The Island - Peter Watts

Peter Watts 33 The Island
away?
And why didn't they warn me about you?
Yes, there are rules. There is the threat of enemy surveillance
during long dead nights, the threat of— other losses. But this is
unprecedented. Surely someone could have left something, some
clue buried in a metaphor too subtle for the simpleminded to
decode…
I'd give a lot to tap into that pipe, to see what you're seeing now.
Can't risk it, of course; I'd give myself away the moment I tried to
sample anything except the basic baud, and—
—Wait a second—
That baud rate's way too low. That's not even enough for hi-res
graphics, let alone tactile and olfac. You're embedded in a
wireframe world at best.
And yet, look at you go. The fingers, the eyes— like a cat,
dreaming of mice and apple pies. Like me, replaying the long-lost
oceans and mountaintops of Earth before I learned that living in
the past was just another way of dying in the present. The bit rate
says this is barely even a test pattern; the body says you're
immersed in a whole other world. How has that machine tricked
you into treating such thin gruel as a feast?
Why would it even want to? Data are better grasped when they
can be grasped, and tasted, and heard; our brains are built for far
richer nuance than splines and scatterplots. The driest technical
briefings are more sensual than this. Why settle for stick-figures
when you can paint in oils and holograms?
Why does anyone simplify anything? To reduce the variable set.
To manage the unmanageable.
Kai and Connie. Now there were a couple of tangled,
unmanageable datasets. Before the accident. Before the scenario
simplified.
Someone should have warned me about you, Dix.
Maybe someone tried.
*
And so it comes to pass that my son leaves the nest, encases