Playground by Richard Powers

Author:Richard Powers
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2024-08-23T00:00:00+00:00

I TOOK RAFI to my little cubicle in the new supercomputing building. We played with CRIK for a long time, as if that creature were another of the many addictive networked games running on the university’s groundbreaking time-share system. Rafi wanted to stump CRIK. He probed it to see if it really understood the concept of “water.” Did it know that water was continuous with snow and ice and vapor? Did it know that water ran downhill and could polish granite or break it into little pieces? Did it know what it meant to make a thing “wet”? Did it understand “pouring” and “drinking” and “flow”?

We sat there for two hours, poking our probes into a clunky keyboard and waiting for CRIK to respond on a green, all-text screen. It was the strangest, most exciting, most entertaining thing in the entire universe. And CRIK did reasonably well. Not human, but it could answer questions. That alone felt like a miracle.

It was Sunday, the day when the dorm cafeteria served no dinner. So after playing with CRIK, Rafi and I went to campus town and shared a deep-dish pizza. The pie cost eight dollars—a ruinous expense for both of us. He had grown up on the border of poverty and would never learn to spend money freely. My father had had his own airplane, but my mother now lived in a one-bedroom apartment, selling the last of her husband’s prog rock vinyl collection at garage sales to make bus fare. Splitting that eight-buck pizza felt as sinful as flying to New York for a weekend to see a show.

We ate in near-silence. CRIK had shaken Rafi. I kept waiting for him to volunteer something. Finally, I had to ask. “So, what do you think of my baby?”

“Fuckin’-a, man. As if I didn’t have enough anxiety. Now I gotta decide whether to go on living.”

He was still preoccupied later that night, in our broom closet, as we went to bed. He lay in his narrow bunk, staring up at the ceiling. When he spoke at last, it startled me.

“Has it occurred to you that computers might be the thing that makes it possible?”

We’d been living together in such close quarters for so many months that our brains had synchronized. I knew in an instant what he was talking about. His pet obsession. The Common Task.

“Make everybody live forever?”

“And raise everyone from the dead.”

I waited for him to say more, but Rafi was already starting his long descent into reticence that would, in time, cut him off from me forever. That night, he fell asleep without another word.

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