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.
6
“A great evil will consume you all!” The man’s filthy, mottled face barely restrained a threatened apoplectic fit as he balanced precariously atop an upturned four-gallon paint can.
Wheezing asthmatically, his eyes rolled up toward the damp skies before returning to earth to hunt through the crowd. His gaze swung around to lock onto me and I stared back. Trembling slightly, his already distended pupils widened as he peered at me.
“A great evil is already consuming you, sir,” he whispered, directly addressing me as I passed. And then he screeched to the crowd, pointing at me, “A GREAT EVIL is upon us!”
Shivering, I looked away, but nobody paid much attention.
I was off on another one of my walks to try and clear my mind, this time 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’s city center hung just past the peripheries of my senses.
It was morning for me, but 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 over, I kept my eyes to the ground and wound my way through the crowd, making my escape into 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 without being able to see a clear future, it felt as if my hands were tied behind my back or my limbs amputated.