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

by Neal Stephenson

  I pause and reorder my personal space in the office at regular intervals. I align my unused coloured pens, my three blocks of Post-its, my coffee and tea canisters. I wash my mug, dry it and my spoon, place them on my table.

  #SlythyTove: In the country of the poor of mind the fantasist is king.

  I also dislike, deeply, in fact loathe and abhor, the notion of everything we do here. As @SlythyTove I flit the Cloud, watching for ill deeds. I am the government’s angel of vengeance as it would be, only in truth it’s more like the government’s rat catcher. I poke holes with sticks.

  When I was a girl my father found that mice had come to live in the walls of our house. Ordinary traps didn’t catch them, so he laid up poison in flat trays all perfected so that if there was a disturbance you would see footprints or movements in the strange greenish granules. In the garage and outhouses he was more merciful and put up a milk bottle with a ramp made of wooden school rulers leading to its open neck. Inside, a piece of cake. In due course those mice who came into the house fed on the poison and expired, leaving a horrible smell as their bodies slowly desiccated and rotted far from the reach of human hand. Eventually they dried out completely and the smell went away. I felt this was mouse justice, of a kind, and I accepted that we had to pay for our crime of killing them with at least some inconvenience. We lived, arguably, on mouse land and had built our home on their ancestral graves.

  #SlythyTove: The Cloud is the communal grave of the living.

  However, in the roof and in the garage it was a different story. We forgot those traps because they were out of sight, out of mind. It was weeks later when we found them again. In the attic the poison tray was untouched. Its surface was pristine, although it had been neatly covered in a precise one-inch-thick layer of fibreglass loft insulation. In the garage there was no sign of mouse nor cake, just a bottle filled to the brim with tiny scraps of chewed and ripped-up newspapers.

  As much as I spend my time baiting and checking traps, I am also strategically piling newspapers and insulation.

  Something is up today. @YellowFeather agrees with me, but neither of us can say what it is. Since we became phones, the dataverse is a lot less like a thing one accesses and is more of a thing one is infested by. @YF and I are old enough to remember cell phones, though. We’re old enough to be Pre-Text. There’s a joke there but I’m not going to make it.

  #SlythyTove: Check out this footage of soldiers shooting their own people during ____ gov crackdown—are these your sons? Are you proud?

  I do the same with anything I find that looks like a crime where the morons film themselves. Now that our eyes are cameras this happens way more often than you’d think, as people don’t always remember to turn off the functionality and criminals aren’t the brightest stars. #AutoProsecute is trending every day, since it’s legal for the government to take a recording directly from your videocapture any time it likes. Then they live-stream the automated court. Meanwhile thousands of people per day sign up to offer free rides to anyone who wants one.

  #SlythyTove: I see you are wearing a diving suit and goggles. Are we swimming or is this for the bedroom scene?

  I don’t get that. Do people honestly think their lives so fascinating or is it that transported delight of imagining oneself the star of a 24/7 commentated documentary which relentlessly reveals one’s own rise to fame and glory? As long as someone is watching, you have become interesting. You have become. Witnessed, your actions take on an intangible, magical significance. You are a star. Meanwhile you watch a girl in Budapest. She is studying. You read her book in her café. Although she understands it, and you feel like you do, there is a failure of comprehension thanks to the language gap which the interface just can’t cover up. You feel you’ve understood, though the text means nothing to you. You don’t read Hungarian. It’s lunchtime. She’s hungry but only having coffee. Outside she’ll wait later for an electronic cigarette. You can feel the anticipation of her reward. It’s just like the reviews promised—other people’s ordinariness is more rewarding than your own. Their banality is soothing to your own sense of failure. Because being you is so much more interesting than being me.

  #SlythyTove: MortalSin.com for all your online penance needs. Rates are reasonable. No sin too large for the right price. Non-phone nuns will pray for you on God’s eternal hotline. All religions and denominations catered for. No Lollers.

  Sometimes I’m not sure how much I’m joking. I am sure that the potential functionality of this system is way beyond what they claim the software will allow. Reason? Because I can say things like ‘I feel unrest in my bones’ and I know it’s not the weather or sudden-onset osteoporosis. It’s the Cloud. In particular, because it’s my right foot most affected, I know it’s in the damp swamps of the financial mire that oddness lies: somewhere a cold economic seeping is a-creeping. But it has a jaunty tune. The brief trend of #SlythyTove has gone now. It was a portent.

  @YellowFeather agrees with my foot. Like me, she’s been waiting for inspiration to strike, and the charge is rising in her hair follicles, warning her of lightning. Something is going down. We doubt we’ll be able to do more than observe, but it’s exciting to try.

  Deep immersion is required for comprehension of the Cloud entire, which means leaving bodies behind, hence we have couches and not desks. Outside the office I’d never do this. Maybe in bed at night. Diving mask on. Goggles. I need a snorkel. Deep immersion isn’t for the faint lights of the world.

  I have to switch Dad off. He doesn’t notice. He’s on the bus, watching an old movie. I lie down and synch my feeds with @Yellow. There’s a moment of nausea as my body trades data sources, and then we are rolling.

  Hollow vastness, the upended jar of stars overhead, and swim, fly, or roll, it doesn’t matter, you will and you go, you go as you will. The uniqueness of the interface only really shows up once you close your eyes and go for it. To get this far you need upgrades so that the nanotube-guided uplink neurons track your real-time cellular ion pathways and follow them like faithful pack mules dragging the broadband railroad behind them. Eventually if you use the cue training system like you’re supposed to they’ll home in on your own personal highways for organising information, and then you’re all set to get your own sensory information paused while your uplink feeds you whatever you’ve got lined up from the Cloud. Your brain doesn’t know the difference, only you do, so at this point it get can pretty hairy. Your body will react as if it’s all real, and if you double feedback with another person you can make them copy your moves in real time like a dancing marionette. Consenting adults only, of course.

  #SlythyTove: Popping out for a quick bite. I see there are no heroes any more. Where is my head of Joseph Kony on a plate? Slice him thinly so there’s enough to go around.

  At the most sophisticated level your own sensory inputs selectively replace their normal load with data from the Cloud. This cannot be apprehended directly; it is processed by the body, as the faithful body has processed all such things over the long years of humankind. I feel in my bones the tiny prickle of surprising sale and exchange, but there the limit stops further certainty. We are using voodoo tools to attempt a prophet’s insights into something that a perfect machine sees faultlessly and has no names for. We who have the names lack the sight. A big deal is going down but it is diffuse, a scent of blood on a current from many miles away—yes, something is being slaughtered. Let us swim, Nazgul sisters.

  @YellowFeather confirms it. She has pins and needles in her arms. For her the elbows are money, the skin a map of the world, her blood is the rise and fall of empires. She says, “I think this is a flashraid. But a slow one. If that makes sense.”

  It does. In this case one can’t track the raiders. There are too many; their organisation will be by free-flowing wikis and they will erase as they go, passing the accumulated knowledge ever onwards, dust on the wind, their organisation secret even to themselves. @YellowFeather is good with wikis. They are butterflies in her garden, b
rightly coloured and fluttering, rich and strange enough for her to see easily against the dull grey satin of disorganised bickering and tweeting. She will try to get in on the action before it is over, searching for specific repeats of figures and banking codes with her delicate proboscis. Even the reavers must go through central clearing.

  I am not suited to the job of finding the bodies. I am only a rat catcher.

  I go and recruit @Exodiac, who is an expert shark, glamorous and swift. He promises to call when he finds something to call about. Later alligator. Meanwhile that leaves me with my daily rounds.

  I start with the roaring trade in rewrites of approved papers. This is nothing new, but the speed and the variance with which the industry has evolved is mind-blowing. For all the false students and cheating professors there is a nexus of incredibly well-read and hyper-educated human encyclopaedias waging price wars with each other across the globe. They know human knowledge inside out. At least to bachelor level. My A is better than your A. My First is cheaper than your First. Nya nya nya. The learning churns like tyres in mud, spinning on their axles. Above, the passengers in the bus are stuck fast.

  My dutiful rat friends check in with me. They will give me 500 names—mostly doctors—in exchange for protection. Do you want a doctor who bought their degree from a clearinghouse?

  After some haggling we agree. Bad doctors for a blind eye to humanities fraud. The lesser evil, one supposes.

  @YellowFeather calls me and I have to snap out of it. She is looking at the phone network, at the connections. She directs me to a particular feed. Some old lady on the coast, watching her azaleas, following azalea-fancier trends, competing with her closest global rival in the field, Hiro Akita of Tokyo. They are both midway up the rankings, where competition is the fiercest and most merciless. Mrs Helen Riley, for it is she, is sending a text compliment on Hiro Akita’s rather lovely plum-leaf azalea. How very gracious. Then a timer comes up on her old-fashioned HUD. A network action is cued. @YellowFeather shows me that a chain of such cues has gone out over the morning.

  Together we watch, rapt.

  #SlythyTove: Something mimsy this way comes.

  I keep thinking about the impossibility of those mice piling up insulation on the poison. The effort. The concentration. The exactitude. The time it took. The persistence of it. It all bothers me. Has always bothered me. There was no cake nor mouse in the bottle.

  Only now does it occur to me that my father may have tricked me. It could have been a hoax. In all your life, if you tell the truth and nobody has a reason to suspect you, couldn’t you pull off one perfect lie? I can’t remember if there were mouse droppings on the scene. I think there were but I’m not sure. I don’t know. I don’t remember.

  @Exodiac joins the conversation. He agrees that this azalea woman is the huntress, is Ahab. Ahabbess! Together we wait the final minutes. I don’t know about the others, but I suddenly have high hopes.

  Mrs Helen Riley examines a leaf for pests. She does not see us. Finally, with thirty seconds left, she accesses a wiki and we hold our breath.

  @Exodiac’s microagents return nearly at the same moment, each bearing aloft like a tiny banner one name of the tens of thousands of people that Mrs Helen Riley has been in contact with over the last six months, in fact ever since Cloud 2.1 came out and allowed the network to act as a constant, live trading floor for both corporate and private brokers.

  Skitter, scrabble. We ransack her records of every kind. I am in the attic doing education, parents, home, family connections, and all of that. Lower down @YellowFeather smashes up the glassware and flings open the drawers, searching for hidden gems: tax returns, old debts, credit ratings. In the basement @Exodiac grubs the bins: relationships, friends, correspondence, lifestyle habits, shopping records, exes.

  In the living room the grandfather clock chimes the tones for the hour and three rats look up breathless, wide-eyed, our whiskers twitching as we listen. The house is become a ship and capable Ahabbess is at the rudder. Unsuspecting, the whale lies before us, already made into soap and stew and phones before he knows it by the curious means of the vorpal bomb awaiting signal beneath Ahabbess’s finger. I see it now. Just a time cue. That’s all it is. That little thing that all her people know.

  Mrs Riley puts down her secateurs and takes off her bright-green rubber gardening gloves. Mrs Riley smiles and her investors, scattered like seeds, smile with her as for one perfect moment they unite and display the creeping mould of their covert, hostile takeover.

  The whale is filleted in seconds, every tendril exploding his assets, selling them, reorganising them, distributing him piecemeal. A multinational long criticised for exploitation of Third World workers has just become the property of a cartel that existed for less than a second. In that second they formed new companies under new owners, reorganised his bones, made him into sausages, scattered his blood. He is already chaff on the wind by the time we rats turn to regard each other in shock.

  This cannot be legal. The system is meant to be coded via the law. You can’t do this. Such a thing. Such a thing! But the system is the law in solid form. If it were not legal, it could not have happened. Someone somewhere has left a loophole and the mice have romped through it with their little scraps of newspaper.

  #SlythyTove: A moment’s silence for all who have died believing in the competence of human beings.

  Who has financed this? No banks involved. Not a one. What about the notices required, the management proposals, the right procedures? And what about the consequences of such a beast being slaughtered in its traces? The nations feel its collapse, only not yet of course, they have no idea; the phone calls announcing a change of management are only just beginning to arrive. A democracy of right-minded fellows divides the body for communion: your jobs are safe but now you will work for the poor who have bought you, one atom at a time, together. You now have more bosses than there are workers. They will create an emergent CEO. It will be a glorious liberation of the people by the people.

  #SlythyTove: The end of the world is nigh!

  We three rats flee the scene. Mrs Riley goes indoors because it is starting to rain.

  It is entirely preposterous and will not last, is the official verdict on the raid, out ten minutes later. It happened by a programming mistake and must be rescinded; come, don’t be naughty, give it back. It can’t happen again because it would be entirely wrong for people to organise themselves democratically and in secret and do such a thing. It’s unsporting. Tougher systems need to be in place to prevent shocks like this. Why, think of the dangers. Privacy of communications is one thing, but look what happens when …

  I turn off the news. Dad is calling. What about beans? I say, what about azaleas? Hmm, Dad says, they’re poisonous, you know.

  What amazes me, however, is Mrs Riley, now @1082Azalea. A quiet, disciplined, radical mind. Having done no technical wrong, she cannot be prosecuted. Naturally we will follow her now to the end of her days. In particular, I shall.

  I wait a due interval in which Dad and I cook seventy more dinners, shop ineffectively, and bicker with each other about this and that. I buy him an azalea, and he swears the mice stories are gospel as we plant it out in the garden together.

  @SlythyTove @1082Azalea: Might I direct your attention to this extremely interesting plant?

  My plant link takes us directly to a list of individuals long supposed beyond the reach of the longest arm of justice.

  I am piling newspapers. I am putting up a milk bottle.

  @1082Azalea @SlythyTove: Thank you so much for your thoughtful contribution. I will look into it.

  I call my dad. On, just for now. In the background I watch the reconfigurations of azalea justice, not knowing what the results will be, if it will mean more pain or less, if it will be anything like what the creators imagined.

  ‘I’ll be home soon!’

  He sends me a picture of a smiling whale he has drawn. It looks genuinely cheerful, as if something has happened that
only it knows about and has given it satisfaction. ■

  Firebrand

  Peter Watts

  It had taken a while, but the voters were finally getting used to the idea of spontaneous human combustion.

  It wasn’t, after all, as if it were really anything new. Anecdotal reports of people bursting into flame dated back to the Middle Ages at least. And if it seemed to be happening a bit more often in recent years, it was doubtless because—as the pundits pointed out—the new administration’s policy of scrupulous and transparent record-keeping was simply more efficient at detecting those events when they occurred.

  Here, for example, was Ryan Fletcher, igniting in front of his whole family while watching an after-dinner episode of Death Row Death Match on his recliner. According to eyewitness reports, he had lit up the single Benson & Hedges Gold he permitted himself each day, brought it to his lips, and breathed a sudden surprising jet of fire into the room—“just like a dragon!” as eight-year-old Sheldon Fletcher had put it to the police not twenty minutes later. He must have belched. There was no explicit mention of that in the report, but it was the only way that oxygen could have backwashed into Fletcher’s GI tract, where an estimated two and a half liters of dodecane was sloshing around with the usual mix of bile, methane, and prefecal lumps.