Tomorrow Happens (23 page)

Inside, the van was a jumble of clothes and assorted colorful knick-knacks. A guitar lay smashed by the front seats. Near the open panel door, Josh found what he thought were droplets of fresh blood.

He touched the drops. They were still slightly sticky.

Josh blinked suddenly. How long had he been staring at the red smudges? He had to watch himself. Was he becoming more susceptible to daytime mini-trances?

"Don't you move a muscle," a voice spoke from behind Josh. "Don't turn aroun'. I gotta gun."

Josh straightened, cursing himself softly. How long had he let his guard down? Where had the fellow been hiding?

He turned, very slowly and carefully, and saw two rather dirty, disheveled men. One, a young man with a bad complexion and long, greasy locks, waved the muzzle of a slightly rusty rifle at Josh.

"I tol' you not to turn around!" he shouted.

Josh shrugged as he raised his hands. "And take your word for it you had a gun? What if you hadn't, and I just stood there letting you grab mine? Pretty dumb, wouldn't you say?"

The second man, a redhead with a curly beard, chuckled. But when the younger one yelled at him to shut up, he licked his lips nervously and clutched the axe in his hands.

The greasy brunette looked Josh over. "You're a doctor, aren't you?" he asked.

Josh considered quickly. If they thought he was a real physician, they might be eager for his services. It could save him a long walk, or a bullet in the belly. "Well, yes . . . I guess for all practical purposes . . ."

"Thought so. Saw your bag back in your jeep. We got a girl with a broke arm an' a busted head, up there in the shade by them rocks. You bein' a doctor's proof enough that Mellissa's got the power to Call, even when she's delirious.

"Anyway, you fix her up an' we'll do you a real favor. We'll take you with us when we go off in yer Jeep, 'stead of leavin' you stranded out here."

Josh shrugged. There was no answer possible. Protesting would obviously be useless. Besides, he really ought to do what he could for the girl, if she was hurt.

Red Beard walked up cautiously and removed Josh's revolver, then backed away again.

"So where will you be taking me?" Josh asked casually. "You can't be headed for the Arizona border. The feds are back in control, there. And beyond them is Indian Nation."

Long Hair motioned for him to start walking, up toward the Jeep. Red Beard answered him.

"We're goin' to the holy places west of here, in the canyons and the Land of Enlightenment."

Josh stopped, stunned. "The Weird Zones? You can't mean that! You must be crazy!"

Long Hair nudged him with the rifle.

"Move! You may be skeptical now, but you'll thank us when we meet God, and the sky turns into one big rainbow."

Through its Hoechst-Monsanto subsidiary, Fuzzypal Inc announced today that a potentially serious bug will delay release of the next version of the conglomerate's lead product,
Medicine Cabinet
®.

"There is no cause for alarm," assured company spokesman Chow leLee. "Rumors of a virus in the template are overstated. We just want to tweak the security parameters a bit, before offering a free update to consumers."

The news sent Fuzzypal stock down a few points, but analysts don't expect serious losses for the wetware giant. Jacques Peabody of Analyque Zaire explained—"People want the features they were promised in version 3.5. When it comes to combining all the elements—from flesh-editing to headsheets to self-image processing—only
Medicine Cabinet
offers everything in one convenient package. Don't forget who invented chemsynth-in-a-box."

This comment brought jeers from FreeFloatingConsensusFive, a pseudonymical leader of the Open Organism Movement, seeking to replace Fuzzypal's proprietary system with universal free access to the registry of identified organic templates (RIOT).

"By strangling competition and colluding with government so-called
safety
agencies,
Medicine Cabinet
holds everyone back from where we could have been, by now. Haven't you noticed that every version has glitches that prevent people from synthesizing with true inventive freedom?

"That's why almost everybody who owns a home-chem unit sticks to the same ten thousand pathetic and boring organic compounds. The same pseudo-spices, plaque inhibitors, fatsplitters, muscle-stims, endorphins and sense-enhancers. Never before has human creativity been so thoroughly stifled!"

FreeFloatingConsensusFive was especially harsh in hisherits condemnation of the Telemere Act, which mandates that most Medicine Cabinets come equipped with sensors to lock out healthy users under thirty years of age.

"There are over a million teens and tweens using illegally rewired units today, proving that the so-called Age-Socialization Curve is a myth. The worst thing you see on the street nowadays is the snake-skin fad, some watergills and other harmless retro-devo stuff. No poisoned aquifers or fancy plagues...at least none that a roffer can't detect with his sniffer and cancel with a quickie-antidote.

"No one worries about psychotropics in their BigMacs anymore."

When we asked the gov't public safety mavens about this, they just dittoed us their standard white paper—already five hours old— insisting that desktop chemishing is safe, when part of a conscientiously applied program of molecular hygiene and regular protective care. Rumors of a sniff-proof viral protein coat were dismissed as hysterical fantasy.

"
I predicted this
," commented Bruce Sterling, a retired old fart, from his observation pedestal at the ROF enclave in Corpus Christi Under. The vener-/-able futurist seemed about to say more, but was interrupted by a Greg Bear partial, transmitted from a hibernation cave near Vancouver D.C.

"
No, you didn't
," growled the partial. "
I did
!"

Thankfully, the rest of its remarks were quashed under injunction by a thoroughly embarrassed anonymous tribune, suspected to be yet another reminent ROE

Meanwhile, Fuzzypal announced that it is proceeding with plans to acquire Gelatinous Cube in a hostile takeover. "Our dark minions are on the way," trumped Fuzzypal chief Check Portal, standing before a regiment of selfmobile stock certificates, each one double-recrypted and armed with hyperoxygenated proxies.

"We need Web technology in order to survive as a bloatcorp. So GC had better give it up or face a major ink bath."

We asked a seer-oracle at Analyque Zaire to psychologue this statement.

"I guess the day we all expected has come at last. Check Portal's mind has totally humptied. All the king's centaurs won't patch it this time.

"Anyway, the Web is just a passing fad," commented M'Peri N'Komo more soberly. "In the long run, nobody is going to want to remain fused to a continent-spanning network of sticky strands, no matter how many advantages it offers. There's just too much individual—or cranky monkey—in most of us to sit still for so long.

"If we wanted that sort of thing, we would still be squatting in dark rooms, watching TV and typing stupid chat-noises on the Old Internet," hesheit concluded. "Thank heaven-on-earth we managed to see through
those
traps in time!

"I'll bet you a year's supply of fresh flint nodules that this web-craze will turn out to be more of the same."

Lately we've been hearing more from a corner of the New Age that was strangely quiet for a while.
Parapsychology
. This perennial favorite keeps returning to grab the public's imagination, so maybe it's time to try for a little perspective.

Let me admit from the start that I have a murky and conflicted relationship with the quaint concept of "psi."

On the one hand, trained as a physical scientist, I find little to admire about a field that has almost nothing to show after two hundred years of strenuous and diligent effort. Every year, the claims that are made by proponents shrink as our horizons of measurement advance. A field that once purported to find treasures, cure illnesses, convey infinite energy and speak with the dead now craves marginal evidence for a few statistical anomalies in some randomized card tricks. That's pretty hard to respect.

On the other hand, I now make my living as a creator of futuristic worlds in literature, film and other popular media where "what-if?" can be all the justification you need! And despite my reputation as a "hard" science fiction author—known for technically well-grounded extrapolation—I nevertheless have been known to write stories in which characters use telepathy, clairvoyance, telekinesis and the like. (I certainly treat psi with more respect than the silly notion of UFOs! For more on
that
weird mania, see: http://www.davidbrin.com/)

Is it contradictory for me to portray our descendants using methods that I find implausible here-and-now? Why do I find it irresistible, as a novelist, to ponder future eras when people may communicate with each other without words and manipulate objects without tools?

For the same reason that generations of true-believers invested so much time, money and passion, chasing faint, tantalizing clues and self-deceptions in a fruitless search for manipulative powers of the mind. Because such powers go to the heart of what humans deeply
want
!

Take my own background. Surrounded at an early age by delusionally illogical adults, I recall first hearing about telepathy and trying desperately to
use
it for months, in a futile attempt to comprehend or get through to the volatile, powerful and unpredictable beings around me. Oh, I don't relate this anecdote in order to draw sobs; many people had similar experiences, and that's the point. Most, perhaps all of us, have yearned at times for some shortcut to understanding our fellows. Trapped for an entire life in just one head, one subjective reality, what human being hasn't wondered—

"
What makes
him
tick
?"

"
Does she like the things I like
?"

"
Does he experience the color
red
the same way that I do
?"

"
How can I persuade others to see the real me
?

Testimony for this yearning can be found in the extraordinary complexity of human language, so vastly more sophisticated than anything needed for simple hunting or gathering. It must have been advantageous for our ancestors who gained a leg up in conversation, persuasion and reciprocal understanding. Much of human progress has involved developing newer and better means of communication.

Some invent telephones and internets. Others—especially in the long era before electricity—would take peyote and seek communion via a spirit world. Is that so surprising? Wouldn't you have done the same thing?

Take another basic human imperative . . . our incessant drive to alter or control the environment around us. Is it "telekinesis" when we cause physical objects to move and react, far away, with a touch on a keypad or a word spoken over the phone? Of course not. And yet, a Seventeenth Century cosmopolitan like Descartes might draw no other conclusion, if he witnessed a modern person activating the house-lights with a finger's touch.

If I recall correctly, John Henry Newman claimed that human concepts of causation derive directly or indirectly from the experience of intending to do something physical, then seeing and feeling our body do it. If so, it's easy to see how we might start hoping to see an intended effect just by
looking
at something . . . or someone. In fact, now that we spend hours with things like TV remotes and computer mouses, we have a visceral experience of causing effects in remote objects outside our body, without there being a viscerally obvious mechanical explanation.

Already there are devices that respond to crude aggregate brainwave patterns, in order to activate machines at the command of physically handicapped people. Is it a stretch to imagine more sophisticated versions that will focus on narrowly localized states within the frontal or temporal lobes, responding to specific volitional cues . . . in other words,
choices
? Might our descendants use such tools routinely, commanding advanced machines to perform intricate tasks simply by wishing it to happen?

If telekinesis and telepathy don't yet exist, they surely
will
, as technology enables us to get more of what we want, quicker and with less expenditure of our precious attention or effort. (Isn't that what technology is for?) Our great-grandchildren will send messages by thinking them. What's to stop them? They will cause objects to move and the environment to change around them, by the efficient means of wanting that it be so.

The first few generations will know about the machinery in the walls, that make these things happen. Will later generations take it all for granted? Or even forget the machinery is there?

Perhaps parapsychology is something other than its enthusiasts imagine. Not a trail leading back to ancient wisdom, but more of a
prediction
. More an expression of human desire than an exploration of existing or ancient talents.

Well, that's one perspective. And certainly I do not expect psi enthusiasts to accept it! Because there are other forces than mere wishful thinking at work here—factors motivating some to look away from the future and fixate on the past. Nostalgia. Romanticism. Resentment of scientific authority . . . while yearning to
become
the authority on something wonderful. Something to compete with the scientific world that some outsiders malign as soul-less.

At the lowest level, a hunger for publicity — or profit — can propel garish and often unscrupulous claims. It is a realm rife with charlatans, who make money by persuading others to hand over the contents of their wallets. (True psychics would make it off the stock market or by finding buried treasure, no?)

I'm not saying that all enthusiasts are like this. Many are sincere. A few even want to legitimize the field, to bring parapsychology in from the wilderness and make it part of the scientific process that has brought us so far in just a few hundred years.