Neo Ludd – Janus – Yesterday's World of Tomorrow

Timing

“You lied to me.”

“And a good morning to you, Bob. Sit down and tell me what you’re talking about.”

Professor Reinhart indicated one of the two worn leather chairs before his desk, encouraging the obviously distraught young man to take a seat. He delicately removed his wire-frame glasses, carefully detaching the temples first from one ample ear and then the other. He paused for a moment to look at the lenses, seemed to debate whether they warranted cleaning, then folded the glasses and set them gently on his desk beside his small leather pocket diary. Then he leaned back in his own swivel chair and smiled at his research partner.

For four years, Robert Stillwell had worked with Professor Reinhart, first as a graduate student completing his doctorate in physics, and then as a junior partner in the university research lab Reinhart directed. The partnership had been enormously beneficial for the young scientist. Reinhart was brilliant, widely respected for his theoretical work, and a supportive mentor. More than that, in the past year Reinhart had taken a special interest in the younger man, encouraging him to complete and publish his own work. As a result, at barely thirty, Stillwell already had a reputation as a visionary in the esoteric area of physical theory which he and Reinhart were developing.

“What I’m talking about, Roger, is the TEM tunneling project. You told me it didn’t work, that the theory was bad.”

“And it was, Bob. I explained that to you. Tachyon/electromagnetic tunneling was a beautiful idea, and I thought we had something. But it doesn’t work. You’ve seen the equations: we’d need infinite energy to balance the transfer.”

“No. I think it does work, but you’ve kept the corrected equations to yourself. You did all the theory work on that, and you ran all the numbers. It was when Zach was born, and Melanie and I were busy seeing specialists, getting him taken care of. I was distracted, out of the lab for much of the five months you spent doing the final work.”

The older scientist’s smile didn’t change, but his pale blue eyes seemed to focus more intently on Bob’s face. He seemed to slow, to go from motionless to something even more still. When he finally spoke, his voice was quiet, calm, infinitely patient.

“Bob, what has put this thought into your head?”

Without a word, Bob reached into his jacket pocket, pulled out a CD jewel-case, and tossed it onto the desk.

“And what is that, Bob?”

“That’s your speech to the American Physical Society, the guest lecture you delivered a year ago.”

“Ah, yes. The one about the state of mathematical physics education in American universities. I remember that. It was an unexceptional speech, as I recall. I didn’t want to do it, but I’ve known Doctor Woodruff for fifty years – he was the best man at my wedding. I couldn’t turn him down.”

“I watched it last night. They’ve asked me to speak this year – not keynote, just a little break-out group presentation – and I wanted to cover new ground, to give them something you hadn’t already said.”

“Commendable. But I’m afraid I don’t understand how this bears on our conversation.”

“It does, Roger. Half way through the speech you tell a joke, the one about wave equations. It gets a pretty good laugh. As the audience quiets down, you’re standing at the podium smiling. And you’re humming to yourself.”

“I do that. Students have commented on it.”

“Yes.” Bob leaned forward in his chair. The angry young man was gone, replaced by the calm, methodical researcher Reinhart had found to be such an asset to his own work. Reinhart listened, but his mind was elsewhere. He was thinking about what a fine young man Robert Stillwell was, what a beautiful family he had, and how much he, Reinhart, would miss working with the junior scientist.

“Bob,” he said, quietly, the smile never wavering. “Whatever you think you’ve discovered is, I’m sure, easily explained. And I’m hungry. Will you join me for lunch? It’s been a long time since we caught up. You can tell me about Melanie and Zach, and what’s going on at home.”

The young man dropped back into his seat, seemingly confused both by the request and by the tone with which it was delivered.

“Roger, you don’t understand. I know. I know what you’ve done with our research. The investments, your advice–”

“Which you’ve taken, am I correct? You purchased NanoMed and DNX, as I told you to?”

“I did. And Quantic, and Vernier Pharmacology. All of your recommendations. And they’ve paid off extraordinarily well, exactly as you said they would. And, honestly, I thank you for that. We’ll never want for money, even if I don’t get tenure. Even if I never work again, frankly.”

“Good. Good. So, how about lunch?”

“No, dammit! Roger, this is serious. That song you were humming a year ago, that’s Emily’s Last Dance by Pyronaut. It’s a huge hit, some kind of quadruple platinum crossover sensation. It’s everywhere; you can’t avoid hearing it.”

“Indeed? Well, perhaps my musical tastes are a little more broad than I care to admit. But I still haven’t a clue what we’re talking about, Bob. And what would you think of Thai, today? There’s a new place on 8^th I’d like to try.”

“Roger, I heard a radio interview with Pyronaut just a few days ago, while I was driving. They wrote the song in July – ten months after you were humming it. There’s a whole back-story about it, very sad and moving.”

Now, finally, the older man reacted. The smile remained, but it now had a resigned look about it. Reinhart looked at the younger man, and marveled at his timing.

“I see. And you wonder how I happened to know the latest popular song almost a year before it was written.”

“No. I don’t wonder. I know.”

The two men faced each other across the tidy desk. Neither spoke. Finally, the older man leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes, and rubbed the bridge of his nose with both hands. When he opened his eyes the smile was gone from his face, replaced with the neutral, vaguely distracted expression it wore when Professor Reinhart was lecturing a class or delivering a speech.

“You’re correct, Robert. Tachyon/EM tunneling works exactly as the theory suggested it would. I did misrepresent the experimental results to you. Not only are the energy requirements not infinite, but they’re in fact negligible: a few million joules for portal formation, and then the tachyon/photon flow balances and the portal is essentially self-sustaining.

“So time travel is not only possible, but it’s practical. Oh, we can’t move a non-trivial mass through the portal – even most molecules are too large. But energy…. Bob, for almost three years now, I’ve been listening to broadcast news from a year in the future. That’s how I’ve picked the investments that have made me, well, wealthier than I’ll admit. And that’s how I’ve arranged to give your family a nice little nest egg, Bob.”

The candid response didn’t placate the young researcher. How could Reinhart have kept such a momentous discovery to himself? Why hadn’t they published; surely they’d share a Nobel for their work. It was unethical, unconscionable, to deprive the world of this knowledge.

They talked for hours, the older man trying to convince his friend and partner that the ability to predict the future was not something mankind should have, not a power man would be able to use responsibly. If he was unsuccessful, his calm and measured argument at least mollified the younger man’s temper.

Finally Professor Reinhart looked at his watch. “Bob, it’s almost five, later than I expected. You should be home with your family. I’ll tell you what. Go home and sleep on it. Try to put it out of your mind, let it percolate in your subconsciousness. Have a wonderful evening with Melanie and Zach. Then, tomorrow morning, come in and tell me what you think we should do. And we’ll do it, exactly as you suggest. You have my word. But no more discussion tonight. Will you do that for me?”

The two men agreed, going so far as to stand and shake hands awkwardly, as if concluding a business agreement. They said goodnight. Robert Stillwell paused at the door, turned as if to speak, and then, with a bemused shake of his head, left the room, closing the door behind himself.

* * * * *

Reinhart sat at his desk until the light faded. At one point he blew his nose loudly on a handkerchief he took from his pocket. His eyes glittered in the dim light, but tears didn’t quite flow: Reinhart was a kind man, but not particularly sentimental.

He’d take tomorrow off, perhaps go for a long walk in the park if it wasn’t too cold. He’d avoid the news, and discard his newspaper without reading it. He knew what tomorrow’s news would be. He’d heard the radio report a year ago:

December 12, 2016 – University of Urbana-Champain researcher Doctor Robert Stillwell was killed today when he lost control of his Toyota Corolla on an icy patch of Interstate 74 near Mahomet. He is survived by his wife Melanie and their son Zachary. Stillwell, a respected theoretical physicist already known for groundbreaking work in the esoteric domain of multidimensional tachyon theory, was 30.

Thinking about “The Golden Age”

The Golden Age of Science Fiction is generally considered — though opinions differ — to include the three decades of the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s. Writings from the Golden Age are characterized by a charming (to me at least) naivete about the pace of technological progress: we would soon live in a future of interplanetary rockets and robot servants, of gleaming cities and plentiful atomic power.

With few exceptions, Golden Age writers didn’t anticipate the revolution in microelectronics that would spawn portable computers and universal connectivity. (Nor did they foresee the women’s liberation movement or restrictions on smoking, two often jarringly anachronistic aspects of stories from that era. These authors were, in general, more imaginative than visionary.)

Golden Age writing tended to extrapolate contemporary trends, continuing the pace of rapid industrial and scientific development along existing lines. Making things go faster, making buildings and cities bigger, projecting enormous population growth: these were all obvious to the Golden Age writers. They lived in a world where increasing mechanization and industrial scale defined change, and seemed to promise to bring the stars themselves within our grasp.

In the past decade or two, the revolution in computing and consumer electronics has come to define technology for most of us, and today a single product — the iPhone — stands as the icon of our technological advancement. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that so much of modern science fiction concerns itself with computation, with virtual reality and the artificial augmentation of mind. (Interestingly, in the post-Golden Age science fiction of the late 1960s and early 1970s, that alternate reality and artificially enhanced cognition was achieved through drugs, rather than electronics. For many a lover of Golden Age science fiction, the decade following represents the nadir of the genre.)

Entertaining science fiction need not be prophetic, but it’s interesting to look at the mistakes the Golden Age writers made with their simple extrapolations, and to wonder what similar mistakes we’re making today as we imagine the future. What if virtual reality and the computer-augmented mind isn’t a conspicuous aspect of our technological future? What if something not yet trending, but still not preposterously fanciful, is just over the horizon, waiting to transform our world? What might that be?

Imagine writing a plausible, non-apocalyptic story of the day after tomorrow that didn’t feature connectivity, virtual reality, or artificial intelligence as a significant or necessary plot element. What would that look like?

Utterly Absurd

In 1914, in his novel The World Set Free, H.G. Wells wrote of a future featuring “atomic bombs,” in which “it was a matter of common knowledge that a man could carry about in a handbag an amount of latent energy sufficient to wreck half a city.” That was thirty-one years before Trinity — before the detonation of the first atomic weapon in the sands of southern New Mexico.

Ray Bradbury’s dystopian novel Fahrentheit 451, written in 1953, described ear-buds, those ubiquitous little earphones everyone wears today. He called them “seashells,” but we’d recognize them today — as we would the insular cocoon they created for the perpetually distracted wife of that novel’s protagonist.

Arthur C. Clarke predicted the geostationary orbit, that distance from the Earth — about 22,236 miles — at which a satellite will circle the planet precisely once each day, and so appear fixed in the sky above the same point on the Earth’s equator. He introduced this idea in 1945, more than a decade before the Russians shocked the world by placing the first artificial satellite, the short-lived Sputnik, in a far lower orbit. (In 1960, Clarke would feature the still-nonexistent geosynchronous communication satellite in his short story I Remember Babylon, which presaged, among other things, satellite television and broadband pornography.)

Science fiction writers predict the future. That’s their job. They get it wrong more often than right (a good thing, considering the prominent role of alien invasions and global catastrophes in the genre) but they do sometimes get it right — or get it wrong, but in ways that foreshadow our evolving reality.

H.G. Wells, Ray Bradbury, and Arthur C. Clarke are acknowledged giants of science fiction. Not so Albert Teichner, a World War II veteran who most likely passed away in 1989, though biographical information is scarce. But the handful of stories Teichner wrote includes Cerebrum, a fanciful account of Facebook and Snapchat which he penned in 1963.

No, of course it isn’t really about modern social media, nor even the internet. But it does imagine a future in which everyone is networked with everyone else, their instant messaging coordinated by a central switching authority called, prosaically enough, “Central Switching.” It’s a world in which people are constantly connected, are distracted from the world around them by their non-stop mental messaging, and, having instantaneous access to every fact, know less and less, and grow lazier with each passing year.

Most interestingly, it’s a world in which one can be cut off from the great switching center, isolated from the perpetual stream of information and communication, and, so disconnected, become a social outcast and pariah.

That, at least, is nonsense. After all, it’s unimaginable, isn’t it, that the powers behind the internet could ever flex their digital muscles to reward and punish the consumers of their virtual wares?

I mean, Google, for instance. They wouldn’t do something like that.

Or would they?