I decided 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, and were replaced with afternoon sunshine and the autumn green 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 then looked around the park.
It never ceased to amaze me how well this technology worked; I could smell grass being noisily cut by a mower somewhere in the distance. A woman pushing a baby carriage passed by and glanced at me and smiled. I could hear 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 carried 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 seemed beyond grasping, until I lit upon a place to start.
As I slumbered one morning in a semi-lucid state, 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.
I stopped on my walk to smile at a group of people gathered at a crosswalk in the park. They obviously knew each other well, and stood chatting.
As a student of history, I’d noticed that as civilizations became greater, they tended to become greatly 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 had been struggling to find a niche for synthetic future world predictions, or phuturing as I coined the term. 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
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. Early in life, I had developed an obsession with it.
A problem with making predictions, the ones involving people was that as soon as they knew about the prediction, they would tend to confound it, and the more people that knew, the more confounding these effects became. My discovery was that celebrities tended to act 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 tomorrow today.
Celebrity gossip had initially set the sails of the Phuture News Network as 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.
Kicking gravel down the path, I sent up a small 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 had begun 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 had 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.
To begin with, it had been fascinating to tie everything together; in being able 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 had just become depressing.
But in all cases, it turned out that the biggest killer application 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 began 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.
5
“A GREAT EVIL will consume you all!” spat the deranged man from between tangled, yellowing teeth, his mottled face barely restraining a threatened apoplectic fit, as he balanced precariously atop an upturned four-gallon paint can.
Wheezing asthmatically, his eyes rolled up towards the damp skies before returning to earth and hunting through the crowd. His glassy gaze swung around to lock onto me, and I stared back. He trembled slightly, his already distended pupils widening as he peered into me.
“A great evil is already consuming you, sir,” he whispered, directly addressing me as I passed, and then screeched to the crowd, pointing at me, “A GREAT EVIL is upon us!”
I shivered and looked away, but nobody paid much attention.
It was early morning and I was off on another one of my walks to try and clear my mind, today through Hyde Park in London, and I was just passing Speakers’ Corner near Marble Arch. The steady thrum of the automated passenger traffic hummed in the background while the electric crackle of London City center hung just past the peripheries of my senses.
Early morning for me, but it was already well past midday here, halfway around the world from Atopia. The usual collection of crackpots and doomsayers had already installed themselves for the afternoon tourist crowds. I usually enjoyed standing and watching, listening to the passionate ramblings of the desperate men and women on their soapboxes, exhorting us to save ourselves. But today it felt wrong, or perhaps worse, it felt right.
Hunching inwards, I kept my eyes to the ground and wound my way through the crowd, making my escape towards the sanctuary of the park.
Even here in my virtual presence, I had to keep up my guard, a point-of-presence being a potential point of entry into my networks. I had a whole sentry system of future selves walking through the park in the immediate future ahead of me. Threading my way through the periphery of the crowd, my splintered ghosts walked seconds and minutes ahead of me, testing the informational flow through this path and that, dropping data honey pots here and there to pick up straggling invaders, testing for the safest narrow corridor into my future. Salvation for me was
