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 threading the eye of a needle, and it felt as if my hands were tied behind my back, or as if my limbs had been amputated.
Taking some deep breaths, I tried to relax.
The sun was bravely fighting its way through the wet skies, and small collections of people had begun to install themselves on the low-slung green and white striped loungers scattered across the grassy expanse at my end of the park. I was heading directly towards the Constabulary near the eastern end of the Serpentine. On my rambles through Hyde Park I always ran a historical skin so that I could enjoy the Crystal Palace of the Great Exhibition of 1851, and I could see its roof gleaming past a copse of trees in the distance.
It seemed I’d developed a thing for Crystal Palaces.
Right at that moment, however, that same reality overlay was projecting the Tyburn gallows next to a gaggle of old ladies who’d slumped into their loungers in the middle of the field. An execution was in progress, or at least a hanging. The ashen corpse of Oliver Cromwell spun slowly in the breeze, much to the delight of the crowd collected for the spectacle that had ushered London into 1661.
“Old Crommie is dancing the Tyburn jig!” leered an impish woman whose ghost, soiled in sodden rags and rotten teeth, appeared faintly near me amid that long ago crowd.
No matter which way I turned, death seemed to surround me. Quickly I cropped the reality skin into a narrow window of time around the present and 1851, and the crowd and execution dropped away.
Visions of the trail around the Serpentine pond floated into my consciousness as my splinters walked ahead of me, and I collapsed my probable paths to head towards Kensington Road and the entrance of the Crystal Palace, towards the quiet cool of the ancient oaks that stood there, quietly marking their own way through time.
Patricia Killiam had asked to speak with me today. Walking across the edge of the park I summoned up a media feed of her in another of her endless string of press conferences. As an early supporter of much of the deep technology behind the Phuture News Network, Patricia and I had become quite close over the years. In the overlaid visual display, a reporter was just asking her a question.
“Isn’t the world population stable now, even declining?” asked the reporter. “Shouldn’t that help calm the resource shortages?”
“The core problem isn’t population,” explained Patricia, “but that everyone wants to live lives of material luxury. Supporting ten billion middle class citizens on planet Earth was never going to work, and the only solution is to create a simulated reality that is good enough to satisfy our material cravings.”
It was probably the millionth time that Patricia had gone through this, and I could see the fatigue in her eyes, even the synthetic ones projected in the mediaworld I was splintering.
“And why is this proxxi thing such a key part of all this?” asked the same reporter.
“Right now, if you go off into an alternate reality,” she explained, “you just sit there like a potato. If something happens to your body in the real world while you’re away, you have no defense. Do you agree?” The reporters nodded.
“Your proxxi controls a dynamic image of your neural wetware so it can control your physical body when you’re away,” she continued. “This way you can seamlessly drop off into any synthetic space any time you like—even in the middle of a conversation your proxxi can finish it for you. It’s like an airbag for your body and mind, except that this airbag can act as your official representative.”