But who's going to make those spaces? Vulgamott wanted to know. Doesn't matter how wide the pipes get, if all we're going to pump through them is shit.
Aesthetic elitist, Rajasundaran said. You don't think that content is also an engineering problem?
Just you wait, Mikey. Once the Cavern develops an installed client base, things are really going to take off. Loque rolled the threat of fecundity around on her tongue tip, savoring it. If we can get the kinks out of voice-activated, user-directed, high-level VR-CAD, virtual spaces are going to come pouring out as fast as users can dream them up.
Vulgamott cocked his head. And when exactly is this breakthrough slated to happen?
By the end of the decade, Loque said.
Century, Jackdaw corrected.
Millennium, Rajan deadpanned.
Wait until the immersant starts to design pilot worlds on the fly. Clearly Loque couldn't wait. Who knows what will come pissing out of the collective imagination.
Kaladjian almost choked. Who wants to live in a world pissed on by the collective imagination?
We're approaching the point of full symbolic liberation. Free and infinite creation of imagery. Loque almost sang it, gospel-style.
What's the point? Ebesen asked. Wasn't there enough imagery out there already?
But reality had never been large enough, because the body had never been large enough for the thing it hosted. Where else but in the imagination could such a kludge live? The engineers carried on speculating. Human appetite would not stop short of the fully deformable universe. The walk-in hologram was right around the corner. Full-body force-feedback devices would extend illusion to the crucial sense of touch.
Electronic skin promised pleasures deeper than the real thing. Full six-direction telepresence would follow shortly thereafter, linking the mind to remote robotic agents anywhere in space, lifting human senses off the face of the planet.
Jackdaw opened up the latest hot topic — painting images directly onto the human retina. A couple of competing groups were busy honing micro-scanning lasers up to 10K by 10K scan lines, close enough to the resolving power of the retina to call an image continuous. Now if you can get the bandwidth to flip these images at fusing rates, you can take direct control of the whole field of vision. The complete airspace…
Belief, Adie said, is not a question of bandwidth.
Lim looked surprised. What else can it be? That's the variable, isn't it? A question of how much symbol you can fit in the pipe at one go…?
I'm taking bets, Raj announced. On the precise year that computer-generated worlds will first be mistaken for NSR.
NSR? hapless Adie asked.
Non-simulated reality. You know. The secular world. All this opaque stuff.
They got together an ad hoc office pool. Everybody agreed to put up 1 percent of the pots of money they were all going to make, once their machine started selling. The one who came closest to guessing the year that simulation finally surpassed reality would win the kitty?
In the midst of the general hilarity, O'Reilly dropped his bomb. It's all well and good for this business to have a long-term game plan. But if you're really interested in the future, you'll want to hear my latest projections.
Having predicted, out of the blue, the current oil crisis, O'Reilly's models were enjoying a surge in market value. He invited a band of stragglers from the dispersing group into the Cavern. They stood inside his global interface, looking up on the planet's closed surface.
You're looking at the latest recursively updating map of world petrochemical production and consumption. He gave them a crash course in reading the data, the thermometer of colors from cold to hot. We'll start in 1990. The fractal smoke curls unfolded and refolded in such beauty that the band gasped in pleasure.
This looks just like one of our Weather Rooms, Sybil Stance said. Like our ocean current work.
You're manufacturing some very pretty singularities there, Freese
added.
Bergen whistled. We get these same cascade effects in the new
biosim.
The Red Spot of Jupiter, Spiegel decided.
O'Reilly ticked off the count. OK: here's 2000. The hots got hotter and the cools cooled off. Here's 2010.
He called out the mileposts without passion, having seen the sequence unfold countless times. The color zones began to break up and mix more richly. They spilled like ice crystals across a frozen pane. They swirled like paints on a child's easel. They fused like molten elements in the hearts of stars.
By 2020, all the earth's surfaces began tending toward the higher frequencies. Even the lagging continents started to heat up. The whole globe went beet red, blushing or holding its breath. At 2030, the color map staggered, stumbled, then plummeted. All tones free-fell toward
blue.
After two or three attempts to stabilize, the remaining lit nations settled in around a handful of campfires. One by one, these too blinked out. Lim teetered on his feet and had to be walked around to keep from blacking out. The little band of virtual pilgrims stood in the dark,
tittering.
Rajan broke the silence. Amazing. I'd never have seen it if I hadn't believed it.
Kaladjian gave in to outrage. How can you presume to model that far out with any semblance of accuracy? Between faulty assumptions and compounding error, you're in fantasy land before you get two years down the road.
You know the funny thing? O'Reilly replied. I've run it a few hundred times, tweaking all sorts of parameters, sometimes quite dramatically. And I always get something like this.
What about all the unknowns? Political upheavals. Crazy heads of state. Grassroots revolutions. Technological breakthroughs…
They're in the model.
How can they be in the model? You don't know them. That's the whole point. They're random events.
We don't know them, true. But the last thing they are is random. Those sorts of events aren't the cause of numerical discontinuity. They're the consequence.
Freese fought to look amused. Well, Ronan. It's pretty clear what's happening. Around 2030, we develop the perfect alternative energy source. Then why that massive spike just before the crash?
We run out, Vulgamott asked. Is that it? We just run out? Sustainable growth is a contradiction in terms?
O'Reilly shrugged. I'd expect a smoother tail-off, if that were the case.
So it was with the groundhog race, cursed with the ability to cast its own mental shadow. No matter how dark the projection, someone always had heart left for another six weeks of the game.
At the moment, that someone was Jackdaw Acquerelli. You know, 2030 is right around the time that we'll be achieving total human equivalence in silicon. In another forty years, we'll finally be out of here.
Disappear into our own machine space? Spiegel asked.