Holder of the World - Bharati Mukherjee [107]
They had assembled a past with its own integrity. From raw, programmed data, they had created images; the images had their own brief identity. (The individual programs began fading as the data were used up. It’s an eerie feeling, watching faces and buildings slowly dissolve, lose their color and texture, lose their edges and dimension, and revert to gray.) It’s a primitive technology with infinite applications. It solves man’s oldest or second-oldest preoccupation, to master time, which seems even harder than mastering space.
But this wasn’t another 3-D movie house, and we weren’t kids with our special glasses, jumping back whenever fists and spears burst from the screen. I retrieved thirty seconds from lives I’ve never lived—but which now I have. But why did I intercept a lady in her yellow jacket demonstrating faucets in a Kansas City bathroom?
WHEN IT LOOK at all my notes, the five hundred books consulted, the endless paintings, engravings, trade records, journals, the travel and the documentary picture taking, and stack them up in my study, they look impressive. And from them I have reconstructed a life through three continents and thirty years. And when I look at the raw data Venn’s program has ingested to create ten seconds from just three years ago, with no character, no narrative, I think, who am I fooling?
He talks about the bare sets of old movies, the generic “New York Street” and “Frontier Main Street,” even old television series, the telltale sparsity of convincing clutter (even “Hill Street Blues,” his touchstone of sufficient data, will look austere and artificial in a decade, he says), and he sees it as a kind of informational senility, a loss of image diversity. I talk about asset hunting, the fact that data are not neutral. There are assets and debits. There are hot leads and dead ends. To treat all information as data and to process it in the same way is to guarantee an endless parade of faucets in Kansas City.
He’s still looking for his crystal garden. The data plasma that will generate a fully interactive world. He guesses that the rules that govern information are subject to formulas; anything that has ever happened can be reproduced without all the tedious inputting of raw statistics. The process is merely the next step beyond the most powerful computer ever imagined, for now we are talking about the recapturing of past reality, not just the retrieval of information. Everything that has ever happened is still out there, somewhere, like light from distant stars.
I have seen it. I have seen the crystal, the biggest, most perfect crystal in the world. I have held it.
LAST WEEK, on a Sunday night when even Jay Basu might be home (he’s a fan of “Murder, She Wrote”), we went down to the lab, through the elaborate security. Imagine if the program fell into commercial hands before MIT patents it! I have a “subject’s clearance.” The first thing I saw was The Unravish’d Bride hanging on the wall above Venn’s desk, not that he has ever learned to sit at one.
“I think what I have may interest you, Beigh. This is my present to you.”
He has absorbed my manuscript and all the documents, the travelogues and computerized East India records, the lavishly illustrated namas, or chronicles, of the emperors of the Mughal dynasty. He is a thorough researcher; all this is to be expected, even on his own time. Literary prose, as he calls my book, poses certain hierarchical problems for a computer, or for his program, but he thinks, just thinks, he may have found a way of rendering even my words into images. And the diamond is the clue: the fact that