Our Future is in the Air

by Corballis, Tim

  ‘Yeah, an improved HCF kit that could go the other way.’

  ‘That can’t be possible. Can it? I mean, there would be people here from the future. They would come back.’

  Marianne said, ‘The work that Gavrilović and his team were doing—it was very sophisticated. Layers of time. It involved layers, different futures and different pasts. There’s a physics for it. But, ultimately, it’s a physics of the abolition of time itself. That’s very hard to understand. I don’t understand it. When time is abolished, it will happen to all times at once. It’s a whole new way of thinking.’

  ‘It sounds like the Christian view of heaven.’

  ‘Fedorov believed that God’s work was done through the technological advances of humans.’ She shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I’m not Christian. It’s what we can make. We can make it. That’s what excites me.’

  ‘But you left them.’

  ‘Kim and I weren’t good together. But they were talking about going, about travelling without the fluid. Kim especially. Crazy fuck. He wanted to go, just go and not come back. He wanted to travel, and in the future travel further, in each future getting into a new kit. He was sure that the more he travelled forward, the more HCF would be just everywhere—you’d have a kit in your pocket, you’d press a button, blink your eyelids. Ha! Spiralling off into the future, that’s what he wanted. It goes against the whole point, if you ask me. I didn’t like the look in his eyes, you know, after a while. The change is coming, the end of times, I’m sure, but we’re not ready. There’s more work to do.’

  ‘You mean the physics, the machines?’

  ‘Yeah. But you know when a man and a woman break up it’s the woman who gets exiled. I couldn’t be around him, so yeah, I had to leave. It’s fucked up.’

  ‘Are you working on it?’

  ‘Me! No! No. I’m smart, but I’m not… not many people are in that league. No one in this country.’

  ‘I guess not.’

  ‘I just—I didn’t want him to vanish on me one day. To wake up and have a goodbye note by the bed. Every time I looked at him I was afraid of that. Why hang your feelings on someone who’s hardly there? It’s not that I was so deeply in love with him—I just wanted it to end like an ending, a real thing. Oh… I’m sorry.’

  ‘It’s okay.’ Was it? ‘You left him before he left you.’

  ‘Ha. Yeah.’ Then: ‘Why am I telling you all this?’

  ‘I asked, I guess.’

  A laugh. ‘Yeah. I’m sorry about your guy.’

  ‘Thanks… so you have a kit here?’

  ‘Yeah, we do. We do a thing on the full moon.’

  ‘What is this place?’

  ‘This? This is nothing, it’s just a few of us living here together.’

  ‘You’re not—’

  ‘Fedorovians or something? Nah. I don’t even know if there are any really in the world now. Probably somewhere. Gavrilović is dead. I’m not giving up hope for the end of times, but in the meantime this place is okay.’

  ‘Is everyone else here waiting, like that?’

  ‘Nah. I’m the weirdo.’

  It fitted. At the same time, it didn’t make any sense. The end of times? Janet said goodbye and began the drive home. Away from the commune again, and away from Marianne, she realised she had been partly taken in by an insanity. But Pen, leaving for a future, and a future’s future, and a future’s future’s future—that made sense. Yet again, he would have talked about it. She would have known. Pen was not someone who had an idea like that, a mad idea, without talking about it to whoever was at hand. Had the group disbanded long before Pen’s disappearance, or had it simply gone further underground, its whereabouts and membership unknown even to the Security Intelligence Service?

  In any case, there was also something strange about the timing. And in all the images, all the stories brought back by TCF and TCL from the future, had there ever been a sign that the technologies were still being used, that there was a facility or private kit somewhere—that people were still jumping ahead, another thirty-three years? What unthinkable future would that be? What hazy images might return from it? A future, as it opened up further and further, collapsed to the imagination, which strived after it without touching it. These thoughts, uncontrollable in her mind. And in the midst of them the thought of Pen—his body, solid, touchable—now nowhere at all, at no point in the current time but whisked away, simply absented to a place of ideas and pictures. (Is that what the FUTURE was?) He was unreachable—unless she followed. Now, on the drive here that she had kept secret (why?) from her friends, she felt the distance from them with a terrible force—as if she had followed. This road the future; its glimmering light, reflected off the sea. There were few cars. Shouldn’t the future be a populated place, full of the conceits of progress and technology? It overlaid itself on the present, anyway, giving a gloss to her vision. She wasn’t normally prone to such perspectives. The woman’s story, however, had given her not only a sense of ideas normally suppressed and coexisting with the routines of her life—but also of times, multiple times also suppressed, hidden behind the present, and, yes, simultaneous with it. That was what they had talked about: time, broken up by technology, stirred up and allowed to settle into coexisting layers—history remade as eternity. She drove faster, hoping to return sooner from this blinding thought.

  CHAPTER SIX

  ‘The Fedorovians derived their ideas partly from the writings of Nikolai Fyodorovich Fyodorov [1829–1903]. They drew also from later, related thinkers, poets and artists active during the early years of the Soviet Union: Bogdanov, Tsiolkovsky, Malevich and Khlebnikov and others of the Futurist schools. These ideas were revived and disseminated after the advent of TCF technology by the Yugoslav physicist and philosopher Milan Gavrilović[1926–1973]. Gavrilović dissociated himself from the religious aspects of Fyodorov’s thought, insisting that his movement was non-religious but that it remained faithful to the kernel of ideas found in Fyodorov’s work.

  ‘In essence, Fyodorov believed that technology allowed for the PERFECTION OF HUMANITY. Gavrilović: “‘Fyodorov wrote that believers and non-believers can unite in the task of perfection. It is, as he believed, a NATURAL TASK, a goal that cannot be denied by anyone who can perceive that the means are near at hand. We who no longer believe that God and Nature are one, nonetheless hold fast to Nature, and the fulfilment of Nature’s promise through the work of the human race. HCF [i.e. TCF] technology offers a crude glimpse of the possibilities to come: the Historic overcoming of Time itself.”

  ‘Gavrilović, like Fyodoroć, believed in the overcoming of war and exploitation in human society. For both thinkers, this included not only the exploitation of the living by the living, but the exploitation of the dead by the living. All human activity benefited from the achievements of past generations: the steady development of physical machinery, infrastructure, society, knowledge and science. To end that exploitation, it was necessary that the dead be enabled to enjoy the fruits of their own labours. For his part, Fyodorov believed that a post-revolutionary society must work towards the resuscitation of the dead. Gavrilović saw a possibility for putting into practice a modified form of Fyodorov’s vision in an extension of TCF technology: he held that it offered the promise of more and more flexible forms of time travel, not only directed at a specific future time, but at any time of our choosing, including past times. It would be possible to enter the past, and for past generations to travel to the present. Given enough of a research effort, this would lead within a generation to the possibility of the free movement of people throughout time, the opening up of all time to all humanity, and ultimately the final simultaneity of all historical moments.

  Gavrilović diagram showing temporal zones and potentials

  ‘The International Fedorovian Society grew up initially as an association of physicists interested in the practical solution to the problem of more flexible forms of time travel. However, as its character took on more of a political moveme
nt devoted to Gavrilović’s Fedorovian social vision, it opened up also to non-scientists and activists interested in atemporal communism—the belief that the end of history was synonymous with the end of time itself. The society was banned in the Soviet Union as representing a Leftist aberration of the communist idea, and in most of the West as a subversive movement. Gavrilović was tolerated in Yugoslavia itself, and the society had most of its members there.’

  ‘Grey?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I need to know more.’

  ‘So you talked to her?’

  ‘Yeah. She was interesting. Not that helpful.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘I don’t think so. Why didn’t you talk to her yourself?’

  ‘I can’t take the time… ’

  ‘All right. But I need to know more about these people. What do you know?’

  ‘Quite a lot.’

  ‘Are they still around?’

  ‘Ah… ’

  ‘Yeah, exactly. That’s what I want to know. Can’t you find out? You’re the expert. Tap some phones or something. Follow someone around.’

  ‘I could try more.’

  ‘Please.’ Then: ‘Grey? Do you think Pen might have gone to the future and not come back?’

  ‘Is that what she talked about with you?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘I don’t know. The Fedorovians were always talking about interesting possibilities with TCF. As far as we know they never actually tried them. Actually it was mostly Pen keeping an eye on their conversations for us, letting us know what they were doing.’

  ‘Do you think they’re dangerous? The TCF ideas?’

  ‘Mostly not. I think their political programme got diverted into all kinds of talk about experimentation. I think they stopped being openly revolutionary—’

  ‘I’m talking about the tracing fluid—’

  ‘So there was less of a threat—’

  ‘Grey? The thing about some disaster if you do it without the tracing fluid?’

  ‘Oh, that. I’m not a physicist.’

  ‘Don’t they talk like it would be the end of the world or something?’

  ‘Do they? The world seems in pretty good shape.’

  ‘Maybe no one tried it.’

  ‘It’s more of a police thing.’

  ‘Grey!’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘In the event of a NUCLEAR WAR, we believed at the time that small peripheral nations like New Zealand would do well—that they would thrive as truly independent societies. The obliteration of the rest of the world (the US–Soviet axis of conflict) would allow New Zealand to develop more robust cultures and institutions not dependent on the export of agricultural products. Foreign-owned companies would come under the ownership of the state (they would be ORPHANED) and surplus value would remain local. It would be the occasion for a turning inwards, a serious reconsideration of how we live, allowing us to take the best of Western and Māori cultures, and to design cities and communities for living. Proposals: proportional representation, communal land title, renewable energy sources, universal living wage, limited-term currency. Suburban residents could be encouraged to decide between a rural life or an urban one in high-rise, multi-use city developments.’

  ‘But why should it take a nuclear war? Why is this not possible in any case? Is it a question of the REMOVAL OF POWERS from the equation? Or simply of the REINVESTMENT OF PROFITS in the lifestyle of the nation?’

  ‘It’s a question of scale. Is it really possible that an ideal community can be formed at the scale of a whole nation—even a small one of three million people? At one end of the scale, a household is too small. It needs inputs. It can’t be a whole economy. We don’t want to turn our back on the richness promised by civilisation and technology—even if those things have, up until now, been turned almost exclusively towards war and devastation. What can we do on our own? Can we be doctors, mechanics, builders, artists, gardeners, farmers, electricians for ourselves? Could we be everything we need, mill our flour, generate our power? But at the larger scales (how large?) we stop knowing one another. The question of scale, the question of community and of cities—isn’t it also the question of how we relate to strangers?’

  ‘And hoping for a nuclear war is also hoping for the deaths of millions of strangers.’

  ‘But somehow our communes seemed to be stand-ins for the nation—separate enclaves, versions of how a world of togetherness could be. Did it always mean imagining the obliteration of what was outside it?’

  ‘Some of us were in favour of a greater distance from the state, and argued that everyone should devote their skills to the local community rather than taking a job. It was difficult to manage, though, on no income, but the anarchists among us argued that it would be a step towards greater pooling of resources. The question of withdrawing children from school came up repeatedly.

  ‘We thought we should be involving our neighbours in our projects. Taking down the fences and opening up the spaces between houses for children to play, and allowing relationships of mutual aid to develop at a local level.’

  ‘But this talk, wasn’t it all just a matter of impatience—of a strong pull, a too-strong pull, towards the future?’

  Of course he was. Loss of memory? Memory and the. Thrown out and up and leaving. So why not now. Work. Shouldn’t he be? Rolled uselessness. Work, roll, rolled and thrown. A formula, what grasping, what throwing? And the systematic, the repeated, so repeated and so and so. The question of how much was necessary; the question of the wage relation and surplus value. How was it possible to decide what needed to be done? What built? What diseases cured? All of that required—. Useless equations, worked out, out. Rolled out, outwork. Outworkroll, there. Forgettable memory. Outroll and why, out outworking, and. Of course being here. Where? Of course it was a matter of not being at work. Being nowhere. Being nowork. Beingwork nowork so that. Marcus. What after all is work, what nowork? A future without forced labour? Cybernetics—. A different place. Why is he here? It was a mechanical decision—something unjustifiable. This in itself frightens him—as if something outside his SUBJECTIVE CONTROL has moved him here. A heavy wheel turning in him.

  He is outside but underneath a high bridge atop large concrete columns. Where is he? Concrete and earth; parked cars; at some remove, the gleaming sides of buildings. There is the sound of traffic in a continuous hum. The concrete is no longer new, but streaked with grey. He tries to remember the particular quality that the future had last time—a sheen? A layer over things, a marker perhaps of their unreality. Instead, everything seems dull. The sheen is, perhaps, more a matter of memory than of perception. (His vision is still simply a matter of light, lens, retina.) A surge of anger—at himself? He walks downhill, realising that, if the scale of the buildings is anything to go by, he must be close to the centre of town, and that walking towards them will take him to it. The new motorway that has been under construction—that is what he is seeing above him. He is impressed by the scale of it, of the buildings, the degree of change to the city’s fabric. That is one of the themes of the headier TCL magazines: the amount of building that has been done in thirty-three years; the size of the buildings and their spectacular nature. The World Trade Center, never mentioned but always implicit as a counterargument. The buildings, however, famously seem to be taking part in that argument; rejecting the projected uniformity and greyness of the Twin Towers, they have greater colour and curve to them, bursting out into forms that the magazines characterise as ‘post-modern’, as if TCL and TCF had introduced a break in history, the end of the modern itself. The local buildings, the ones in front of him, are no doubt not the most impressive examples. He makes his way along a winding footpath that runs around a shabby patch of grass and trees, onto another road. The Terrace! A few people are walking. In fact, the shapes of buildings and cars and people—these all seem in this future to be imbued with MEANING. Is the structure of the future a structure of metaphor? He thought it last time
too. How, by being thrust out of his own time, does he register a new status in things? It is a meaning he can never quite grasp, however. It is something once again to do with absence, with the nowhereness of his children and wife and friends—a hole in everything, a sadness that inspires deep interest. The world without them.

  Here: an impossibility has been established, a world, a whole world that cannot coexist with theirs (and his). This is no simple distance, despite any equivalence the physicists might make between space and time. Does he vow to pay closer attention to all this? Does he in fact think it? It lies somewhere in him as a feeling, one that conflicts with any thought of simply being where he is. It occurs to him to think about the season—what time of year has he arrived at? It is a sunny day but a cool wind blows between the buildings. Thrown into a world, naked, unaware of its life and its rhythms—its work! He makes his way down into the city proper. People glance at him with his impregnated overalls, his damp beard and hair. ‘Excuse me—.’ But they move past him, tending to avoid his gaze or mouth some form of apology.

  Then a view that brings him to a halt: a square black modernist skyscraper, the completed Bank of New Zealand building. In his time it was still a steel skeleton, its progress halted for the time being. Why does it surprise him that it has been finished? For some reason it has never before occurred to him how much that skeleton could seem like a local monument to the unfinished World Trade Center. Of course he understands that its standstill in his time was just a matter of negotiation between the city council and the unions, and that it might yet begin again. Was it possible that the similarity between the World Trade Center buildings and the locally planned tower played a part in the halting of the local tower’s construction? He wants to climb it, this finished future version, and take the view from its top floor. At the same time he wants to stand where he is and take in its form. It is out of place in the city, even among the other large buildings. There is something terrifying about it, as if it is about to explode. Is this still an effect of the future’s SHEEN? The black finish of the building seems wrong—shouldn’t it be silver and grey? He searches the sky for planes.