telephone. He'd never been more than ten miles from the place he was born. How do you think you would explain 1967 to him…?'
Scratched my head. Interesting question -and not the first time I'd had this conversation. Time-ravelers deal with short-term displacements, tieing up the loose ends of unraveling lives. 'Well, telephones, I guess he could get that. And probably radio. Yeah, wireless telegraphy, so… probably he'd understand radio. And if he could get it about radio, he'd probably get it about television too. And cars -there were cars then, not a lot-so he'd understand cars and probably paved roads and indoor plumbing. Airplanes too, maybe. Lots of people were working on that stuff then.'
'Right. Okay. But it's not the inventions, it's the side effects. Do you think he'd understand freeways, road rage, drive-through restaurants, used-car commercials? You could describe spray paint, would he understand graffiti?'
'I suppose that stuff could be explained to him.'
'Okay. And how about the not-so-obvious side effects of industrialization- unions, integration, women's rights, birth control, social security, Medicare?'
'It might take some time. I guess it would depend on how much he wanted to understand.'
'And how about Nazis, the Holocaust, World War II, Communism, the Iron Curtain? Nuclear weapons? Detente? Assymetric warfare?'
'All of that stuff is explainable too.'
'You think so. Okay. Relativity. Ecology. Psychiatry. How about those? How about jazz, swing, rock and roll, hippies, psychedelics, recreational drugs, op art, pop art, absurdism, surrealism, cubism, nihilism? Kafka, Sartre, Kerouac?'
'Those are a little harder. A lot harder, I guess. But-'
'How about teaching him that he needs to take a bath or a shower every day instead of just once a week on Saturday night? How do you think he'd feel about shampoo and deodorants and striped toothpaste?'
'Striped toothpaste?'
'That comes later. Do you think he'd get it? Or do you think he'd wonder that we were all a bunch of over- fastidious, prissy little fairies?'
'Oh, come on. I think a man from 1900 could get it. They weren't stupid, they just didn't have the same access to running water and water heaters and - '
'It's not about the technology. It's about the transformative effects that technology produces in a society. He could understand the mechanics and the engineering easily enough, but the social effects are what I'm talking about. How long do you think it would take to assimilate sixty-five years of societal changes?'
Shrug. 'I don't know. A while. Okay, I get your point.'
'Good. So how long do you think it will take before I can talk to you about bio-fuels, trans fats, personal computers, random access memory, operating systems, cellular telephones, cellular automata, fractal diagnostics, information theory, consciousness technology, maglevs, the Chunnel, selfish genes, punctuated equilibrium, first- person shooters, chaos theory, the butterfly effect, quantum interferome-try, chip fabrication, holographic projection, genetic engineering, retro-viruses, immunodeficiencies, genome decoding, telemars, digital image processing, megapixels, HDTV, blue-laser optical data storage, quantum encryption, differential biology, paleoclimatology, fuzzy logic, global warming, ocean desertification, stem-cell cloning, Internexii, superluminal transmission, laser fluidics, optical processing units, stamina boxes, buckyballs, carbon nanotubes, orbital elevators, personal dragons, micro-black holes, virtual communities, computer worms, telecommuting, hypersonic transports, scramjets, designer drugs, implants, augments, nanotechnology, high frontiers, L5 stations - '
I held up a hand. 'I said, I get the point.'
'I was just warming up,' Eakins said. 'I hadn't even gotten as far as 2020. And I haven't even mentioned any of the societal changes. It would take a year or two to explain cultural reservoirs, period parks, contract families, role-cults, sex-nazis, religious coventries, home-buses, personal theme parks, skater-boys, droogs, mind-settlers, tanking, fuzzy fandom, alienization, talking dogs, bluffers, bug-chasers, drollymen, fourviews, multi-channeling, phobics, insanitizing, plastrons, elf-players, the Zyne, virtual mapping, Clarkian magic, frodomatic compulsions, deep-enders, body-modders -'
'I think I saw some of that-'
'You have no idea. You want to change your appearance? You want to be taller? Shorter? Thinner? More muscular? Want to change your sex? Your orientation? Want to go hermaphroditic or monosexual? Reorganize your secondary characteristics? Design a new gender? Mustache and tits? Want a tail? Horns? Working gills? Want to augment your senses? Your intelligence? Or how would you simply like the stamina for a six-hour erection?' Thought about it. 'I'll pass, thanks. The intelligence augments, however-'
'There's a price - '
'More than twenty-five million?'
'Not in money. And we haven't even touched on the political or economic changes since your time.'
'Like what-?'
'Like the dissolution of the United States of America -'
'What?!'
'You're in the Republic of California, right now, which also includes the states of Oregon and South Washington. The rest of the continent is still there, we just don't talk to them very much. There's sixteen other regional authorities, not counting the abandoned areas, and seven Canadian provinces -there's a common defense treaty in case the Mexicans get aggressive again, but that's not likely. Don't worry about it. The web has pretty much globalized the collective mindset, we're not predictively scheduled to have another war until 2039, and that'll be an Asian war, with our participation limited to weapons contracts. In the meantime, we'll legalize you as a time- refugee. Most of the old records survived. Digitized. We have your birth certificate. You're a native. So you won't have any trouble getting on the citizen rolls. Otherwise, you'd be a refugee and you'd have to apply for a work permit, a visa, and eventually naturalization.'
'I'm not staying-'
'You're not going back-'
'I can't stay here. You've already shown me how out of step I am. What if I promised not to interfere -?'
'You already broke that promise. Three times. You can't be trusted. Not yet, anyway.' He took a long breath, exhaled. 'You know, you're really an asshole. You really fucked things up for everyone - especially yourself. We were going to bring you aboard. After you finished your probation. It would have been a year or two more, your time. Now, I don't know. I don't know what we're going to do with you. It depends on you, really.'
'What are my options -?'
He shrugged. 'Let's see what Brownie says.' He pulled out that remote thing again and spoke into it. A few moments later, another man -man? -entered the room.
Brownie had copper-gold skin, almost metallic. Eyes of ebony, no whites at all. Perfectly proportioned, he moved with the catlike grace of a dancer. He wore shorts, a vest, moccasins. Body-mods? No, something else -
'Hello, Mike.' His voice was rich contralto. Not male, not female, but components of each. He offered his hand. I stood up, took it, shook firmly. His skin felt warm. 'Just stand still for a moment, please.' Brownie released my hand and circled me slowly. He opened his palms and held them out like antennae, moving them slowly around my head, my neck, my chest, my gut, my groin.
He finished and turned to Eakins. 'Preliminary scans are good. He's healthy. As healthy as can be expected for a man of his time. I'll need to put him in a high-res field, before we make any decisions, but there are no immediate concerns.'
Abruptly, it clicked. I turned to Brownie, honestly astonished. 'You're a robot.'
'The common term is droid, short for android.'
'Are you sentient?'
'Sentience is an illusion.'
I looked to Eakins for explanation. He grinned. 'I've already had this conversation.'
Looked back to Brownie, skeptical.
Brownie explained. 'Intelligence-the ability to process information and produce appropriate responses -exists as a product of experience. Experience depends on memory. Memory needs continuity. Continuity requires timebinding,
