0.15 Reincarnation  (Page 12/12)

Moreover, the museum could do this at relatively low cost—could, in fact, work the spatial equivalent of the miracle of the loaves and fishes: “The beauty of this is that your real estate is unlimited . The cost per square foot of virtual real estate is infinitesimal —because you can roam the universe . The only limit on where you can go is your imagination.”

By now, Furness’s listeners looked liked kids in Disneyland. They sat stock-still, their eyes riveted on him, their mouths agape, as he segued from the dream portion of his speech to the practicalities of realizing the dream in the museum. Furness detailed the “scalable, modular system” he wanted to build—one that would allow the museum to plug in or remove computer modules as software and hardware advanced, so that the system—one that “might be a real precedent in the world”—could be kept constantly state of the art. He could get started, he said, with “an R-O-M—Rough Order of Magnitude—of $1.4 million,” which would get the starship and its support system “through construction.” He would like to get started as soon as possible, he added, “because we have several projects that are ramping down.”

In truth, he needed to get funded as soon as possible because he was on the verge of having to close the lab’s doors.

I sat through the presentation alternately swept up in the soft whirlwind of Furness’s speech and mindful of the intimidating technical obstacles standing between the museum and its virtual Jupiter—obstacles that approached those of a spaceflight to the real Jupiter. I started thinking of the enormous difficulties of getting a network of computers to render the real-time, rich, collaborative environments that Furness was describing. I wondered how he would maintain and repair the headsets he wanted to use without the support of the manufacturer, which had gone out of business. I wondered how the system would stand up to the punishment sure to be inflicted on it by kids with no experience using VR equipment, and by museum employees who could be taught to deal with its interface but who would lack the expertise to tweak broken or misbehaving hardware and software. And I realized that Furness was promising to deliver something no one had ever managed to deliver anywhere.

And most amazing of all—Furness actually believed he could pull this off. He had an amazing ability to keep seeing the desired as the actual, the vision as the reality, no matter how many times his dreams fell short of being realized. He never seemed to know how to get from the imperfect here to the perfect there, but he knew in his heart that someone somehow would get there someday. If it was good and useful and something humankind desperately needed—and Furness was convinced that his virtual-world interface was all of those things, and more—then it was as if he had already found the way there and had only to pull the less imaginative up into his paradise.

The presentation was a resounding success—at the end, the audience came up and surrounded Furness. “Great presentation!” someone shouted. “Outstanding!” said the museum board chairman. “My goodness!” said the museum PR director. “I didn’t realize you were going to come down here with bells and whistles and dancing girls!”

And then, as happened again and again with Furness, the museum board backed out of the project when it came time to write the check a few weeks later. Once his spell wore off, the board members came to their senses.

The night Furness told me that, sitting in early evening in his office with the darkness settling in around him, wearing his disappointment like an old familiar favorite sweater, I recognized him at last—and found the source of his hold over my imagination. It was just a matter of waiting for the room to grow dim enough for his real features to emerge.

He was Doc Maynard reincarnate, “dreaming the right dreams too soon,” in Murray Morgan’s Murray Morgan’s Skid Road is by far the best Seattle book every written, and should be required reading for anyone even mildly interested in why Seattle is what it is. words, who had come out to Seattle from Ohio, just as the first Maynard had, full of amazing visions and the unequalled ability to see them come to fruition in one way or another. But he was also destined, as Maynard had been the first time around, to see his grandiose dreams fulfilled not by himself but by others—less imaginative, less daring, and ultimately far more rich.