Under the mews’s cobblestones, below buildings that, prior to their conversion into advertising, architecture, investment-portfolio management and film-production company offices, slept and fed and watered Fitzrovia’s draught and livery horses; off the courtyard, past an iron door whose perfunctory chain lock persistent junkies are continually unpicking; down a stone staircase on which both light and oxygen levels noticeably decrease every two or three steps; beyond another, state-of-the-art double door that neither addict nor anyone else not armed with trifecta of swipe card, RFID tag and daily-generated pin code has yet managed to outsmart; in an expansive if compacted basement whose humidity and temperature are recalibrated every five and a half minutes lies Degree Zero’s render farm. There, behind glass dust covers, eighty-two motherboards denuded of their casing and arrayed either upright in long lines, like after-dinner mints, or horizontal, one above the other, like shelves built to store nothing but shelf, flicker and blink in restless computation. Between these and across floor, walls and ceiling snake two hundred and eight yards of cabling. Tower fans, also shelf-sized, rotate sentinel among them. Their modulating roar, the motherboards’ relentless hum, the general tremble of electric overcharge all rise through earth and bricks above; below, they shake plasma and membranes of all plastic, metal, glass and wood and, not least, the lone human who’s on duty here tonight.
Do we know him? We do: it’s Soren, he of the velveteen hairs. He has, as hoped, ‘progressed’. No longer a mere runner, he has been promoted to the post – still entry-level, but a salaried one nonetheless – of render wrangler. His job: to monitor, from dusk to dawn, the passage of the endless gigabytes that make up each of Incarnation’s images, through the SVN-filters into the server; to assign to each frame’s cluster a processing pen fenced off from all the others yet at the same time, inasmuch as they all feed off and into the same source and output channels, conjoined; to see to it that these pens don’t become overcrowded, blocked, stampeded; to ensure the welfare and, indeed, to verify the basic genetic purity of each one’s charges, checking for scripting errors, unforeseen corruptions and all manner of infirmity that, if not picked up and isolated at this stage, will mutate and multiply through the next, and the one after that – contagion that, worst-case scenario, will eventually erupt across the skin of the released film in an outbreak of glitches and anomalies that would cost DZ their reputation and (needless to say) Soren his job. More specifically: this job entails watching, on his desktop, logged into the server through VNC client, the revision numbers roll past and refresh themselves; checking how much memory each processor, or ‘proc’, is using, and reallocating a portion of its labour to another when the figures go too high; updating the SVNs; running system admin … Sometimes Soren moves methodically, from one proc to the next; sometimes he darts between them randomly, spot-checking, keeping them all on their toes with the element of surprise. From time to time he pulls up all the procs’ vital statistics simultaneously, lays them out side by side in multi-screen, columns of numbers and figures all jiggling together: a muster-parade roll-call, to ascertain whether there’s been any slacking off. If he spots sloppiness or snags, he brings offending stragglers back into the fold by issuing an shh command. He does this manually, types into the Blender script the letters shh – as though he were some kind of whisperer, lulling and soothing not a single restless animal but hundreds all at once. This render farm has more processing power than most countries. It’s managing calculations that would take a human a whole lifetime – to work out the position of a hair, the passage and rotation of a piece of dust, the luminescence of a fork’s tine, frame by frame by frame …
Incarnation’s render has been scheduled as a twelve-week task. 44,928 frames, to be rendered at an average speed of sixty-one minutes and fifty-six seconds per frame, with twenty-three being concurrently processed at each given moment, equals 2,016 hours. It’s running round the clock, every day of the week, no breaks for public holidays. Soren is one of four wranglers – the most junior, which is why he’s got the graveyard shift. So here he is, tonight: corralling, shhshing, verifying, updating, cross-checking, plucking sample lines of code out of the millions that shuttle past like (if you want old-school, analogue comparators) newspapers on the conveyor of an offset press, or reels of cross-weave rolling off the loom of some giant fabric plant – the difference being that each of Soren’s interventions, rather than carrying the process forwards, helping to fire the morning edition off to waiting stands, newsboys and breakfast tables, or to bring the tapestry closer to completion, sets it back: it’s an unpicking, registered by a small back-tick on the aggregated progress bar that has its own dedicated screen both here on the farm’s wall and on the remote desktops of the many supervisors and coordinators, editors, compositors, accountants and so forth who track it like impatient suitors to whom an answer, yay or nay, some kind of resolution, is long overdue.
To unpick or back-tick ourselves: Incarnation’s render had been scheduled as a twelve-week task. That figure’s been revised to fourteen. It will go up further: no one doubts that. We’re in Week Eleven. Right now, most of the frames working their way through the procs are drawn from the film’s final, seven-minute sequence, which depicts the KFS Sidereal’s break-up as it drives manically, suicidally, towards Fidelus. As the ship powers its way past the star’s outer heliopause, into its heliosheath and on towards the boundary of its termination shock, the plasma-discharge sloughing off the sun’s upper atmosphere, racing at supersonic speed from its corona, proves too much for the vessel’s constitution. Screws and rivets bend and elongate and shoot off like so many poppers on a baby’s one-piece; panels of sheet-metal sheer away and tumble down-hull, gouging into heat shield, wing and skirt new gashes where their jagged sides make contact; stabilisers, banks and a whole storage bay detach themselves and, rather than simply hurtling away, hover, vortex-held, expanding and imploding simultaneously, their forms, dimensions and properties, the very laws by which they’re bound, gone haywire. The bow wave has indeed, as Briar proposed, brought on a general fucking with all terms and values. Basic oppositions – up/down, attraction/repulsion, togetherness/separation, even inside/outside (of an object, of the ship, of people’s bodies) – seem to be collapsing. A rapier (maybe Tszvetan’s, lethal implement that stove Merhalt’s skull, that led to the seduction and thus, indirectly, to the present pass, or maybe just a random rapier whose history we can only guess at – either way, denuded now of all pasts, which slough off particulate as well), moving of its own volition, lunging and patinandoing in mid-air down an auxiliary corridor, is shattering into ten thousand shards but still managing to sear through the jugular of a stoker whose own vital frame, though similarly crystallising and disintegrating, writhes in affliction, as though each of its newly minted fragments retained the memory of the whole of which they until recently formed molecules; the stoker’s blood, spilling, mingles with distant stars, becomes the stars that are now fully visible through the Sidereal’s hull although the hull, somehow, is still there, both contained by and containing the external space that it was built to keep at bay. Things proximate – grid-panels, ring-latches, attenuators – seem to stand at infinite distances; things far or forgotten – distant nebulae, brinquedotecques and gzhiardini, relics of Argeral childhoods – seem to be close at hand: it’s a catastrophe happening here, sure – an annihilation, an extinction – but there’s also, ultra-paradoxically, a counter-movement of formation, of emergence, going on as well, a sense of something edging its way, through all the chaos, to the threshold of the visible, the comprehensible …
Tszvetan and Tild, like salmon fighting their way upstream to the pools from which they spawned, have pulled and scraped and lunged themselves back to the place where it all started: the Observatory. They’ve writhed and threshed their way through hatches, slid along conjoining tunnel walls to which gravity has at first pinned them down, then, suddenly reversing its direction, thrust them onwards, as though willing them towards their goal. From time to time they’ve had to push aside a stoker’s body, or observe a dying one being vacuum-sucked into the interstellar void. The stokers’ faces, both alive and dead, all have the same expression carved across them: never terrified or anguished, but satisfied, contented, happy even, proud of having seen through to its endgame and beyond a fierce devotion from whose pledge they drew their strength and purpose, drew their very essence as retainers. Death, conjunction with the stars, cements this essence, renders it eternal. Even amidst the carnage, Tszvetan and Tild register these attestations of a faith oblivion can’t snuff out; vindicated and spurred on by them, they plough on through disintegrating airlocks and equipment bays, battery modules, water-storage tanks, up past what used to be the Sidereal’s starboard trusses; tumble up, down and along the geometry-defying, now semi-fluid double-helix of the uncoiling spiral staircase; and, finally, find themselves spat, internally vomited, into the viewing platform’s spherical and cyst-like chamber.
The sapphire-glass dome – perhaps because it was so thin and provisional in the first place, scarcely more solid than a bubble – has held up to now, although it’s only a matter of time before it, too, disintegrates. The instruments, the spectrohelioscopes, astrolabes, dioptras and torquetums, are flying through the air, colliding with each other and the central console, with the globe-within-globe reader whose controls are running all amok, casting out names, coordinates and legends, defunct cartographies dredged up from unravelling memory, on to a territory also unravelling, buckling, shredding. The radium-coloured zigzags in Tild’s hair are tangling and unravelling too, transversals warping and distending with the globe’s schizoid projections. The G-force is playing tricks with her and Tszvetan’s facial muscles, tautening and stretching mandibles and orbitals and infraorbitals, setting them in arrangements that are manic and yet also strangely calm – like the stokers’ expressions, acquiescent, happy, utterly committed to a process that’s been willed and dared, and that’s now daring them. Tszvetan, wrenching at Tild’s shoulder, turning both their bodies round so that they’re facing outward, bulging eyes pressed right against the sclera of the dome’s own bulging eyeball, says to Tild:
‘It’s waiting for us.’
Despite all the roar, the splintering and smashing, he doesn’t have to shout. The magnetospheric overhaul, the atmospheric stripping brought on by the solar wind, has imposed intimate acoustics in which the sound-waves carrying his voice convey it to her as directly as if he’d spoken straight into her skull, or in the dome, the whispering gallery, of a silent cathedral. At the same time, propagating without amplifying it any more, they carry it all over: along each of the Sidereal’s tunnels, corridors and bays, up and down its sump-tanks, masts and vent lines, skirts and cones and baffles – and beyond, over Fidelus’s termination shock, throughout its heliosheath. The intimacy’s general. It encompasses way-distant clusters, all the hypergiants and subgiants, binaries, deltas and cepheid variables, the furtive aggregates of dusty clouds, the welcoming abyss into which, willing the dome to shatter, he and Tild are preparing to leap. Is that what Tszvetan meant by ‘it’? Is that what’s waiting for them? The abyss? Or did he mean the leap itself: the doing of it, the enactment of its moment, the split second at which time makes contact with eternity? His words, replaying now like a universal echo, vest all power of decision in the it, not in the lovers: it’s the it that’s clasping them within its holding pattern, offering them their only course of action, the choice of doing what they have no choice but to do: to yield, to surrender to this omnipresent and elusive place, this instant whose happening can take place only as a pause, a waiting …
Motherboards hum. Tower fans’ roars modulate as they rotate. Soren checks the time: 3:21 a.m. He does this on his desktop, since he’s not allowed to have a phone down here, nor any other interface with what’s beyond the door. The upper world could end without him knowing it; could have, somewhere between frames 37,204 and 37,275, between the last SVN update and the one before, between a dust fleck’s impetus towards a new rotation and the putting of this into motion, the conception of a shadow cast out by a fork tine and the shadow’s generation, ended. Soren often finds himself entertaining – running, updating, revising – fantasies of emerging, blinking, into the next day’s light to find that London has been nuked, zombie apocalypsed or fire-and-brimstoned from existence. He was raised Methodist, taught to believe in the end of time, in rent and rapture. Render: the word, now, still carries echoes of his first encounter with it, Mark 12: 17 – Render therefore unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s. And of his second, also in the church in which he sang each Sunday, surpliced and cassocked choirboy, number 103 in the Welsh Hymnal: All laud we would render: O help us to see … He hears, from time to time, more frequently the tireder he gets, the hymn’s words, the tune, its cadence, slinking through the farm’s background, foreground and surround sound, replaying in his head, an ear-worm:
Immortal, invisible, God only wise,
In light inaccessible hid from our eyes …
… then Something, blessèd, glorious, Ancient of Days, then more light: unresting, un-something and silent as light … pure Father of light; Thine angels adore thee, all veiling their sight … and clouds which are fountains … something … and then back to light again: ’Tis only the splendour of light hideth thee … It’s not just him remembering, half-remembering, them: the lines are being sung to him actively, it seems, by voices not quite human – maybe super-, of a higher order, angels, dancing in the circuitry, light inaccessible, wisdom pronounced in muffled tones, in shh code; or maybe sub-, the half-formed tongues of entities themselves only half-formed, half-thought, held within some limbo of not-quiteness: foetus-beings, unbaptised, unsaved, their fallenness surrounding them like artefacts, RGB-separated halos of imperfection. In the last fully rendered sequence, committed to SVN as avi file 7,021, light from Fidelus, its corona’s plasma-stream, is washing the Sidereal’s command antenna, pouring into and through it, liquefying it while, reciprocally, the antenna, its assembly mount and the surrounding fuselage are pouring out too, shedding their forms to flow, proton, electron, alpha particle, into the sunlight, like gold melting. Rendering, as Soren knows full well because it’s what his mother thought his job involved when he first told her about it, can mean smelting iron, lead or brass; also reprocessing (this is what his grandmother understood his new métier to be) the overspill of slaughterhouses, the already-butchered carcasses of cows or chickens: grinding, steaming, crushing them still further to extract the fat or tallow, to squeeze out a tiny bit more profit, one last ounce of mulch …
On his desktop, through the VNC window, Soren watches frame 37,289 go through its one hundred and sixty-fourth render pass. The physics, the material properties, the specular qualities and a dozen other factors have been overlaid, grafted on one another, and the finished image is now looming into view. It’s a close-up of Tszvetan’s skin: his bulging forehead pressed right up against the now almost impossibly overpressured sapphire glass. Skin is translucent; it’s notoriously hard to get the balance of fleshiness and luminescence just right in a normal setting (sitting in a bedroom, walking down a street or even riding a horse or spaceship into battle in a stable light environment), let alone when you’ve got multiple reflections and a general collapse of the physical field in which both light and skin reside. And then the porousness, the hairs … One integer, one digit off the mark, and suddenly you’ll have great clumps of thick-weave pushing through the membrane like diseased rabbit fungus. In those instances he has to pull the frames out, send them back into production, and the progress bar back-ticking too. Those are the easy calls: the harder ones come when it’s just one or two pixels, one fragment of flesh or hair or shadow in the wrong place for a fraction of a second, miniature sub-error no one’s going to notice – until someone does, not necessarily his line manager, nor even Herzberg, Dressel, Incarnation’s ten or twenty million viewers; it’s that twenty million and first, that nerd who spots it on his fifteenth streaming, pulls it out, posts it on badrender.com, and the shame wends its way slowly but surely back to Soren, settles on him like a rash. Even harder: if the image is fine but he can see an error in the code behind it, inactive for now, but … Does he wave it through since no one else is going to know; or will this error, like a bullet in an unused chamber, work its way round eventually, a few roulette turns on, and splatter brains, his or someone else’s maybe but his fault, forensically retraceable to him, to this decision or avoidance of, this moment of deferral …?
Tszvetan’s temple, although bulging and stretching to the limits of epidermal tolerance, is intact. Its underlying code is sound. Tild’s skin, too, tautening in manic yet calm determination, retains its integrity; her hair’s geometry may be going wildly wrong, but it’s going wrong in a way consistent with the render code, the right way. Stokers, too, and grilles, airlocks and panels are flying apart correctly, each of their parts following trajectories consistent with those of each of the other parts, the collisions between, the currents and back-swells acting on them generated by the previous currents and collisions, the trajectories and back-swells plotted by the software. As each frame completes its final pass, it’s posted on the same screen as the progress bar, remaining there until the next completed frame replaces it. The order of succession follows that not of the film itself, its narrative, but rather of the sequence in which each of the twenty-three frames being worked over in each batch is spat out of its rendering pen, assigned an avi number and held up for scrutiny both here and in DZ’s linked spaces, like (to go old-school once more) a newly developed photographic print being pegged up dripping on a darkroom clothesline. The last one out, the one drying on the progress-bar screen right now, shows, in close-up, a pressure-gauge dial mid-eruption, glass face cracking like sheet caramel, the needle detaching, propelled outwards on its spring like an ejector seat. The next, replacing it now, shows, in wide-shot, a long jet of light that was correction engine similarly leaping from the ship – initially as a coherent streak, then fraying as its wavelengths fluctuate and part, then finally, at the shot’s far edge, being reamalgamated as the colour-threads are gathered and subsumed, like candyfloss strands, by the larger clumps of light spinning and amassing in Fidelus’s heliosheath. Here’s that Livnära fork again, free-floating trimaran cast loose from the Sidereal, ploughing its way hungrily towards Fidelus as though to devour it, to be devoured. This is an orgy of consumption, cosmic autophagia, space eating itself, chucking itself up, swallowing itself again, viscera and linings involuting to ingest whatever’s just ingested them: plasma-wave, loading bay, dome, termination shock, temple, abyss …
Tszvetan and Tild are through the Observatory’s pane now – through it and within, both here and there, as though they’d broken through the boundary not just of the sapphire glass but also of their bodies, of their senses, at once dispossessed and occupying the other side of them, looking at both themselves and space, all space, from any and all points, possessing each of them convulsively. Seeing is touching; light is vision; laud we would render; 71 per cent complete … And, most miraculous of all, amidst the deformation and the involution, there are forms: there is consistency; faces and landscapes – eyes, smiles, zigzags, outlines of Kernwinal Hills and Marais wildlands – still, flying in the face of possibility, persisting …
The sequence-file Soren’s got open on his desktop, playing and replaying through the speakers, is the one containing Tszvetan’s line: It’s waiting for us. As it loops, it, too, breaks down: swaitingf … swaitingf … swaitingf … It’s 4.17. The splendour of light hideth. The adoring angels are speaking in tongues now, echolalia. The room, like the Sidereal, like termination shock and heliosheath, is melting and reforming. In the choir, they kept their vestments in the sacristy off to the side, on hooks, beside the albs and stoles and cinctures of the clergy. Reverend Edwards always liked to watch the boys change, their white flesh. Shh. Soren’s dozing. Photons shoot off the corona. In The Beatitudes, Lillian’s eyes are blighted, cataract-occluded, lenses glazed and clouded. Faded colours, halos, rays of that deep light which in itself is true, nel suo profondo vidi che s’interna, saw gathered together, legato con amore, bound by love into a single volume, leaves that lie scattered through the universe, squaderna, shh, substance and accidents and their relations, I saw as though they fused in such a way, that what I say is but a beam of light.
Out past the double door, on the stone staircase, halfway up or maybe halfway down, two junkies are, like Soren, on the nod. Do they have names? Of course – but these will only show up near the end of some long credit roll nobody ever bothers watching, least of all them. The farm’s noise carries to them, but out here it’s less aggressive, its roar muffled, almost lulling. It’s still physical, though, a buzz and tremor rolling out in waves, washing their crumpled bodies, holding them in place. As each new wave crosses the unmanned border of their consciousness it ripples slightly, bending and diffracting; then it, too, starts to disintegrate as it heads further in, towards the lower reaches, to a blackness neither rays nor traces penetrate.