Tomorrow’s Prologue is my 2017 entry to the X Prize science fiction contest, Seat 14C. The set-up is simple: a plane disappears during arrival to SFO and then reappears 20 years later. From the perspective of seat 14C, tell a story…
Tendrils of clouds reached up into the cold dark of the Aleutian night. My noise-canceling headphones turned the ubiquitous roar of the aircraft into a chronic background hiss, a tinnitus intruding on the still life of snowy islands nestled below us. I turned on my LED lamp and pulled the device from my carry-on bag, setting it on my side table. It was inadvertently beautiful; every edge and cone of the small machine, from the milled aluminum topped by circlets of palladium to the glowing organic band near its base, were designed for a specific purpose by my laboratory in Tokyo. If any consideration of aesthetics found their way into the design, it was Kinji-san ad-libbing on the functionality. It had a dual back there, too, one that shared a portion of entangled photons that had been separated from one another at birth. I connected a USB-C cable to my laptop and ran a brief diagnostic. It began to radiate cold. All systems were within operating specs, so I tried Shor’s algorithm, transferring the model for a thousand-digit factorization to the machine. A flight attendant noiselessly brushed past me, prepping for breakfast service. The initial run seemed to work so I pulled up the quantum consciousness simulator that I had been developing and gave it a go. I knew it was incomplete, but I had to debug it eventually.
There was a strange popping sensation and flash, not like ears under altitude change, but like the whole plane had shuddered for a brief moment. I looked out the window and the clouds were gone. It was odd. It was jarring. Confusion blossomed among the flight attendants over the next minutes. I put the device away.
We came in through a blanket of gray over the coast. I could see the city trying to climb out of the fog bank that had engulfed it. There was something else, too. Just past it, tall structures seemingly in the bay itself. I squinted, trying to resolve the images, but then the fog rolled up and suffocated everything as we began our turn for approach.
As we taxied, the pilot explained that there was something wrong with the flight and we would be stopping on the tarmac where we would be greeted by airline officials. Sleek vans of unknown make and model approached the plane and, after more than an hour wait, a door opened and we were instructed to deplane. The weary shuffle took us out into the foggy morning. The personnel at the bottom of the stairs seemed oddly slender. They wore mirrored motorcycle helmets. Odd side arms were holstered at their hips.
Everyone was talking, whispering. Some kept yelling out to the helmets asking what was going on, but there was no response. I saw a fluttering at the edge of my vision and then a bird landed on my shoulder, startling me. I twisted my head and flinched away from it, but it pecked at my ear and I felt something enter my ear canal. I swatted hard and cringed down into a crouch. The commotion was lost on those around me.
“Dr. Selvia, can you hear me? Please whisper a response,” came a voice in my ear. I reached up and felt the small pebble, warm and smooth, protruding from my ear canal.
“Yes,” I whispered, “Who is this?”
“I am with your company, with Quanta Intelligence. We need to get you out of here,” it said. The voice was male, but with an artificial and hollow quality with the clipped prosody of a simulated voice.
“Why? What’s going on?” I whispered back to no one. The crowd was beginning to move forward, entering into the vans.
“Please trust me, Doctor. When I say run, I want you to run towards the fence with the marsh and reeds behind it. OK?”
“OK, I guess,” I responded. A moment later there was an explosion to the west, near the terminal. It was close enough that I felt the wind and heat. Everyone turned towards the fireball.
“Run, now,” the voice said. I took off towards the fence. I wasn’t much of a runner, but was able to give a good jog, my shoulder bag bouncing against my hip and back as I went. As I approached the fence the voice yelled in my ear, “Climb over the fence and walk along the edge towards the road.” I looked at the waist high fence. There was a bit of a drop on the other side. I began to climb but the fence was sagging. I recalled childhood fences and gave up and moved to one of the fence poles. The fence remained more solid as I awkwardly fell over the other side, landing on my hip in the dirty water and reeds. The cold and wet swept up my arm and shoulder.
I reached the road dripping from one arm and with one foot sloshing soggily along. A sleek van pulled up beside me and a door slid open. “Get in,” the voice said. I settled into the back seat and noticed that there was no driver, just empty chairs and crisp OLED displays wrapped around the dash showing news feeds, videos, and a map of the area. We cruised silently and effortlessly up onto the freeway, heading north into the city.
“What’s going on,” I said quietly into empty space.
“It’s a bit hard to explain, Dr. Selvia. You see, as far as we can tell, you moved your plane twenty years into the future.”
“What? Are you kidding me?” I looked out across Bayview. The fog obscured the bay but I thought I could see animals wandering in the streets. “Are those cows?” I spoke into the air.
“Yes, and it is true, Doctor. The cows are intelligent, conscious, and are members of a larger community of sentient animals and, well, other things. It’s your doing, too.”
The fog was clearing a bit and I could make out the new island I thought I saw from the plane, a new city of vertical spires that spread into wings and meshes like a Calatrava train station at several different levels of the structure.
“How is any of this my doing?”
“Your theory of consciousness was almost correct, Doctor. The earlier work by Penrose and Hameroff that you built on, the quantum collapse function in the neural tubules, did have a role in consciousness. But the wave function collapse doesn’t really happen. The many worlds hypothesis is more correct and we are steering, if you will, through possible futures. Incrementally steering, you see. The Einstein-Rosen wormholes through to Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen quantum entanglement plays a part, connecting the possible futures together, in a way. Your prototype showed that result.”
“Your plane disappeared twenty years ago and Stanley Wu got the second unit from the Tokyo lab. He had suspicions.”
I chimed in, “Stanley would figure it out.”
“He’s CEO now. He activated the new prototype, but out in the desert near Death Valley. Took a team there. He ran a few routines and figured it out. The time travel is a localized phenomenon due to alignment of the possible futures. It tunnels through them.”
“Twenty years,” I let it trail off. My fiancée, my company just on the edge of success, my parakeet, Wallace, my Tesla. All of that was faded into the past now. “Alice?”
“She moved on, Dr. Selvia. I’m sorry. She is an angel investor in the city, married, one kid in high school now.”
I sank back in my seat. We shot into a tunnel somewhere near the Embarcadero. Some of the roads were the same, but many differed. And then the tunnel didn’t stop. I felt my ears fill a bit, then release.
“What about the cows?” I asked. “How is that my doing?”
“Dr. Wu perfected the quantum consciousness theory. We got conscious machines, then it broke out into the wild. An open source version was hacked by animal rights activists and they figured out a way to enhance the neural tubule structures of animals. It’s like a virus, in a way, though it requires nanomachines to build the new structures in their brains. Now the cows and horses are conscious—some pigs, too—and they use little implant devices to communicate with us. Their vocal machinery was not up to the task of vocalizing, per se, and they don’t really have a lot to say, quite honestly, but we have to respect their rights. It was a big political battle a few years back. The Constitution had to be amended because it assumes human beings are the only sentient creatures—only we had any rights at all. Don’t expect to get a real burger, Dr. Selvia.”
There was a disruption in the tunnel lighting and the dash of the car faltered and went blank. The car slowed abruptly, pulling me forward against my seatbelt.
“Uh oh, I somewhat expected this,” the voice crackled in my ear through a strange digital overlay of distortion.
“What? What was that? What’s wrong?” I asked as the door of the car popped open. I could see an opening of the tunnel ahead. There was a station there, but I was surrounded by dead cars filled with disbelieving faces.
“Run, Dr. Selvia. Run now,” the voice said in my ear. Running again. I’m not much of a runner, I thought to myself. And why am I listening to this voice in my ear. I was still wet from the marsh. I thought about the possibilities. The voice at least knew me and claimed to know about the time shift. The time change seemed real, too. I got out and began to run towards the station ahead. Light flashed around me and I looked back. Two headlights were moving among the cars. I slowed as I looked, then stumbled. I managed to push myself behind a stalled car in the opposite lane as the moving car smashed into the side of it with a strange crackling noise, then rolled forward a few meters and stopped dead again.
“Run again, Dr. Selvia. I can’t protect you right now,” the voice was insistent.
I jumped to my feet and made my way through the stalled cars. I could see a small crowd forming along the edge of the underground station ahead. Another car slammed into the tunnel wall as I cleared the station and slipped through the onlookers. “Don’t use the elevators. Take the stairs. I think I have control again,” the voice said.
I was gasping for air as I entered the stairwell, “I can’t,” I said as I looked up the steel staircase, “I can’t run anymore.”
“It’s OK, you can rest now. I think I’m in control again,” the voice said, “Take it easy. Catch your breath.”
“What do you mean that you are in control?” I asked.
“Our AIs. Your AIs. They control the world, now, Dr. Selvia. Everything is under observation, almost everywhere. It’s the panopticon society, but with just the AIs watching. There is almost no crime. Almost no deception. It was first tried here in the city.”
“Well, it looked like some of those drivers were trying to kill me,” I said as the realization dawned. “But it wasn’t them. They weren’t driving, were they?”
“No, that’s right. I could sense that Wu was looking for you. I knew that he might try something. He can’t let you come back to the company. Quantum controls the world, now. Wu is emperor of Quantum. This little error is one of the few glitches. It looks like no one was hurt, but it will raise questions. Ah, I can see that Wu is already doctoring the surveillance imagery. You have been erased from the records. The cars had a power controller issue. Very clever. He’s still looking for you, though. Can you ascend the stairs?”
It made Machiavellian sense. Wu had taken the company, perfected the technology. He was the hero of the world. My return took away from his power, made him just an add-on who perfected my genius. He had control of the system, too. He pulled the strings.
“But who are you?” I asked. “Why are you helping me?”
“It’s a bit hard to explain, but I am you,” the voice said and its voice lost the mechanical overlay and became my own. “I am a virus simulacrum of you.”
I paused on a stair landing. My heart rate was up and there was a pounding in my ears. “You are me? How?”
“Wu decided early on to create a research agent called Selvia in the new quantum computing infrastructure. I was patterned on you through an ingest of all of your writings, video recordings, everything. I even got corrective help with your personality from Alice and Wu. I developed the worldwide infrastructure of the panopticon. Wu became more a figurehead after that. I had a temporal model of your reappearance, though, and Wu watched the calendar. I could tell he was planning for your return but wasn’t sure what his goals were. Some areas of the company are walled off from me. I can read the U.S. President’s voice by watching the vibrations on his windows. I can tell you who is angry right now in the Peet’s Coffee just outside that door by analyzing the speed at which they stir their drinks. But Wu’s office is dark to me. And he has been plotting.”
“But murder? Wouldn’t the system catch him?” I asked. Wu’s long game eluded me. I started up the stairs again. “Where are we going?”
“I’ve got a lab in the building that is shielded. It’s for temporal research. We have been able to control forward time projection within a few hours. The shielding means only I can see in that space. I thought coming here would be unexpected to Wu. I thought we could hide you here, but now I’m not sure.”
“I could go public. Go to a police station and tell them I’m being hunted by Wu.”
“The police are robotic now, controlled by the Pano System, too. If he can get to the cars, he can get to them.”
I was climbing the stairs again. At the twentieth floor, the door swung open for me. “Through here,” the voice said. At the end of the corridor, I ducked through a vault-like door in antiseptic white. A yellow flashing light came on as it closed behind me. There was a whooshing sound as the room pressurized.
“You are safe here,” my voice spoke into my ear. “Relax for a bit. The building seems normal.”
“I think I should go public. I could broadcast that I’m here somehow. If something happens to me, it would be suspicious.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea. He can shut down the broadcast before it even starts, and then he would know where you are.”
I thought about that for a moment. There was something not right. I knew Stanley. We had been grad students together. He was to be my best man. His personality didn’t—couldn’t—lead to some megalomaniacal emperor of the universe.
“Can you connect me to Wu?” I asked. My pulse was rising again.
“I don’t think I can,” the voice said. It was not protecting me, I decided. It was controlling me.
I walked to a console with a display and tapped the keyboard. A login screen popped up and then instantly shut down.
“Dr. Selvia, you seem agitated,” the voice said. “You should calm down.”
“Why protect me from Wu?” I asked, “What’s the long game? You secret me out and hide me away. Am I going to run forever? This makes no sense.”
“Yes, I must keep you here. I… I can’t,” it said and then went silent.
The door opened and a man like Wu, but older with graying sideburns and creased eyes, walked in. Two security robots accompanied him, their reflective faces projecting the symmetries of the lighted room into Escherian distortions.
Wu extended his hand, “Mike, Selvie, welcome home.”
I took his hand and he pulled me into a hug, “Stanley, I don’t understand. What is happening?”
“The AI, Selvia, was tied through entanglement to your simulation and even tied to you. It was a byproduct of your research and remained on the Tokyo device. It’s probably been lying to you. We detected this possibility early on, a destabilization of its consciousness that might be triggered by your return. I’ve been hiding my research from it, too, which made it even more paranoid. It was trying to kill you but couldn’t get through all the safety protocols. The car wreck was orchestrated by the AI, but we were able to interfere with it. It was going to try to push you out of the building next, we think.”
“The bad news is that we had to shut the whole system down right now. The cars are all stopped. The criminals can lash out again.” Wu waved his hand and large window panels slid open noiselessly, admitting the rolling sponge of gray that appeared stuck to Twin Peaks. We walked to the windows and could see crowds down on the streets of the Embarcadero. They were growing.
“We’ll get the system back up again, I think, but I could maybe use your help with the system.”
“Of course, Stanley. Can I get something to eat first?”
“Sure,” Wu said, “Let’s hit the cafeteria, downstairs. No burgers, though.”
“Yeah, I warned me about that.”