People don't even see those things. They blow right past them, on their way to the stores.
Well, the stores, then. The malls.
I'm talking about places where we can be subsumed by forces larger than ourselves.
You've obviously never run up a monolithic MasterCard tab at Bloomie's, have you?
Places where we can reconstruct ourselves and nature. Where people can share transforming experiences.
The Kingdome?
His lips tightened, without much mirth. All right. Adie sobered. Books, then. Who has time to read anymore? Little magenta books from your childhood. Lost. Broken.
Movies. Of course. Movies.
Too solipsistic. You sit there for an hour and a half, chained up in the dark. Immersed, sure, but eyes forward, on the screen. Your guts get turned inside out, completely manipulated, fine-tuned by the industry's latest big release. But two weeks later, you cant even paraphrase the plot. Adie threw a few honeyed peanuts to the birds. Every pigeon in the Pacific Northwest went into an all-points feeding frenzy. Why do I have this sneaking suspicion about where you're heading here?
He nodded. You got it I mean, the car, the airplane, even printing. They only changed the speed with which humans can do existing tasks. But the computer…
Ah ha! Adie said, slapping him on the thigh. The computer changes the tasks. Other inventions alter the conditions of human existence. The computer alters the human. It's our complement, our partner, our vindication. The goal of all the previous stopgap inventions. It builds us an entirely new home.
Hey? What's wrong with the old home? I liked living in the old home. Did you? He held her eye. She looked away first. Well, however you feel about the new one, you have to admit, it's out of this world. Oh, that much Ym sure of.
You know what we're working on, don't you? Time travel, Ade. The matter transporter. Embodied art; a life-sized poem that we can live inside. It's the grail we've been after since the first campfire recital. The defeat of time and space. The final victory of the imagination.
Whoa there, cowboy. It's four bedsheets and some slide projectors. Oh, you ain't seen nothin yet. Forget the technology for a moment. I'm talking about the raw idea. The ability to make worlds — whole, dense, multisensory places that are both out there and in here at the same time. Invented worlds that respond to what we're doing, worlds where the interface disappears. Places we can meet in, across any distance. Places where we can change all the rules, one at a time, to see what happens. Fleshed-out mental labs to explore and extend. VR rein-vents the terms of existence. It redefines what it means to be human. All those old dead-end ontological undergrad conundrums? They've now become questions of engineering.
Adie tilted her head, withholding and conceding at the same time. What makes you think…? Nothing else has ever worked. All the arts, all the technologies in the world have failed to placate people. Why should it be any different this time around?
First, because we're assembling them all into a total—
Na, na. That's Wagner. That's Bayreuth. And you see all the good that did.
But the Cavern blows opera out of the box. We're not just passive recipients anymore. We'll become the characters in our own living drama.
She shook her head. The problem isn't going to answer to technology, you know. The problem is inside us. In our bodies.
The Cavern is the first art form to play directly to that body. We're on the verge of immediate, bodily knowledge.
It doesn't work that way, Stevie. We habituate. Something in us doesn't want to stay sublime for very long.
We can be refreshed. Revitalized, by the sheer density…
She took in Pioneer Square in one glance: this palpable place, the master foil to Stevie's crazy vision. All at once, the tap of sunlight opened. Why not life, then? she said. Life itself, as our final art form. Our supreme high-tech invention. It's a lot more robust than anything else we've got going. Deeply interactive. And the resolution is outstanding.
But we can't see life. He gestured to include the world's tourists, rushing through the miraculous density of day's data structure without so much as a second glance. Not without some background to hold it up against. In order for the fish to know that it's swimming in an ocean-He has to jump into the frying pan?
Spiegel snorted. Something like that. Something like that.
Some cloud passed from off the face of the sun. The sky grew so briefly radiant that it forced Adie's face up. Something in the light felt so desperate for sharing that it stretched out the deficit in her heart and left it, for the length of that glint, fillable. Breezes were stronger than reason. They just didn't last as long.
Nothing, she said, nothing we make will ever match sunlight. A beautiful day beats all the art in the world.
He looked at her oddly. As if they were bound together. As if they had the luxury of the rest of their lives to come to terms with each other. I wouldn't know. I live in Seattle.
That reminds me, she said. Car. Ferry. Island. She stood and stretched. Garden. Dinner. Sleep. Wake. Work.
He stood with her. Where are you parked? I'll walk you.
They steered uphill, through the public sphere, avoiding by complex collision algorithm a throng of other autonomous agents loose on their own improvised routes. They pressed along Occidental, above the buried Underground warrens. A juggler to their left kept a small pastel solar system twirling in orbit. From the south floated the sound of a busker picking out "Will the Circle Be Unbroken?" Panhandlers of all races, colors, and creeds approached them with elaborate narratives— wives in vehicular distress, misunderstandings with employers involving salary moratoria, momentary misplacement of all worldly possessions— then retreated again, fifty cents richer, wishing them both the best of available afternoons.
They plotted a course through Occidental Park, midway between the totem pole and the knockoff pseudo-Greek plaster sculpture directly across the square from it. Adie threw repeated backward glances over her shoulder through the peopled fray.
It's bothering you, he caught her. Isn't it?
What is?
That statue. What's the matter? Can't name that tune?
Oh, I guess it's supposed to be an imitation of some kind ofkouros. One of the Apollos, maybe? Hard to tell. It's not a very good copy, to say the least
That's it? Don't look. What else?
She stopped and closed her eyes. Well, the size, for one thing. Too big. And it has all its limbs. I don't think any real ones are that intact.
That's all?
Can I peek again?
No.
The colors off. But I guess it's hard to make gypsum look like marble. And the face isn't right. More Roman than Archaic, I think.
And?
She shrugged.
Go ahead. Look.