RICHARD POWERS by Unknown Read Free Book Online Page B

while Sue navigated through a menu waterfall with a tilt of her head, selecting from commands with a blink of her laser-tracked eye.
    Loque blinked twice, choosing "Brightness" from a menu labeled "Chroma Tuning." A beveled representation of a knob sprung into existence, out of nothing. It acted exactly like the knob it represented, except that it slid back and forth in its track simply as Loque shook her head.
    She slid the knob all the way to the left. In a literal eye blink, the laurel went dark. Each wrinkle and vein deepened into shadow. Dusk swept across the face of the plant. With another head wag Sue swung the slider to its opposite pole, bathing the branch in the overhead glare of midday.
    How' s that for turning over a whole new leaf?
    Crikey, Adie answered. I cant take it What do all the numbers mean? How much is minus 170? What 's a plus 190?
    They're arbitrary. The scale runs from zero to 255.
    Two hundred and fifty-five? You people are truly occult.
    It's a binary thing, babe. Give me this one on faith.
    Sue shook her fuchsia head and twitched her ruby-studded eyebrow, dragging the knobs through their paces. She called up sliders for contrast, saturation, and hue. The laurel wreath metamorphosed into supersaturated narcissi and hyacinths. It hardened to a turn-of-the-century black-and-white lithograph. It ignited in a lurid laundry soap commercial.
    We can tweak each color channel separately. Or we can nudge around points on a histogram or an active compensation curve.
    Adie looked on her colleague in a we. Loque's own aggressive Papa gena plumage began to make sense. That's OK. I trust you.
    Big mistake. Here. Watch this. From out of a menu labeled "Transforms" came a choice called "Vortex." Sue blinked, and the laurel sprig descended into a Cartesian maelstrom. It wrung itself out like a topologisfs spent dishrag. And still it twirled in the mythic blackness.
    Wait. God. What have you done? You've wrecked it. It looks horrible.
    Easy, sweetie. Haven t you heard? What's done can always be undone.
    With a single click, Sue returned the spinning branch to mint condition. There you are. Unblemished. Untouched by human tinkering.
    The idea grazed Adie, like a pile of bricks falling off a scaffold and killing the pedestrian in front of her. She saw why the mind raced to convert to digital. Why it needed this place where ingenuity could always hit the Undo button.
    Sue Loque warped and bulged and folded the innocent sprig until it was no longer fit to grace a wilted salad. Laurel twisted into oak into maple. Each derangement offered its own custom parameters, permutations too numerous to investigate.
    Adie watched her expert pilot steer them into "Shadows and Edges." On the Cavern wall, the leaves fell away to a penciled outline. The mottled surface of a thousand greens vanished into mere contour flapping in the invented breeze. Surface reduced to a ghostly mold, a pipe-cleaner sculpture that Adie reached out and poked her fingers through.
    This isn't right. I cant cope ...
    Hang on. It gets worse.
    We're not meant to be able to do all this. It's not good for us.
    Loque turned her attention to the archaic creature. She fiddled with the chains dangling from her studded skirt. I don't get it. You've never used a computer in your work?
    Adie shot her head back, horrified.
    All those little pastel magic princess thingies of yours?
    Thanks, Sue. By hand. Every one. You remember the human hand, don't you?
    Do you? Sue asked, and reached out. Adie, despite herself, stepped back. Sue laughed, and snorted again at the color she brought to the artist woman's cheeks. You've never seen Monday Night Football? Saturday cartoons? This stuff is all over every prime-time fifteen-second commercial spot that —
    Another horrified head shake. I don't own a TV .
    Well. Aren't we precious? Wait until the baddies at TeraSys learn who they've hired.
    Adie regrouped. What they don't know can't hurt them.
    Oh, they know everything, finally.