Visions of the Future

by Brin, David

  As soon as I could, I collared Tuli for an explanation.

  “We used the lasers from the Atlantic Station and every ounce of catalysts I could find. The effect isn’t spectacular, no noticeable weather change. But the desert High has shrunk slightly and the jet stream has moved a little southward, temporarily.”

  “Will it be enough?” I asked.

  He shrugged.

  Through the long afternoon we watched that little curl travel along the length of the jet stream’s course, like a wave snaking down the length of a long, taut rope. Meanwhile the former Great Lakes High was covering all of Maryland and pushing into Virginia. Its northern extension shielded the coast well into New England.

  “But she’ll blast right through,” Ted grumbled, watching Omega’s glowering system of closely packed isobars, “unless the jet stream helps push her off.”

  I asked Barney, “How does the timing look? Which will arrive first, the jet-stream change or the storm?”

  She shook her head. “The machines have taken it down to four decimal places and there’s still no sure answer.”

  Norfolk was being drenched by a torrential downpour; gale-force winds were snapping power lines and knocking down trees. Washington was a darkened, wind-swept city. Most of the Federal offices had closed early, and traffic was inching along the rain-slicked streets.

  Boatmen from Hatteras to the fishhook angle of Cape Cod—weekend sailors and professionals alike—were making fast extra lines, setting out double anchors, or pulling their craft out of the water altogether. Commercial airlines were juggling their schedules around the storm and whole squadrons of military planes were winging westward, away from the danger, like great flocks of migrating birds.

  Storm tides were piling up all along the coast, and flood warnings were flashing from civil defense centers in a dozen states. The highways were filling with people moving inland before the approaching fury.

  And Omega was still a hundred miles out to sea.

  Then she faltered.

  You could feel the electricity crackle through our control center. The mammoth hurricane hovered off the coast as the jet-stream deflection finally arrived. We all held our breaths. Omega stood off the coast uncertainly for an endless hour, then turned to the northeast. She began to head out to sea.

  We shouted our foolish heads off.

  When the furor died down, Ted hopped up on his desk. “Hold it, heroes! Job’s not finished yet. We’ve got a freeze in the Midwest to modify, and I want to throw everything we’ve got into Omega, weaken the old girl as much as possible. Now scramble!”

  It was nearly midnight before Ted let us call it quits. Our Project people—real weathermakers now—had weakened Omega to the point where she was only a tropical storm, fast losing her punch over the cold waters of the north Atlantic. A light snow was sprinkling parts of the Upper Midwest, but our warning forecasts had been in time, and the weather makers were able to take most of the snap out of the cold front. The local weather stations were reporting only minor problems from the freeze. The snow amounted to less than an inch.

  Most of the Project people had left for sleep. There was only a skeleton crew left in the control center. Barney, Tuli, and I gravitated toward Ted’s desk. He had commandeered a typewriter and was pecking on the keys.

  “How do you spell ‘resignation’?” he asked.

  Before any of us could answer, the phone buzzed. Ted thumbed the “on” switch. It was Dr. Weis.

  “You didn’t have to call,” Ted said. “Game’s over. I know it.”

  Dr. Weis looked utterly exhausted, as if he had personally been battling the storm. “I had a long talk with the President tonight, Marrett. You’ve put him in a difficult position, and me in an impossible one. To the general public, you’re a hero. But I wouldn’t trust you as far as I could throw a cyclotron.”

  “Don’t blame you, I guess,” Ted answered calmly. “But don’t worry, you won’t have to fire me. I’m resigning. You’ll be off the hook.”

  “You can’t quit,” Dr. Weis said bitterly. “You’re a national resource, as far as the President’s concerned. He spent the night comparing you to nuclear energy: he wants you tamed and harnessed.”

  “Harnessed? For weather control?”

  Weis nodded wordlessly.

  “The President wants to really work on weather control?” Ted broke into a huge grin. “That’s a harness I’ve been trying to get into for four years.”

  “Listen to me, Marrett. The President wants you to work on weather control, but I’m the one who’s going to be responsible for controlling you. And I will never—do you hear, never—allow you to direct a project or get anywhere near directing a project. I’m going to find bosses for you who can keep you bottled up tight. We’ll do weather-control work, and we’ll use your ideas. But you’ll never be in charge of anything as long as I’m in Washington.”

  Ted’s smile died. “Okay,” he said grimly, “as long as the work gets done… and done right. I didn’t expect to get a National Medal out of this anyway.”

  Still glaring, Dr. Weis said, “You were lucky, Marrett. Very lucky. If the weather patterns had been slightly different, if things hadn’t worked out so well…”

  “Wasn’t luck,” Ted flashed. “It was work, a lot of peoples’ work, and brains and guts. That’s where weather control—real weather control—wins for you. It doesn’t matter what the weather patterns are if you’re going to change ’em all to suit your needs. You don’t need luck, just time and sweat. You make the weather you want. That’s what we did. That’s why it had to work; we just had to tackle it on a big-enough scale.”

  “Luck or skill,” Dr. Weis said wearily, “it doesn’t matter. You’ll get weather control now. But under my direction, and on my terms.”

  “We’ve won,” Ted said as he shut off the phone. “We’ve really won.”

  Barney sank into the nearest chair. “It’s too much happening all at once. I don’t think I can believe it all.”

  “It’s real,” Ted answered quietly. “Weather control is a fact now. We’re going to do it.”

  “You’ll have to work under Dr. Weis and whoever he appoints to handle the program,” I said.

  Ted shrugged. “I worked for Rossman. I can work for anybody. The work’s important, not the titles they give you.”

  Tuli rubbed his midsection and said, “I don’t know about you inscrutable westerners, but this red-blooded Mongol is starving.”

  “So’m I, come to think of it,” Ted said. “Come on you guys, let’s have a celebration breakfast!”

  “Guys,” Barney echoed, frowning.

  “Hey, that’s right, you’re a girl. Come on, Girl. Looks like you won’t have to play second fiddle to hurricanes anymore.” He took her arm and started for the door. “Think you can stand being the center of my attention?”

  Barney looked back at me. I got up and took her other arm. “If you don’t mind, she’s going to be the center of my attention, too.”

  Tuli shook his head as he joined us. “You barbarians. No wonder you’re nervous wrecks. You never know who’s going to marry whom. I’ve got my future wife all picked out; our families agreed on the match when we were both four years old.”

  “That’s why you’re here in the States,” Ted joked.

  Barney said, “Tuli, don’t do anything to make them change their minds. I haven’t had this much attention since I was four.”

  Down the main stairway we went, and out onto the street. The sidewalks were puddled from rain, a side effect of Omega, but overhead the stars were shining through tattered, scudding clouds.

  “Today the world’s going to wake up and discover that man can control the weather,” Ted said.

  “Not really,” Tuli cautioned. “We’ve only made a beginning. We still have years of learning ahead. Decades, perhaps centuries.”

  Ted nodded, a contented smile on his face. “Maybe. But we’ve started. That’s the important thing.”

  “A
nd the political problems this is going to cause?” I asked. “The social and economic changes that weather control will bring? What about them?”

  He laughed. “That’s for administrators like you and the President to worry about. I’ve got enough to keep me busy: six quadrillion tons of air… and one mathematician.”

  A little more than two years later, on a golden October afternoon, the United Nations convened a special outdoor session in Washington to hear an address by the President.

  It was the first time I had seen Barney and Ted since their wedding, six months earlier. She had told me about her decision as gently as possible, and I learned that it’s possible to live with pain even if there’s no hope that it will ever be completely cured.

  I had been running Aeolus; there was plenty of work for the Laboratory now. Ted and Barney (and Tuli, too) were living in Washington and working on the Government’s weather-control program. Ted had settled down, under the direction of one of the nation’s top scientists, and was seeing our years of struggle turned into solid accomplishment.

  The UN delegates met at a special outdoor pavilion, built along the banks of the Potomac for their ceremony. Key people from the Weather Bureau and Congress and Government were in the audience. Beyond the seats set on the grass for the delegates and invited guests, a huge thronging crowd looked on, and listened to the President.

  “…For mankind’s technology,” he was saying, “is both a constant danger and a constant opportunity. Through technology, man has attained the power to destroy himself, or the power to unite this planet in peace and freedom—freedom from war, from hunger, and from ignorance.

  “Today we meet to mark a new step in the peaceful use of man’s growing technical knowledge: the establishment of the United Nations Commission for Planetary Weather Control…”

  Like Ted’s victory over Hurricane Omega, this was only a first step. Total control of the weather, and total solution of the human problems involved, was still a long way off. But we were started along the right road.

  As we sat listening to the President, a gentle breeze wafted by, tossing the flame-colored trees, and tempering the warmth of the sun. It was a crisp, golden October day; bright blue sky, beaming sun, occasional puffs of cottonball cumulus clouds. A perfect day for an outdoor ceremony.

  Of course.

  LAST DAY OF WORK

  douglas rushkoff

  Winner of the first Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity, Douglas is an author, teacher, and documentarian who focuses on the ways people, cultures, and institutions create, share, and influence each other’s values. He sees “media” as the landscape where this interaction takes place, and “literacy” as the ability to participate consciously in it. His best-selling books on new media and popular culture have been translated to over thirty languages.

  Read his Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now at http://amzn.to/1DwSijh.

  SUMMARY

  Today is Dr. Leon Spiegel’s last day of work. But he’s not just another retiring technology worker: he is the last man ever to work. Having delayed the inevitable for longer than he should, Spiegel recounts the events that have led to a world where no companies, no money, and no need for employment exist. In doing so, he reveals how humanity nearly allowed technology to bring life to a close, before stumbling upon the truth of man’s own culpability for his dire condition. And now that humankind has avoided its dark fate and transcended the previously limited definition of what it means to be human, Spiegel is having a hard time letting go and joining the rest of the world.

  I’m finally doing it. Clocking out for the last time.

  It’s been twenty years since they began offering the package, close to a decade since the company’s been down to just the skeletal observation crew, and over a year since it’s been just me. Well, Curtis and me, but he wasn’t every fully here, anyway, so when he left the office it was more like watching someone log off one network to join another.

  And I’m looking forward to it, I really am. I just thought being the last one here would be a more notable achievement. At least more noted. An accomplishment as fame-worthy as something my father could have done. So while it is a significant human milestone, I’m sure of it, I just so happen to be doing it when nobody is around to care. I am the headline of every newspaper, the front page of every web site, and the message in everybody’s inbox: Dr. Spiegel Turns Off the Lights.

  I’ve been delaying the inevitable (and, from what I’m told, my own joy, my own release of ego, my membership in the next phase of human evolution) mostly because there’s no one who knows or cares that I do. I’m collecting salary every day—I’m paying myself time-and-a-half, in fact, in consideration of my having to both work and monitor my own progress. It’s not easy being the last guy.

  Of course there’s nowhere left to spend the money I’m earning. The last few businesses stopped accepting credits early last year, and even before that most financial transactions were done purely for show. Once the Date of Dissolution had been agreed to by the banks, there wasn’t much point in hoarding currency of any kind. It’s as if we just needed the credit for credit’s sake—to prove to ourselves and our friends we had really done something of value. Kind of made everyone think about the stuff they used to buy with money, and if most of it was for the same, empty purpose.

  Just because you know something to be true doesn’t make you any better at accepting it, or acting any differently because of it. That was the main message of my dad’s work, I suppose. Not that he was any messiah himself; just the messenger. But in a land of no egos or authority, that’s pretty much the best anyone’s going to get. As for me, well, I’m a messenger, too—but in a world with no recipients. Except maybe you, if you happen to find this missive. And if you do, I guess it means we were wrong about the whole thing.

  But that possibility has been enough to keep me going at this chronicle, written in the same work hours that I used to spend monitoring the systems, making sure the nano, robo, digital, and genetic algorithms were all working within predicted parameters. Ready to pull the plug right up until the moment there was no longer any plug to pull.

  I mean, everyone—at least everyone who was anyone—went over. Someone had to watch from the other side. Someone had to be the last one to leave. Work the last day of the last job. Close the door, turn out the lights.

  It’s fitting that I’m the one—and not just because I’m a Spiegel. As a kid I had always been obsessed with Michael Collins—the Apollo 11 command module pilot—not Neil Armstrong or Buzz Aldrin, the guys who actually landed on the moon’s surface. Collins circled around, alone, over to the dark side while the other two made the historic lunar landing for the TV audience. He just sat there in the capsule, beyond the range of our communications, when everybody else celebrated our first truly unifying planetary achievement. He was completely responsible and utterly by himself.

  So yeah, I’ve been relishing my “last-remaining-human” experience, and dragging it out far longer than I have any excuse to. I wander through the abandoned shopping malls, try on clothes I would never have been able to afford, watch movies the old-fashioned way, stack paper cash in big piles, and shoot machine guns at cars. It’s fun. As long as there’s only one of me, I can afford to live in exactly the way my father’s work showed us not to.

  On the off-chance you have no idea what I’m talking about (Wouldn’t that be a hoot? Me having to tell people about his existence?), here’s how it came to pass:

  I’ve got my own theories on the moment it all shifted—but so does everyone else. There’s no way to know exactly which technology or policy or pop star or combination of these led to the great unwinding. There’s not much consensus on this, but I still think it was the TP, or telepathic podster. It wasn’t a truly telepathic uni device, of course. That took another decade. The TP was just a biofeedback circuit. It observed the neural output of enough people thinking “right” or “left” and then use
that data to predict when someone else is trying to move the cursor in that direction. It was the first smart phone / gamepad that seemed to know what we meant without our telling it anything.

  While that might not seem like so very much, it changed the whole way technology developed from then on. Instead of it being our job to figure out how to make some new thing and then figure out what the heck to use it for, now it was technology’s job to figure out what we wanted and then just go do it for us.

  This turned out to be a big problem, because what we all wanted was more of everything we already had. Consumer technologies learned to think of people the way we already thought of ourselves: as absolute consumers. Technologies from net agents to nano-bots competed through the networks to bring their owners as much stuff as cheaply as possible. Meanwhile, technologies in the service of corporations and governments mirrored the profit-minded or bureaucratic ideals of their own users. They created trading algorithms, intelligent currencies, and self-referential legal axioms that brought capital into their coffers at alarmingly rapid rates.

  This was all good for the economy—at least in the short run, as measured by the GNP. The faster the economy grew, the faster it could accelerate. As long as there were new thresholds for acceleration, the sky was the limit.

  The only drag on the system proved to be human intervention. The amount of time it took human beings to make decisions for themselves paled in comparison to the rate at which these same choices could be accurately predicted and carried out by assumption routines. Our impulses at that stage of evolution, after all, were really quite simple. They all pointed towards more of one thing or another, the sooner the better.

  Once outside direct human command and control, technologies from the TP to the nano probe were capable of reflecting and meeting the aggregate human demand well in advance of our conscious requests. At least until the economic systems on which all this was occurring began to break down.