by James Gleick
Newspapers and websites polled their readers for predictions. They were disappointing. We will control the weather. (Again.) Deserts will become tropical forests. Or the reverse. Space elevators. But not much space travel. Warp drive and wormholes notwithstanding, we seem to have given up on populating the galaxy. Nanorobots. Remote-control warfare. The internet in your contact lens or brain implant. Self-driving cars, a comedown, somehow, from i futuristi and their fearsome roaring racing machines. The aesthetic of futurism changed, too, without anyone issuing a manifesto—from big and bold, primary colors and metallic shine to grim, dank rot and ruins. Genetic engineering and/or species extinctions. Is that all the future we have to look forward to? Nanobots and self-driving cars?
Credit 14.1
Card produced c. 1900 by Hildebrands chocolate company
If we lack space travel, we do have telepresence. “Present” in this context pertains to space, not to time. Telepresence was born in the 1980s, when remotely controlled cameras and microphones came into their own. Deep sea explorers and bomb squads can project themselves elsewhere—project their souls, their eyes and ears, while the body remains behind. We send robots beyond the planets and inhabit them. In the same decade the word virtual, already by then a computer term, began to refer to remote simulations—virtual office, virtual town halls, virtual sex. And, of course, virtual reality. Another way to look at telepresence is that people virtualize themselves.
A women finds herself piloting a quadcopter in a slightly creepy “beta of some game”—like a first-person shooter with “nothing to shoot”—and because she is a character in a novel by William Gibson (The Peripheral, 2014) we must already wonder what is virtual and what is real. Her name is Flynne and she seems to live somewhere in the American South—back country, trailer down by the creek. But in the present or the future? Hard to know exactly. At the very least, waves of the future are lapping at the shore. Marine vets have scars, physical and mental, from implanted “haptics.” The era’s namespace includes Cronut, Tesla, Roomba, Sushi Barn, and Hefty Mart. Roadside storefronts offer “fabbing”—three-dimensional printing of practically everything. Drones are ascendant. Every buzzing insect is a potential spy.
Anyway, Flynne leaves her reality behind to pilot her drone through a different, virtual reality. A mysterious (virtual?) corporate entity is paying her to do it. She hovers near a great dark building. She looks up—camera up. She looks down—camera down. “All around her were whispers, urgent as they were faint, like a cloud of invisible fairy police dispatchers.” Everyone knows how immersive a computer game can become, but what is her goal? Her purpose? Apparently she is meant to chase away other drones, which swarm like dragonflies, but it doesn’t feel like any game she has played before.*4 Then—a window, a woman, a balcony—Flynne witnesses a murder.
We have met Gibson before: the futurist who denies writing about the future. It was Gibson who invented the word cyberspace in 1982 after watching kids playing video games at an arcade in Vancouver, staring into their consoles, turning knobs and pounding buttons to manipulate a universe no one else could see. “It seemed to me that what they wanted was to be inside the games, within the notional space of the machine,” he said later. “The real world had disappeared for them—it had completely lost its importance. They were in that notional space.” There was no such thing as cyberspace then—as Gibson imagined it, “a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation.” The space behind all the computers. “Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data.” We all feel that way sometimes.
At some point it occurred to Gibson that he had been describing something like the “Aleph” of Borges’s 1945 story: a point in space that contains all other points. To see the Aleph you must lie flat and immobile in darkness. “A certain ocular adjustment will also be necessary.” What you see then cannot be contained in words, Borges writes,
for any listing of an endless series is doomed to be infinitesimal. In that single gigantic instant I saw millions of acts both delightful and awful; not one of them occupied the same point in space, without overlapping or transparency. What my eyes beheld was simultaneous, but what I shall now write down will be successive, because language is successive.
The space in cyberspace vanishes. It collapses into a network of connections: as Lee Smolin said, a billion-dimensional space. Interaction is all. And what of cybertime? Every hyperlink is a time gate.*5 Millions of acts both delightful and awful—posts, tweets, comments, emails, “likes,” swipes, winks—appear simultaneously or successively. Signal speed is light speed, time zones overlap, and time stamps shift like motes in a sunbeam. The virtual world is build on transtemporality.
Gibson, who always felt time travel to be an implausible magic, avoided it through ten novels written across thirty years.*6 Indeed, as his imagined futures kept crowding in on the conveyor belt of the present, he renounced the future altogether. “Fully imagined futures were the luxury of another day, one in which ‘now’ was of some greater duration,” says Hubertus Bigend in the 2003 Pattern Recognition. “We have no future because our present is too volatile.” The future stands upon the present, and the present is quicksand.
Back to the future once more, though, in Gibson’s eleventh novel, The Peripheral. A near future interacts with a far future. Cyberspace gave him a way in. New rules of time travel: matter cannot escape its time but information can. The future discovers that it can email the past. Then it phones the past. The information flows both ways. Instructions are sent for 3-D fabbing: helmets, goggles, joysticks. It is a marriage of time shifting and telepresence.
To the people of the future, the denizens of the past can be employed as “polts” (from poltergeist—“ghosts that move things, I suppose”). Money can be sent or created (win lotteries, manipulate the stock market). Finance has become virtual, after all. Corporations are shells, built of documents and bank accounts. It’s outsourcing in a new dimension. Does the manipulation of people across time create headaches? “Far less than the sort of paradox we’re accustomed to culturally, in discussing imaginary transtemporal affairs. It’s actually quite simple.” After all, we know about time forks. We are aficionados of branching universes. “The act of connection produces a fork in causality, the new branch causally unique. A stub, as we call them.”
Not that paradoxes are unknown. At one point a future law-enforcement agent called Detective Inspector Ainsley Lowbeer explains to an avatar—exoskeleton, homunculus, peripheral—inhabited by Flynne, “I’m told that arranging your death would in no way constitute a crime here, as you are, according to current best legal opinion, not considered to be real.” Nanobots are real. Cosplay is real. Drones are real. Futurity is done.
—
WHY DO WE NEED time travel? All the answers come down to one. To elude death.
Time is a killer. Everyone knows that. Time will bury us. I wasted time, and now doth time waste me. Time makes dust of all things. Time’s winged chariot isn’t taking us anywhere good.
How aptly named, the time beyond death: the Hereafter. The past, in which we did not exist, is bearable, but the future, in which we will not exist, troubles us more. I know that in the vast expanse of space I am an infinitesimal mote—fine. But confinement to an eyeblink of time, an instant never to return, is harder to accept. Of course, before inventing time travel, human cultures found other ways to soften the unpleasantness. One may believe in the soul’s immortality, in cycles of transmigration and reincarnation, in a paradisical afterlife. The time capsulists, too, are preparing transport to the afterlife. Science provides cold comfort—as Nabokov says, “problems of space and time, space versus time, time-twisted space, space as time, time as space—and space breaking away from time, in the final tragic triumph of human cogitation: I am because I die.”*7 Time travel at least sets our imaginations free.
Intimations of immortality. Maybe that’s the best we can hope for
. What is the fate of Wells’s Time Traveller? For his friends he is gone but perhaps not dead. “He may even now—if I may use the phrase—be wandering on some plesiosaurus-haunted Oolitic coral reef, or beside the lonely saline lakes of the Triassic Age.” Entropy can be held off only here and there, now and then. Every life lapses into oblivion. Time and the bell have buried the day. Einstein was explicit about seeking solace in the spacetime view (“Now he has left this strange world a little before me. This means nothing”), and so likewise is Kurt Vonnegut’s narrator in Slaughterhouse-Five:
The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral….It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever. When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in a bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments.
Some comfort there. You lived; you will always have lived. Death does not erase your life. It is mere punctuation. If only time could be seen whole, then you could see the past remaining intact, instead of vanishing in the rearview mirror. There is your immortality. Frozen in amber.
For me the price of denying death in this way is denying life. Dive back into the flux. Turn your face toward sensation, that flesh-bound thing.
By this, and this only, we have existed
Which is not to be found in our obituaries
Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider
Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor
In our empty rooms
Every death is an obliteration of memory. To counter, the online world promises a collective, connected memory and thus offers an ersatz immortality. In cyberspace, the present moment churns and past moments aggregate. @SamuelPepys, tweeting his diary day by day, is one of “ten dead people” the Telegraph (London) recommends we follow, because “Twitter isn’t solely the preserve of living beings.” Facebook announced procedures for continuing or “memorializing” the accounts of its deceased customers. A startup called Eter9 offered to “externalize” (and “eternalize”) customers in the persons of artificial agents. Evidently corporeal death is no reason to stop posting and commenting: “The Counterpart is your Virtual Self that will stay in the system and interact with the world just like you would if you were present.” No wonder science-fiction writers despair of inventing the future. Eternity isn’t what it used to be. Heaven was better in the good old days. Peering toward the afterlife, we can look forward and we can look back.
“When I look back all is flux,” writes John Banville, “without beginning and flowing towards no end, or none that I shall experience, except as a final full stop.”
What comes next? After the final full stop, nothing. After the modern—the postmodern, of course. The avant-garde. Futurism. You can read about all these epochs in the history books of the prewired world. Ah, the good old days.
When the future vanishes into the past so quickly, what remains is a kind of atemporality, a present tense in which temporal order feels as arbitrary as alphabetical order. We say that the present is real—yet it flows through our fingers like quicksilver. It slips away: now— no, now— wait, now…Psychologists try to measure the length of now as felt in, or perceived by, the brain. It’s hard to know just what to measure. Two sounds as close together as a millisecond tend to be perceived as one. Two flashes of light seem simultaneous even when they are one-hundredth of a second apart. Even when we recognize separate stimuli, we can’t reliably say which came first until they are close to a tenth of a second apart. Psychologists suggest that what we call now is a rolling period of two or three seconds. William James’s term was the “specious present”: this illusion, he said, “varying in length from a few seconds to probably not more than a minute…is the original intuition of time.” Borges had his own intuitions: “They tell me that the present, the ‘specious present’ of the psychologists, lasts between several seconds and the smallest fraction of a second, which is also how long the history of the universe lasts. Or better, there is no such thing as ‘the life of a man,’ nor even ‘one night in his life.’ Each moment we live exists, not the imaginary combination of these moments.” Immediate sensation dissolves into short-term memory.
In the wired world, creating the present becomes a communal process. Everyone’s mosaic is crowd-sourced, a photomontage with multiple perspectives. Images of the past, fantasies of the future, live videocams, all shuffled and blended. All time and no time. The path back through history is cluttered, the path forward cloudy. “Fare forward, travellers!” Eliot said, “not escaping from the past / Into different lives, or into any future.” Without the past for background and frame, the present is only a blur. “Where is it, this present?” asked James. “It has melted in our grasp, fled ere we could touch it, gone in the instant of becoming.” The brain has to assemble its putative present from a hodgepodge of sensory data, continually compared and contrasted with a succession of previous instants. It might be fair to say that all we perceive is change—that any sense of stasis is a constructed illusion. Every moment alters what came before. We reach across layers of time for the memories of our memories.
“Live in the now,” certain sages advise. They mean: focus; immerse yourself in your sensory experience; bask in the incoming sunshine, without the shadows of regret or expectation. But why should we toss away our hard-won insight into time’s possibilities and paradoxes? We lose ourselves that way. “What more terrifying revelation can there be than that it is the present moment?” wrote Virginia Woolf. “That we survive the shock at all is only possible because the past shelters us on one side, the future on another.” Our entry into the past and the future, fitful and fleeting though it may be, makes us human.
So we share the present with ghosts. An Englishman builds a machine in guttering lamplight, a Yankee engineer awakens in medieval fields, a jaded Pennsylvania weatherman relives a single February day, a little cake summons lost time, a magic amulet transports schoolchildren to golden Babylon, torn wallpaper reveals a timely message, a boy in a DeLorean seeks his parents, a woman on a pier awaits her lover—all these, our muses, our guides, in the unending now.
* * *
*1 Marshall McLuhan said that in 1962.
*2 “They make me feel sad.” What’s good about feeling sad? “It’s happy for deep people.”
*3 Like David Tennant, to be exact.
*4 “Feels more like working security than a game.”
“Maybe it’s a game about working security.”
*5 “—Must be a spatio-temporal hyperlink.”
“—What’s that?”
“—No idea. Just made it up. Didn’t want to say ‘magic door.’ ”
—Steven Moffat, “The Girl in the Fireplace” (Doctor Who), 2006
*6 Completists will note, however, his 1981 story “The Gernsback Continuum,” a hat tip to Hugo. The story is at least time travelish. Semiotic ghosts. “As I moved among these secret ruins, I found myself wondering what the inhabitants of that lost future would think of the world I lived in.”
*7 Heidegger: “We perceive time only because we know we have to die.”
Acknowledgments
For pointers and discussion I am deeply obliged to David Albert, Lera Boroditsky, Billy Collins, Uta Frith, Chris Fuchs, Rivka Galchen, William Gibson, Janna Levin, Alison Lurie, Daniel Menaker, Maria Popova, Robert D. Richardson, Phyllis Rose, Siobhan Roberts, Lee Smolin, Craig Townsend, and Grant Wythoff, as well as my indefatigable agent, Michael Carlisle, my wise and patient editor, Dan Frank, and, always, Cynthia Crossen.
Sources and Further Reading
These are some of the works on which this one depends.
STORIES
Edwin Abbott Abbott, Flatland, 1884.
Douglas Adams, “The Pirate P
lanet” (Doctor Who), 1978.
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, 1980.
Woody Allen, Sleeper, 1973.
Midnight in Paris, 2011.
Kingsley Amis, The Alteration, 1976.
Martin Amis, “The Time Disease,” 1987.
Time’s Arrow, 1991.
Isaac Asimov, The End of Eternity, 1955.
John Jacob Astor IV, A Journey in Other Worlds, 1894.
Kate Atkinson, Life After Life, 2013.
A God in Ruins, 2014.
Marcel Aymé, “Le décret,” 1943.
John Banville, The Infinities, 2009.
Ancient Light, 2012.
Max Beerbohm, “Enoch Soames,” 1916.
Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward, 1888.
Alfred Bester, “The Men Who Murdered Mohammed,” 1958.
Michael Bishop, No Enemy but Time, 1982.
Jorge Luis Borges, El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan, 1941.
El aleph, 1945.
Nueva refutación del tiempo, 1947.
Ray Bradbury, “A Sound of Thunder,” 1952.
Ted Chiang, “Story of Your Life,” 1998.
Ray Cummings, The Girl in the Golden Atom, 1922.
Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle, 1962.
Counter-Clock World, 1967.
“A Little Something for Us Tempunauts,” 1974.
