The Gentle Seduction (29 page)
In those first moments of solitude, being alone seemed unnatural, as unnatural as the communion had seemed earlier; she felt the coldness that comes after a swim, when breeze strikes bare skin. She shuddered.
Was she still herself?
Of course you are. You are all you have ever been, and more.
The answer was her own, but it had once belonged to another person. For a moment she stumbled; perfect memory did not guarantee instantaneous memory, and she was seeking thoughts from her infancy. Then she remembered.
Jack!
She remembered, he had known that she'd remember.
What had happened to Jack?!
Could she have missed him all these years? She initiated a search of the community, but knew its futility even as it began; he could not, would not have remained hidden.
Yet her need to know him again grew stronger as she opened more of her long unbidden memories.
She searched swiftly back through the annals of history. Her search slowed suddenly to a crawl as she reached the early moments of Singularity: before the dawn of civilization, records had been crudely kept, with links insufficient to allow swift scanning. An analogy to cobwebs made her smile for a moment.
Only a handful of machines maintained this ancient knowledge, older machines in older places. Her search plunged to the surface of Earth. There, in a place once called California, all the remnants of prehistoric information had been collected. But it had not been collated. It would take much time to find Jack in this maze. But she had the time.
A salary report from a corporation of long ago . . . an article on accelerated technology's impact on the individual . . . a program design with its inventor's initials . . . and suddenly she found him, in a richly interconnected tiny tapestry within the sparsely connected morass. She read all of it, rapidly, as if she were inhaling fresh air after too long a stay in a stale room.
Jack had saved her life, she realized. The capsule she had taken so long ago to heal her backache, that first step on the road to the life she now knew, was his—he had designed the machine that designed the machine that designed that pill. It turned out that he had learned much from her on that day when they walked quietly amidst the lush green wilderness. And it had taken her all these millennia to learn what he had known even then.
From her, Jack had learned the importance of making technology's steps small, making its pieces bite-size. He had learned this as he watched, in her disbelieving eyes, her reaction to the world he had planned.
For those who loved technology and breathed of it deeply, small bite-size steps were not important. It would have been easy to callously cast off those who did not understand or who were afraid. But Jack had thought of her, and had not wanted her to die.
Reading these glimpses of his past, she grew to know Jack better than she had ever known him in life. With her growing wisdom, she soon understood even the clarity of organization that encompassed this lone swatch of antiquity: the clarity, too, was of his making. He had believed in her. He had believed that one day she would search for him here. And he had known that, when she arrived, her expanded powers of perception would enable her to understand the message embodied in the clarity, and in all his work.
I loved you, you know,
Jack told her across the millennia.
She wanted to answer. But there was no one to hear.
It hurt her to think of him lost forever, and she had not felt hurt for a very long time. Feverish, she worked to rebuild him. The Earth-bound computers gave her all the help they had to give, every memory of every moment of Jack they had ever recorded. She traced her own memories, perfect now, of every word he spoke, every phrase he uttered, every look he gave her in their long walks. She built a simulation of him, the best and most perfect simulation she could build with all her resources, resources far beyond those of a million biological human minds. It was illegal to build a simulation such as this, one of the few laws recognized by the community, but this did not deter her.
The simulation looked like Jack; it talked like Jack; it even laughed like Jack. But it was not Jack. She then understood why it was illegal to build such a simulation; she also understood why it was not a law that needed to be enforced: such simulations always failed.
Jack was gone.
What could she do?
What did she have to do?
Suddenly she realized how silly the simulation had been: how could she have hoped to get closer to him, than to live his vision of the future?
Only one small action, one appropriate action, remained that she could perform. She could remember forever.
And so, just as a part of her lived forever on the Mountain, just as a part of her lived forever singing, so now she maintained a part of her that would spend all its moments remembering her earlier moments with him. She became in part a living memorial to the one who brought her here.
And though no one could hear, the essence of her memory would have been easy to express:
Jack, I love you.
She turned her attention to the living members of humanity. There were many other places in the community, she realized, where the techniques she employed in contact with the aliens could help; there were many places where they needed her elemental force invested with the fullness of such expanded communion. She was eager to go. But still a question remained.
Would she still be herself?
The answer Jack had wrought so long ago welled up from within, her rightful inheritance of his understanding. Part of the answer, she knew, lay within another question:
Are you still yourself even now? Were you still yourself even when you were twenty-five?
She looked back with the vision that perfect memory brings. She remembered who she had been when she was twenty-five; she remembered who she had been when she was just ten. Amusingly, she also remembered how, at twenty-five, she had erroneously remembered her thoughts of age ten. The changes she had gone through during those fifteen years of dusty antiquity were vast, perhaps as vast as all the changes she had accepted in the millennia thereafter. Certainly, considering the scales involved, she had as much right today to think of herself as the same person as she had then. Expanded communion would not destroy her; she was her own bubble no matter how frothy the ocean might become.
At least, this first time she had remained her own bubble. Would it always be so?
She dipped into communion, and withdrew to ask the question. She found the answer, and it was good. She dipped again, for a longer time; and still the answer was good, perhaps better.
She dipped much longer still and asked one more time. This time she understood. The answer was so simple, so glorious, so joyful, that she did not ask the question again for a billion years.
And by then, it just didn't seem to matter.
Hypermedia and the Singularity
Hypermedia is one of the technologies that will take us into the future of "The Gentle Seduction "
I wrote this article about hypermedia just before writing "Seduction." I had come to realize about a year earlier that hypermedia was going to be a very important technology, and I had set out to make myself an expert in it. I went so far as to write a hypermedia version of one of my novels.
Despite this, I did not realize at the time just how central a role hypermedia would play in my own future. Xanadu, which gets a one-paragraph mention here, received financial backing from Autodesk (one of the quietest but biggest software companies in the world) the month after 1 completed "The Gentle Seduction." A month after that, 1 met the Xanadu team for the first time. This team was composed of some of the smartest, most talented people I had ever met. But though they were very bright, none of them had ever managed a software engineering project of this size to success.
I, however, had.
So from Xanadu I received a call. They made me an offer 1 could not refuse. So I moved to California, to build great software, to hurry my vision to fruition.
You see, I do not merely wish to write about Singularity. I wish to experience it.
I cut a number of passages from the final drafts of "The Gentle Seduction" because, in the end, there was no place to put them. One of those was the following, an observation she makes shortly before entering expanded communion:
"The population had stabilized at just a bit over a trillion individuals. A trillion seemed about the right size for a community: large enough to allow some diversity, but small enough so that you could get to know each member of the community quite well."
With the right balance of enthusiasm and prudence there's no reason we can't be members of that community.
I hope to meet you all there, on the other side of Singularity. I'm looking forward to it. I hope you are, too.
Hypermedia and the Singularity
-
A Child Dying of Adrenoleukodystrophy
-
Buttons to begin an Article on Hypermedia and the Singularity
TO SEE ONE OF THESE SECTIONS, JUST POINT AND CLICK
(oops—this is a paper document, not a computer document).
This article is about the relationship of the technology of
hypermedia
to the approaching time of technological
Singularity
. There are a lot of ways we could start this discussion; up above, in italics, you see a list of the starting places that I considered before writing. The article, as it now stands, has the following layout:
1)
the
list of buttons (the section in italics at the beginning of the article),
2)
the
road map (that's where we are now),
3)
a
major section to define hypermedia, with sidesteps to consider:
a.
Sanskrit
literary style
b.
flight
in information space
c.
hypermedia
art, and
d.
issues
of hyperstyle
This lengthy discussion of hypermedia is followed by:
4)
a
shorter definition of the Singularity, and
5)
a
discussion of how the Singularity and hypermedia are interrelated. This discussion of interrelationships wraps up with an example of how hypermedia will accelerate our approach to Singularity: the story of the child with adrenoleukodystrophy.
Finally, the article ends with:
6)
a
discussion of the next steps in hypermedia development, who is taking those steps, and where it will lead.
Hypermedia is much easier to use than to define. In one sense, you have already seen a definition of hypermedia in the early layout of this article, though in practice it's difficult to grasp without a computer-based example.
Hypermedia is the child of
hypertext
. Ted Nelson coined the term hypertext in the sixties and defined it simply as "nonlinear writing."
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Linear
writing has been mankind's standard for millennia. One alphabetic character follows another, one word follows the next, building sequential sentences, paragraphs, and chapters. The writer designs his document for a reader who is
trapped
: the writer assumes that the reader only has the ability to go forward one step, or backward one step, but nowhere else.
Of course, we have had limited forms of nonlinear writing mixed in: the table of contents and the index are modern (though primitive) nonlinear writing tools—though slow, they do help the reader skip to the sections of the document of most interest to him.
Nonlinear writing goes back at least as far as Sanskrit. With one of the stylistic approaches used in Sanskrit, the document's opening passage was a series of one-line descriptions of what would follow. The next section contained a paragraph for each one-line description; the next section devoted a chapter to each paragraph description. This design encouraged the reader to skim only as far as he needed to go, reaching into the deep, extensive discussion only as a last resort. The article that you are reading now, with the list of items as its first paragraph, is organized in a way similar to those ancient Sanskrit documents.
Newspapers also encourage nonlinear reading—the headers for the different articles appear in a bolder, larger style, which the human eye can automatically pick out (the powerful perceptual computers behind our eyes that do this automatic selection are a major reason why people find Macintosh-like, icon-oriented software easier to use—using imagery, we can grasp many features without recourse to our conscious reading abilities). After the eye has picked out an interesting article, the first journalistic paragraph summarizes the whole article—only the most in-depth reader must go beyond that first paragraph.
But this is exactly where newspapers fail—the in-depth reader must page back and forth from the front to the far back just to read a whole article.
And while the newspaper frustrates the in-depth reader, the textbook with its index frustrates the skimming reader, who has no real way of perusing just the summaries. The nonlinear extensions to linear books fail because paper is inherently a linear medium. Enter the computer.
Modern desktop and laptop computers have grown powerful enough so that they can give us a truly nonlinear medium for document presentation. No longer must we ask the question "should I set my article up like a newspaper, for skimmers, or should I set it up like a book, for detailed readers?" Set it up for
both
.
With either Guide
2
or HyperCard™
3
(the two widely-accessible hypermedia tools at the time of this writing), the table of contents can be a series of one-line entries that are treated as buttons: when the reader points at the entry and clicks, the computer brings forth the detailed backup information in the twinkling of an eye. This detailed information can in turn contain other buttons.
Buttons do more than link a brief description with its detailed explanation. Buttons can link multiple, partially related items. A paragraph describing a disease might have a link to a separate paragraph about the cure, which might be linked to a list of related medicines, each of which is linked to a manufacturer, each of which is linked to a list of products, each of which is linked to a list of diseases for which that product is the cure. In this sense hypermedia offers instantaneous references, akin to the suggested reading lists tagged on to encyclopedia articles.
The elements of a hypermedia document do not all have to be text—they can also be pictures, sounds, and full-color videos and animations. For many documents, the table of contents should not be a list of chapter names, it should be a
picture
. A car repair manual, for example, might have a picture of the car as its first item. The mechanic would point to the part of the car he needed to know about, which would give him a closeup view and a short textual description of what it is and how it should work, with a few extra pictures (through other buttons) of typical forms of wear that would call for replacement. The mechanic would zoom in again and again until he found the specific part to replace—and he would then press the button that runs a short video sequence showing how to remove the old part and install the new one (for a simple example of zoom, see Figure 1). With these links interconnecting pictures, text, and video sequences, we have true hyper
media
(for the syntactically finicky, the word "hypermedia" is a singular group noun, unlike the word "media," which is the plural of medium).
The links inside a hypermedia database allow the hypermedia reader (a hyperreader?) to leap through a document as quickly as today's linear reader can turn a page.
Indeed, the whole concept of a
document
—a standalone volume of text and pictures—becomes less meaningful with hypermedia. As more documents are added to the hypermedia database, with rich crosslinks to other documents, the reader finds himself browsing, not through documents, but through an
information space
. And information space, like normal space, is designed for flight.
I remember witnessing hypermedia for the first time at the Microsoft CD-ROM conference in February of 1987. Owl International was announcing Guide, the first commercial hypermedia system. The presenter pointed at a line in the table of contents, expanded that section to show a list of subsections, and quickly hit four buttons. In an eyeblink, four new windows popped open on the computer screen, each showing a different section of the document, three with pictures. He continued to click, bringing new windows to the fore with new information. I experienced a momentary sense of disorientation. That sensation quickly developed into a sense of breathless movement, of
flight
, the feeling I usually reserve for watching the stars flash past on Star Trek.
With the advent of hypermedia, the quiet but explosive revolution of the "paperless office" draws close at last. The paperless office received much acclaim years ago, but the vision faded as computerization actually
expanded
the creation of paper. This disillusionment with the paperless office came about through a tragic misunderstanding. The vision of the paperless office, however dim, was correct.
When a new technology is introduced, people's natural first reaction is to use the technology to do the same old tasks more quickly. Thus people first used computers to create paper—and they succeeded beyond their wildest nightmares. Computers have dramatically increased paper production—but they have not, by any current measure, increased productivity. This is about to change, and will change with ever greater speed for the next decade as we build tools that make computerized data more effective than paper counterparts.
Hypermedia is a key ingredient for creating that effectiveness (though other ingredients are still necessary to match the merits of paper, namely durability, portability, and resolution; these, too, will be solved, but that's another article). Once data is put into a hypermedia-based information space, it is easier to retrieve and easier to read than it would be on paper. People will not want to print hypermedia documents: the translations will lose so much value, writers will instead give readers access on the computer. As all the worker's data begins to show up in the same format, interlinked with all the other data so that he can toggle back and forth at the touch of a finger, productivity will start to rise.
Alas, in our modern society, improved productivity no longer guarantees improved performance. Bureaucrats can always increase the demand for paperwork (or computerwork) to negate any increase in productivity. Technological solutions to more classical problems have not faced such an unbounded obstacle. Not even the government will move a city ten times as far away from you just because your new car goes ten times as fast. Bureaucrats can, however, require ten times as much paperwork once you get there. Consider the effect of our recent tax simplification: it made bestsellers out of thick books about taxes. It seems clear that bureaucrats will require even more paperwork.
Hypermedia Art
Besides giving a big boost to the paperless office, hypermedia will give rise to a new form of art to stand beside painting, cinematography, and literature. Indeed, hypermedia may become the culmination of these separate lines of artistic expression, as it weaves the now-disparate genres into a stunning tapestry. In a hypermedia novel, the reader has much more control over which pieces he reads—he might choose to follow a single character through the course of the story one day, and a different character the next.
Winds of
War by Herman Wouk might be much more readable in this fashion.
David's Sling
, the world's first hypermedia novel, allows the reader to follow not only charactersrs but also subject topics through the period of time chronicled by the story (see Figure 2).
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Following multiple character threads in this manner opens up even more unusual possibilities. The reader may revel in reading a single scene from several different points of view—Roger Zelazny's
Amber
series offers some interesting hypermedia possibilities in this regard. And the reader would benefit from hypermedia when engaging Heinlein's future histones Just because he could finally
find
things.
In SF novels in particular, hypermedia gives the writer a Way of sharing his mountains of background material with the interested reader, without imposing on the tight construction of the plot.
David's Sling
has a separate section of Blueprints for those who desire more technical information about the Sling Hunters (see Figure 3). Indeed, in
David's Sling
a reader skilled in the arcane mysticisms of modern management can read the entire story with the Program Evalution and Review Technique (PERT), in a series of PERT charts (see Figure 4). This is almost certainly the first time that management science has been intentionally used for artistic expression (though from what I hace seen, management science is often used unintentionally to create works of fantasy).
Future hypermedia art will require ever more innovative intertwining of graphics with text and animation. The development of truly great hypermedia documents—whether they be pure art, pure information, or a weaving of the two—will require an array of skills that includes illustration, writing, cartoon creation, and cinematography. The most urgently needed skill will be a new one that might best be called
link architecture
: the design of sets of links that offers the reader intuitive flight paths. Whereas modern writers only have to worry about the transition from one paragraph to the next paragraph, the hypermedia author will consider dozens, perhaps even hundreds, of such transitions. Part of skillful design will be to keep the number of transitions, the number of branches, small, while still guaranteeing fast and understandable traversal of the whole document.
Fortunately, these designers will have hypermedia style guidelines on-line to assist them.
Hyperstyle
Some discussion of hyperstyle here may help illuminate the meaning of hypermedia.
Hypermedia designers, just like ordinary writers, would do well to start with the
Elements Of Style
by Strunk and White. As Strunk would say, "Omit needless words. Omit needless words! OMIT NEEDLESS WORDS!"
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