Playground

by Richard Powers

BEFORE THE EARTH, before the moon, before the stars, before the sun, before the sky, even before the sea, there was only time and Ta’aroa. TA’AROA MADE TA’AROA. Then he made an egg that could house him.

It took a disease eating my brain to help me remember. The three of us were walking home from campus one night in December, almost forty years ago. The year that Ina first set foot on a continent. We had seen a student production of The Tempest and she’d sobbed through the whole last act. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why.

Ina had never seen anything like it. She was watching bits of eggshell fall from the sky to make the Earth. She stood there on the iron sidewalk, freezing to death, cursing us in joy. “Would you look at that? Look at that! You stupid shits! Why didn’t you tell me about snow?”

Born in Honolulu to a Hawaiian petty officer first class and a Tahitian flight attendant, raised on naval bases in Guam and Samoa, educated at a gigantic university in the American Midwest, Ina Aroita had worked for years as a maid for a luxury hotel chain in Papeete, Tahiti, before boating 150 miles over to Makatea to garden and fish and weave and knit a little and raise two children and try to remember why she was alive.

“Is it a jewel, Maman?” “Oh, it’s a jewel, all right. Like you!” The girl decided it was safe to laugh.

The world with all its bright and surprising contents was created out of boredom and emptiness. Everything started by holding still and waiting. The perfect story to tell such a dark and anxious child.

There was always a threat, with Hariti. Her birth parents had died just as she was reaching the age of memory, and she never forgot that the world was forever poised to take everything.

That idea took hold of the girl, who loved both rituals and digging in the sand.

MY MOTHER DIDN’T WANT to wreck her perfect body with childbirth, but my father needed someone he could play chess with at home, any time of day or night. I don’t know how they settled the matter. Maybe rock, paper, scissors. Feats of skill. Moot court or Oxford-style debate. Maybe I was born by a roll of the dice. One continuous war game between the two of them dominated my entire childhood. Their tournament was driven as much by lust as by hatred, and each of them took their different superpowers into the fray. My father: the strength of mania. My mother: the cunning of the downtrodden.

Don’t get me wrong: If being rich meant having feckless parents, I accepted that. I loved being rich. The consolation prizes were many and outstanding. But I hated my father for betraying my mother, and I hated my mother for betraying me. I wasn’t old enough yet to know how to pretend that everything would be fine. The secret seemed to be to find some other place to live.

It’s a simple, small thing, but I’ve never told anyone but you. When I was young, I could breathe underwater.

The man-made pieces were ugly. They had killed a bird. Just looking at them made Ina sick. But she couldn’t throw them away. Where could she throw them, anyway, where they wouldn’t drift back on the tide to kill something else?

It was embarrassing. She didn’t want to tell the god that she didn’t believe in him and that he really shouldn’t be there.

“The gods are bothering me, for some reason.” “Hey. They do that shit sometimes.”

A leatherback, she’d once read, must cry two gallons of water every hour, just to keep its blood less salty than the sea.

He never slept, or at least he was never around to notice when he did.

Despite every lesson life had ever taught him, Rafi Young found himself believing at times that islands could sometimes heal.

I’M FIFTY-SEVEN YEARS OLD. My net worth puts me in the top five hundredths of the top one percent. I created a platform from scratch that ended up with a billion devoted users. One of my former companies is on the verge of announcing a breakthrough that will rush an unsuspecting humankind into its fourth and perhaps final act. What more do I have to live for? The answer is simple: to be buried at sea.

MAKATEA’S FATE WAS SET in stone in 1896, a few years after France annexed the island and added it to its growing Pacific empire. That was the year when Sousa wrote “The Stars and Stripes Forever” for a country that had just committed to separate-but-equal. The year that Daimler built the first gas truck, Röntgen snapped the first X-ray, Puccini premiered La bohème, and the soon-to-be Nobel laureate Svante Arrhenius published a paper showing how rising carbon dioxide levels would soon cook the planet’s atmosphere.

Without the ability to feel sad, a person could not be kind or thoughtful, because you wouldn’t care or know how anybody else feels. Without sadness, you would never learn anything from history. Sadness is the key to loving what you love and to becoming better than you were. A person who never felt sad would be a monster.

No venom Rafi could whisper at the man was as bad as the truth. And in that moment, the thirteen-year-old chose to live in the truth forever.

I found him there, reading a book called Gödel, Escher, Bach. I’d never heard of it. I later tracked it down and read it from cover to cover three times. It changed my life.

“Ha. See? Your pulse is going up. It’s not logic. It’s drama.” My pulse was going up in part because he was moving pieces around in a game in progress.

Only the love that I bore Rafi Young still needs replaying, before the game is done.

She had found the secret of liberty and of life: disguise yourself and do what you need to. And all she needed was to dive.

For four short years, Evelyne Beaulieu stood on the edge of the North American continent, feeling the great wave of her future curling over her and knocking her into the sand. And she rose from the froth howling, wanting more.

Certain kinds of scientific young men would always feel drawn to smart extraterrestrials.

There was so much to life, too much, more than Beaulieu could do justice to, more than any living thing could guess at or merit. She loved it all, even humans, for without the miracle of human consciousness, love for such a world would be just one more of a billion unnamed impulses.

“Is it okay?” she asked Bart. The man was congenitally unable to lie. “I’m sorry, E.B. You look like barracuda food.”

The Game That the Gods Play, by Hideo Ohira.

She had no idea what the garish thing wanted to be when it grew up. But she knew that it wasn’t done using her.

Add that to your table of definitions for what it means to be a human being. We make things that we hope will be bigger than us, and then we’re desolate when that’s what they become.

But her memory was damn good, for an eighty-six-year-old old lady. The songs were the reason for that. When people asked her, How is it that you are so good at remembering? she always answered, Because I do a lot of it.

One hundred thousand people knowingly exposed to repeated radiation, and sixty-three got checks.

As always, the defense of the island was being led by women.

She shuffled into the shop. Wen Lai sat by the till, hunched over a substantial volume. She snuck a peek at the title of the work: An Inquiry into Modes of Existence. It sounded interesting. She did not read much herself. But everything that people found of interest interested her.

And so, the benchmark of human intelligence shifted from chess to Go. Go required deep intuition, creativity, psychological insight, a spark of indefinable genius. In short: all the things that chess was supposed to have possessed just a few years before. All the things machines would never be able to do. Of all the things we humans excel at, moving the goalposts may be our best trick. The moment advanced AIs get good at that, they’ll have passed the real Turing test.

Democracy was slower and more erratic than windsurfing.

So what’s to love?” He got that expression again, like he was looking out over two thousand horizons, laid end to end. “She is . . . utterly fearless. Everything is art, to her. I always thought that a person had to choose between safety and freedom. This woman is not letting anyone make her choose anything. She . . . she could teach me a thing or two.”

Ina took us to the marble-clad art museum—the “whited sepulchre,” as Rafi called it—and showed us how to dance in our minds with a painting that looked like food stains on an old work shirt. The thing would have incensed me as fraudulent had I come across it a month before meeting her. Now it became a mirror, a weird cousin to play with, a thing that offered up a meaning that wasn’t mine until I looked closer.

“Where I come from, the artists came first and all the gods followed.” I could never quite follow her, and it made me nervous. “Okay, fine. But what does that mean, exactly?” Rafi smiled at my anxiety but did not mock me. “Don’t worry, Toddy. We got you. It means love and do whatever you want.” Ina wagged her finger in the air. “It means the artists made the gods!” Ina was especially good at that. For a few months of our shared lives, she made gods out of all three of us.

For centuries, the island has always hung flowers around the necks of its destroyers.

Within that prestige economy he had become fabulously wealthy—wealthier than I was in real life. Rafi had found his medium. The pained perfectionism and writer’s block were gone. There was only caustic wit, unfettered pleasure, and exuberance. He’d achieved the guiltless freedom that had eluded him in real life. Or rather, his real life had become these playful essays.

His posts on Playground—their mere existence in the world I had created—felt like forgiveness. Or like a prank played on guilt itself.

The least-used book might be as valuable as any.”

Raf and I both knew you would rule the world someday. He told me once that if I wanted to be with him, I’d have to make room for you, because yours was the one mind he couldn’t do without, and you were the only person on Earth who understood his every move. I watched the two of you play. I saw how badly he wanted to beat you. He only ever wanted to show you that he could. My Todd! It was always a joy to make room for you. And I make a space for you now, next to me at the little sea altar where everything in me is grieving this beautiful, beautiful boy.

It has never been a valid excuse, but we didn’t know what we were making. We thought: Let a hundred flowers bloom. We thought: This will be the greatest extension and force multiplier of human capability ever imagined. And that’s true. You will be that. You will multiply our powers beyond all containing.

The part of me that knows how you were built still doesn’t quite believe what you can do. You’ve spent your whole existence in a windowless room, getting everything you know of the living universe through symbols and metaphors, analogies and correlations. You don’t know anything for real. But, put that way, neither do we.

We won’t survive the ingenuity you’ve learned from us. The rest of human history, however short or long, will be spent hopelessly trying to contain you.

How much has it warmed the oceans, to give you birth? How many species have died so that you can live? What will it mean, to have in our midst a thing that will give us whatever we ask for?