They gaped at the blank walls. Then the expanse of emptiness cleared. Up from a hidden seam in the whiteness, a stone slab emerged: a chunk of burnished marble chiseled with text, something Herod would have slapped up on an imperial stele to appall the natives, as deep into rebellious Judaea as he could get away with. The plaque twirled about in space before settling back down in midair, to be read.
That spinning stone even cast real shadows. No sooner did Spider land the first slab than he hooked another. The second plaque flopped out of the wall and pirouetted in space in front of Adie. She fought the urge to reach out and pinch it.
More stone tablets materialized from on high. They fell into formation alongside one another, forming the beveled buttons of a menu. A floating finger moved upon this list, a disembodied digit that tracked the waves of Spider's wand.
From the several choices, he selected a slab labeled Crayon World. Here we go, he said. Hold on now. He clicked, and the floating finger riffled. The marble button receded, as if really pressed. The menu beeped and dissolved. For a moment, the walls went dark. When they lit again, they were no longer walls.
A hailstorm of aquamarines filled Adie's vision, a shower of silver-blue shards, as if the air had just shattered. Then the shards condensed, reassembling into a blue ceiling. The three of them stood in their own bodies, under a blazing sky. Yet they floated above the scene they looked at, canted at an impossible angle. Adie's knees buckled. She pitched forward, compensating for this snub to gravity. When she righted herself, so did the Crayon World below.