“It would be a very strange situation,” Pluto said. He pointed out the window of the restaurant, up into the sky. “A piece of Earth is up there. Sundered. Separated forever. Not coming back.” Then he lowered his aim and pointed down at the floor. “While down inside the earth is alien stuff. Stuff that doesn’t belong. The residue of the thing that hit us and sundered the world.”
Richard had been worried that D-squared would find Pluto incomprehensible and that the entire interview would be one long series of excruciating faux pas. But, perhaps because Cameron lived and dined with Premier League nerds at Cambridge, he seemed perfectly at ease with the shaggy Alaskan demiurge. He was either fascinated by Pluto’s idea, or putting forth a commendable effort to feign fascination, and it didn’t matter which. “Is it your idea that this alien planetesimal remains intact and hidden below the surface?”
“Way deep down, a big chunk of it might be intact,” Pluto said, “but some of it would have been melted and carried away by magma flows. But not dissolved. It would manifest on the surface of T’Rain as veins of special ores and so on.”
“Of course!” said Don Donald. “And the cultures that arose on the planet’s surface, knowing nothing of the geological facts, would come to recognize the special properties of these ores, whatever they might be.”
“If the physics of the planetesimal were different, like because it came through a wormhole from another universe or something, then that would provide a basis for what we call magic,” said Pluto, “and the metallurgists, or whatever, who learned how to exploit it would become alchemists, brewers of potions, sorcerers—”
“And they would get busy manufacturing lots of NOMOs,” Richard put in, just in case anyone was losing sight of this. Because he had played enough games to know that NOMOs equaled valuable virtual property which equaled cash flow for Corporation 9592. “I think my work here is done,” he said, rising to his feet by the always-safe drunken expedient of leaning against a wall as he straightened his legs. “I shall leave you two to work out the details.”
Not for the first time, the future survival and prosperity of the company was secured by Pluto’s memory. After talking to D-squared for another couple of hours, he went home and wrote it all down in an emacs document entitled “it.txt,” which was later transmogrified into “it.docx” and thereby founded a lineage of more discursive documents and wiki pages, and a project and then a department that were all called “it” until one of the professional managers who had begun to infiltrate the company raised her eyebrows and it all had to be renamed Narrative Dynamics. The first major initiative of which had been to hire Devin Skraelin.
The gist of “it,” as Richard only found out much later (he was a big believer in delegating responsibilities to people who actually cared about them), was that the T’Rainian biosphere supported two distinct types of DNA, one made exclusively out of original T’Rain elements, the other commingled with trace amounts of stuff from the swallowed planetesimal and therefore imbued with “magic,” where “magic” was now a social construct invented by T’Rain’s sentient races to explain the different physics that governed the alien atoms. Some species were made entirely of the mundane DNA, some were hybridized with a bit of the alien stuff, and a very few were made of 100 percent alien material and consequently had angelic/demonic/godlike qualities, though these had trouble reproducing since it was difficult to round up a sufficient biomass of the right kind of stuff.
Of course. it was way more complicated than this made it sound; and it wasn’t long before tables and tree diagrams had to drawn up to keep it all straight, but this was the gist of it.docx, which, in its fully fledged, nine-point-seven-megabyte incarnation, they had handed off to Devin when they had made him the first, and the last, Writer in Residence.
“HOW’S ZULA DOING?” Richard asked, trying to get a conversation started with Pluto. They were over the High Plains now and he supposed that his traveling companion might have less to gaze at.
“I haven’t seen her in a few days,” Pluto said, without taking his eyes off the window. Perhaps his attention had been seized by the meanderings of the Platte.
So that gambit had failed. Richard considered his options. Other people would want to sentimentalize about the old days, but the great thing about traveling with Pluto was that he only cared about you to the extent that you were interesting to him now. In that way he kept you on your toes. No aspect of the relationship could be counterfeited when it was being minted anew from moment to moment.
“I meant,” Richard said, “how’s she doing in the job?”