Read RICHARD POWERS for Free Online

own body when he's not around, don't you?
    She shocked him into looking almost at her. He shook his head gravely: huh-uh. Honest injun.
    You're all clones of the same experimental genetic material. Admit it.
    At last Jackdaw smiled. But she still couldn't tell if he smiled at her inanity or at something on his monitor that his typing had produced.
    She saw in the smile some spark of software loyalty. This boy would always do things for her. Small, stray errands and favors, whatever happened in the lab between them. And the seed of his devotion made her feel safe, here in this precarious new world. Safe, knowing that she would never ask anything from him but the smallest of favors.
    Jackdaw, she said. Jackie. He flinched at the familiarity on her lips. You still haven't answered my question. What makes the pictures?
    What makes the pictures? His face labored at the cipher. It squeezed itself through every real-time translation algorithm that he possessed. What makes the pictures?
    Yeah.
    Uh, we do? Not even hoping that he'd guessed right.
    No! Not that! She pictured herself stamping on the floor, the spade-footed kick of a dwarf whose secret name has just slipped out. You know what I mean.
    You mean, what hardware do we use to generate the graphics? What computers?
    Yes. Probably.
    Jackdaw took her back for her first look at the monsters. The Cavern's graphics engines filled a room at the far end of the RL's long central artery. Jackdaw and Adie threaded down this hall, past knots of flannel and corduroy that stood around volubly sharing their latest discoveries in a language entirely foreign to her. Those who noticed them waved, taking Adie in as if she'd been among them for years, laboring away on her few square inches of the common canvas.
    Some unseen whole was taking shape here: a gargantuan corpse, hauled in chunks along this animated ant trail. Each worker they passed carried an integral piece of the spoils many times his own body weight, part of a prize orders of magnitude larger than all of them combined. Hey, her new colleagues called to her. Hey. The quick facial dip of acknowledgment: you're creating, I'm creating. We're at the peak of our assembled powers, joined together, about to set in place civilization's crowning capstone. Each distracted knowledge engineer exuded a happy preoccupation, needing no words. The whole picture scared the daylights out of her.
    Jackdaw led her to the end of the corridor, and let her into a window-less back room. Between its dropped ceiling and raised floor, the space felt almost as cramped as the Cavern. Inside the sanctum, a woman in her mid-twenties, her hair the color of a Faberge egg, paced between the machine furrows, chattering back at the murmuring chrome.
    Hey, Jackdaw said. Sue Loque. What's a software type doing down among the nuts and bolts?
    The woman's ambiguous splay of signals —biker leather trimmed with ratty lace—would have intimidated Adie, even back in blase New York. Out here, in this flood of new rules, they left her feeling shamefully normative.
    Sue Loque threw up her hands, the icon for distress. If the hardware types would keep these things tweaked, we software types wouldn't have to get our hands dirty. Why do you think I went into coding in the first place? So that I wouldn't have to touch any printed circuits. What's the problem? Adie asked. They're ugly and septic. No, I mean with the machines.
    Oh. Well, they're none too pretty either. And they just stopped polling. Jackdaw shook his head. What do you mean, they stopped polling? I mean they stopped polling.
    Whatever it meant, Adie stopped polling, too. Or at least she stopped existing for the two professionals, who set out to backtrace their way into the heart of logic's arctic crystal. The Loque woman and Jackdaw called in Spider Lim, and all three of them disappeared into the
    printed-circuit thicket.
    Adie glanced around the room. Its likeness had never once been painted. It glowed, an eerie,