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. 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. Ãò 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. Ãò mostly software.
That's a difference?
He's like, Korean. Ãò what you call Italian?