In the Screen of the Machine
Every culture gets"You have a message from Fujiko, sir," Jeeves, his supervisor program, tells him in its Oxford accent. He looks up. He is working in one of his virtual offices, but Jeeves has standing orders to interrupt him for Fujiko's messages. Jeeves's image---for the last few months dressed as an English butler---is holding a gold tray with a note on it. "Read the message, Jeeves," he says tiredly.
the magic it deserves.
Dudley Young,
Origins of the Sacred
Jeeves's image picks up the simulated note and pretends to read it. "Home for lunch in an hour. Fujiko."
The man smiles. As usual, Fujiko didn't waste words.
Jeeves coughs gently and dematerializes the tray and note. It seems annoyed at the message's abruptness. "If I may take the liberty, sir, over the past three hours Secretary received ninety-two other messages. Thirteen were prerecorded holocalls, fifteen were text and pictures only, four were voice..."
"I'm sure if any were urgent you would've interrupted me, Jeeves."
"Just as you say, sir," Jeeves says in its don't-interrupt voice. "Besides the calls, News has found 604 potentially interesting..."
He waves Jeeves to silence. "Thank you, Jeeves, they can wait." Two-year-old Jeeves is already getting quite persnickety. When he first bought the program, it was as bland as American cheese. But as it found a persona to assume, it---or should that be he?---was rapidly becoming an aged Gruyere.
"Please send the news to Library for integration and summarize the calls and mail to one sentence descriptors. I'll listen to it later." Jeeves, managing to look both pleased and miffed, nods and obligingly vanishes.
Sighing, the man wonders just how Jeeves spends its computer time when it doesn't have to service his requests---which is most of the time. Does it have a secret life? Smiling now as he tries to imagine what that could be, he speaks an activation word and his present synthetic office vanishes, to be replaced by another.
He now appears to be lying on a couch next to a coffee table in a small transparent room, as if he is inside a giant soap bubble. Through it he sees a moonscape with a robot miner at work---one of his whimsies this month. Just above his head, a line of what appear to be paper books floats in mid air---a small window onto the world's library of electronic books. There is a clutter of small objects on his simulated coffee table: a fold-down paper calendar with a ticking clockface embedded in today's date, a tiny file cabinet, a flower in a vase, and a small toolbox. There is no keyboard, screen, or telephone.
What looks like a paper calendar is really an agenda file, and the clock is an electronic simulation that tells him about upcoming appointments. The tiny file cabinet is an enormous filing system, which contains electronic, not paper files. The health of the flower reflects the state of his business. Its color, the shape of the vase, and the amount of water in it reflect orders, contracts, and service requests. It gives him a quick way to estimate how well he's doing. Right now it is blooming in a tall thin crystal vase with plenty of water.
Ignoring the flower, he commands the toolbox to open and it does, revealing some small shimmering objects. He picks up what looks like a waterstained cardboard box, places it on the coffee table next to the toolbox, and tells it to open. He can see some tiny objects inside, and when he directs them to grow they do.
The man starts rummaging through the things at the bottom of the box. For the most part, the objects look like chrome or pewter widgets, differently shaped and colored; in fact they are representations of his neural-probe programs, neurophysiology software models, pharmacology texts, psychology toolboxes, old brain scans...
After a few seconds of rummaging, he looks a bit exasperated and says, "Jeeves, find me my latest brain simulator prototype." Immediately a cream-colored pillbox hidden in a corner starts blinking red; then, through a complicated origami trick, all the other things---including the coffee table---fold into themselves and shrink away as the pillbox grows to handy proportions.
Soon the clock bleats softly and, using Jeeves's voice, tells him it's time for his next meeting. Snapping his fingers, he says "Shift me" and immediately pops up to High Hilton to meet with a Neurotek representative and go over some initial designs. His comfortable virtual office has vanished entirely, and although he knows exactly where his body is, he is still a bit disoriented. Everything he sees and hears tells him he is now a sophisticated motorized camera bolted to the wall of a cabin in orbit far above. He is now inside a reality, inside a reality, inside a reality.
When he concludes the meeting fifteen minutes later, he speaks the word to power down his electronic contact lenses. The orbiting cabin vanishes, leaving the couch on the moon, which also vanishes, leaving him back in his first virtual office, which also vanishes.
His physical home finally opens out on him. After spending the entire morning in various artificial realities, he's finally back in real reality---such as it is. He is alone at home, swaying gently in a hammock on a veranda facing out to the sea near Köschi Bay. His computer is in his shirt pocket; its microlasers, which tracked his gestures and facial expressions and sent information to his earplugs and the tiny displays in his contact lenses, wink out.
As usual the transition has left him a little unsettled. His brain, evolved to deal with one stable reality, still isn't used to abrupt jumps between realities. Someone should fix that, he thinks. It would be even worse when computers talk directly to the brain. He would have to remember to make the transitions in his new interface more graceful. He rubs his eyes tiredly---being careful of his contacts---and thinks of the years of work ahead for him and his people.
Neurotek had been very insistent at the meeting. They want the first of the next generation of interfaces, direct-to-brain interaction, in three years. It would be crude, of course; the first generation of anything always was. Neurotek knew that the erotica market alone was worth killing for. If they got what they wanted, they would be years ahead of the competition, and reality would become even more unreal.
What is real? he thinks. Some of his older programs are already becoming more real to him than many of his childhood friends. And his alternative realities are becoming more pervasive every day. Sometimes he catches himself snapping his fingers and uttering his various call words, unthinkingly trying to summon things in his real home. They rarely come of course. It's December 20, 2021, and reality isn't by any stretch of the imagination what it used to be.
His stomach rumbles, interrupting his thoughts. Well, at least that's real. Never mind the philosophy. He would test his first mockup after lunch. Fujiko would be home soon.
The Power of Ideas