Nature Futures 2 (6 page)

“I'm not a collector, and those are worthless now, inflated away in value.”

The time jaunter blinked. “Look, this is one of the first attempts to jump forward and back. I don't have —”

“I know, we've seen jaunters from your era already. Enough to set up a barter system. That's why I had this cancer-canceller.”

Confusion swarmed in his face. “Lady, I'm just a guinea pig here. A volunteer. They didn't give me —”

I pointed. “Your watch is a pleasant anachronism, I'll take that.” I gave him the usual ceramic smile.

He sighed with relief. “Great —” But I kept the cylinder away from him.

“That's an opener offer, not the whole deal.” A broader smile.

He glanced around, distracted by my outfit. I always wore it when the chron-senser networks said there was a jaunt about to happen. Their old dress styles were classic, so they weren't prepared for my peekaboo leggings, augmented breasts and perfectly symmetric face. The lipstick was outrageous for our time, but fit right into the twenty-first century kink.

He raised a flat ceramic thing and it whirred. Taking pictures, like the rest. They still hadn't learned, whenever this guy came from.

“Your pictures won't develop,” I told him with a seemingly sympathetic smile.

“Huh? They gave me this —”

“You've heard of time paradoxes, yes? Space-time resolves those nicely. You can't take back knowledge that alters the past. All that gets erased automatically, a kind of information cleansing. Very convenient physics.”

Startled, he glanced at his compact camera. “So … it'll be blank?”

“Yes,” I said crisply. My left eye told me the chron-senser network was picking up an approaching closure. I leaned over and kissed him on the mouth. “Thanks! It's such a thrill to meet someone from the ancient times.”

That shook him even more. Best to keep them off balance.

“So how do I get that cancer thing?” he said, eyes squinting with a canny cast.

“Let me have your clothes,” I shot back.

“What? You want me … naked?”

“I can use them as antiques. That cancer stick is pretty expensive, so I'm giving you a good deal.”

He nodded and started shucking off his coat, pants, shoes, wallet, coins, cash, set of keys. Reached for his shorts —

“Never mind the underwear.”

“Oh.” He handed me the bundle and I gave him the cancer stick. “Hey, thanks. I'll be back. We just wanted to see if —”

Pop
. He vanished. The cancer stick rattled on the ground. It was just a prop, of course. Cancer was even worse now.

They never caught on. Of course, they don't have much time. That made the fifth this month, from several different centuries.

Time was like a river, yes. Go with the flow, it's easy. Fight against the current and space-time strips you of everything you're carrying back — pictures, cancer stick, memories. He would show up not recalling a thing. Just like the thousands of others I have turned into a nifty little sideline.

The past never seemed to catch on. Still, they stimulated interest in those centuries where time jaunters kept hammering against the laws of physics, like demented moths around a light bulb.

I hefted the clothes and wallet. These were in decent condition, grade 0.8 at least. They should fetch a pretty price. Good; I needed to eat soon. Time paid off, after all. A sucker born every minute, and so many, many moments in the rich past.

Gregory Benford is a professor of physics at the University of California, Irvine, and a novelist. His best-known novel is
Timescape
.

Eating with Integrity

David Berreby

So, how was the big dinner party?

A complete disaster! Geoff and I haven't spoken since …

Not since
Friday
?

That's right. You know, sometimes we joke about divorce when we're arguing, but this time … it doesn't feel safe to kid about that. It's just so silent and grim. I think he thinks I've ruined his career.

Look, I'm sure you did your best. It was a lot of pressure. All three of his new colleagues, plus the Big Boss. I'm sure you did everything right.

I thought I had. I checked everyone for allergies. Religious covenants. Lipid and corticosterone metabolism. Medications, immunizations …

Well, you can't be too careful.

And I social-vetted the menu: everyone checked off everything. And there was nothing to offend anyone. Tempeh-salmon, made by our own 'bot, right here. All ingredients grown sterile, no contact with organic matter or pollutants …

You don't have to tell me. I know how careful we have to be. How careful you are. No one's been sick from your place in years, and how many of us can say that?

Thanks. I appreciate that, especially after what's happened. God, I don't even want to tell. It's just so mortifying.

I think you'd better, though.

Sigh
. Well, then, from the top. The table is set and the containers are all sealed and ready to be opened, the dining tents are over the chairs …

You used the good ones?

Of course! Pressurized, sterilized, totally safe, near-transparent. The ones we got for our tenth anniversary. So there I am, all ready and Geoff is wandering around resterilizing forks because everything's perfect and he has nothing to do and then bing! In walks our first guest, who is also the Big Boss, and he's carrying several things that look like food boxes and I think, uh-oh. Then I think, well, of course, those must be gifts, maybe a floral hologram or something, because it can't be what I'm afraid it is. It just
can't be
!

Well, how could you expect
that
?

You know how this thing is spreading. But I didn't update before the dinner, so I managed to miss the day when Mr Big Boss became one of
them
.

We had three people at work do the same thing last week. It's like some damn cult!

“I hope it's not a problem,” he says, with that hick accent, “but I've decided to
Eat With Integrity
.” I mean, I about died. And the worst of it is, he's the
first guest
. Everyone else is going to think we approve of this kind of thing.

He's also Geoff's boss. You didn't have much choice.

I know, but I was just so … appalled. And disgusted. And I had no idea what to do, because we don't have the equipment.

You mean it
wasn't cooked
?

Oh, no, of course it wasn't cooked. Mr Big isn't just a new-minted Integretist, he's a hard-core Integretist. The meat has to be fresh as can be. He harvests himself, he cooks himself, it has to be done within the hour.

You know, I just realized, in a way it's … well, it's sort of like what our great-grand-parents ate, isn't it? Kind of like … meat?

Exactly the problem! It's not tofurkey or FauxPorc, I can assure you. It's red and bloody and it smells of iron and something else …

I'm sorry, I think I'm going to be sick.

You asked me to tell you!

Oh, God. To think, in your own home!

Right, so there he is, and he forceps out this … lump of flesh, this oozing …
thing
like it's the Dark Ages and he looks at me cool as a cucumber and asks me if he can use the stove. And that's when most of the others walked in. I don't know what was worse — the disgust as they looked at us, or the pity. So, of course, into this conversational vacuum leaps our newly converted Integretist. How he can talk! How he'd been thinking about Eating With Integrity for years, how much sense it made, what with all the contaminants and the epidemics, you couldn't be too careful, blah blah blah. How it was all well and good to grow your own foods and use sterile hydroponics but you couldn't be too sure, and anyway, we evolved to eat meat, and the fact that there are 10 billion of us on Earth doesn't change our basic anatomy, yak yak yak. Stem-cell technology is perfected now, and you can grow whatever you like, they have scaffolds for anything, muscle, liver, sweetbreads …

Oh, my. No one spoke up?

He's the boss! No one dared. And I think they were all just stunned to see that this movement's spreading into their own lives, into their own office. It's not just for recovering plague victims and famine survivors any more.

You know, I saw something the other night about that. The Integretists are getting up to 20% in some cities. Once it costs nothing to clone yourself, a certain kind of person thinks, well, why not?

Meanwhile the stove is doing what it can, trying to cook this … this
lump
. So it starts to … smell, you know? And a couple of the more sensitive people, Geoff's brother, for one, they excuse themselves. And that sets off our guest.

It's the safest meat there is, he says. People didn't have to agree, but they shouldn't feel free to be downright rude.

Bit of a buzz-kill, eh?

… So then people force themselves to sit down, and they're tented up, and their containers unseal, but … God, I can still see it! No one eats a thing. We're all just too disgusted and perplexed, so the only sound at the table is my one happy guest, Eating With Integrity, happily chewing away on what he keeps insisting is the only 100% safe and healthy food left: his own flesh, cloned and grown in a vat next to his coffee machine. I can still see him there, having harvested himself and cooked himself, now eating himself; holding up his fork to our averted eyes, smiling and saying, now this,
this
is
Eating With Integrity
!

A science writer in New York, David Berreby writes the Mind Matters blog at
bigthink.com/blogs/Mind-Matters
and is the author of
Us and Them: The Science of Identity
. He is at work on a book about the future of autonomy.

Expectancy Theory

Ananyo Bhattacharya

I conceived then that, irrespective of the brutal history of our species and the multifarious dark, disturbing truths revealed to us in the natural sciences by studies of the human mind and instincts, the world was perfectible. Not through a long, desperate and tenacious struggle against our own fell natures but simply because a large enough number of well-intentioned folk wished it to be.

— Jacques Monad, Journals Vol. III (2003–2006)

 

Expectancy theory, the scientific hypothesis that ended science and permanently changed the lives of every member of the human race, grew out of a single line of mathematics scribbled down hastily in the journals of the former sociologist Jacques Monad.

At the time of his groundbreaking work, Monad was a 43-year-old tax accountant living in Basingstoke, but he claimed he had drawn the rule out of the surveys he carried out as a PhD student at the University of Liverpool. Although he spent four years conducting research, his doctoral thesis — ‘Study of the effects of alcohol consumption on the behaviour of single females: an examination of contemporary Merseyside mating rituals' — was never completed. Monad was thrown out of the university amid claims, always denied by him but, oddly, never contested formally, of scientific misconduct.

The simple law he formulated — the law of modified probability — still lies at the heart of even the most complex papers of expectancy theory. It can be stated mathematically as follows:

P
(
x
) +
eP
(
x
) =
P
r
(
x
)     (1)

where
P
(
x
) is the probability of an event
x
occurring in the absence of anyone hoping that it will happen,
e
is the expectancy index and
P
r
(
x
) is the actual probability of the event occurring once the full expectation of event
x
has been taken into account.

It is possible that Monad himself did not perceive the true significance of what he wrote that night. In an interview shortly after his theory was published, Monad said that the law came to him after he had had “a few too many one evening”. A few months later, Monad seemed to have changed his mind. “It was divine inspiration,” he said. “I was truly touched by the hand of God.” A statement he was to repeat many times. The theory's publication history is itself notorious. Rejected by
Nature
as “a cock-and-bull story that could only have been dreamed up by a madman”, it was swiftly accepted the following week by
Science
, which in an editorial referred to it as “a landmark”.

The theory is simple enough but many fail to grasp it immediately because of its counter-intuitive implications. The expectancy index
e
, in particular, requires further explanation. It is a measure of the effect a human mind can have on the course of natural events by wishing them to be a certain way. In most situations it is, of course, negligibly small. It was found, however, that in certain circumstances, if enough people wish for something to be true, the probability that it becomes true rises significantly. This is because
e
is a cumulative quantity. Thus if three people, A, B and C, wish for the same event, the total expectancy index
e
T
is a sum of their individual expectancy indices:

e
T
=
e
A
+
e
B
+
e
C
    (2)

When the total expectancy is a positive value, Equation 1 becomes:

P
r
(
x
) >>
P
(
x
)     (3)

This astonishing result has profoundly changed the way we think about the world and ourselves. Science has largely been discarded as the cheerless product of unimaginative minds. The theory of evolution, a particularly diseased example of the genre, was trashed first. Now we no longer regard ourselves as hairless monkeys desperately trying to cope with a somewhat oversized brain, and as a result we also abandoned the field of sociobiology, with its less than flattering findings about human nature.