THE BOY WHO’LL HELP CHANGE humans into other creatures is in his family’s apartment above a Mexican bakery in San Jose watching tapes of The Electric Company. In the kitchen, his Rajasthani mother chokes on clouds of ground black cardamom that clash with the cinnamon of pan fino and conchas trickling up from the bakery below. Outside, in the Valley of Heart’s Delight, the ghosts of almond, cherry, pear, walnut, plum, and apricot trees spread for miles in every direction, trees only recently sacrificed to silicon. The Golden State, the boy’s parents still call it.
The boy’s Gujarati father comes up the stairs balancing a massive box on his broomstick body. Eight years before, he arrived in this country with two hundred dollars, a degree in solid-state physics, and a willingness to work for two-thirds of his white colleagues’ salaries. Now he’s employee number 276 at a firm rewriting the world. He stumbles up two flights underneath his load, humming his son’s favorite song, the one they sing together at bedtime: Joy to the fishes in the deep blue sea, joy to you and me.
The child hears his steps and rushes to the landing. “Pita! What is it? A present for me?” He’s a seven-year-old little Rajput who knows that most of the world is a present for him.
“Let me come in first, Neelay, please-thank-you. A present, yes. For both of us.”
“I knew it!” The boy goose-steps around the coffee table hard enough to clack the steel balls on the pendulum toy. “A present for my birthday, eleven days early.”
“But you have to help me build it.” The father nurses the box onto the table, pushing the clutter to the floor.
“I’m a good helper.” The boy counts on his father’s forgetfulness.
“And that will take patience, which you are working on, remember?”
“I remember,” the boy assures him, tearing at the box.
“Patience is the maker of all good things.”
The father steers his son by the shoulders into the kitchen. Mother barricades the door. “Don’t come in here. Very busy!”
“Yes, hello, too, moti. I got the computer kit.”
“He tells me he got the computer kit.”
“It’s a computer kit!” the boy shrieks.
“Of course you got the computer kit! Now you two boys go play.”
“It’s not exactly playing, moti.”
“No? Go work, then. Like me.” The boy yips and tugs at his father’s paw, pulling him back to the mystery. Behind them, the mother calls out, “One thousand words memory or four?”
The father blossoms. “Four!”
“Four thousand, of course. Now go away and make something good.”
THE BOY POUTS when the green fiberglass backplane comes out of the box. “That’s a computer kit? What use is that?”
His father grins the most foolish grin. The day is coming when use will be rewritten by this thing. He reaches into the box and turns up the heart of the matter. “Here it is, my Neelay. Look!” He holds up a chip three inches long. His head wags with pleasure. A look dangerously like pride spreads across his ascetic face. “Your father helped make this one.”
“That’s it, Pita? That’s a microprocessor? It’s like a bug with square legs.”
“Oh, but think what we managed to put inside.”
The boy looks. He remembers his father’s bedtime stories from the last two years—tales of heroic project managers and adventuring engineers who suffer more mishaps than the white monkey Hanuman and his entire monkey army. His seven-year-old brain fires and rewires, building arborized axons, dendrites, those tiny spreading trees. He grins, cagey but uncertain. “Thousands and thousands of transistors!”
“Ach, my smart little man.”
“Let me hold it.”
“Chh, chh, chh. Careful. Static. We could kill this fellow before he even comes to life.”
The boy blooms with luscious horror. “It’s coming to life?”
“If . . . !” The paternal finger wags. “If we get all our solders right.”
“Then what will it do, Dad?”
“What do you want it to do, Neelay?”
In front of the boy’s widening eyes, the component turns into a jinn. “It does whatever we want?”
“We just have to figure out how to get our plans into its memory.”
“We’re putting our plans in there? How many plans will fit?”
The question stops the man, as simple ones sometimes do. He stands lost in the universe’s weeds, hunched a little from the stronger gravity of the world he visits. “Someday, it may hold all the plans we have.”
His son scoffs. “This little thing?”
The man scrambles up to the bookshelf, takes down the family scrapbook. A few flips, and he calls out in triumph. “Hee! Neelay. Come see.”
The photo is small, green, and mysterious. A tangle of giant boa constrictors pour out of broken stone.
“See, na? A tiny seed fell on this temple roof. After centuries, the temple collapsed under the seed’s weight. But this seed just keeps going and going.”
Dozens of braided trunks and roots feed on the ruined walls. Tentacles drip down to fill the chinks and split stones open. A root thicker than Neelay’s father’s body creeps across a lintel and seeps like a stalactite into the doorway beneath. This vegetable probing horrifies the boy, but he can’t look away. There’s something so animal in the way the trunks find and follow the openings in the masonry. Like those other kinds of trunks—the trunks of elephants. They seem to know, want, find their way. The boy thinks: Something slow and purposeful wants to turn every human building into soil. But his father holds the photo in front of Neelay as if it proves the happiest destiny.
“You see? If Vishnu can put one of these giant figs into a seed this big . . .” The man leans down to pinch the tip of his son’s pinkie. “Just think what we might fit into our machine.”
THEY BUILD THE BOX over the next several days. All their solders are good. “Now, Neelay-ji. What might this little creature do?”
The boy sits frozen by possibility. They can release any process they want into the world, any kind of willful thing. The only impossible thing is how to choose.
His mother calls from the kitchen. “Teach it to cook the bhindi, please.”
They make it say, “Hello World,” in flashing coded lights. They make it say, “Happy Birthday, Neelay Dear.” The words that father and son write arise and start doing. The boy has just turned eight, but in this moment, he comes home. He has found a way to turn his innermost hopes and dreams into active processes.
Right away, the creatures they make begin to evolve. A simple, five-command loop expands into a beautiful segmented structure of fifty lines. Little portions of program detach into reusable parts. Neelay’s father hooks up a cassette tape player, for easy reloading of their hours of work in mere minutes. But the volume button must be set just right, or everything explodes with a read error.
Over the course of a few months, they graduate from four thousand bytes of memory to sixteen. Soon they leap again, to sixty-four. “Pita! More power than any human has ever had to himself in all of history!”
The boy loses himself in the logic of his will. He housebreaks the machine, trains it for hours like it’s a little puppy. It only wants to play. Lob a cannonball over the mountain onto your enemy. Keep the rats out of your corn harvest. Spin the wheel of fortune. Seek and destroy every alien in the quadrant. Spell the word before the poor stick man hangs.
His father sits watching what he has unleashed. His mother bunches up her blouse-tails in her fist and berates all males within earshot. “Look at the boy! He just sits and types. He’s like a sadhu, stoned on something. He’s hooked, worse than paan-chewing.” His mother’s hectoring will go on for years, until her son’s checks start rolling in. The boy never stops to answer. He’s busy making worlds. Small ones, at first, but his.
There’s a thing in programming called branching. And that’s what Neelay Mehta does. He will reincarnate himself, live again as people of all races, genders, colors, and creeds. He’ll raise decaying corpses and eat the souls of the young. He’ll tent high up in the canopies of lush forests, lie in broken heaps at the bottom of impossibly high cliffs, and swim in the seas of planets with many suns. He’ll spend his life in the service of an immense conspiracy, launched from the Valley of Heart’s Delight, to take over the human brain and change it more than anything since writing.
There are trees that spread like fireworks and trees that rise like cones. Trees that shoot without a ripple, three hundred feet straight skyward. Broad, pyramidal, rounded, columnar, conical, crooked: the only thing they do in common is branch, like Vishnu waving his many arms. Among those spreaders, the wildest are the figs. Strangler trees that slip their sheaths around the bodies of others and swallow them, forming an empty cast around their decomposed hosts. Peepal, Ficus religiosa, the Buddha’s Bo, their leaves tapering into exotic drip tips. Banyans that plump out like whole forests, with a hundred separate trunks fighting for a share of the sun. That temple-eating fig in his father’s photo inhabits the boy. It will keep on growing faster with each new chunk of reusable code. It will keep on spreading, searching the cracks, probing all the possible means of escape, looking for new buildings to swallow. It will grow under Neelay’s hands for the next twenty years.
Then it will flower to become the boy’s belated thanks for an early birthday present. His homage to skinny little Pita, lugging that massive shipping box up the apartment stairs. His praise to Vishnu, known only through cheap newsprint Hindi comic books he could never read. His farewell to a species turning from animal into data. His effort to raise the dead and make them love him again. So many trunks growing downward from the same tree. The seed his father plants in him will eat the world.
THEY MOVE INTO A HOUSE down the valley along El Camino, in Mountain View. Three bedrooms: Such luxury confuses Babul Mehta. He still drives a twenty-year-old car. But every five months he upgrades the computers.
Ritu Mehta panics each time a new crate arrives. “When does it end? You’re pauperizing us!”
The garage fills with so much old gear the car won’t fit. But every component, however outdated, is a marvel of mind-boggling complexity created by a team of heroic engineers. Neither father nor son can throw even these obsolete miracles away.
The snail’s pace of Moore’s law tortures Neelay. He’s starved for more RAM, more MIPS, more pixels. Waiting for the next barrier-breaking upgrade takes a tenth of his young life. Something inside these tiny, mutable components is waiting to get out. Or rather: there’s something that these reticent things might be made to do, something humans haven’t even imagined yet. And Neelay is on the verge of finding and naming them, if he can only find the next new magic words.
He skitters through the schoolyard like a traitor to childhood. He learns the shibboleths—the famous refrains from countless sitcoms, the hooks of pernicious little radio tunes, the bios of fifteen-year-old sexpot starlets he’s supposed to be slayed by. But at night, his dreams fill not with playground battles or the day’s take-down gossip but with visions of tight, lovely code doing more with less—bits of data passing from memory to register to accumulator and back in a dance so beautiful he can’t begin to tell his friends. They wouldn’t know how to see what he put in front of their eyes.
Every program tunnels into possibility. A frog tries to cross a busy street. An ape defends himself with barrel bombs. Under those ridiculous, blocky skins, creatures from another dimension pour into Neelay’s world. And there’s only the narrowest window of time in which to really see them, before these things that never were turn into things that have always been. In a few years, a kid like him will be given cognitive behavioral therapy for his Asperger’s and SSRIs to smooth out his awkward human interactions. But he knows something certain, before almost anyone else: People are in for it. Once, the fate of the human race might have been in the hands of the well-adjusted, the social ones, the masters of emotion. Now all that is getting upgraded.
He still binges on old-school reading. At night, he pores over mind-bending epics that reveal the true scandals of time and matter. Sweeping tales of generational spaceship arks. Domed cities like giant terrariums. Histories that split and bifurcate into countless parallel quantum worlds. There’s a story he’s waiting for, long before he comes across it. When he finds it at last, it stays with him forever, although he’ll never be able to find it again, in any database. Aliens land on Earth. They’re little runts, as alien races go. But they metabolize like there’s no tomorrow. They zip around like swarms of gnats, too fast to see—so fast that Earth seconds seem to them like years. To them, humans are nothing but sculptures of immobile meat. The foreigners try to communicate, but there’s no reply. Finding no signs of intelligent life, they tuck into the frozen statues and start curing them like so much jerky, for the long ride home.
HIS FATHER IS THE ONLY PERSON Neelay will ever care for more than he cares for his creations. They understand each other, with no words spoken. Neither of them is happy unless they’re sitting at a keyboard together. Cuffs of the neck and pokes in the ribs. Teasing and giggles. And always that gentle, head-tilted, singsong lilt: “Watch out, Neelay-ji. Be careful! Don’t abuse your powers!”
The whole wide universe waits to be animated. Together, they must create possibilities out of the smallest atoms. The boy wants scales and songs, but his machines are mute. So Neelay and his father create their own sawtooth waves, clicking the little piezo speaker on and off so fast it starts to sing.
His father asks, “How is it that you have turned into a creature of such concentration?”
The boy doesn’t answer. They both know. Vishnu has put all of living possibility into their little eight-bit microprocessor, and Neelay will sit in front of the screen until he sets creation free.
In middle age, the boy will be able to drag a cute icon and drop it into a tree diagram, producing in one flick of the wrist things that took him and his father six weeks of evenings in the basement together to create. But never again, this sense of the inconceivable, waiting to be conceived. In the redwood-trimmed lobby of the multimillion-dollar office complex paid for by a galaxy right next to this one, he’ll hang, for many years, a plaque inscribed with the words from his favorite author:
Every man should be capable of all ideas, and I believe in the future he shall be.
ELEVEN-YEAR-OLD NEELAY makes his Pita a kite for Uttarayan, the great kite festival. Not a real kite: something better. Something the two of them can fly together without anyone in Mountain View thinking they’re ignorant cow-worshippers. He tries out a new technique for animating sprites he read about in a mimeographed hobby magazine called Love at First Byte. The idea is clever and beautiful. You rough out the kite in different sprites, then poke them directly into video memory. Then you shuffle them onto the screen like a flip-book. The first little flutter makes him feel like God.
His brainstorm is to write the program so that it can itself be programmed. Let the user key in the melody of his choice, with simple letters and numbers, then make the kite dance to that rhythm. The grandeur of the plan spins Neelay’s head. His Pita will set his own kite dancing to a real Gujarati tune.
Neelay fills a loose-leaf binder for the project with notes, diagrams, and printouts of the latest version. His father picks up the binder, curious. “What is this, Mr. Neelay?”
“You don’t touch that one!”
His father grins and bobs. Secrets and gifts. “Yes, Neelay, my master.”
The boy works on the project when his father’s not around. He takes it to school, that maze of halls full of organized torture that will inspire many a dungeon crawl of his later making. The black notebook binder looks official. He pretends to take notes in it, while working on his code. His teachers are too flattered to suspect.
His plan works like clockwork until fifth period—American literature, with Ms. Gilpin. The class is reading Steinbeck’s The Pearl. Neelay kind of likes the story, especially the part where the baby gets stung by the scorpion. Scorpions are outstanding creatures, especially giant ones.
Ms. Gilpin drones on about what the pearl symbolizes. To Neelay, it’s a pearl. He’s beating his head against a real problem: how to synchronize the dancing kite with the music. He flips through pages of printout when the solution jumps out at him: two nested loops. It’s like the gods draw it in bright chalk on his mind’s blackboard. He burbles to himself, “Oh, yeah!”
The class bursts out laughing. Ms. Gilpin has just asked, “No one wants to see the baby die, do they?”
Ms. Gilpin daggers everybody silent. “Neelay. What are you doing?” He knows not to say a word. “What’s in the notebook?”
“Computer homework.” Everyone laughs again at the insane idea.
“Are you taking a computer course?” He shakes his head. “Bring it here.”
Halfway through the journey up to her desk, he considers tripping and spraining his ankle. He hands over the notebook. She flips through it. Drawings, flowcharts, code. She frowns. “Sit down.”
He does. Ms. Gilpin returns to Steinbeck while he soaks in a pool of injustice and shame. After the bell, when the room clears, he returns to Ms. Gilpin’s desk. He knows why she hates him. His kind will drive hers extinct.
She opens the notebook to grids filled with images of blocky kites. “What is this?”
She has no idea of Uttarayan, or what it’s like to have a father like his. She’s blond, from Vallejo. Machines are her enemy. She thinks logic kills everything fine in the human soul. “Computer stuff.”
“You’re a smart boy, Neelay. What don’t you like about English? You’re so good at diagramming sentences.” She waits, but can’t outlast him. She taps the notebook. “Is this a game of some kind?”
“No.” Not the way she means it.
“Don’t you like to read?”
He feels sorry for her. If she only knew what reading could be. The Galactic Empire and its enemies are sweeping across the entire spiral of the Milky Way, waging wars that last for hundreds of thousands of years, and she’s worried about those three poor Mexicans.
“I thought you liked A Separate Peace.”
He liked it enough. It even punched him in the lungs, a little. But he can’t see what that has to do with getting his private property back.
“Doesn’t The Pearl interest you? It’s about racism, Neelay.”
He stands blinking, as at his first contact with alien intelligence. “Could I just get my notebook back, a little? I won’t bring it to class anymore.”
Her face crumples. Even he can see how he’s betrayed her. She thought he was in her camp, but he has slipped away from her over the weeks and turned enemy. She touches his notebook and frowns again. “I’m going to hold on to it for now. Until you and I are back on track.”
In a few years, students will shoot their teachers over less. He goes to her office at the end of the day. He fills his mind with sincere reform. “I’m very sorry about working in my notebook when you were teaching.”
“Working, Neelay? Is that what you were doing?”
She wants a confession. She wants him to thank her for saving him from the perils of playing games while all the rest of the class was hard at work extracting fiction’s pearls. Fifty hours of effort on his father’s kite lies four feet away, unreachable. She wants to humiliate him. Outrage boils over. “May I have my damn notebook back? Please?”
The word slaps her. Her eyes set and she goes to war. “That is a demerit. You swore at a teacher. What will your parents say?”
He freezes. His mother will fell him with one great blow, like so much jhatka meat.
Ms. Gilpin checks her watch. Too late to send him to the principal. Her boyfriend is picking her up in ten minutes. They’ll laugh together over the pigheadedness of this Indian boy with his notebook full of hieroglyphs. How he insisted that it wasn’t play. She turns into a pillar of authority. “I want you back at this desk tomorrow morning, before the first bell. Then we’ll talk about what you have coming to you.”
The boy’s blood hammers and his eyes burn.
“You may go.” Her eyebrows do a little push-up of command. “Until tomorrow. Seven a.m. sharp.”
HE NEEDS TO THINK. He skips the bus and heads home on foot. The day is one of those eerie Central Peninsula imitations of heaven—seventy degrees and clear, the air thick with bay laurel and eucalyptus. He drags along the familiar route at half his usual pace, past the modest middle-class bungalows that people will soon pay a million and a half for, just to tear down and rebuild. He has to make a plan. He swore at a teacher, and his old, golden life shatters in the single, terrible syllable. This disrespect of white people will cripple his father. Patience, Neelay. Reserve. Remember? Remember? Word will spread through the community of Indian expats. His mother will die of disgrace.
He walks along the fingerprint-whorl of tree-lined streets, that neighborhood hemmed in by three highways. Four blocks from home, he cuts through the park, the place he goes whenever his parents force him outdoors. The path snakes through a gauntlet of low-slung encinas with phantasmagoric branches growing since California was Spain’s remotest outpost. If he’s ever noticed the species at all, it was only in the movies: the trees of Sherwood and Bagworthy, stand-in forests to frighten Pilgrims and challenge castaways. When Hollywood needs trees, it turns to the only nearby broadleaf that will do.
They beckon, bizarre, dreamlike, contorted. One huge beam of branch swoops toward the ground like it’s lying down to rest. A single swing, and from that low branch Neelay shimmies up into the roost, where he sits like he’s seven again. There, he takes stock of his ruined life. From high up in this crazy cantilevered oak, looking down on the sidewalk where two kids swing a stick at pebbles and a humpbacked white-haired woman walks her dachshund, he can see this whole mess from Ms. Gilpin’s eyes. She wasn’t wrong to reprimand him. And yet, she stole his property. The whole disaster, from up in this crow’s nest, has what Ms. Gilpin might call moral ambiguity.
He makes room on the oak’s sinuous branch for the two boys from A Separate Peace. He watches them play their white-guy, prep school games of love and war in their tree above their river. Way below, the brown-green California ground bounces each time a breeze pitches the branches. He knows almost nothing of his parents’ world, but one thing is as certain as math. Shame, for Indians, is worse than death. Ms. Gilpin may already have called them with details of his crime. His head throbs at the thought and his tongue tastes metal. He hears his mother howl: You let that rat-haired woman humiliate your whole family? Soon a distant country filled with aunts, uncles, and cousins will know what he has done.
And his poor father, who has made himself invisible for years, just for the right to live and work in this Golden State: he stares at Neelay in horror, wondering how a child might be so arrogant as to think that he could talk back to an American authority and live.
Neelay peers down from this oak aerie onto the path below, his mind a mass of tangled code. An idea flashes through him, a glimpse of easy peace. If he could get dusted up a little bit, it might win him the sympathy vote. You can’t beat up on a wounded boy. Delicious terror strokes his neck, like it does when he watches old Twilight Zones. The idea is nuts. He must suck things up, go home, and take his punishment. He leans out for a good look at the big picture, his last for a while. His parents will ground him for months.
He sighs. Steps down onto the branch below him to descend. And slips.
There will be years to wonder whether the branches jerked. Whether the tree had it in for him. Limbs slam him on the way down. They bat him back and forth like a pinball. Earth rushes up. He lands on the concrete path and bounces on his coccyx, which cracks the base of his spine.
Time stops. He lies on his shattered back, looking upward. The dome above him hovers, a cracked shell about to fall in shards all around him. A thousand—a thousand thousand—green-tipped, splitting fingerlings fold over him, praying and threatening. Bark disintegrates; wood clarifies. The trunk turns into stacks of spreading metropolis, networks of conjoined cells pulsing with energy and liquid sun, water rising through long thin reeds, rings of them banded together into pipes that draw dissolved minerals up through the narrowing tunnels of transparent twig and out through their waving tips while sun-made sustenance drops down in tubes just inside them. A colossal, rising, reaching, stretching space elevator of a billion independent parts, shuttling the air into the sky and storing the sky deep underground, sorting possibility from out of nothing: the most perfect piece of self-writing code that his eyes could hope to see. Then his eyes close in shock and Neelay shuts down.
HE WAKES DAYS LATER in the hospital, strapped down and vised. Tubes restrain his arms and legs. Two wedges press against each ear, arresting his head. He can see nothing but ceiling, and it isn’t blue. He hears his mother shout, “His eyes are open.” He can’t understand why she keeps sobbing those words, like they’re a bad thing.
He lies in a cloud of narcotic unknowing. Sometimes he’s a string of stored code in a microprocessor bigger than a city. Sometimes he’s a traveler in that country of surprise that he’ll come to build, when machines are at last fast enough to keep up with his imagination. Sometimes monstrous, splitting tendrils come after him.
The itching is insane. Every spot above his waist is unreachable fire. When he drops back down to earth again, his mother is there, curled up in the chair next to his bed. A change in his breathing wakes her from her sleep. His father is there, too, somehow. Neelay worries; what will his employers say when they discover he’s not at work?
His mother says, “You came down out of a tree.”
He can’t connect the dots. “Fell?”
“Yes,” she argues. “That’s what you did.”
“Why are my legs in tubes? Is that to keep me from breaking things?”
Her finger wags in the air, then touches her lips. “Everything will be fine.”
His mother doesn’t say such things.
The nurses ease him by degrees off the pain drip. Anguish sets in as the drugs dry up. People come to see him. His father’s boss. His mother’s card-playing friends. They smile like they’re doing calisthenics. Their comfort scares the crap out of him.
“You’ve been through a lot,” the doctor says. But Neelay has been through nothing. His body, perhaps. His avatar. But he? Nothing important in the code has changed.
The doctor is kind, with a tremor when his hand drops to his side, and eyes that fix on a blank spot high up on the walls. Neelay asks, “Can you take the vise-things off my legs?”
The doctor nods, but not in agreement. “You have some mending to do.”
“It’s bugging me, not to be able to move them.”
“You concentrate on healing. Then we’ll talk about what happens next.”
“Can you at least take off the boots? I can’t even wriggle my toes.”
Then he understands. He’s not yet twelve. He has lived for years in a place of his own devising. The thought of countless good things passing out of his life doesn’t quite occur to him. He still has that other place, the heaven in embryo.
But his mother and father: they fall apart. Awful hours set in, days of disbelief and desperate bargaining that he won’t remember. There will be years of supernatural solutions, alternative practices, and miracle cures. For a long time, his parents’ love will make his sentence worse, until they finally put their faith in moksha and accept that their son is a cripple.
HE’S STILL LYING in the traction bed, days on. His mother has stepped away on an errand. Maybe not by chance. His teacher comes through the doorway, all warmth and energy, prettier than he remembers.
Something goes wrong with her face. But then, people’s faces always look wrong, from his new vantage place, underneath them. She comes near and touches his shoulder. It freaks him.
“Neelay. I’m glad to see you.”
“I’m glad to see you, too.”
Her whole torso trembles. He thinks: She knows about my legs. The whole school knows. He wants to tell her: It’s not the end of the world. No crucial world, anyway. She talks about the class and what they’re reading now. Flowers for Algernon. He promises to read it by himself.
“Everyone misses you, Neelay.”
“Look.” He points to the wall, where his mother has taped the giant fold-out card signed by the entire ninth grade. She breaks down. He’s helpless to do anything. “It’s okay,” he tells her.
Her head jerks up, crazy with hope. “Neelay. You know I never meant . . . I never thought . . .”
“I know,” he says, and wants her gone.
She pushes her face back with two splayed palms. Then she reaches into her satchel and retrieves his notebook. The kite program for his father. “This belongs to you. I should never . . .”
He’s so happy he doesn’t even hear the words she keeps on mouthing. He thought the notebook was gone forever, another thing he’d never get back from his life before the tree dropped him.
“Thank you. Oh, thank you so much!”
A moan comes out of her. When he looks up, she turns and runs. Distress lasts only until he opens the notebook. Then he lies flipping through the recovered pages, remembering everything. So much work, so many good ideas—saved.
Six years pass. Puberty transforms Neelay Mehta. The boy shoots up into a fantastic creature: Seventeen years old, six-foot-six, 150 pounds, and fused to his wheelchair. His torso stretches out. Even his legs, shriveled to thick twigs, grow stupidly long. His cheeks shift like continental plates and his face spawns shoals of pimples. Black wires sprout from his once-pristine privates. He drops from soprano to high tenor. His hair grows as long as a Kesh-practicing Sikh’s, though he doesn’t tie it up into a rishi knot. He lets it flow in thick vines that fall all around his elongated face and down his bony shoulders.
He lives in his rolling metal rig—captain’s chair on a starship forever voyaging through strange regions of thought. Some people who can no longer walk grow fat. But those people eat. He gets through the day on fifty cents of sunflower seeds and two caffeinated sodas. Of course, he rarely spends a pointless calorie. Once he rolls up to his custom desk in the morning, his CPU tower and CRT need more power than he does. His fingers graze the keyboard and his eyes scan the screen, but his brain burns considerable glucose as he fashions his prototype creations, in eighteen-hour increments, command by careful command.
Stanford accepts him, two years early. The campus is just up El Camino. Its CS department flourishes, fertilized by extravagant gifts from the founders of his father’s company. Neelay has haunted the campus since the age of twelve. Long before he starts school as an official freshman, he’s a de facto mascot of the computer science set. You know: the ectomorph Indian kid, in the fancy chair.
Something is being born in the bowels of half a dozen different buildings across the Farm. Magic beanstalks erupt everywhere, overnight. It comes up in conversation with friends, in the basement computer lab where Neelay hangs out and codes. They can be a taciturn bunch, but on Sunday nights, the coders lift their heads from their do-loops long enough to dole out the liter soda bottles and break pizza crusts together, while shooting a little philosophical shit.
Someone says, “We’re evolution’s third act.” Sauce dribbles from his gaping mouth.
It’s like they all have the idea together. Biology was phase one, unfolding over epochs. Then culture throttled up the rate of transformation to mere centuries. Now there’s another digital generation every twenty weeks, each subroutine speeding up the next.
“Chips doubling their transistor count every eighteen months . . . ? I mean, take Moore’s law seriously, man.”
“Say it holds for the rest of our lives. We could live another sixty years.”
A giggle passes through them at the insane math. Forty doubling periods. Stratosphere-high piles of rice on the fabled chessboard.
“A trillionfold increase. Programs a million million times deeper and richer than the best thing anybody’s yet written.”
They pause for sober marveling. Neelay hangs his head over his untouched pizza, staring at the wedge as if it’s a problem in analytic geometry. “Living things,” he says, almost to himself. “Self-learning. Self-creating.” The whole room laughs, but he doubles down. “So fast, they’ll think we’re not even here.”
AT FIRST, the point of coding is to give everything away. Pure philanthropy. He’ll find a marvelous seed program in the public domain. Then he’ll flesh it out, add new features, switch on his 1,200-baud modem, dial in to a local bulletin board, and upload the source for anyone who wants to grow it some more. Soon his creatures propagate on hosts across the planet. Every day people around the globe add new species to the repositories. It’s the Cambrian Explosion all over again, only a billion times faster.
Neelay gives away his first masterpiece, a turn-based romp where you play a Japanese movie monster eating its way across the world’s metropolises. Hundreds of people in a dozen countries grab it, even at forty-five minutes per download. So what if playing it does to your free time what the monsters do to Tokyo? His second game—conquistadores ravaging the virgin Americas—is another freeware hit. A Usenet group forms just to trade game strategies. The program generates a new, geologically realistic New World each time you play. It turns any grocery store bag boy into stout Cortez.
His games spawn imitations. The more people steal from him, the better Neelay feels about his chair-bound life. The more he gives away, the more he has. From his vantage, stranded in his wheelchair in a basement lab, whole new continents swing into view. The gift economy—free duplication of well-shaped commands—promises to solve scarcity at last and cure the hunger at the heart’s core. The name Neelay Mehta grows mini-legendary among the pioneers. People thank him on dial-up boards and in game news groups. College kids talk about him in chat rooms as if he’s some Tolkien character. On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a beached, elongated freak, unable to move without machines.
But by his eighteenth birthday, paradise is sprouting fences. Former philanthropists of free code start taking out copyrights and making actual coin. They even have the nerve to form private companies. Granted, they’re still just peddling floppy discs in baggies, but it’s clear how things will go. The commons are getting enclosed. The gift culture will be throttled in the cradle.
Neelay blasts the betrayal at each week’s meeting of the Home-Rolled Club. He spends his free time re-creating one of the most famous commercial offerings, improving on it, then releasing the clone into the public domain. Infringement? Maybe. But every one of the so-called copyrighted properties relies on decades of prior unpaid art. For a year, Neelay plays Robin Hood, camped out in the anarchic forest with his merry men, under a massive oak older than the deed to the land it grows on.
HE WORKS FOR MONTHS on a role-playing space opera slated to be his greatest giveaway yet. The graphics are sixteen-bit high-res sprites, come to life in sixty-four glorious colors. He heads out on a hunt for surreal bestiaries to populate his planets. Late one spring evening he winds up in the Stanford main library, poring over the covers of golden age pulp sci-fi magazines and flipping through the pages of Dr. Seuss. The pictures resemble the mad vegetation in those cheap Vishnu and Krishna comics from his childhood.
Needing a break, he rolls across campus down Serra Mall to see what’s cooking in the labs. It’s near dusk, in that soft perfection that flavors this place for nine months of the year. He heads toward his cubicle in the networked lab, navigating as through a first-person adventure. The Oval’s grandiose palm arcade snakes away to his right. To his left, the Santa Cruz Mountains peek out from behind the fake Spanish Romanesque cloisters. Once, in another life, he walked the trails up near Skyline under the redwoods with his father and mother. Behind the mountains, half an hour away by wheelchair-ready van, lies the sea. The beaches and bays are not forbidden him. He visited them only three months ago. Several friends had to carry him down near the shore and set him in the sand. He sat and stared at the waves and watched the diving shorebirds and listened to their spectral complaints. Hours later, when his friends were done swimming and throwing Frisbees and chasing each other up and down the sand, he was the only one who hadn’t had enough.
He turns up the ramp to Memorial Court into the main quad, past Rodin’s life-sized Burghers of Calais. The night will be long, and he needs to stock up on snacks to power him through. He motors straight into the inner court, toward the back exit to the Union and all the best vending machines. Lost in his intergalactic plans, he almost mows down a group of Japanese tourists photographing the chapel. Backing away, apologizing, he runs over the toes of an elderly woman on her first trip abroad. She bows, mortified. Neelay extricates himself, slams the chair into a hard left, and looks up. There, in a car-sized planter, just to the side of the chapel entrance, bulbous and elephantine, is the most mind-boggling organism he has ever seen. It’s the thing he has been searching for, for his intergalactic opera. A living hallucination from a nearby star system at the other end of a wormhole in space. The groundskeepers must have snuck it in last night under cover of dark. Either that, or he has rolled past it every evening for months, without once seeing.
He wheels up to the tree and laughs. The trunk looks like a giant upside-down turkey baster. The branches skew and spike out at foolish angles. He reaches out to touch the bark. It’s perfect. Absurd. Up to something. A tiny placard reads: BRACHYCHITON RUPESTRIS. QUEENSLAND BOTTLE TREE. The name excuses nothing and explains even less. It’s an alien invader, as surely as Neelay.
He can’t decide which is more incredible: the tree, or the fact that he’s never noticed it. Shapes flicker on the edge of his vision. Something is happening behind his back. He has the overwhelming feeling of being watched. A silent chorus in his head sings: Turn and look. Turn around and see! He spins the chair in place. Nothing is right. The whole cloister courtyard has changed. One hyper-jump, and he has landed in an intergalactic arboretum. On all sides, furious green speculations wave at him. Creatures built for otherworldly climates. Crazies of every habit and profile. Things from epochs so old they make dinosaurs look like upstarts. All these signaling, sentient beings knock him back in his seat. He has never done drugs, but this must be what it’s like. Plumes of cream and yellow; a purple waterfall that evaporates before it touches the ground. Trees like freak experiments beckon from out of eight large planters, each one a miniature starship ark on its way to some other system.
Neelay sweeps the chair around the courtyard. His paraplegic body tenses as the council shimmers in their standing circle, watching him make the circuit. He rolls past another Seussian monster as alien as the first. He reads the tag: a silk floss tree, from Brazilian forests even now shrinking by a hundred thousand acres a day. Sharp-tipped warty cones cover the trunk, spines that evolved to fend off grazing beasts that went extinct tens of millions of years ago.
He rolls from planter to planter, touching the beings, smelling them, listening to their rustles. They have come from hot islands and desiccated outback, from remote valleys in Central Asia breached only recently. Dove tree, jacaranda, desert spoon, camphor tree, flame tree, empress tree, kurrajong, red mulberry: unearthly life, waiting to waylay him in this courtyard while he was searching for them on distant planets. He touches their bark and feels, just beneath their skins, the teeming assemblies of cells, like whole planetary civilizations, pulse and hum.
The Japanese tourists disappear back to their bus on Galvez. Neelay holds still in the emptied space, like a rabbit evading a raptor. He’s alone for no more than a few seconds. But in that interval, the alien invaders insert a thought directly into his limbic system. There will be a game, a billion times richer than anything yet made, to be played by countless people around the world at the same time. And Neelay must bring it into being. He’ll unfold the creation in gradual, evolutionary stages, over the course of decades. The game will put its players smack in the middle of a living, breathing, seething, animist world filled with millions of different species, a world desperately in need of the players’ help. And the goal of the game will be to figure out what the new and desperate world wants from you.
The vision ends, depositing him again in Stanford’s inner quad. The vision, religious and dark green, fades back into its Platonic shadow, wood. Neelay holds still, clinging to what he has just seen, the thing his brain has somehow apprehended, lurking out at the end of the curve of Moore’s law. He’ll have to drop out of school. No time for more classes now. He must pace himself for the long run. He’ll finish the quaint little role-playing space opera he’s working on, then put it up for sale. Real money, earth dollars. His fans will howl. They’ll smear him on the country’s dial-up bulletin boards as the worst traitor. But at fifteen bucks for thirty parsecs, the game will be a steal. The profits from his first foray into alien life will pay for the sequel, a game to surpass the original in ambition many times over. And by such small steps, he’ll get to the place he has just seen.
He rolls out of the cloister just as the light vanishes behind the mountains. The hills cast a shadow on themselves, bruise-blue turning to forgetful black. High up, beyond his sight, rocky outcrops crawl with manzanita, shedding their curling, crimson barks. Bay laurels rim the logger-made meadows. Canyons thicken with orange madrone peeling to creamy, clammy green. Coast live oaks like the one that crippled him gather on the crags. And down in cool riparian corridors smelling of silt and decaying needles, redwoods work a plan that will take a thousand years to realize—the plan that now uses him, although he thinks it’s his.