Advanced science, of course, profited enormously from the web. The groups at the Center could now read journal articles months before they hit print. The data Autobahns had no speed limit. They plunked one in front of any results on earth before you could read the "Connect. " Researchers peered into colleagues' labs on other continents, in real time. They shared data in 3D, as they gathered it.
On all sides of my cubicle, experimenters scoured the nodes. The net reduced duplication of effort and helped pinpoint crucial results they otherwise might have missed altogether. Instant telemessaging produced an efficiency that fed back into steeper invention. And invention accelerated the universal linkup.
But the longer I lurked, the sadder the holiday became. People who used the web turned strange. In public panels, they disguised their sexes, their ages, their names. They logged on to the electronic fray, adopting every violent persona but their own. They whizzed binary files at each other from across the planet, the same planet where impoverished villages looked upon a ball-point pen with wonder. The web began to seem a vast, silent stock exchange trading in ever more anonymous and hostile pen pals.
The web was a neighborhood more efficiently lonely than the one it replaced. Its solitude was bigger and faster. When relentless intelligence finally completed its program, when the terminal drop box brought the last barefoot, abused child on line and everyone could at last say anything instantly to everyone else in existence, it seemed to me we'd still have nothing to say to each other and many more ways not to say it.
How long could I show up at the Center and produce nothing of use to anyone? The productivity problem.
The pure-research problem. The inspiration, the blind-trust problem. I could drift without limit and still not be reprimanded. I had the year gratis. I might do nothing but prime the pump, rest and recharge, and still I would not ruffle so much as a mite's mood where it camped out on the eyelash of the emergent digital oversoul.I meant to milk the new book for as many weeks of touch-up as I could get away with. Past that point I tried not to speculate. Three times before, the end of a long project had kicked off the start of another. I'd mastered the art of surviving narrative whiplash. No reason, in theory, why I couldn't regroup again. Go on and work forever.
But this time felt different. This time, after I paid my Pied Piper account, nothing waited for me on the far side of story's gaping mountain. Nothing but irremediable Things As They Are.
What little diversionary work remained I dragged out for all it was worth. Two Kbytes of new text or four of reasonable revision honorably discharged me of the day. Beyond that, I could indulge my remaining hours in good faith. A page and a half freed me to go and do as I liked.