Crowd Futures: We Have Always Died in the Castle

by Elizabeth Bear

  CROWD FUTURES: WE HAVE ALWAYS DIED IN THE CASTLE.

  Copyright © 2018 Center for Science and the Imagination, Arizona State University.

  ISBN 978-0-9995902-5-6

  Story “We Have Always Died in the Castle” by Elizabeth Bear. Copyright © 2018 Sarah Wishnevsky.

  Illustrations by Melissa Gay. Copyright © 2018 Melissa Gay.

  Section break image by Bettina Tan from the Noun Project

  eBook design by Emily Buckell emilybuckellebooks@gmail.com

  Center for Science and the Imagination, Arizona State University

  PO Box 876511

  Tempe, AZ 85287-6511

  https://csi.asu.edu

  Credits

  Story

  Elizabeth Bear

  Illustrations

  Melissa Gay

  Technical and Creative Advisor

  Dennis Bonilla

  Ebook Design

  Emily Buckell

  Cover Design and Art Direction

  Nina Miller

  Crowd Futures Team

  Bob Beard

  Joey Eschrich

  Joseph Bianchi

  Phillip Garcia

  Michael Zull

  Leadership for the Center for Science and the Imagination

  Ed Finn

  Ruth Wylie

  Greetings from the Future(s). How Did We Get Here, Exactly?

  By Bob Beard, Center for Science and the Imagination, Arizona State University

  The future is uncertain. We all live amid multiple and often-conflicting timelines, where pathbreaking technologies will transform the world around us, giving rise to new economies, communities, and geographies.

  Or they won’t.

  In an uncertain future, humankind simultaneously lives among the stars, stays perpetually Earthbound, thrives, evolves, dies, or experiences myriad other potentialities, as varied as the personalities that populate them.

  At the Center for Science and the Imagination, we flit between multiple timelines every day, using storytelling to examine potential near-future scenarios in low-Earth orbit, sustainable cities, AI-augmented homes, and beyond. None of these aim to be definitive predictions, of course. Instead they serve as experiments in communication, inviting interaction, deliberation, and decision-making among diverse groups of scholars, artists, engineers, and technologists. What emerges is a vision of a future (but not the only future)—a story, a piece of visual art, and in the case of this book, a bit of both—which provides a threshold upon which to pause and reflect on the individual, social, and technological possibilities of progress.

  Our aim for this first Crowd Futures project is to throw this method into sharp relief: working with a curious public to gather research, weigh options, and make informed decisions at every step of the imaginative and creative process. We documented these interactions online, largely on our website, crowdfutures.us, but also on YouTube and Medium.com.

  Futures work relies on assiduously gathering information from multiple disciplines and perspectives, so we invited our friend and frequent collaborator, Elizabeth Bear, to help steer the ship. Bear, a Hugo and Sturgeon Award–winning science fiction and fantasy writer, was the ideal collaborator for this project; she’s used to our playful narrative experiments (dig her haunting short story “Covenant,” in our first science-fiction collection, Hieroglyph), and crafts real-time interactive stories as a game master for several tabletop roleplaying games.

  To begin, we decided to center our collaborative short story on an emerging technology—what science-fiction theorist Darko Suvin calls “the novum”—and ground it a familiar literary genre. Pairing scientific disciplines and cutting-edge research with recognizable tropes and archetypes provided a fertile set of initial story ideas that we examined and discussed on social media and our website. From these configurations sprang ideas of a road trip in an autonomous vehicle, space-based agriculture capers, a classic Western adventure amid a sprawling geoengineering project, and more. Any one of these ideas could have (and really should) become a rollicking science fiction yarn, but after a few rounds of voting by the Crowd Futures community, our story became a tale about the application of virtual reality technologies for social good—with a Gothic twist.

  Thinking about the full potential of virtual reality, beyond R&R on the Holodeck or sojourns to the Metaverse, we tapped Dennis Bonilla, the Chief Technology Officer at Variable Labs. With his work in design, technology development, and storytelling, Dennis is an advocate for how emerging tools like VR can help users learn, change, and grow. As we plotted the narrative, his insights, experiences, and dreams for the transformative power of VR led us and the Crowd Futures audience to exciting story spaces, and established the uncanny essence of our strange tale.

  Fully embracing the fanciful and fluid potential of simulated reality, we turned to Melissa Gay, an award-winning illustrator of books and tabletop roleplaying games, to help visualize an alternative, Gothic version of VR, bereft of the sleek screens and goggles we’ve become accustomed to in these types of stories. Melissa, with her training as a scientific illustrator and her work in fantasy, horror, and science fiction, was another fortuitous discovery. Her ability to channel a variety of styles and mediums enhanced Bear’s tale as well as our own notions of what sorts of experiences and feelings these technologies might stir. The sketches and final art—dreamlike, dark fantasies rendered in charcoal and pencil—beautifully complement the inherent unreality of this story’s VR experiences.

  What you have before you is the result of this experiment in collaboration: a distillation of facts, passionate feedback, queries, and choices from the Crowd Futures community, working together with a talented creative team to imagine one potential future. But there are many more.

  We hope this story—and the entire Crowd Futures process—inspires you to further explore any of the multifarious timelines you’re living in. Grab some friends, ask some questions, and let us know what you discover.

  For more projects and publications from the Center for Science and the Imagination, visit our website, csi.asu.edu, or follow us on Twitter and Facebook at @imaginationASU.

  We Have Always Died in the Castle

  By Elizabeth Bear

  It’s cold in the room that is not real.

  Marie stands in a self-conscious huddle, arms folded across a hollowed chest, breath rising in a plume in the unstirred air and fingertips prickling, despite her having tucked them into her armpits. It’s a convincing effect and she wonders if the tank has ever given anyone hypothermia.

  Or heart failure.

  She’s in an octagonal room, half again as tall as she is and only perhaps twice that around. The walls are yellow stone. There’s a dais at the far end of the room, holding an ornate chair. Some other furnishings are scattered here and there. A trestle hangs on the wall. Some tapestries.

  The floor is tongue-and-groove, and so is the ceiling. The boards above her show rough; the ones beneath her feet have been smoothed by many centuries and many shoes. The windows are high and round-arched. There is no glass in them.

  Beyond, a glimpse of wintry sky.

  The hair on her neck lifts. She hasn’t felt a draft, but she’s even colder now. She relaxes her muscles consciously to keep from shaking so hard her teeth click.

  She wasn’t told what to expect, other than that the simulation would help her practice and experience empathy. She signed a lot of waivers before they helped her dress in the suit, seated the mask and gloves, threaded the needles into her veins, and assisted her in climbing into the tank.

  She’s not sure she believe
s this nonsense works. But she’s not sure she believes in acupuncture, and she would have signed up to get stuck full of those needles too, in order to keep her job. Not that she did anything to justify being fired over, anything everybody doesn’t do, except the bad luck of getting caught.

  And if it doesn’t work, hey, so much the better for her. She’s a human interface designer for a game company, for crying out loud. Reading interfaces and figuring out how the designer thought they would be used, how they will be used, and how they ought to be redesigned to be easier and more efficient to use is what she does.

  She’s got a couple of sessions, at least, before her progress comes up for review. She’ll have figured out what response they want from her and learned to fake it by then, she’s sure.

  flash

  Marie is above the scene now. She seems to be looking down, through the floor which is also the ceiling, as if it were not there. She can see herself, huddled against the cold—but she doesn’t feel it except as a distant, residual chilliness, as if she’s come inside after shoveling and hasn’t yet shaken the clinging cold from her limbs.

  She can’t feel much of anything, she realizes. Not the weight of her body. Not those fine hairs on her nape. Even the stiffness of her old neck injury and the constant ache of her impinged shoulder seem more distant than usual. This is the tank, she tells herself. She’s floating in body-temperature, neutral-buoyancy saline. That’s why everything feels easy and comfortable and a little alienated. She’s suspended in a nice warm bath.

  That’s all.

  Except she’s cold. Really cold.

  Are they dropping the temperature for real?

  flash

  Just as she wonders that, she’s back in her body. Back on her own two feet, standing on the unreality of that cantilevered wide-board floor. You would have to travel to places far and remote to find trees in the world today to equal the ones felled to provide this lumber. Just as she thinks that, she realizes how ridiculous she’s being. The trees to make these boards never existed, except in the designer’s imagination.

  Marie’s head cranes so far back her neck aches. She looks up, watching a veil of filmy gray like blowing mist appear through the ceiling overhead. She sees the faint outline of legs, the drape of a long old-fashioned dress descending a stair that is not there. All of it is washed out, watercolor, as if multiple images had been layered over one another and their opacity reduced.

  The chill intensifies. The feeling of shuddering panic grows. She would thrash, bolt, struggle—but she feels thick, frozen, her limbs unresponsive with the immobility of nightmare. Even the shout she longs to give voice to is—at first—logjammed in her throat. When she forces it past the constriction it comes out in choking bubbles, strangely muffled, as if she were screaming into a pillow.

  It’s the tank. It’s just the tank.

  Her endocrine system is not buying a word of whatever sweet reason her forebrain is peddling. The part of her mind that is detached—dissociated—and trying to be reasonable reminds her that she needs to maintain, that she has no idea what the cocktail of drugs in her system is doing. She signed the waivers, but knowing the names of the drugs doesn’t mean she really understands their impact. Are they causing this panic, this reactivity? Or are they just making her suggestible?

  She concentrates on her breathing. Calm the body, calm the mind. Her heart begins to slow, and she manages to make herself enjoy the beauty with which the gossamer veils of ghostiness drift and flow.

  That lasts all of two seconds, while the ghost finishes her descent through the ceiling. Then Marie gets a good look at her face. And sees what is not there.

  The stasis lifts, or perhaps her adrenaline finally drags her free. She bolts for the door.

  flash

  It’s not the right door at all.

  Marie struggles with the heavy wood, the archaic latch. The intense chill of the ghost flows along her back like cold water. Which is probably exactly what it is in reality, says her last remaining skeptical neuron. She can almost feel the ghostly hand reaching out, the bony, unreal claw closing on her recoiling shoulder.

  Maybe her fear gives her strength. Maybe the simulation algorithms decide they have pushed her as far as they can right now, and are moved to let her escape.

  The door jerks open, her own momentum almost enough to send her sprawling backwards. She catches herself, the swinging door both her anchor and her counterweight. For a moment, she arcs like a pendulum.

  Then she manages to shift her momentum and staggers forward. She lunges through the doorway, just avoiding barking her toes on the lintel as she stumbles over it. Even as she yanks the door closed behind her, a part of her brain remarks on how stupid a waste of time that is. None of it is real—door, ghost, lintel. Anyway, the ghost has adequately demonstrated her ability to walk through solid objects as far as this consensus-reality tunnel matters.

  Marie expects to find herself outside. She is not outside. She is in a cramped and raggedly masoned passageway. Nightmare logic, she supposes. Whatever door she chose would be the wrong one, at this point in the narrative.

  She moves along the corridor—if you can dignify it with such a term—because she cannot make herself do otherwise. She can’t go back. She has to go forward. At least the chill here is just the chill of stone and shadow. Her fingers and toes burn with returning life. She is doubly grateful now that she did not stub her toes. Pain would blur her eyes with tears and slow her to a stagger.

  She cannot afford that. Not if she’s going to get out of here before the damn VR tank gives her frostbite.

  The passageway is low enough that Marie must duck at regular intervals, and there are no warning tapes or paint. The walls are some pale veined yellow stone, and the passage is so narrow that walls brush her shoulders unless she walks at a slight angle. The floor is bluestone, flags worn into slick hollows by many feet. The stones step up or down a few centimeters from one to the next. Uneven, and so is the illumination. What light there is trickles and flutters from reflectorless lanterns set in niches along the walls. They make a webwork of moving, overlapping shadows that do nothing for Marie’s nerves and writhe confusingly over the treacherous architecture.

  She nearly takes a right turn through what looks like a doorway with a short stair up to it, but is actually an aperture gaping out over a precipice.

  “All right,” she mutters, one hand braced on the comforting solidity of the entirely hypothetical wall. “Why do we even have that thing? Maybe there is something to building codes after all.”

  If you die in the tank you don’t actually die in real life, she reminds herself. Her heart, racing with vertigo, is uncomforted.

  She retraces her steps and finds the left turn she should have taken, hidden behind a bit of buttressing for an arch. After that, she walks with one hand trailing the wall, fingertips chilling on rimed roughness. The lantern flames cast no heat. She entertains—or at least distracts—herself by wondering if that’s an oversight on the part of the designers, or an intentional part of the program.

  Intellectualizing is supposed to help you beat brainwashing. That doesn’t make it easy.

  She thinks of the joke about the psychologist and the lightbulb. Only one, but the lightbulb has to want to change.

  Marie is perfectly happy the way she is. It’s everybody else who has the problem. Everybody else who doesn’t treat her as well as she deserves. Who doesn’t respect her. Doesn’t understand how special she is. It’s those jerks who should be in this tank, not her.

  She’s not panting any more. As she sneaks around, she wallows a bit in her scorn for the people who think that this … this toy can somehow change her. They want to ruin her. Make her as weak and stupid as they are. They’re the abusive ones. The only reason she is here is their jealousy.

  She feels her heartbeat slow. Reminds herself that it’s just a simulation. That it’s not real.

  Her wallow is so satisfying and she is enjoying it so much that when
the passageway opens out onto a chamber, she nearly pitches down the two banisterless narrow steps that descend into it. She catches herself instinctively, then—when her fingers unclench from the stone doorway—she wonders what the simulation would do if she let herself fall. Down these steps, or from the terrifying window she passed earlier.

  The instinct to keep herself from falling is strong. Could she overcome it? Even knowing that she can come to no real, lasting harm in here? That the tank will not hurt her? That she actually cannot fall because she is floating in a neutral-buoyancy chamber that’s only four feet deep?

  She can imagine the sickening vertigo, the impact at the bottom, all too well. She broke her ankle once, both bones, and she can imagine the limpness of flesh without architecture, the pain and wrongness and sense of not being attached.

  But they couldn’t hurt her that badly.

  Could they?

  … it’s not like those waivers are enforceable.

  She forces herself to look at the room. It’s dimly and indirectly lit. Most of the illumination filters in from the outside through a pair of embrasures that have no glass in them, and are only as wide on the outside as her two palms held side by side. The inside apertures are three times broader, and she can see that the walls are close to a quarter-meter thick.

  Marie picks her way down the stairs with exaggerated care, balancing with one hand on the wall. She eases along the wall to the embrasure and looks out.

  A bracing wind makes her teeth ache. The landscape sprawls in vague twilight scribbles to a distant horizon. Dawn—or sunset—stains the edge of the world. They built their castle high.