Visions of the Future (69 page)
Read Visions of the Future Online
Authors: David Brin,Greg Bear,Joe Haldeman,Hugh Howey,Ben Bova,Robert Sawyer,Kevin J. Anderson,Ray Kurzweil,Martin Rees
Tags: #Science / Fiction
It’s funny how business dress has swung back to formality in the past few years. When I was starting out as a journalist, I once saw a CEO deliver his company’s quarterly results while wearing a bathrobe. I was definitely underdressed in a sports jacket here, however. I spotted at least one person wearing a bow tie.
“Nicely played.” I turned around to see who had spoken in my ear.
“Hi Katherine,” I said. “That was Jake doing the playing, not me.”
“You got to break the story at least,” she said. The truth was, I had led with the story for all of a few hours, and then the scrum had pushed me aside. I would have done the same to them, of course.
“You look delighted,” I said. Perhaps disquieted was a better description though.
“Good news, bad news as usual,” she said. “We’ve filed for nearly three hundred patents so far. I’m pretty sure we can do something with the portfolio, even if it means licensing it to some of our competitors. I’ve already been fielding calls.”
“That doesn’t sound like bad news to me,” I said.
“Well,” she said. “We have competitors a hundred times our size. We’ll have to see if we can actually do something with the head start. It can take decades to turn an idea like this into products, and billions of dollars. It probably makes us a serious takeover target, so who knows if we’ll be able to continue as an independent company. And guess who has to free up budget room for—”
“This is why she’s the chief operations officer,” said Jake, taking my elbow with one hand. He had a tall, fluted glass of something in his other. “Attention to details. Katherine, you need to enjoy today. We can worry about the small stuff tomorrow.”
She rolled her eyes, and started to reply, but he was already walking away.
“Jake,” I called out to him. He half-turned back to me. “I have to ask. Why do you call it a noodle forest? Why not macaroni, or string, or something else entirely?”
He laughed and tapped his finger against his head. “Use your noodle,” he said. Then he vanished into a sea of black business suits.
A REQUIEM FOR FUTURE’S PAST
ille c. gebeshuber
Ille is a member of the Lifeboat Nanotechnology Advisory Board and is a Professor from the Institute of Applied Physics at the Vienna University of Technology, Austria, Europe, who has been living and working in Malaysia since 2009. She is Associate Editor of IMechE Journal of Mechanical Engineering Science and is an editorial board member of various scientific journals. Read her bio at http://lifeboat.com/ex/bios.ille.c.gebeshuber.
Ille coedited
Biomimetics—Materials, Structures and Processes: Examples, Ideas and Case Studies
available at
http://amzn.to/1AN52OV
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Looking back at the last years I feel pain. Nothing but pain! And I hate them. It was their duty to let me die, but—in the so-called name of progress—they kept me alive. And in the dark. So my mind was barely existing there, isolated, screaming and screaming but no one would listen…
What seemed like an eternal darkness would extend to an infinite emptiness. Eventually my screaming stopped, I gave up hope and wondered what kept me alive. Or better—not dead. It is funny but hidden in the absolute darkness there is this weird craziness, like a constant terrible itching, never letting you go, never letting you relax. But there is no space for madness. Under such pressure you are alone with yourself and forced to escape the only possible way. You begin to wander your inner gardens. Discover the indiscoverable. See what you cannot and should not see. After some time the black is turning into shadows, the shadows turn into grey and then, then you remember. You go back in time…
High school. The usual suspects. The big love? Definitely! Ann was her name and she was a loner. Actually beautiful, a tall girl with red hair and some nice freckles. She had some female friends, but more the type that are together for public appearance. This group of loosely connected girls would appear at the party and then dissolve into the mass as individuals. We happened to sit not far from each other in the corner of the party that is reserved for the less popular kids. And this is probably the place where most relationships start; mainly because the same people would meet again ever and ever. But this is not always bad.
At first she ignored me so perfectly that I knew she had a weak spot for me. The way she looked through me gave me the impression to be of the purest invisible matter. But I could not run away. Nerds are confined to certain social behavior and party locations. So due to the logic of high school I had to follow her like a little dog and to show up as she expected, giving her the opportunity to even more ignore me. That hurt and she enjoyed that. But when eventually our eyes locked, there was this spark, this amused superiority of a female who knows she cannot lose this game. It was not long after that that I told her of my love. “I know”, she said and I hated her for that. A few weeks passed and we started to talk. I turned from this invisible matter to the formable sponge that once would become a good husband. She really liked me, we got on together and we got married… and I have to admit, I still love her!
Life is planned in a certain way. You have your dreams and your attitudes. You mimic what society tells you to live a successful life. Most of that is wasting your time to do what is expected of you and not what you want to do. You play a grownup that you are not. You sit around the table with people that all want to do something crazy, but all without exception finally succumb to normality. In most cases this plan of life unfolds perfectly and the numb environment of suburbia evolves into a memory of dear people, who forget you in the blink of an eye once you fall off the cliff. The cliff…
In my case the cliff was flames. A crash. More flames. The last thing I saw was Anne being caressed by the flames with her face looking kind of peaceful. Why did we have no kids? I asked myself. Why did I take that road? Why did I not… It was as if time stood still. Slow motion, all burning. No pain, followed by a terrible cold and silence. Then darkness, darkness, darkness.
As already mentioned, I lived in the shadows for an infinite number of eternities. I remembered every detail of my life. These memories were the only things that made me cling to my personality. And I felt that this would not last forever. Loneliness without any feedback is a dissolution process that the one and lonely in us cannot withstand forever. So I waited, knowing that time—even in this eternity—is a precious resource. Eventually the wall would start to crack…
And it cracked, but in a different way than I thought. As a lost soul you are making several kinds of scenarios. Eventually I believed to be in hell and the darkness to be the worst punishment. I wondered which sin that I had committed demanded such a terrible fate. But then there was this light. Imposing absolute fear. But where to run? I could not ignore it so I finally walked towards it. And I loved it. A change in hell! Salvation? Finally! I tried to grab it. And grab it again. But it was so complicated, it evaded, was incomprehensive, abstract. It took me probably another thousand years to get a grip of it.
Later I learned that it was a neural interface. An ingenious gadget that linked my brain to an array of connectors and sensors, which somehow managed to allow me to communicate with my environment. They told me that the accident had completely destroyed my sensoric system and that usually people injured at such a level die or are allowed to die. But it turned out that science had kept me alive as a living guinea pig. They needed a person to spike it with all these soulless implants, and a person that would be 100% motivated to adapt to this torture, or bust. The neural chips were specially adapted for me while I was in absolute sedated isolation. It was a race against time that they supposedly won. After three months the interface was ready and it took me another year to master the system. They told me that I was unique, a wonder, a marvel. They did not care for the pain and suffering this caused me. It is for the sake of mankind they said. Mankind.
The interface is an artificial world. It is obvious that none of today’s equipment reaches the sophistication of the human sensors that we take for granted. Living with a surrogate teaches you to go for the little cravings. The smell of soup, the shades of dawn, the touch of grass or the sound of playing children in the distance. Imperfection is a curse if you are crippled from a well-known ideal. It was not hell I was in; it was a special place, a very special place. And I got the feeling that there is always a price you pay if you cheat death…
And finally payday was coming.
Its inventor, or better owner, was Bancroft Croyd, an industrial tycoon whom nobody knows, but everyone should know of. An elegant, slightly arrogant gentleman of a very good breed who had these eyes you better not say “no” to. He could have played in one of these demon movies where the supposed good guy turns to be in a pact with the devil. A highly intelligent man, a good gambler, a scientist. And what a scientist he was. I found it out the hard way.
Our first encounter was brief. He focused on me, smiled his nicest fake smile and said, “How would you like to be my messenger?” – “A messenger without legs?” I said “You are kidding, Sir!” – “Call me Croyd! I think we will become good friends. Can I call you Louis?”
It is not easy for a man to say “no” if he knows that the black void is just the switch of a button away. My agreement in that case was only a formality; he and I, we knew it well.
The following days were busy. My network was integrated in the group and gradually I found out that something really big was going on. The group of scientists around Croyd was preparing a huge mathematical project that involved the use of significant resources. It had been planned for years.
Being a witness had the huge advantage that nobody expected anything from me. So I tried to listen and understand as much as possible. But this would prove to be rather difficult.
It all started with the development of the perfect code. Sooner or later the crackers had to lose the war against the stackers. But when it happened it was like a shock. The development of the perfect code, a milestone in the history of mathematics, meant that such encrypted information could not be extracted from the conventional flow of data anymore. After a series of desperate attempts to get control of the input/output terminals, secret services had to admit that there was no conventional way to gather secret information. The classical approach would involve extracting hidden information from a sheer infinite sea of data by more and more sophisticated programs. This happened by the identification of patterns and the successive processing of these into the specific, desired output—the original information. Unfortunately the perfect code made these patterns disappear.
Croyd explained the dilemma of the perfect code to me by an analogy: “Prometheus was fleeing Diana to evade punishment for the stealing fire from Mount Olympus. He would eventually approach Rhea and ask her for help. Rhea, who always had a good heart, agreed and created an infinite number of copies of Prometheus and deemed it an impossible task for Diana to succeed in her quest. On arrival Diana did not even have a look at the mass of copies but just blindly shot an arrow into the bulk. She hit Prometheus who had no other choice than to continue to run. Rhea was surprised and asked Diana how she solved the infinitely complex search, Diana answered, ‘It might be infinitely complex, but as a goddess I am also infinitely skilled’. Soon after that Prometheus approached Cronus for help. Cronus just lifted the veil of time and said ‘you never existed’. Diana came, fired her arrow, but divine skill is of little value in a void.”
The new approach would therefore mean not to extract, but to create information. Retrieval would be replaced by data generation, based on a clearly defined setting. One of the discussions of the team was that during WWII the German spy network in Britain was 100% undermined. Croyd believed that their approach to access information via spies was the most unreliable way and also the most likely way to get fooled. He said an assumed paranoid “factus est principle” of infiltration would have rendered the data collected by the spy system ineffective, but in hindsight proved the only way to succeed. It might have been best for the Germans to assemble a “counter think tank” of the most talented young generals and to plan the war from the British side, using current true events to update their scenario. “Growing information” by an assessment of available resources of the other side and their available planning information would have been easier than the extraction of classified data. In such a way the Germans probably would have created a precise duplication of the D-Day plans far in advance.
Croyd took a lot of time to talk to me and to answer my questions. He believed that I would need a lot of theoretical knowledge on my “journey”. “Our body travels physically in the so-called presence that is actually a slow and hopefully constant movement through time. If we want to understand other levels of time, the past and the future, we have to deal with information. The past is classified by a loss of information; here the available lack of data needs to be enhanced with new context to get a comprehensive overview. The future gives us an infinite number of scenarios, an over information; here we need to eliminate the so-called unlikely. In both cases these processes get more and more complex the more the gap between the now and the distant time widens. What helps us in this case is that we usually do not need to find the one and only truth. It suffices to find an acceptable and compatible reality, and this can be achieved by a proper and decent, but not necessarily objective, handling of information.”
So the days went on and on. Gradually I found out that everyone was talking about a so-called Leibowitz barrier and a vessel, called “Golem”, that would be able to master it. The theory was simple. According to the philosopher Leibowitz, to gain all the knowledge in the universe a master would ask a fairy to grant him three wishes:
- Take a page of paper and cover it randomly with all kinds of letters and symbols.
- Take out the ones that make no sense.
- Take out the ones that are false or misleading and sort the remainder.
The outcome would be an infinitely complex amount of true information. Every atom in the universe would be described, any entity that ever lived and every event that ever took place. But how should one navigate in this chaos? Croyd believed in a model that evolved. He compared it with an infinite, multidimensional labyrinth. No matter how complex it was, an airflow from the starting to the ending point would determine the critical path without complex mathematical determinations. This meant his mathematical approach did not really focus on equations and a detailed solution, but on potentials and likelihood scenarios. Golem would produce the huge amount of data, create scenarios and from the most probable ones a possible, acceptable reality would be created.
The remaining problem was to link the perfect machine with reality. The answer was rather complicated but came from the fact that quantum signatures of an atom do not really correspond to each other, but mirror the state/position of the respective atom in the surrounding sublime matrix. A reading of the quantum status would fill a specific position in an eternal matrix. In different times/states this would happen at different positions, but still on the same page. The longer the measurements would take place, the better and more completed the matrix would be known and the input of the atom would be more valuable.
Croyd called it the “Big Monte Carlo Cheat”. His goal was to not only eliminate the unlikely future paths by technical realty checks but also to identify them by deviation of the quantum signatures. To achieve this he would conserve a Magnetite molecule and use it as a sample over time. He called this machinery the “Atom” and with all its conservation systems and sensors loved it more than anything else. Some even said he worshipped it. But it was his firm belief that if the molecule would remain to be connected to a computer in the future these two units could interact. A loss of the Atom would break this chain forever. No wonder the Atom was the most guarded item of the whole high security complex.
“In the best case”, Croyd said, “the future will interfere with the matrix of the molecule of the Atom. They know the programming of the computer and will help to choose the right scenario. The matrix of the Atom is always the same connecting the past and the future. It is the lifeline that connects us with tomorrow.” – “But they will not be able to change the matrix. It has to be the same from the past to the future.” – “Not necessarily. But they will have far more advanced technical opportunities. While they cannot change the form/structure, they can reinforce what they want. It is like carving a statue that has already been carved. In this form of quantum physics we do not have a specific succession of time. The form is there because it will be changed in the future. You might remember that Michelangelo once said that he did not ever chisel a statue from the stone, it was already there.” – “You are crazy, Croyd!” – “If you are not crazy,” he said, “quantum physics will not discover you.”
