5
Time—Einstein famously said that it was purely an illusion, just a construct of the conscious mind. A nice idea, but try having this conversation with someone who sensed theirs ending. Time was something we all desperately wanted more of when it ran short, yet we wasted it frivolously when we thought we had enough.
I was in a bad mood after a long day of saving my own life dozens of times. Midnight was rolling around, and I’d just finished with the last of it. The air was calm and a full moon was out as I sat out on the top deck of my habitat, watching glittering waves swell over the kelp. I leaned back in my chair and considered my problem for a moment.
I could use a walk to clear my mind.
“Hotstuff, could you drop me into Retiro Park, near the Crystal Palace?”
The surging ocean and the outlines of my deck faded from view, replaced with afternoon sunshine and the greens and golds of Madrid’s Buen Retiro Park. I was standing on a gravel path beside the Crystal Palace as requested. It was one of my favorite places to take a walk when I was having a hard time with something.
I looked down at my hands, admiring their apparent solidity, and took a moment to gaze around the park. It never ceased to amaze me how well this technology worked. I could smell grass that was being noisily cut by a mower in the distance. A woman pushing a baby carriage passed by and glanced at me, smiling. I heard the gravel crunching under the carriage wheels and the soft burble of the baby inside.
Most people took the wikiworld—the collected audiovisual and sensor inputs of all people and networks and cameras spanning the world—for granted. But for those of us who had slaved away to make it a reality, it still evoked a certain sense of awe.
I took a deep breath, straightened up, and began walking down the path.
The wikiworld was great, but the thing that had made me really famous was the future—literally.
Science was, at its root, just a hodgepodge of rules for predicting the future. How to achieve the same sort of success science had in the physical domain, and replicate this to predict daily human life, had seemed beyond grasping, until I lit upon a place to start.
Slumbering one morning, my great idea came to me suddenly, as great ideas tended to do, and that idea was celebrity gossip. As social animals, gossip was something humans couldn’t do without.
A student of history, I’d noticed that as civilizations advanced, they tended to become more and more interested in the tiny details of famous peoples’ lives. The Romans were the great innovators, but it was modern America that had really taken it to new heights.
When you started with any new technology, you needed to establish a foothold, a niche you could call your own, and I’d been struggling to find a niche for synthetic future world predictions, or phuturing—a term I had coined. A “phuture” was an alternate future reality that sprouted off from the present moment of time. The future, with an “f,” was the actual, single future that you ended up sliding along your timeline into; but the future was only one of many possible phutures.
Weather forecasting and stock markets were well covered with established brands and pundits, but this wasn’t the kind of future I had been interested in. I wanted to know the future of individual people, on the most detailed possible levels.
A problem with making predictions, especially the ones involving people, was that as soon as they knew about a prediction, they would tend to confound it, and the more people that knew, the more confounding these effects became. My insight was that celebrities acted as a foil to this. Even when they were presented with a prediction concerning them, most enjoyed the attention enough that they would go along with whatever the prediction was.
We soon began to make a name for ourselves by scooping major news outlets to break stories that hadn’t even happened yet, beating entertainment and gossip media to the punch by featuring the celebrity headlines of the future before they even happened.
Celebrity gossip set the sails of the Phuture News Network to become a commercial success, and we gradually expanded our predictive systems to encompass nearly every aspect of daily life. Advertising revenue had skyrocketed as we began selling ad space for things we could predict people would want tomorrow, but it was nothing compared to the money people were willing to pay for the service itself. Almost overnight, we became one of the world’s most valuable companies, rising to the top of the tech industry in earnings and sales.
Kicking gravel down the path, I sent up a cloud of dust and overlaid a visual phuturecast onto it. I watched it as it was carried away by the wind, flowing into its future self as it dissipated and eventually disappeared.
On Atopia, we’d taken Phuture News to the next level and begun constructing perfect, sensory realistic phutureworlds. Some scientists began claiming that these weren’t just predictions, but portals into alternate parallel universes further forward along our timeline, and had started to use this as the technical definition of a “phuture.”
Not quite what I’d had in mind when I began the whole enterprise into divining tomorrow’s cocktail-dress-du-jour, but in all cases, people had begun to live ever more progressively in the worlds of tomorrow.
While the personalized future predictions we generated for people were private to them, as the owner of Phuture News, I built in one proviso: I could confidentially gain access to any and all phutures generated in order to build my own personal, and highly detailed, phutureworlds.
It had been fascinating to tie everything together, to peer into the collective future of the world. At least, it had been fascinating to begin with, until I could see far enough forward. Then it became depressing.
In all cases, it turned out that the biggest killer app of the future was the future itself, and sitting atop the greatest computing installation the world had ever known, I became the only person on the planet who could literally see into the world of tomorrow.
With great powers, they said, came strange responsibilities, and therein was the problem—for while I could see the future, it seemed that the future now refused to see me.
At least, it refused to see me in it.
Hotstuff had already snuggled my body comfortably into bed as I collapsed my subjective away from Retiro Park and back home. I sighed and pulled the sheets closer around me. It was time to get some sleep.
I had a feeling I’d need it.