Twelve Tomorrows - Visionary stories of the near future inspired by today's technologies

by Neal Stephenson

  “Maybe this is more universal? Something for everyone, anyone? A manufacturing powerhouse, with exquisite sensors able to calibrate fine neurological differentiations and adjust accordingly?”

  “Um, thanks.” She ducks out and I’m left with an object taking up space until I think of how to tear it down and use the parts for something better. I lean against it. Yes, you may touch it.

  There was a drive I used to take along the mountains out west, where weather brewed up and spilled over, sliced into life with light and fury, inky violet mountains row on row, sunstruck red/yellow striated cliffs, close detail of lightning-illuminated cacti, black cloudburst, swept-away cars: transformative.

  Sometimes my art, which had begun accidently, felt like it might do something like that to somebody, maybe just one person, maybe a million, if tried a little harder.

  If I had a place to come from instead of numbed fragments. If I could move past that, reassemble myself somehow.

  If had a damned thing to say.

  The feeling of being swathed in thick pink insulation, like everything I’d ever done was futile and stupid, returns. So far I’d at least been pleased with myself about barely scraping by; at least I had that. I’d hoodwinked people by playing around with color and form: cool, distant, far from any emotion. Being empty, for them.

  A collision of forces emerges again as if I were on that western road.

  This is new and frightening.

  Now it looks like I want to figure out something to say. I want to open doors in their minds—deliberate doors, that led to rooms I’d designed.

  And what work, to design those rooms! The SMOOTH™ bracelet lights up and I do not satisfy it by swallowing my daily dose.

  I see the woman coming back down the street with a man in a suit.

  They look determined.

  Get out the back, Jack.

  No. No more flight.

  They don’t glance at me.

  He circles the work critically. Shakes his head. “I don’t like these dangly things.”

  She runs her hand along them. As she sounds them colors sing above the sculpture like a bar graph. The colors rise, then fall, leaving a slight opalescence hanging in the air. I try to ignore the colors, realizing they’re just a side effect of the shirt, but though I worked on the tones for a week, I can now see now what is wrong with them and cringe. I open my mouth to say “I can fix them” when he nods. “Okay.”

  He lowballs me but two heavy men are leaning on a truck parked out front and I stand firm. Scowling, he pays cash.

  They’re hoisting it onto the truck when I thrust the money in his face. “I want it back.”

  He stares at me.

  “I need to change it—“

  He slams the door.

  “Look, it’s just wrong!” As they drive down the street I run after it for half a block shouting before I come to my senses, jumbled as they are, and stumble back to the shop, still suspicious.

  But even without SMOOTH™, I’d handled the last situation all right. Hadn’t I? Like a normal person?

  Anyway, the bracelet has gone dark. Usually it flashes three times, at twenty-minute intervals, then goes into an unholy buzzing mode designed to wake you up.

  I stare at the money in my hand. I should celebrate—maybe call Ariel.

  No. She won’t go. Instead I pull on my jacket, lock the door, head out into the blast of colored lights, even more potent and alluring right now. Night is the best time for me. I head up toward the Monument, stopping at the war memorials as usual, then, as usual, stare at the Capitol building all lit up at night for the long blocks heading up to it, my head full of ellipsoids.

  I love this city. The promenades are engraved in my brain and I get deep satisfaction in making the turns, feeling the angles, immersing myself in perfect Design, like I’m cruising along someone’s ancient drawing board, absorbing ideas as old and as new as the concept of atoms.

  I drag in at about four in the morning with a jacket filled with riches, which I set out on my work table. I should be tired but I’m not.

  I begin arranging pipes, jump up and get some cedar scraps, make sure my power tools are charged, and get moving.

  I don’t stop moving for weeks. I create something—a big dodecahedron, for instance, with stained glass inserts or parts of old movie posters—set it out in the shop, and start another one, compulsively refining, until I’m done with them and move on. Everything I make starts a kind of craze; I hire somebody to handle the front so that I can work.

  I’m off SMOOTH™ completely.

  I dream the designs. The air is filled with color. When the shirt lets me rest I devour online information about neuroplasticity, about our infantile state when we are all in a state of synesthesia, which I regard as a lovely gift. The smell of a sixty-degree angle is lemony, but the color is a clear blue winter sky, and it sounds, unsurprisingly, like A-sharp.

  One night I’m working on a glass sculpture, when I drop it, fall to the floor, curl up, and begin to cry, great, tearing sobs. I remember childhood wrongs, childhood slights, each magnified to the point of intense pain, suffering with no understanding and with no end. I relive, waking and not in nightmare, like a video, every horrible thing I did to innocent humans, collaterally, while I was fighting. My friends died, one after another. Some people could handle this. For some reason, because of some personal mental bent, I could not. With each memory came talking—to someone, that useless therapist they’d sent me to, perhaps. Or my father.

  But this time, on this flashing night, there is healing. All the work I have done with my hands, my eyes, purposeful, focused motion, has been uniting the injured parts of my brain.

  My brain had been a warehouse of unconnected objects, disconnected circuits, useless to me, and useless to society.

  The shirt, with unconscious feedback from me, has brought those parts together. I am rewired, renewed.

  Repurposed.

  In the morning I wake up on the floor. The shirt is loose.

  I call Ariel. “You gave me the shirt. You knew I wouldn’t wear it on a bet, so you planted it. You knew when I’d be there to find it.”

  “What are you talking about?” Her voice is slow, sleepy, and gives me rainbows in the head.

  “You knew what it was, what it would do.”

  “I have a job.”

  “You turned off the bracelet.”

  “Only a reckless fool would do that.” A golden smile in her voice.

  “Or someone with a damned good idea about how it works. Where did you get it?”

  Silence that sounds in my head like the chanting of Tibetan monks, orange and green waves of light. Then, “Are you all right?”

  I say, “You’d be the best judge of that.”

  I did buy the place next door and tear out the wall. Ariel and I have a huge workshop and on Saturdays two people out front to take money.

  I passed the shirt to others like me, whose lives have been wasted by mental disabilities, derailed by misguided education, failed relationships, lack of ability to reach a wider vision—whatever. The shirt loosens when it is finished. Brains are turned on and tuned up. Lives are changed.

  The network of users is growing, and our work—each of us completely unique, but newly empowered—is emerging, building a new world in design, in many fields—mathematics, music, physics, painting—that someday, I hope, will reach a critical mass, will push us past the singularity dividing warring humankind to cooperative utopia. Except that it won’t be dull. It won’t be one flavor. It’s just positive energy waiting to be released.

  I still don’t know where the shirt came from. Maybe Ariel. Maybe the woman who bought the sculpture. They’ll be on the market soon, anyway, and not nearly as expensive as first believed.

  The VA did some scans, and my lesions are healed. Mental health is measurable, and many problems are now curable.

  And my art?

  Some of my pieces are in museums. I’m off to Amsterdam for a sh
ow next week.

  They say that my work is antiwar. I don’t intend that, consciously. Maybe I’ve just traded one kind of crazy for another, but this is a good kind. Maybe my pieces just seem intriguing to people because they look a certain way, or because they make them think and thinking feels good.

  All I know is that they do keep looking. ■

  Zero for Conduct

  Greg Egan

  1

  Latifa started the web page loading, then went to make tea. The proxy she used convinced her Internet provider that every page she accessed belonged to a compendium of pious aphorisms from uncontroversial octogenarians in Qom, while to the sites themselves she appeared to be a peripatetic American, logging on from Pittsburgh one day and Kansas City the next. Between the sanctions against her true host country and that host’s paranoia over the most innocent interactions with the West, these precautions were essential. But they slowed down her already sluggish connection so effectively that she might as well have been rehearsing for a flight to Mars.

  The sound of boiling water offered a brief respite from the televised football match blaring down from the apartment above. “Two nil in favor of the Black Pearls, with fifteen minutes left to play! It’s looking like victory for the home team here in Samen Stadium!” When the tea had brewed, she served it in a small glass for her grandfather to sip through a piece of hard sugar clenched between his teeth. Latifa sat with him for a while, but he was listening to the shortwave radio, straining to hear Kabul through the hum of interference and the breathless commentary coming through the ceiling, and he barely noticed when she left.

  Back in her room after fifteen minutes, she found the scratched screen of the laptop glistening with a dozen shiny ball-and-stick models of organic molecules. Reading the color coding of the atoms was second nature to her by now: white for hydrogen, black for carbon, cherry red for oxygen, azure for nitrogen. Here and there a yellow sulfur atom or a green chlorine stood out, like a chickpea in a barrel of candy.

  All the molecules that the ChemFactor page had assigned to her were nameless—unless you counted the formal structural descriptions full of cis-1,3-dimethyl-this and 2,5-di-tert-butyl-that—and Latifa had no idea which, if any of them, had actually been synthesized in a lab somewhere. Perhaps a few of them were impossible beasts, chimeras cranked out by the software’s mindless permutations, destined to be completely unstable in reality. If she made an effort, she could probably weed some of them out. But that could wait until she’d narrowed down the list of candidates, eliminating the molecules with no real chance of binding strongly to the target.

  The target this time was an oligosaccharide, a carbohydrate with nine rings arranged in pleasingly asymmetric tiers, like a small child’s attempt to build a shoe rack. Helpfully, the ChemFactor page kept it fixed on the screen as Latifa scrolled up and down through the long catalog of its potential suitors.

  She trusted the software to have made some sensible choices already, on geometric grounds: all of these molecules ought to be able to nestle reasonably snugly against the target. In principle she could rotate the ball-and-stick models any way she liked, and slide the target into the same view to assess the prospective fit, but in practice that made the laptop’s graphics card choke. So she’d learned to manipulate the structures in her head, to picture the encounter without fretting too much about precise angles and distances. Molecules weren’t rigid, and if the interaction with the target liberated enough energy the participants could stretch or flex a little to accommodate each other. There were rigorous calculations that could predict the upshot of all that give and take, but the equations could not be solved quickly or easily. So ChemFactor invited people to offer their hunches. Newcomers guessed no better than random, and many players’ hit rates failed to rise above statistical noise. But some people acquired a feel for the task, learning from their victories and mistakes—even if they couldn’t put their private algorithms into words.

  Latifa didn’t overthink the puzzle, and in twenty minutes she’d made her choice. She clicked the button beside her selection and confirmed it, satisfied that she’d done her best. After three years in the game she’d proved to be a born chemical matchmaker, but she didn’t want it going to her head. Whatever lay behind her well-judged guesses, it could only be a matter of time before the software itself learned to codify all the same rules. The truth was, the more successful she became, the faster she’d be heading for obsolescence. She needed to make the most of her talent while it still counted.

  Latifa spent two hours on her homework, then a call came from her cousin Fashard in Kandahar. She went out onto the balcony where the phone could get a better signal.

  “How is your grandfather?” he asked.

  “He’s fine. I’ll ask him to call you back tomorrow.” Her grandfather had given up on the shortwave and gone to bed. “How are things there?”

  “The kids have all come down with something,” Fashard reported. “And the power’s been off for the last two days.”

  “Two days?” Latifa felt for her young cousins, sweltering and feverish without even a fan. “You should get a generator.”

  “Ha! I could get ten; people are practically giving them away.”

  “Why?”

  “The price of diesel’s gone through the roof,” Fashard explained. “Blackouts or not, no one can afford to run them.”

  Latifa looked out at the lights of Mashhad. There was nothing glamorous about the concrete tower blocks around her, but the one thing people here in Iran didn’t lack was electricity. Kandahar should have been well-supplied by the Kajaki Dam, but two of the three turbines in the hydroelectric plant had been out of service for more than a year, and the drought had made it even harder for the remaining turbine to meet demand.

  “What about the shop?” she asked.

  “Pedaling the sewing machine keeps me fit,” Fashard joked.

  “I wish I could do something.”

  “Things are hard for everyone,” Fashard said stoically. “But we’ll be all right; people always need clothes. You just concentrate on your studies.”

  Latifa tried to think of some news to cheer him up. “Amir said he’s planning to come home this Eid.” Her brother had made no firm promises, but she couldn’t believe he’d spend the holidays away from his family for a second year in a row.

  “Inshallah,” Fashard replied. “He should book the ticket early though, or he’ll never get a seat.”

  “I’ll remind him.”

  There was no response; the connection had cut out. Latifa tried calling back but all she got was a sequence of strange beeps, as if the phone tower was too flustered to offer up its usual recorded apologies.

  She tidied the kitchen then lay in bed. It was hard to fall asleep when her thoughts cycled endlessly through the same inventory of troubles, but sometime after midnight she managed to break the loop and tumble into blackness.

  “Afghani slut,” Ghamzeh whispered, leaning against Latifa and pinching her arm through the fabric of her manteau.

  “Let go of me,” Latifa pleaded. She was pressed against her locker, she couldn’t pull away. Ghamzeh turned her face toward her, smiling, as if they were friends exchanging gossip. Other students walked past, averting their eyes.

  “I’m getting tired of the smell of you,” Ghamzeh complained. “You’re stinking up the whole city. You should go back home to your little mud hut.”

  Latifa’s skin tingled between the girl’s blunt talons, warmed by broken blood vessels, numbed by clamped nerves. It would be satisfying to lash out with her fists and free herself, but she knew that could only end badly.

  “Did they have soap in your village?” Ghamzeh wondered. “Did they have underwear? All these things must have been so strange to you, when you arrived in civilization.”

  Latifa waited in silence. Arguing only prolonged the torment.

  “Too stuck up to have a conversation?” Ghamzeh released her arm and began to move away, but then she stopped to g
ive Latifa a parting smile. “You think you’re impressing the teachers when you give them all the answers they want? Don’t fool yourself, slut. They know you’re just an animal doing circus tricks.”

  When Latifa had cleared away the dinner plates, her grandfather asked her about school.

  “You’re working hard?” he pressed her, cross-legged on the floor with a cushion at his back. “Earning their respect?”

  “Yes.”

  “And your heart is still set on engineering?” He sounded doubtful, as if for him the word could only conjure up images of rough men covered in machine oil.

  “Chemical engineering,” she corrected him gently. “I’m getting good grades in chemistry, and there’d be plenty of jobs in it.”

  “After five more years. After university.”

  “Yes.” Latifa looked away. Half the money Amir sent back from Dubai was already going on her school fees. Her brother was twenty-two; no one could expect him to spend another five years without marrying.

  “You should get on with your studies then.” Her grandfather waved her away amiably, then reached over for the radio.

  In her room, Latifa switched on the laptop before opening her history book, but she kept her eyes off the screen until she’d read half the chapter on the Sassanid kings. When she finally gave herself a break the ChemFactor site had loaded, and she’d been logged in automatically, by cookie.

  A yellow icon of a stylized envelope was flashing at the top of the page. A fellow player she’d never heard of called “jesse409” had left her a message, congratulating “PhaseChangeGirl” on a cumulative score that had just crossed twenty thousand. Latifa’s true score was far higher than that, but she’d changed her identity and rejoined the game from scratch five times so far, lest she come to the notice of someone with the means to find out who she really was.

  The guess she’d made the previous night had paid off: a rigorous model of the two molecules showed that the binding between them was stable. She had saved one of ChemFactor’s clients the time and expense of doing the same calculations for dozens of alternatives, and her reward was a modest fraction of the resources she’d effectively freed. ChemFactor would model any collection of atoms and molecules she liked, free of charge—up to a preset quota in computing time.