Our Future is in the Air

by Corballis, Tim

  ‘Excuse me?’ Now someone stops. ‘I’m—have you got a portable phone?’

  A laugh. ‘Yes. You all right?’

  ‘Oh, yeah. Yes. I’m looking for someone.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Is it one of the… can you use it to help me find him?’

  A look, maybe a glimmer of recognition. ‘What? Oh, no, sorry. I’ve only got this thing.’ The man waves a small object in front of Marcus.

  He asks a number of other people the same question, but with similar results. Finally he approaches a young man, possibly a student.

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Can you use your mobile phone to help me with something?’

  ‘You mean… ’

  ‘Can you look someone up?’

  ‘Here.’ Holding the phone out, as if proud.

  Marcus is reluctant to touch it. ‘Can you do it?’

  ‘You haven’t got a computer or anything?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Okay. Who do you want to look up?’

  ‘Penwyn Evans.’

  The young man operates the phone. ‘P, E, N… ’

  ‘W, Y, N.’

  ‘… Nothing. Hang on. Nothing. I can’t see anything on someone with that name.’

  ‘You can’t find his address or anything?’

  ‘I can’t find anything at all. Why are you… ?’

  ‘I’m a ghost.’

  ‘I thought so. Well, sorry I can’t find anything on your friend. Want me to look you up?’

  Marcus is surprised by the suggestion. He pauses. ‘Okay. Marcus Milne.’

  ‘Okay. Hang on. Oh, yeah, there’s—’ He shows the screen to Marcus. ‘None of those guys looks like you, though.’ The man is using his finger to move pictures from side to side on the phone. They are mostly men’s faces, and some boys. ‘I guess if you lost the beard.’

  Marcus shakes his head. ‘Thanks.’ He moves away.

  ‘No problem.’

  Could he look for Lilly? Dani, Sarah? He is caught in the uncanniness of the parade of faces on the young man’s phone—the profound anonymity of that sample of humanity brought forth by his name, linked by it, a fragile sign. The young man’s gestures on the phone’s screen were quick and light. Looking around, he sees a few other people looking at similar screens—which is something people have said about the future, that people have started to use these phones and other gadgets for all sorts of purposes. He is, however, surprised by how easy it is to bring forth faces, as if people themselves can be tickled into presence. It is not just the city’s work that he now feels separate from, but its very gestures, its throwaway visions, the possibilities inherent in the screens carried everywhere. When were faces reduced to something so light? Did this happen between his time and now? If Lilly, or Dani, or Sarah—or Janet or Peter for that matter, or even the others in the house—if their faces came up, would they slide as easily into view and out again? The faces of the future people passing him on the street take on some of the same quality, sliding by and blinking out when no longer visible. And not just the faces, but all of the sights. This experience, this future—it is unexpected in so many ways, not least the effect it has on his vision, his mind. There is a surface quality now to the world, and a fluidity, as if the weight of concrete and glass and brick were annulled and the buildings might leave Earth. Their upper levels take on the character of a sketch of themselves, a gesture. He resolves to ride an elevator up, as far as it will take him. This future—city in the sky. He moves foward. He moves. He. Marcus.

  ‘Naturally, our work and its wider effects have attracted a number of alternative views, which might be labelled heresies were we not uncomfortable with the implication of that term—namely that the scientific community is akin to the closed hierarchies of a religious order. Generally, although they involve adjustments to the expansion of EM’s standard field equations by Korngold and Krauss (the so-called “expanded field” equations), they are not strictly speaking scientific or mathematical models at all, but hybrid interpretations that have something of a religious, social or otherwise messianic nature. TL’s position might in fact be considered the first such alternative view since, although he does not challenge expanded field theory at all, he reads a human meaning into it beyond anything that is promised by science as such. This in itself would not be problematic—we are not opposed to the interpretation of our results by artists and writers—were it not, as discussed, for the severe risks and social consequences of his position.

  ‘We can only say that we were saddened by the death of one of the more colourful “heretics”, Milan Gavrilović. His interpretation of our work reached back to the ideas of early twentieth-century Russian Biocosmists—in it, he saw hope for the fulfilment of their promise that technology might eventually allow for the acceleration of time, indeed the overcoming of it. It is a common misunderstanding to say that he rejected Korngold’s work outright. Rather, he saw Korngold’s model as a restricted case of a more general set of equations that modelled the dynamic and material equilibrium between different points in space-time. He believed that if the general theory could be established—a combination of relativity and quantum theories—it would allow for masses to be transferred through a lens for longer than the Korngold period. Naturally, this would require a significant enhancement of the kit used for TCF. We believe that Gavrilović himself did not travel, however. Although his research was tempered with a revolutionary and messianic belief system, he remained cautious at the level of his practice and of scientific rigour. We say this in full knowledge of the more speculative side of his research—the belief that the general theory would also allow fuller control over the trajectory and decay rate of the lens, and even what he called “retrospective” lensing, meaning that it would eventually be possible to travel to any other time, past or future. Science thrives under such speculative vision, provided it remains open to falsification and is not allowed to disturb the clarity of theoretical and experimental practice.

  ‘Many of Gavrilović’s followers, then, do not do him justice by their own crude beliefs—the notion that Korngold’s work is the result of some conspiracy. They are in any case a minor movement, rightly outlawed. It is a shame that this illegal organisation has done so much damage to Gavrilović’s name, and indeed that he allowed himself to be associated with it.

  ‘Another position is that taken by what we have called sceptics (though this is not generally a term they themselves use), who “challenge the truth claim” of our work. As far as we understand it, some take a similar line with regard to all scientific inquiry. The first sceptical claims about our theories were the attempts by physicists at the Lebedev Institute in Moscow to show that the information received by lensing events must in fact originate in the present or past rather than the future. This is the work that is commonly understood or misunderstood—including by many within the Soviet establishment itself—as a belief in different possible futures. In many ways, it showed the influence of dialectical materialism, despite the waning influence of that ideology on Soviet science in general. They developed an account of time (influential also on Gavrilović) that defined its passage according to the emergence of qualitatively new data—such data could not be measured by any present instrumentation but required human and technical development before it could be detected. A dissenting account from within the group by Lysov held that lensing could indeed receive information from the future, but that it was impossible for humanity in its current state to detect or interpret that information—to convert it into data, per se.

  ‘More radical challenges come from various French thinkers. In particular, some of the pupils of the philosophers Louis Althusser and Georges Canguilhem have engaged with the results of our work. We are in no position to comment closely on this strand of thought, drawing as it does on a particularly dense philosophical tradition with roots in Marxism and so-called structuralism. There are, we understand, resemblances to Lysov’s theory, in that many of thes
e thinkers see future imagery as intrinsically caught up in the structures and myths of the present—in, we suppose, some version of “theory-laden” observation. All future data can do, then, is “play a role in the present”, a role that is predetermined for it by our present ideas. Others have taken the opposite line and seen the “shock” of lensing as a challenge to “structures”, and one factor in the Parisian anti-establishment uprisings of 1968. The themes that emerge from this literature concern the nature of human temporality—the questioning of how the human organism relates to “normal” and “abnormal” time, drawing on the ancient Greek categories of chronos and kairos. Such ideas are presumably not without their own interest within a sociological or philosophical register—but we are not convinced that they have any interest for the scientist.

  An image from the future

  ‘Many of the questions behind the alternative theories of lensing are, it has to be said, prior questions about the nature of time in general, and the nature of our own existence within it. Lensing throws up a profound challenge to our ideas of free will and historical progress alike, all the more so for the confusing set of images and experiences produced by it. “Heretical” theories are, we suspect, no more than evidence of the human need to feel in control of our fate—to assess our place in the world and to rail against those facts that seem to constrain us. In truth, the information that has come at us from the future is vague and contradictory, itself open to any number of different interpretations, even without the need to challenge the science by which it has come. We cannot rule out further developments of that science, further technological innovations, indeed further possibilities for exploring times other than our own.’

  Marcus could not go back again to the facility. He could not easily explain any more absences from work. Or, yes, he could, but he didn’t want to. At the same time, he could not stop his thoughts from returning to those visits to the future. They gave everything a seemingly insubstantial nature, and this made his blundering, half-understood search for Pen into something new, as if he were sifting through a future made of paper and dry leaves. Nothing there could be touched without it quivering. In contrast, the present, the house, his job, all the questions that surrounded them all constantly, all this seemed possessed of too much inertia. The future itself, a light and frictionless medium. He couldn’t think it. The unthinkable thoughts made him retreat within the house. He spent more time in his and Lilly’s room, or just in his own head. The adults did not apparently notice, but the children did.

  ‘Dad!’

  ‘Oh—sorry.’

  ‘Karen says I shouldn’t be going to school. She says school is about state control.’

  ‘Yeah. Well, I know. I know.’

  ‘Do I have to go?’

  ‘Yes. That’s a serious decision. It’s… ’

  What was it? It was a matter for the HOUSE—a complicated one, to do with who was responsible for the children and who could make decisions; to do with how they understood the state. Where was the state in the future? There was evidence, he had heard, that money was disappearing from the future world—and the state itself? Was that disappearing too?

  ‘Dad!’

  ‘You do have to go to school. We can’t stop you going just like that.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Don’t you like it?’

  ‘Yes, I like it.’

  Would this all, this world, take on that sheen of immateriality? Even the trees and houses, their solidity? It seemed as if it were the sign of a crumbling future—but Marcus hadn’t in any other way felt that the future was a place of decline. He didn’t believe in catastrophes, in worlds ending. Did he? In this way, he was different from Pen. Wasn’t he?

  ‘Could the transition state also be said to resemble the state of dreaming?’

  ‘Some people have argued that TCF transitions are similar to dream-states, in which the signs and images of daily life become subjectively dissociated from any meaning that they ordinarily have. They therefore gravitate around certain psychically charged repressed thoughts. This kind of idea is influential in Europe and especially Argentina, where TCF has been used in therapeutic procedures by psychoanalysts.’

  ‘How does the therapy work?’

  ‘There is no evidence that it is effective.’

  ‘But what happens during a session?’

  ‘The patient is asked to use the twenty minutes of future time to reflect on the experience of the transition. TRANSITION is understood by the therapist to be the dismantling of the patient’s narrative consciousness, and FUTURE TIME the progressive “rebuilding” of a symbolic world out of the broken matter of the transition. The traveller “pieces together” a future world. The patient is asked to pay attention to the process by which the world is thus constructed, the gradual appearance of ego out of the inert objects of the unconscious.’

  ‘The future is not, then, a real thing, only a product of the patient’s unconscious?’

  ‘Yes—though, according to these theories, the same could be said of the present.’

  ‘There is no coherent world as such?’

  ‘No—all coherence is forced on the world. It is a ruse of the ego. There is, strictly speaking, NO WORLD at all, only a chaos of objects, signs and images. In fact there is no distinction at this level between objects, signs and images. Time itself must be understood as an imaginary system, something that also comes apart at the moment of transition.’

  ‘It is only the ego that constructs the point of arrival as FUTURE in the first place?’

  ‘Yes. Although, to be honest, I don’t understand this theory.’

  ‘Does the future moment take on something of the dreamlike quality of the transition?’

  Notes from a therapy session

  ‘Many people have said that their experience of the future is dreamlike. This would go against the theory of the Argentinians, of course, since for them the transition is most close to true dreaming. But yes, the result of the therapy would be an attention to how the future itself takes on some of the character of the transition. It’s a kind of laboratory for the attention, or a training ground. Ultimately, the same sort of attention would be put into practice during the PRESENT LIFE of the patient.’

  ‘An attention to the incoherence of things?’

  ‘An attention to the incoherence of things.’

  What about this? The loud hum. Why here? No one. He can understand what Pen found. Great absences. No, three people down the far end. They are walking; one disappears into a door at the side of the hall. The others vanish somewhere else. Now: empty. But it was only according to… what was the man’s name? Strange that he doesn’t know. They reappear, still down the far end. One is pushing a wide mop. Marcus approaches him.

  ‘You should be wearing a helmet and hi-vis vest.’

  ‘I’m from the past.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Do you get a lot of us?’

  ‘Nah. There was another guy.’

  ‘Oh. Pen Evans?’

  ‘I don’t know his name.’

  Marcus follows the man as he mops.

  ‘We weren’t supposed to talk to him. Some of us did. I guess I’m not supposed to talk to you either.’

  ‘He talked to people?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘He—I think he said there was no one here.’

  ‘There’s just a few of us. We clean, and there’s a maintenance crew. Depends what needs doing. There’s no one on the weekends.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Except the tourists. Like you I guess.’ Marcus stops, and the man carries on. ‘Just stay in the hall, and keep out of the way. Don’t go down below.’

  ‘Okay.’

  Pen can’t still be here, of course. Is Marcus a tourist? What is he doing here? Nonetheless, he looks. He glances down a set of stairs, but is mindful of the man’s warning. A great hidden structure, bringing water from far above and churning it through the turbines under the floor. The machinery runs its
elf. Pen’s interest: not that there is no one here, but that the machines require no one. They release people. What was Pen doing here? The people released—how do they live, without jobs? Marcus turns again but the man is down the far end of the hall, pointedly uninterested in talking with him. What can machines now do? What has cybernation achieved? Is there, after all, now a universal income paid to all citizens so that they can choose not to work, or so they can live when machines make their jobs redundant? His conversations with Pen and Lilly, and everyone. This was part of their vision for the future. It is palpable here, far underground, in this great space hewn out of rock: the steady operation of machines, the harnessing of energy. There is a weight here, contrasting with the sense of immateriality that he felt on his last trip. And the two are connected, surely! The weight underground of machinery, the lightness of—what, freedom? The flow of people on the street, of faces on the screen. That had not seemed like the freedom they imagined, however.

  Bare rock is visible behind the steel columns supporting crane tracks above. Seven giant blue exciters are ranked out in front of him in the centre of the hall. The power station was built to feed electricity to the new aluminium smelter to the south. But didn’t the aluminium price plummet after the aviation industry collapsed, threatening the whole project? Marcus can’t remember what allowed it to continue to completion. In fact, is the future only this: a time of COMPLETION itself, a time when all the projects, the half-built and half-imagined thoughts came to their fruition? A complete and final place, a place that is the future but has no future? (Do they still practise TCF?) The machines, the weight of rock and water throw him back onto a sense of his solitude, despite the men moving quietly down the hall, or because of them. Here and not here; far from anything, near only to the indifference of the machines. From here, lines go out—the nation, the world itself as machine. That is the promise of cybernation, but now for the first time he has a sense of the unconcerned operation of that promise. It is the promise of a world that merely functions, and carries its humans along as passengers and spectators. And, out there, no one he knows; Lilly and the girls and Marcus himself are all grown and changed or dead. Bittersweet distance. Finality—completion. At the centre of hope the loss of hope—futureless future. Futureless, a time of function, of distanced. Does it make a difference whether he enters the transition in this melancholy state? Why should it? The transition is a physical process. Or. But this futureless time dragged off. Dragged taken into future, into time’s end and time. Time taken; rock time steel time time time end. Undecided. Complete. Futureless and on, so on without future; complete in futureless. Can he? A formula. No. No time future futureless time. Dragged future, time and. A bittersweet of steel rock water lines indifferent future. It doesn’t let. Think: a wordless. Thoughtless timeless lessless less, the formula on and the future, less futureless lessfuture no. Hard to graspless, dragged and grasped less and less. Oh? Less now? No. Marcus? Marcusless futureless without. Dark chamber with its hint of echo—echoless no.