Our Future is in the Air

by Corballis, Tim

  Sarah was saying, ‘Are you going to the future?’

  Marcus and Lilly hesitated. Then, ‘Yes!’

  ‘Oh!’

  ‘Is that… ’

  She said, ‘I know I can’t come.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Will you meet yourself?’

  ‘No.’

  A pause. ‘Mum. Dad. Will you meet me? When I’m… ’

  ‘No. Are you happy playing here? It won’t be too long.’

  ‘Okay. Yes!’

  The commune member who was looking after all the children said, ‘They can have some food with us.’

  Janet, Marcus and Lilly allowed themselves to be shown to the shed where the kit was. Shanks followed, and Kenneth, and Kim, and some of the commune members, so the small space was crowded. They were travelling to where, according to Kim, Pen had died. None of them asked why Kim had never travelled there himself. Would there be anything to see? Who had killed him? Had he been meeting someone?

  Kim was silent. Then he said, ‘Go on. You’ll see.’

  ‘Are there any instructions? Anywhere we should go?’

  ‘No. Just be careful. They won’t like you being there, so keep it as hidden as you can. I’ll put you in a good place.’

  There was a moment’s reflection. Kim was looking away. Then he looked at Shanks, who met his eye. Why? Shanks spoke quickly. ‘It’s a problem we never wanted to face. The problem of future jurisdiction. This is the only case—potential case—I’ve heard of in our country. How far does our jurisdiction extend into the future?’

  ‘Is that why you covered up the death?’

  Shanks looked up at the sky. He said, ‘In America it’s gone to the Supreme Court, which has tended towards the idea that the user and the pusher are to blame. There are surprisingly few cases. Anyway, you can’t bring some future person back for trial. Future law enforcement agencies are not, as I understand it, inclined to cooperate with us by laying their own charges, even if we could contact them. We’re forbidden to use temporal contour technology, as part of an investigation.’

  They didn’t see themselves, though, as investigators or seekers after justice. That idea—the calculation of right and wrong—had been far from their thoughts. Wasn’t everything now too entangled, too fixed in complicated layers? If anything, they just wanted more knowledge, more perspective on events. After Marcus had administered the tracing fluid, Janet said, ‘Can we have a little less of an audience?’

  Shanks and Kenneth shuffled out of the small shed, as did the various commune members. It left only the three of them, and Kim, who spent some time adjusting the kit for their destination. They waited quietly.

  When it was time, Lilly climbed in first, followed by Marcus and then Janet. They could feel the warmth of each other’s bodies and the mingling of breath in the small space.

  Once the lid was brought down over them it was completely dark. There was an intimation of the fluid in their veins and on their clothes, a shared substance, something passing between them. Their skins were porous. It became difficult to tell who was who. Their touch. They waited.

  Already, before the solenoids charged and the lens field began to weave, they began to dissolve into one another. The waiting made them still, but the touch gave them small movements—nothing overt or mentionable. Perhaps more pleasant because of that? Pleasure/waiting fused. Each of them become something like what Marianne and Kim had described—a vehicle for things in them. Each ceased. Each became the blandest thing. Each/fused. JanetMarcusLilly. A thing with no outside. Luxury of ceasing. Pen and economists. What would be an economy of ceasing (general economy)? Infinite vehicle, movement through extension in space, sunlight sunbody rotation and the spinning of space out of movement in space, movement is the making of space, sun the making of its effects and the penetration of bodies and borders and the finding of economies and populations and molecules where we thought, where we, where we, what life but the motion of bodies captured in suneffects, planets thrown, the symmetrical body and its twists, why that? so that, so so so and an object composed of the penetration of vectors and the translation of entropy and that kind of thing all mostly all soup of light lightsoup… in darkness… lightdark… quiet quiet all energy quiet quiet a field the universe in states a soup a state a state of the universe a state of everywhere everywhere nothing nowhere without its states quantum division etc etc generaleconomy eyestory eyeeggball what trinity three and one etc no eye to see not eye not eye.

  A thing without outsides.

  No eye.

  No.

  Without an outside it is impossible to fall apart. The world conceived as thought. No no nosuchgod. The world, a negotiation. Numbers established. Are they first? Before the sun? What thoughts. Why begin? Why not just let it fall out into itself? It? Speaking it. Words, state of everything. Uncomfortable and entangled as if waking. Sudden and simultaneous. Standing or lying? They bring themselves into being in the act of moving from whatever untidy position could be called an origin. ‘Oh my.’ Who says it? Well, it is said. Now, not enough eyes—for each other, for the situation they find themselves in. The world! A short slope interrupted by a high fence, and beyond it a road busy with traffic, and then the sea—a bay ringed with road and buildings. The world is blazing. The sun fills it up. People and objects might float on the surface of such energy—mere skins, swelling and blowing as it surges, flapping lips, vibrating, letting limbs work on the sheer rush of it. Their skins too. A threeone, they stand for a while looking out and in, as if their timelines in the tunnel have been braided together. Actually, no a laugh, and it comes not from all of them but just from Lilly. It makes her into herself—she laughs and laughs. She says, ‘I like this.’

  Marcus says, ‘Yes. See? But also… ’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m sometimes afraid of not returning.’

  Janet says, ‘Yeah. It’s so long since I’ve done this. It was different when I was younger. I didn’t really want to return. Now… ’

  ‘It takes you so far, into different worlds and thoughts.’

  This is the strangest thing about travelling: the fact that different thoughts seem possible, as if thought itself is attached to time, as if thoughts live and die, independently of the brain that holds them, as if they are found not in the brain at all, but in the air.

  Janet says, ‘Maybe I just forgot about this. I wish he’d brought me along. We could have got a babysitter. Maybe, back then, I never looked at it all in this way, never noticed how strange it all was. Maybe I was too hungry for something.’

  Lilly says, ‘You’re not still hungry for something?’

  Janet laughs. They don’t, for a while, think about where they are. Then, there is a noise, a distant, slow noise like the noise of the traffic and the wind, but layering over it and weaving through it. It seems like the world’s noise, the noise of time or the noise of history. At the moment that’s what it seems like to them. It adds base notes and grows. Do they all realise it at once? It’s a diffuse thing, surrounding them. They all wonder if the noise is in their heads, then they think about where they are. All at once they climb to the top of the slope, putting their heads just over the top to see. None of them, actually, believes it. Pen would have no reason to come here. What kind of ride has Kim sent them on? There’s something strange about it, about this trip—but also, in some way, something right about it. They don’t mind.

  The runway stretches out in front of them, and there on it is a large jet, its engines pointing back towards them, the sound no longer muffled by the slope but a directed shock of noise of all colours, deep and white, tearing out and around them. Why would Pen come here? Who would he meet here? No one. It reminds Marcus, though, of the other places he’s been: forbidden places, places where the work of the world carries on without people—the power station, the nerve centre. This, though. The machine’s noise is raising itself up, though it remains stationary on the runway, facing away from them. Wind, cold/hot, and the sound lik
e a wall, pulling at the sides of their faces, at their necks.

  And, to be sure, it’s a dangerous place. Not the place for a murder, but the place for a terrible accident. None of them can think it: Pen’s body, here, especially in its fragile contrast with that loud, heavy and unthinking thing. Is it piloted by people or by computers? What drives it? Would it hesitate before a human body? Would its machinery be concerned at the thought of impact? It begins to move away from them, from where they are lying flat and feeling the noise come up from the ground. Do people travel in time to airports? They must—but none of them has heard anything about the practice, or seen images. There is something wrong with the mechanisms of time, some confusion in it. They form a bewildered knot here. Their presence is as much of a problem as anything. Would Pen throw himself at this? Now the plane is dwindling, and the noise and chaos of it too. It wavers from side to side as it leaves the runway, looks now suddenly fragile. How can it be converted so quickly, from the heavy crushing thing of only a few moments before, to this?

  They still don’t move, though they let their heads drop. Are they visible to anyone? Another plane is already approaching, a smaller one with propellers, but still large enough, whose noise has more of a buzz to it, a vibration that runs through the air at them. The planes, the sounds, the fence and the runway—they are all part of nature here, part of a whole world that takes in road, cars and a sea that slops against the rocks behind them, sending up dots of spray and sun. And if they are an interruption, a problem, a presence that cannot quite be, then Pen was too—did his body collide with this whole world, with the rage and movement of it? His death an unthinking, a nothing?

  Everything around is spectacular and insubstantial at the same time. Every movement seems like the movement of machine parts, or possibly of signals, energetic pulses fired here and there through and in some system of control. Everything seems caught in this layering. Of course it seems their own bodies might be in the same danger as Pen’s of being swept up or crushed or dismantled. And, in fact, only a few moments (a generation) before, this feeling was something exciting: the sense that things move through them. None of them now wants dissolution in it.

  ‘Fuck this. Let’s go down.’

  They slide down until they are close up against the fence, looking resolutely out over the road towards the harbour. The cars. From here, the old place, the place they left behind, is overlaid on their vision, in the form of the familiar outline of hills. They forget about changes, about differences and similarities, and just see. At the same time, they all at once begin to cry.

  Janet says, ‘Yeah, I remember this.’

  ‘This?’

  ‘The crying.’ She laugh-cries. ‘Man, we used to joke about it. All the crying. Jump to the future and cry your eyes out. Fuck.’

  Lilly says, ‘But I’m sad!’ She laughs through her crying too, and more loudly. ‘It’s real isn’t it? The sadness? It’s not just the effect of the fluid or something?’

  No answer. Their tears infect their vision. They come close to one another, touching and standing, looking out. Janet says, ‘We look like a bunch of ghosts.’ They are wound up in their vision and their tears. Is some of the sadness the simple awareness that their time is running out, that they have not found what they are looking for, not really, and that they will return to their own time in a few minutes? That, and other things. It is a sadness without overt content. It is to do with Pen, and possibly also some vague, maudlin cliché to do with time itself, with everything absent in the world they are visiting, with everything that has passed. It is as if a surfeit of emotion flows through their bodies and between them. The tears as the liquefaction of bodies, the overflowing of boundaries, tears permeated with lysergide, their clothes damp in the wind, the sense of a world, the hills become their own silhouettes, a glowing sky blurred by softening presence. They move closer, without moving. They are the outlines of themselves. Indistinct as paint. Melt out. ‘I think it’s…’ Intermingling, then. The felt painless opening of skin. What opens. In some sense, they control it—their movements in it, thought-movements in a non-place. Experiments/curious/remove. Thought-orbits, wordless circulation. Gender, at some point, becomes an issue. Is it? Bodybodybody. Theybody threebody throughbody. The fall, together, falltogether overlap, oneanother, threeinone boundary boundary. She sees him seeing her and her seeing, seeing seen he sees and sees seeing she he seeseess heherr numbersense seeiseeinngg hherim throuacroghss shared tears hihherers and allallall nothey. Nothey circle around no, like always, likeall ways sherimhe and how to build a grammar without boundaries, see thing seething sheseesherhhimhe could get the hang of thherherimhshee wordsoundlettersignnumberno.

  ‘Our understanding of what happens to a human body during the transition is still very incomplete. Although the body is to all intents and purposes physically transported through the lens or tunnel, it also undergoes rapid alterations in its relation to its environment. Different concentrations of mass seem to be affected differently, both by the initial lens and by its interaction with the resonating fluid. In particular, the temporal movements of gases such as the air surrounding the body and in the lung cavity are complex. Theory suggests that chaotic dynamics can occur at the molecular and atomic level. Levine, Schüler et. al. have described the theoretical possibility of what they call “temporal spin”, a looping back and forth at nanoscales of particles travelling at less than light speed through the tunnel and, although they did not raise this question themselves, others have wondered whether the phenomenon might result in moments during which the lungs are fully or partially emptied of air, with unknown effects. This kind of phenomenon would be characterised as a “boundary problem”—the question of how it is possible to physically conceive of the relation between the body and its surroundings, especially under conditions wherein a body is, in effect, instantaneously removed from those surroundings. The boundary itself is sometimes characterised as fluid, fractal or indeterminate: our environment reaches into us, and we extend beyond our own skins into the environment. The boundary is, at all points and levels, porous to matter, energy and information. Some go so far as to suggest that the human person is so connected with its world as to be inseparable from it—so that complete or abrupt removal from the wider environment constitutes a form of injury or trauma, even the end of the integrated person who undergoes it. The experience of TCF, while seeming to be grounded in the fact of the body’s wholeness, its ability to move from one time to another, seems from this perspective to be something else entirely: the proof that a person is so part of their time as to be inseparable from it; a demonstration that moving from one time to the other can only operate through a profound disturbance of one’s being. The traveller, on this understanding, experiences nothing so much as oblivion. Perhaps this is why it has proven so difficult to bring anything back from the future—any genuine knowledge, anything of use, anything other than the briefest, haziest and most incomprehensible of images. If this idea is correct, then times are not like places, somewhere we can visit, but whole interconnected systems that the traveller crashes through and remains disconnected from, just as he has become disconnected from his own time. The deepest truth of the time traveller would be that he is, after all, no different from the isolated astronaut, removed from anything that can sustain him—given the means to continue breathing, perhaps, but strange air, and only receiving the light of distant stars.’

  Levine et. al.’s diagram of macroscopic temporal spin interactions

  The scattering of the ashes took place by a stream, near an isolated beach to the west of Wellington. The broad valley was warm but with an offshore breeze. There was a small crowd: Janet and Peter, Pen’s mother and brother, Lilly, Marcus and the girls, Kim, Marianne, Heather Ford and two other colleagues, Tama, and three other old activist acquaintances. Kenneth and Shanks stood, each at his own slight remove from proceedings. The doctors had agreed to let Peter out for the occasion—his condition had improved, though perhaps only te
mporarily and they wanted him back under observation before nightfall.

  Janet had one arm around Peter, and the other around Pen’s mother, as Pen’s brother tipped the urn. The ashes fell and rose, sorted at the mouth of the urn into their lighter and heavier particles, and were carried away by the air and the stream, in both cases leading in eddies to the sea. The only sound was the soft talk of grasses in the wind.

  Shanks looked at Kim and met his eye. He saw that they were both moved, despite themselves—moved by the silence and the patterns of dispersal, the ritual of it all. Yes, there was something in Kim’s look that seemed false, but Shanks was confident it would only be visible to him. Even Grey, supposedly also an expert in such matters, would miss it.

  It had been a very satisfactory story, somehow—the thought that Pen had died in the future. What a thought! What complications it would have raised. What madness. What a mad idea. Was that Kim’s idea? They’d come up with it amongst themselves. But yes, yes, it played the part that stories must play: it ended things. He had told them, at their insane house, that he longed for some kind of event—an EVENT!—here in this far-flung nation. Even here. But of course, his job was to turn the event into something else, to make it go away, to let it trickle off away into closure. He hungered for them, for happenings—Pen might have been one, in a small way—but he was their enemy. An enemy of events, an enemy of eruptions, an enemy of the new. He was on the side of narrative, of the illusory satisfaction of hungers. The ashes were, what, wood? They contained no part of any human. The only worry now was that Pen might, after all, show up—as if he might even now come trudging up the beach, glowering, and wind his way along the stream to his own funeral. He’d vanished for long enough now, though, that Shanks felt confident. It was a risk, of course. Small expenditures of energy would be needed to keep watch, to avoid his return.

  And the new police computer at Wanganui, that would help matters, wouldn’t it? It would help find Pen, if he was, in fact, to be found. The computer would do that. But for now, for all that innocent crowd, any larger hope had seeped away from the thought of him. The story had been told. It had practically told itself. Shanks hadn’t even worked hard at this, but he had orchestrated it. The parts, maybe, didn’t all fall together right—but as long as those ashes floated and fell and joined the wind and water, well (what language had found its way to his mind!) no one would look. That was a closing, the final one. Maybe Pen was alive? Maybe he had migrated to the future? Kim wouldn’t risk admitting it—he knew he could be taken in at any time. For all the others, Pen was gone for good.