The Bridge Trilogy Part 118

Laney has other things on his mind, but it does occur to him that if it is the Suit he sends out to the drugstore as his more presentable representative, then he, Laney, is in bad shape indeed.

And he is, of course, but that seems, against the flood of data flowing Nile-wide and constantly through him, from inner horizon to inner horizon, scarcely a concern.

Laney is aware now of gifts without name. Of modes of perception that may never have previously existed.

He has, for instance, a directly spatial sense of something very near the totality of the infosphere.

He feels it as a single indescribable shape, something brailled out for him against a ground or backdrop of he knows not what, and it hurts him, in the poet's phrase, like the world hurts G.o.d.

Within this, he palps nodes of potentiality, strung along lines that are histories of the happened becoming the not-yet. He is very near, he thinks, to a vision in which past and future are one and the same; his present, when he is forced to reinhabit it, seems increasingly arbitrary, its placement upon the time line that is Cohn Laney more a matter of convenience than of any absolute now.

1~.

All his life Laney has heard talk of the death of history, but confronted with the literal shape of all human knowledge, all human memory, he begins to see the way in which there never really has

been any such thing.

No history. Only the shape, and it comprised of lesser shapes, in squirming fractal descent, on down into the infinitely finest of resolutions.

But there is will. "Future" is inherently plural.

And thus he chooses not to sleep and sends the Suit for more Regain, and he notices, as the Suit crawls out beneath the melon-tinted blanket, that the man's ankles are painted, in imitation of black socks, with something resembling asphalt.

107.

26. BAD SECTOR.

CHEVETTE bought two chicken sandwiches off a cart on the upper level and went back to find Tessa.

The wind had shifted, then died down, and with it that pre-storm tension, that weird elation.

Storms were serious business on the bridge, and even a gusty day would up the probability of someone getting hurt. In a rising wind the bridge could feel like a ship, anch.o.r.ed rock solid to the bottom of the bay, but straining. The bridge itself never really moved, no matter what (although she supposed it must have, in the quake, which was why it was no longer used for what it had been built for), but everything that had been added subsequently, all of that, with the wrong kind of luck, could move, and did sometimes with disastrous results. So that was what sent people running, when a wind got up, to check tumbuckles, lengths of aircraft cable, dubious webworks of two-by-four fir.

Skinner had taught her all that, more in pa.s.sing than as formal lessons, though he'd had his way of giving formal lessons. One of those had been about how it had felt to be out here the night the bridge was first occupied by the homeless. What it had felt like to climb and topple the chainlink barriers, erected after the quake caused enough structural damage to suspend traffic.

Not that long ago, as years were measured, but some kind of lifetime in terms of concept of place.

Skinner had shown her pictures, what the bridge looked like before, but she simply can't imagine that people wouldn't have lived here. He'd also shown her drawings of older bridges too, bridges with shops and houses on them, and it just made sense to her. How could you have a bridge and not live on it?

She loves it here, admits it now in her heart, but there is also something in her, watching, that feels not a part of. A self-consciousness, as though she herself is making the sort of docu Tessa wanted to make, some inner version of all the product Carson coordinated for Real One.

108.

Like she's back, but she isn't. Like she's become something else in the meantime, without noticing, and now she's watching herself being here.

She found Tessa squatting in front of a narrow shopfront, BAD SECTOR spray-bombed across a plywood facade that looks as though it's been painted silver with a broom.

Tessa had G.o.d's Little Toy, semi-deflated, on her lap and is fiddling with something near the part that holds the camera. "Ballast," Tessa said, looking up, "always goes first."

"Here," Chevette said, holding out a sandwich, "while it's still warm."

Tessa tucked the Mylar balloon between her knees and accepts the greasy paper packet.

"Got any idea where you want to sleep tonight?" Chevette asked, unwrapping her own sandwich.

"In the van," Tessa said, around a mouthful. "Got bags, foam."

"Not where it is," Chevette told her. "Kinda cannibal, around there."

"Where then?"

"If it's still got wheels, there's a place over by one of the piers, foot of Folsom, where people park and sleep. Cops know about it, but they go easy; easier for them if people all park in one place, to camp. But it can be hard to get a place."

"This is good," Tessa said to her sandwich, wiping grease from her lips with the back of her hand.

"Bridge chickens. Raise 'em over by Oakland, feed 'em sc.r.a.ps and stuff." She bit into her sandwich. The bread was a square bun of sourdough white, dusted with flour. She chewed, staring into the window of this Bad Sector place.

Flat square tabs or sheets of plastic, different sizes and colors, baffled her, but then she got

it: these were data disks, old magnetic media. And those big, round, flat black plastic things were a.n.a.logue audio media, a mechanical system. You stuck a needle in a spiral scratch and spun the thing. Biting off more sandwich, she stepped past Tessa for a better look. There were reels of fine steel wire, ragged pinkcylinders of

109.

wax with faded paper labe~s, yellowing transparent plastic reels of quarter-inch brown tape.

Looking past the disphy, she could see a lot of old hardware side by side on shelves, most of ii in that grubby beige plastic. Why had people, for the first twenty years of computing, cased everything in that? Anything digital, from that century it was pretty much guaranteed to be that sad-a.s.s inst.i.tutional brige, unless they'd wanted it to look more dramatic, more cutting edge, in which case they'd opted for black. But mostly this old stuff was ifolded in nameless shades of next-to-nothing, nondescript sort-of-tan.

"This is b.u.g.g.e.red," sighed Tessa, who'd finished her sandwich and gone back to poking at G.o.d's Little Toy with the driver. She stuck out her hand, offering Chevette the driver. "Give it back to him, okay?"

"Who?"

"The sumo guy inside"

Chevette took the little micro-torque tool and went into Bad Sector.

There was a Chinese kid behind the counter who looked like he might weigh in somewhere over two hundred pounds. He had that big pumpkin head the sumo guys had too, but his was recently shaven and he had a soul patch. He had a short-sleeve print shirt on, big tropical flowers, and a conical spike of blue Lucite through the lobe of his left ear. He was standing, behind a counter, in front of a wall covered with dog-eared posters advertising extinct game platforms.

"This your driver, right?"

"She have any luck with it?" He made no move to take it.

"I don't think so," Chevette said, "but I think she pinpointed the problem." She heard a faint, rapid clicking. Looked down to see a six-inch robot marching briskly across the countertop on big cartoony feet. It had that man-in-armor lDok, segmented glossy white sh.e.l.ls over shiny steel armatures. She'd seen these before: it was a fully remote peripheral, controlled by a program that would take up most of a standard notebook. It came to a halt, put its hands together, executed a perfect miniature bow, straightened, held up its little clip hands for the driver. She let it take the driver, the pull of the little arms somehow scary. It 110.

straightened up, putting the driver over its shoulder like a miniature rifle, and gave her a military salute.

Sumo boy was waiting for a reaction, but Chevette wasn't having any. She pointed at the beige hardware. "How come this old s.h.i.t is always that same color?"

His forehead creased. "There are two theories. One is that it was to help people in the workplace be more comfortable with radically new technologies that would eventually result in the mutation or extinction of the workplace. Hence the almost universal choice, by the manufacturers, of a shade of plastic most often encountered in downscale condoms." He smirked at Chevette.

"Yeah? What's two?"

"That the people who were designing the stuff were unconsciously terrified of their own product, and in order not to scare themselves, kept it looking as unexciting as possible. Literally 'plain vanilla,' you follow me?"

Chevette brought her finger close to the microbot; it did a funny little fall-back-and-shuffle to avoid being touched. "So who's into this old stuff? Collectors?"

"You'd think so, wouldn't you?"

"WJell?"

"Programmers."

"I don't get it," Chevette said.

"Consider," he said, holding out his hand to let the little 'bot offer him the driver, "that when this stuff was new, when they were writing multi-million-line software, the unspoken a.s.sumption was that in twenty years that software would have been completely replaced by some better, more evolved version." He took the driver and gestured with it toward the hardware on the shelves. "But the manufacturers were surprised to discover that there was this perverse but powerful resistance to spending tens of millions of dollars to replace existing software, let alone hardware, plus retraining possibly thousands of employees. Follow me?" He raised the driver, sighting down its shaft at her.

"Okay," Chevette said.

111.

"So when you need the stuff to do new things, or to do old things better, do you write new stuff, from the ground up, or do you patch the old stuff?"

"Patch the old?"

"You got it. Overlay new routines. As the machines got faster, it didn't matter if a routine went through three hundred steps when it could actually be done in three steps. It all happens in a fraction of a second anyway, so who cares?"

"Okay," Chevette said, "so who does care?"