going apeshit crazy. His eyes close and he thrashes around for calm. He tries to summon the details that the audiotape reels off. The straight, bronze spears of beech buds. The buds of a red oak, massed on the branch tips like maces. The hollow end of a sycamore’s leaf stem, cupped over next year’s start. The taste of a black walnut and the look of its monkey-faced leaf scars.
After a while, they start to solidify—simple at first, but gaining grain. The way a maple in spring flushes red from the top. The polite applause of aspens. A yew reaching out, like a parent taking a child’s hand. Whiffs of scratched hickory nut. Dams break and memories flood him, like the million keyholes of light coming down through the palms of a horse chestnut. The angle between locust thorns. The turbulence in a piece of turned olive wood. Sprays of a mimosa’s foliage, like the tails of tropical birds. The secret writing on peeled-back birch bark, its words blurred and cryptic. Walking under Lombardy poplars where the calm was so heavy that even inhaling seemed a crime. Scraping against a cypress and thinking, This is what the afterlife should smell like.
He may be the richest man who ever lived. So rich he can lose it all and still turn a profit. He stands next to the green cinder-block wall, its paint like shiny, hardened flesh. He looks up into the fall of light and tries to recall. His hand presses where it always does, against the walnut in the side of his belly, just above his belt. Something is in there, a sizable seed, impossible to picture, not an ally, but life just the same.
ANOTHER RICH MAN—the sixty-third richest in Santa Clara County—sits in his own confinement, typing into a screen. Does it matter where? The words Neelay writes add to a growing organism, one that has just now begun to add to itself. At other screens in other cities, all the best coders that several hundred million dollars can hire contribute to the work in progress. Their brand-new venture into cooperation is off to the most remarkable beginning. Already their creatures swallow up whole continents of data, finding in them the most surprising patterns. Nothing needs to start from scratch. There’s so much digital germplasm already in the public domain.
The coders tell the listeners nothing except how to look. Then the new creations head off to scout the globe, and the code spreads outward. New theories, new offspring, and more evolving species, all of them sharing a single goal: to find out how big life is, how connected, and what it would take for people to unsuicide. The Earth has become again the deepest, finest game, and the learners just its latest players. Wild in their diversity, they fly up, flock into the datasphere like origami birds. Some will thrive for a while, then fall away. The ones that hit on something right will increase and multiply. As Neelay has learned with the greatest pain: Life has a way of talking to the future. It’s called memory.
. . .
OTHER LEARNERS, born yesterday, study every button Judith Hanson clicks. They follow her to the gargantuan film archive, where thirteen more years of new video have sprouted so far today. Learners have already watched billions of these clips and begin to make their inferences. They can identify faces now, and landmarks, books, paintings, buildings, and commercial products. Soon enough they’ll start guessing at what the films mean. Life is speculation, and these new speculations strain to come alive.
Mimi clicks. Videos line up beneath the headline clips, gathered by invisible agents smart enough to know that if Judith Hanson watched that she will surely want to watch these. Life Defense Force. Forest Wars. Redwood Summer.
Mimi binges. Each six-minute clip takes forever, and she rarely lasts more than a few dozen seconds. She clicks on a clip called ArBoReal. It was posted months ago and has already acquired thousands of thumbs up and down. The opening shot fades in from black on a clear-cut as far as the eye can see. Ancient wooden instruments play a resigned chorale prelude that unfolds so slowly, the whole intricate mechanism of its inner lines might as well be stopped. She doesn’t know the piece; the learners could tell her what it is. The learners can already name ten million tunes in a few notes.
The camera zooms in on a massive stump as big as a pocket