Visions of the Future

by Brin, David

  “Carl Julius Hasenkamp,” Jake said, leaning forward, suddenly intent.

  “Who is that?” I asked.

  “He’s a scientist, working for me,” he said. “He is somewhat missing.”

  “Call the police,” I said. “I’m a journalist—”

  “Investigative journalist,” he said. “The cops aren’t interested, because he isn’t actually missing. He sent me a message about a week ago that he’d made a breakthrough on a project he and his team have been working on, and that he needed some time to confirm his findings. He’s been online intermittently since then, but he hasn’t been in contact, and he isn’t answering my messages.”

  “And you want me to find him?” I said. “I’m sure you’ve got other people who can do that.”

  “No,” Jake said. “It probably isn’t too hard to find him. It’s more a matter of persuading him to talk to me, and maybe also to report on what he’s found. Eventually.”

  “Honestly, I think you need to do this yourself,” I said.

  He shook his head. “He’s stubborn. He probably won’t talk to me until he’s sure of himself. I think he could benefit from an outside perspective though.”

  “From a journalist?” I asked.

  “With a technical background—” he said.

  “An extremely out-of-date technical background,” I said. I wasn’t kidding. Fifteen years is more than sufficient time for skills to atrophy to extinction. I can do background research and dig up a story as well as anyone in my profession, but my math isn’t what it once was. “Why do you want me to do this anyhow? There’s many better qualified people.”

  “I don’t know them,” he said, simply.

  Something clicked. Sometimes I’m slow that way. “You want editorial control over what I write,” I said.

  Jake stood up, and started pacing the floor of the hut. “Yes,” he said, after a pause.

  “I can’t work that way,” I said. “You’re talking about my integrity as a journalist.”

  He sighed. “Can you at least show me what you write first, before you publish?”

  “You’re saying you want to censor my work?” I said. “What happens if you don’t want it released in the end?”

  “I’m not sure,” he said, not exactly answering my question. “I’m paying though.”

  “Well there’s always that,” I said.

  Indeed, there always is. Journalism has always been a tough profession, and the digitization of news and the subsequent financial race to zero of the first two decades of the century hadn’t helped. Some in my profession survive through patronage, becoming little more than PR agents as a result. Although I cherished my independence and professional integrity, money was always tight.

  The Director of Operations lived in an older building that looked like it had originally been a single, large dwelling. Jake had recommended that I talk to her first, without explaining why.

  The car pulled over to the curb, and made a pinging noise to indicate that I’d arrived. I swiped the payment notification on my phone, and exited, with a quick look at the sky, which threatened rain. The car drove away quietly as I entered the lobby.

  “So you’re the sucker that Jake has drawn into his newest melodrama?” She said. She’d been waiting in the doorway as I walked out of the elevator. “I beg your pardon,” she said, and stuck out her hand. “Katherine Fitzgerald.”

  I shook her proffered hand. It’s often tricky to figure out people’s age these days, but I guessed she was a decade or more older than me.

  I followed her into the apartment. It was more modern on the inside than the building’s facade had indicated. The room was reconfiguring itself, a set of comfortable chairs and a coffee table unfolding from the floor, as office furniture slowly moved aside. That was probably one reason Katherine had been standing in the hallway. Despite the assurances of the manufacturers of such intelligent furniture systems, there had been several high profile lawsuits in recent years, resulting from injuries caused by moving furniture that didn’t detect people in the way.

  I hadn’t seen a smart furniture system in action before, so I watched with some interest. The office furniture collapsed into a compact cube, and a hole in the parquet floor opened up to draw it down into a temporary storage space between the floors of the building. The chairs appeared from a similar hole relatively intact, and the coffee table’s legs unfolded as it was moved into position.

  One wall of the apartment was occupied from floor to ceiling with a sleek-looking food wall. Each of the dozens of growing chambers had a small screen indicating the crops within and their ripeness. I’d considered installing one myself, and hoped that the price would eventually come down. The manufacturers claimed that some families could grow more than fifty percent of their food using their system, with everything completely automated, including cleaning.

  “I appreciate your seeing me at home, after hours,” I said, sitting down on one of the newly blossomed chairs. “If I understand correctly, the whole thing is a little—”

  “Sensitive?” she asked. “Oh please. Don’t get pulled in. This is one of his little theatrical—”

  “Does he do that often?” I asked. I couldn’t tell if she was annoyed, or just naturally abrupt.

  “I thought you knew Jake well?” she asked me, instead of answering.

  “Not recently,” I said. “What about your missing scientist though?”

  “Carl?” she asked. “The poor old dear probably just needed a vacation. He’s horribly overworked. That’s something he should take up with human resources, not some sort of enigma. Why Jake has to involve the police and the press is quite beyond me. No offense to you, of course,” she added.

  I made a small non-committal gesture with my hand. “I don’t suppose you know where he is though?” I asked.

  “I think he has a cabin somewhere or other,” she said. “But really, he could be anywhere. Just send him a message and ask.”

  “I think Jake actually just wanted me to go talk to him about his team’s recent work,” I said. I pulled myself to my feet, and looked around for my coat and hat.

  “You must be hungry,” she said, changing the topic. She examined her food wall, checking for green indicator lights. “I think I have some basmati rice, some fresh herbs, a bunch of peppers. I can throw in some protein and make a quick stir-fry dinner for two.”

  “I already ate,” I said, not sure what to make of the change in her manner. “I appreciate the offer though.”

  “Well, what about a drink before you go?” she asked. “I feel like an awful host.”

  “I really do have to go,” I said. “Duty calls.”

  The rain was pelting down when I left. The car’s windows were hydrophobic, so they remained clear, but the car still occasionally swept its wipers across the windshield, probably more to improve my view than for its own safe operation.

  “Please use my preferences,” I said. My voice was sufficient permission for the car to access my contact list and the list of preferences that I had set for how I liked to interact with my environment.

  “Yo,” the car said.

  “Can you call Jacob Wexler for me?” I asked.

  “On it, dude.” Fortunes have been made by marketers and psychologists who have analyzed why people set their preferences the way that they do.

  “He’s apparently in a meeting,” said the car, “But he left specific instructions to patch calls from you through to him directly.” The car made a ringing sound, to indicate that it was calling. Jake picked up after the second ring.

  “Your COO thinks you’re making a fuss over nothing,” I said.

  “I need to remind her not to air our laundry in front of the press,” he said. “Nothing personal, of course.”

  “Why did you send me to meet her?” I asked. It felt like I was being thrown into the middle of something political, with little explanation.

  “We don’t agree about the direction of the company,” he said. “You
know about how the business model for utilities has changed over the years, right?”

  “Yeah, I’m mostly on solar,” I said, apologetically.

  He chuckled. “We largely sell energy to manufacturing companies these days. The noodle forest hits peak power during the same hours that they operate, and we’re really cheap. The problem is that even that is slowly declining over time. I’m trying to diversify the company—”

  “Hence Carl and his team,” I said.

  “Right,” Jake said. “Katherine and I don’t completely see eye to eye on this direction. This is just normal internal stuff though. Every company has similar discussions at the top.”

  “I’ll keep it to myself,” I said. “By the way, she was a lot more animated when I mentioned that you wanted me to talk to Carl about his work—”

  “Was she now?” Jake laughed again. “Isn’t that interesting?”

  “There’s something I don’t understand yet,” I said, changing the topic. “They call it big science for a reason. The sort of ground-breaking research you’re talking about is done by large teams, not a single scientist.”

  “Carl’s the head of a small engineering team,” said Jake. “What is often called a skunkworks. I’ve been keeping them separate from everyone else. I’m pretty sure that whatever they’ve found is a result of engineering work, rather than experimentation of the type you’re used to. I think Katherine’s reaction is due to a desire to learn what they’re up to.”

  “Have you heard from him?” I asked.

  “No,” Jake said. “And I really need him back on the job.”

  “Any messages?” I asked. I threw my coat over the back of a chair, and my hat onto the table. The house pulled up a list on the nearest wall. I’d set my incoming calls to go directly to the message box while I was away.

  There were two requests from editors, an invite from some journalist friends to meet up for dinner, and one from the local police division to tell me that they didn’t have an active investigation, that as far as they could tell Carl wasn’t missing anyhow, and that if I came up with any information to the contrary to please get in touch with them. I hadn’t called them, so I assumed that either Jake or Katherine must have told them about my involvement. I left another message for Carl, splashed some water on my face, and then headed out to the restaurant.

  There was a small journalistic huddle around a table in a far corner. The place was crowded, dark and noisy. There was more beer than food on the table. I had almost reached the table when the restaurant patched a call through to me. “Priority call from Katherine Fitzgerald. Do you wish to take it?” The restaurant must have had an extraordinarily good environmental sound system. The audio appeared to be positioned right next to my head, and perfectly compensated for the background noise.

  “I’ll take it,” I said, waving distractedly at my colleagues.

  “I’m sorry if I’m interrupting something,” Katherine said. Perhaps some of the background noise was coming through on her end, despite the restaurant’s best efforts. “I have an idea where Carl and his team could be.”

  I chuckled. “Is this going to cost me?”

  “Hey,” she said. “I think the whole thing is a wild goose chase, but I want to know what my budget line item is paying for. Nobody talks to me.” I wasn’t sure if she was exaggerating or not.

  “Why don’t you try talking to them directly?” I asked.

  “Carl is pretty stubborn,” she said. “I don’t think he’ll talk to anyone until he’s ready. Whatever ready even means in this case.” She sounded peeved.

  “That’s pretty much the same thing that Jake said,” I said.

  “We have an old warehouse,” she said. “We used to use it for light manufacturing early on, but we outgrew it years ago. We’ve been trying to sell it. I think they may have moved in there in the meantime. I’ll send you the address, just in case.”

  “I’ll head over there after I eat,” I said. “Do you mind sending him another message to let him know I’m heading over?”

  “It’s a pretty run-down area,” she said. “Make sure you get the car to wait for you, otherwise you may have trouble getting a ride back if there’s nobody there.”

  Katherine hadn’t been kidding about the neighborhood. There was a burned-out hulk of a building across from the warehouse, and the parking lot was overgrown with weeds. I couldn’t tell if there was anyone around, because it didn’t look like there were external windows. I instructed the car to wait for me, and went to find an entrance.

  After knocking on the front door with no answer, I got back in the car and drove around the back to the loading bay. The bay door was open, surprisingly, and two people were standing on the dock. They were backlit by the light from the warehouse, so I could only see their silhouettes.

  “You the journalist?” one of the figures said.

  “Who’s asking?” I replied. I shielded my eyes and tried to make out their features with little success.

  “I guess that’s a yes,” he said. “Katherine called about an hour ago to say you were on your way down here. I don’t know how she knew to call here. I guess you’d better come on in.”

  “Are you Carl?” I asked. I climbed the stairs up onto the dock, and got a better look at who I was talking to. One of the two men was young, tall, exceedingly thin, and just about to fall over from exhaustion. The other was older than me, but certainly not old enough to match Katherine’s “poor old dear”.

  “That’s me,” the older one said.

  “I was expecting some sort of éminence grise, from what Katherine’s description,” I said.

  He chuckled. “She has a way with words.”

  “Pretty much everyone said you probably wouldn’t talk to me either,” I said.

  “That’s pretty much the point of having a secret skunkworks team,” Carl said. He looked at his companion, and then back at me. “Jake said you studied physics before becoming a journalist.”

  “You spoke to him?” I asked.

  “I called him after Katherine called us,” he said. “Jake said he trusts you to keep a lid on the story until it’s okay to release.”

  “I don’t know what the story is though,” I said.

  Carl turned and walked back into the warehouse, waving with his hand for me to follow. The younger man closed the loading bay door after us.

  I had been anticipating a dusty, cavernous space, but instead the room inside of the loading area was small, and looked more like an office. They must have sectioned the room off from the rest of the building, and cleaned it up.

  Several young people were seated at various desks, and were clearly focused on their work, as my entrance appeared to be barely noticed.

  “My team,” said Carl. “We’ve been working around the clock for the past few weeks. I’ve been sleeping here, when I can even find a moment.” He gestured at a pile of inflatable mattresses in the corner of the room.

  “So what is the big mystery about?” I asked.

  “Come,” he said, leading me to a flat metal table, in the middle of a cluster of equipment and instrumentation.

  There was a small, flat metal disk floating several inches above the table. Carl whacked the disk with his hand, and it swung violently to-and-fro for a few seconds before reaching equilibrium once more.

  “Electromagnets?” I asked. “Neat trick, but I’ve seen this one before.”

  “Nope,” he said. “Why don’t you put your hand over the table and see what happens?”

  I tentatively waved my hand over the table, and immediately noticed a small but not insignificant upward pressure. “What the—,” I said. “How did you get an electromagnetic field to interact with my hand?”

  “This isn’t magnetic”, Carl said. “This is something completely else.”

  “I thought your team was doing engineering, not cutting-edge physics,” I said.

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes we are. I think you went up to see the noodle forest with Jake, right?” />
  I nodded affirmatively.

  “Did you notice the bright coloration?” Carl asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “Jake said the colors were specifically tuned to frequencies from the sun.”

  “Right. We use special materials to capture as many photons as possible, at the wavelengths that make it through the Earth’s atmosphere.”

  “Okay,” I said, “But what does that have to do with this floating disk?”

  Carl looked at me slightly apologetically. “Sorry, it’s going to take one or two more digressions to explain what you’re seeing. You see,” he said, continuing, “humanity has become quite good at manipulating electrons over the past two hundred years. As a result, we can do all sorts of neat tricks with the electromagnetic force—”

  “Like memristors?” I asked. Memristors, theorized about long ago, but only discovered practically in the last two decades, make so much of modern computer technology possible. The immensely powerful smart environment that we take for granted is entirely dependent on them, from the pattern matching that allows our driverless cars to function, to the seamless movement of my personal communication preferences as I move from place to place.

  “Yes,” Carl said. “Like memristors. The thing is though, we have almost no ability to manipulate the other forces of the universe. Like the strong nuclear force, for example. The only way we know of to do anything with it is to blow things up.”

  “Nuclear reactions,” I added.

  “Right,” he said, “But it’s blunt force. We hit atoms with a metaphorical hammer and break them apart, or we apply immense heat and pressure and we fuse them together again. The same thing goes with the weak nuclear force, and—” he paused here for maximum effect, “with gravity.”

  “Are you telling me you have some sort of anti-gravity device here? That’s simply not possible,” I said. There’s never been any solid evidence for a force that opposes gravity.

  “Not precisely,” he said. “Remember we were talking about metamaterials for capturing photons and electrons?” A metamaterial is a blanket term for any substance that has been engineered to have properties not normally found in nature. The water repelling glass of a car’s windshield and the self-repairing fabric in clothes are both examples.