Chasing Shadows: Visions of Our Coming Transparent World

by David Brin

  During the week of September 23, seven thousand Ozos were shipped to domestic and Canadian addresses supplied by Smith: five hundred to electronics manufacturers and suppliers; six thousand, thirty to a carton, marked “On Consignment,” to TV outlets in major cities; and the rest to private citizens chosen at random. The instruction booklets were in sealed envelopes packed with each device. Three thousand more went to Europe, South and Central America and the Middle East.

  A few of the outlets which received the cartons opened them the same day, tried the devices out, and put them on sale at prices ranging from $49.95 to $125. By the following day the word was beginning to spread, and by the close of business on the third day every store was sold out. Most people who got them, either through the mail or by purchase, used them to spy on their neighbors and on people in hotels.

  * * *

  In a house in Cleveland, a man watches his brother-in-law in the next room, who is watching his wife get out of a taxi. She goes to the lobby of an apartment building. The husband watches as she gets into the elevator, rides to the fourth floor. She rings the bell beside the door marked 410. The door opens; a dark-haired man takes her in his arms; they kiss.

  The brother-in-law meets him in the hall. “Don’t do it, Charlie.”

  “Get out of my way.”

  “I’m not going to get out of your way, and I tell you, don’t do it. Not now and not later.”

  “Why the hell shouldn’t I?”

  “Because if you do I’ll kill you. If you want a divorce, OK, get a divorce. But don’t lay a hand on her or I’ll find you the farthest place you can go.”

  Smith got his consignment of Ozos early in the week, took one home and left it to his store manager to put a price on the rest. He did not bother to use the production model but began at once to build another prototype. It had controls calibrated to one-hundredth of a second and one millimeter, and a timer that would allow him to stop a scene, or advance or regress it at any desired rate. He ordered some clockwork from an astronomical supply house.

  * * *

  A high-ranking officer in Army Intelligence, watching the first demonstration of the Ozo in the Pentagon, exclaimed, “My God, with this we could dismantle half the establishment—all we’ve got to do is launch interceptors when we see them push the button.”

  “It’s a good thing Senator Burkhart can’t hear you say that,” said another officer. But by the next afternoon everybody had heard it.

  * * *

  A Baptist minister in Louisville led the first mob against an Ozo assembly plant. A month later, while civil and criminal suits against all the rioters were still pending, tapes showing each one of them in compromising or ludicrous activities were widely distributed in the area.

  The commission agents who had handled the orders for the first Ozos were found out and had to leave town. Factories were firebombed, but others took their place.

  * * *

  The first Ozo was smuggled into the Soviet Union from West Germany by Katerina Belov, a member of a dissident group in Moscow, who used it to document illegal government actions. The device was seized on December 13 by the KGB; Belov and two other members of the group were arrested, imprisoned and tortured. By that time over forty other Ozos were in the hands of dissidents.

  * * *

  You are watching an old movie, Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice. The humor seems infantile and unimaginative to you: you are not interested in the actresses’ glances, smiles, grimaces, hinting at things that will never be shown on the screen. You realize that these people have never seen anyone but their most intimate friends without clothing, have never seen any adult shit or piss, and would be embarrassed or disgusted if they did. Why did children say “pee-pee” and “poo-poo,” and then giggle? You have read scholarly books about taboos on “bodily functions,” but why was shitting worse than sneezing?

  * * *

  Cora Zickwolfe, who lived in a remote rural area of Arizona and whose husband commuted to Tucson, arranged with her nearest neighbor, Phyllis Mell, for each of them to keep an Ozo focused on the bulletin board in the other’s kitchen. On the bulletin board was a note that said “OK.” If there was any trouble and she couldn’t get to the phone, she would take down the note, or if she had time, write another.

  In April 1992, about the time her husband usually got home, an intruder broke into the house and seized Mrs. Zickwolfe before she had time to get to the bulletin board. He dragged her into the bedroom and forced her to disrobe. The state troopers got there in fifteen minutes, and Cora never spoke to her friend Phyllis again.

  * * *

  Between 1992 and 2002 more than six hundred improvements and supplements to the Ozo were recorded. The most important of these was the power system created by focusing the Ozo at a narrow aperture on the interior of the Sun. Others included the system of satellite slave units in stationary orbits and a computerized tracer device which would keep the Ozo focused on any subject.

  Using a tracer, an entomologist in Mexico City is following the ancestral line of a honey bee. The images bloom and expire, ten every second: the tracer is following each queen back to the egg, then the egg to the queen that laid it, then that queen to the egg. Tens of thousands of generations have passed; in two thousand hours, beginning with a Paleocene bee, he has traveled back to the Cretaceous. He stops at intervals to follow the bee in real time, then accelerates again. The hive is growing smaller, more primitive. Now it is only a cluster of round cells, and the bee is different, more like a wasp. His year’s labor is coming to fruition. He watches, forgetting to eat, almost to breathe.

  * * *

  In your mother’s study after she dies, you find an elaborate chart of her ancestors and your father’s. You retrieve the program for it, punch it in, and idly watch a random sampling, back into time, first the female line, then the male … a teacher of biology in Boston, a suffragette, a corn merchant, a singer, a Dutch farmer in New York, a British sailor, a German musician. Their faces glow in the screen, bright-eyed, cheeks flushed with life. Someday you too will be only a series of images in a screen.

  * * *

  Smith is watching the planet Mars. The clockwork which turns the Ozo to follow the planet, even when it is below the horizon, makes it possible for him to focus instantly on the surface, but he never does this. He takes up his position hundreds of thousands of miles away, then slowly approaches, in order to see the red spark grow to a disk, then to a yellow sunlit ball hanging in darkness. Now he can make out the surface features: Syrtis Major and Thoth-Nepenthes leading in a long gooseneck to Utopia and the frostcap.

  The image as it swells hypnotically toward him is clear and sharp, without tremor or atmospheric distortion. It is summer in the northern hemisphere: Utopia is wide and dark. The planet fills the screen, and now he turns northward, over the cratered desert still hundreds of miles distant. A dust storm, like a yellow veil, obscures the curved neck of Thoth-Nepenthes; then he is beyond it, drifting down to the edge of the frostcap. The limb of the planet reappears; he floats like a glider over the dark surface tinted with rose and violet-gray; now he can see its nubbly texture; now he can make out individual plants. He is drifting among their gnarled gray stems, their leaves of violet horn; he sees the curious mis-shapen growths that may be air bladders or some grotesque analogue of blossoms. Now, at the edge of the screen, something black and spindling leaps. He follows it instantly, finds it, brings it hugely magnified into the center of the screen; a thing like a hairy beetle, its body covered with thick black hairs or spines; it stands on six jointed legs, waving its antennae, its mouth parts busy. And its four bright eyes stare into his, across forty million miles.

  * * *

  Smith’s hair got whiter and thinner. Before the 1992 Crash, he made heavy contributions to the International Red Cross and to volunteer organizations in Europe, Asia and Africa. He got drunk periodically, but always alone. From 1993 to 1996 he stopped reading the newspapers.

  He wrote down the coordi
nates for the plane crash in which his daughter and her husband had died, but never used them.

  At intervals while dressing or looking into the bathroom mirror, he stared as if into an invisible camera and raised one finger. In his last years he wrote some poems.

  We know his name. Patient researchers, using advanced scanning techniques, followed his letters back through the postal system and found him, but by that time he was safely dead.

  * * *

  The whole world has been at peace for more than a generation. Crime is almost unheard of. Free energy has made the world rich, but the population is stable, even though early detection has wiped out most diseases. Everyone can do whatever he likes, providing his neighbors would not disapprove, and after all, their views are loose, generally accepting, like yours.

  You are forty, a respected scholar, taking a few days out to review your life, as many people do at your age. You have watched your mother and father coupling on the night they conceived you, watched yourself growing in her womb, first a red tadpole, then a thing like an embryo chicken, then a big-headed baby kicking and squirming. You have seen yourself delivered, seen the first moment when your bloody head broke into the light. You have seen yourself staggering around the nursery in rompers, clutching a yellow plastic duck. Now you are watching yourself hiding behind the fallen tree on the hill, and you realize that there are no secret places. And beyond you in the ghostly future you know that someone is watching you as you watch; and beyond that watcher another, and beyond that another … Forever.

  Might the problem be

  The very opposite of privacy?

  EYEJACKED

  DAVID WALTON

  Patrick felt glad his wife wasn’t home. What did that say about his marriage, when he preferred Alicia to be away? Nothing good, that was for sure. But it was a relief to play a board game with his daughter in something like privacy for once, without any strangers looking in.

  The board game was called Become a Star with Delia Sharp, and it had the same basic rules as Candyland, except that it followed the pop star’s road to fame instead of a path through the Peppermint Forest and around Gumdrop Mountain. He found it dull as dirt to play, but Maddy, at age seven, loved it, just as she loved Delia’s weekly show and associated children’s books. Patrick didn’t care what game they played. He felt happier than he remembered being in a long time, just sitting there on the living room floor, watching Maddy crow with delight at each new card.

  A tiny display at the corner of his vision read 4:30, almost time to start making dinner, but no rush. The display also revealed that he had one follower, his mother, probably, who often connected to his feed to watch Maddy through his eyejack lenses. He didn’t mind her looking in. She was family. It gave her a way to stay connected from her apartment.

  With Alicia, it felt different. As a Lilo—a Life Logger—and rapidly becoming one of the most popular in the country, she had thousands of followers, mostly strangers, who watched the world through her lenses or followed her through the aggregation of neighborhood cams and the viewfeeds of passersby. Her quick rise to celebrity brought dramatic changes, including a lot of money. Patrick felt happy for her. He did. But the changes weren’t all for the good.

  He switched his view, opening a window in his field of vision and instructing his lenses to show him his mother. He saw her at her dining room table, working on a puzzle with a picture of a castle, somewhere in Germany perhaps. His view of her came from the perspective of AAL, her Automated Assisted Living system, which enabled her to live independently despite advancing Alzheimer’s. She managed well enough, but it would get worse over time, and he was glad to be able to check on her whenever he wanted.

  Her agile, long-fingered hands selected pieces and placed them without hesitation. He remembered those hands playing Chopin with similar confidence. She could still play, if he cajoled her, though she tended to forget that she could until she sat down and her fingers moved of their own accord.

  “Your turn, Dad.”

  Patrick switched his attention back to Maddy and selected a card. It told him that Delia had broken up with football star Justin Matthews, sending Patrick back two blue squares. Maddy giggled at his bad luck and hopped his marker backward with childish glee. Her flyaway brown hair always stuck up in odd places, despite Alicia’s attempts to tame it, and her lopsided smile showed off the proud gaps of several missing baby teeth.

  The number of followers indicated at the corner of Patrick’s vision rose from one to two, and then jumped to five. It flashed red as he gained more viewers, jumping ten and twenty at a time until it reached the hundreds. Surprised, he queried the network and discovered that Alicia, charmed by the quaint and picturesque scene of a father playing a board game with his daughter, had tagged the feed for her followers, many of whom had added it to their visual display. His feeling of relaxation disappeared. Three hundred strangers from around the world were now watching him and Maddy play together in their living room.

  He could disconnect, of course. Without Alicia actually here in person, he could choose to be private. But Alicia wouldn’t like it. She would accuse him of being anti-social and secretive for no reason. And she was probably right. Patrick knew he could be old-fashioned where eyejacks were concerned. And it wasn’t like he had anything to hide. But with so many people looking at him, he felt self-conscious. Watched. It made what had been a genuine moment with Maddy feel like a charade, a kind of playacting for the satisfaction of others.

  A few predictable comments started to litter his board, Awww, how sweet, and What a good father. I wish my husband would.… Patrick swept them away with a flick of his eyes, annoyed at Alicia for disturbing his tranquil afternoon, and at himself for minding something that ultimately didn’t matter. He didn’t care what any of those viewers thought, so why did it bother him to have them watching?

  Maddy, who had no eyejacks, didn’t notice any of it. “No, Daddy. You have to wait back in Memphis. You can’t go to L.A. until you get the ‘land a film agent’ card.” Her infectious laughter helped him set his worries aside.

  When the game ended, he stood, stretched, and headed toward the kitchen to make dinner. By then, most of the new viewers had drifted away, probably back to Alicia and a higher likelihood of drama and spectacle. A glance at her feed showed her, at that moment, walking through a food court in Midtown, exclaiming to a friend in appalled tones about fat and sugar content, processed chemical ingredients and a general lack of cleanliness.

  “… there was a study, I don’t remember where, by some scientist or other, that the napkins at these places have more germs on them than the toilet paper at a truck stop,” Alicia said, to her friend’s evident astonishment. “Can you imagine? Wiping your mouth…?”

  As her friend shuddered, comments rolled down the bottom of Alicia’s feed. Half of her viewers expressed horror and revulsion, while the others hurled abuse on the first half for being so gullible. The ensuing arguments spiraled quickly into attacks on each other’s mental capacity, loyalty to Alicia, and general fitness to be called members of the human race.

  Patrick shut off the feed. Alicia was just hitting her stride, and she was still a taxi ride away from their Upper East Side apartment. She wouldn’t be home for dinner.

  “Come on, Maddy,” he said. “Let’s make some chocolate-chip pancakes.”

  * * *

  Alicia made it home in time to put Maddy to bed, a drawn-out affair involving several children’s books (Delia Sharp Can Do Anything!), a glass of milk, and endless hugs and kisses. The voices Alicia used when reading were dynamic and funny, and kept Maddy laughing and begging for more. Despite himself, Patrick smiled to watch them. Alicia’s genuine interactions revealed a cherishing of their daughter that went beyond merely pleasing her viewership.

  Then Maddy made several sugary-cute comments that rang false to Patrick and set him worrying again. Maddy couldn’t see Alicia’s ratings, but she could tell what made Alicia happy, which was more or less t
he same thing. What would that teach her? And how long would it take Maddy to figure out that the ratings increased even more when she behaved badly?

  He cleaned up the remains of the dishes in the sink, changed for bed, then popped out his eyejack lenses and set them in their case. The air-conditioning made the air feel dry and fresh on his skin, and the sheets were pleasantly cool to the touch. He settled back against a stack of pillows with a novel. He would have to wake early to get to work, but a little solitary time to unwind seemed like a good idea.

  When Alicia finally joined him, dressed in an elegant but chaste nightgown, he folded the book and set it on his night-table. He had been waiting for this opportunity, the only time of day he could be sure of a truly private conversation.

  “I want to talk,” he said.

  She sat next to him, her loose hair falling across her shoulders. Beauty was almost a job requirement in her line of work, but even so, it made him forget, for a moment, what he intended to say. She looked at him, unsmiling. “So talk.”

  He hugged a pillow to his chest. “It’s about all this success you’ve had. I just think.…” He sighed, tried again. “I know this is what you’ve wanted for a long time. But I don’t think it’s good for Maddy, or for our family. It’s as if we don’t know you anymore. You’re like an actor playing the part of you in your own TV drama.”

  “Not good for her?” Alicia gave a surprised little cough. “Maddy has more now than she ever did. Better clothes, better neighborhood. You think we could send her to the Dalton School on your salary?”

  “I’m not talking about money. I’m talking about a family life that’s not influenced by what will make us more interesting to strangers.”