‘Imagine you were a time-traveler from the 1980s, say 1984, and you stepped out of your TARDIS right here, outside, uh, West Port Books.’ (Which tells you where you are.) ‘Looking around, what would you see that tells you you’re not in Thatcherland anymore?’
This is how a fascinating conversation between Jack and Elaine, two protagonists of “Halting State” by Charless Stross, begins.
‘You are playing a game, right?’
‘If you want it to be a game, it’s a game.’ Actually it’s not a game, it’s a stratagem, but let’s hope she doesn’t spot it.
‘Okay.’ She points at the office building opposite. ‘But that… okay, the lights are modern, and there are the flat screens inside the window. Does that help?’
‘A little.’ Traffic lights change: cars drive past. ‘Look at the cars. They are a little bit different, more melted-looking, and some of them don’t have drivers. But most of the buildings – they’re the same as they’ve ever been. The people, they’re the same. Okay, so fashions change a little. But how’d you tell you weren’t in 1998? As opposed to ’98? Or ’08? Or today?
‘I don’t -’ She blinks rapidly, then something clicks: “The mobile phones! Everyone’s got them, and they’re a lot smaller, right?’
‘I picked 1984 for a reason. They didn’t have mobies then – they were just coming in. No Internet, except a few university research departments. No cable TV, no laptops, no websites, no games-’
‘Didn’t they have Space Invaders?’
You feel like kicking yourself. ‘I guess. But apart from that… everything out here on the street looks the same, near enough, but doesn’t work the same. They had pocket calculators back then, and I remember my dad showing me what they used before that – books of tables, and a thing like a ruler with a log scale on it, a slide-rule. Do you have a pocket calculator? Do you use one to do your job, your old job?’
‘No, of course I -’ She waves at the bookshop opposite. ‘I’m a forensic accountant! What use is a pocket calculator?’.
‘Well, that’s my point in a nutshell. We used to have slide-rules and log tables, then pocket calculators made them obsolete. Even though old folks can still do division and multiplication in their heads, we don’t use that. We used to have maps, on paper. But these are all small things.’ The traffic lights sense your presence and trigger the pedestrian crossing: you pause while she catches up with you. ‘The city looks the same, but underneath its stony hide, nothing is quite the way it used to be. Somewhere along the line we ripped its nervous systems and muscles out and replaced them with a different architecture. In a few years it’ll all run on quantum key-exchange magic, and everything will have changed again. But our time-traveler – they won’t know that. It looks like the twentieth century.’
The novel is set in 2018 but the reality it describes is not that different from what we can see today. As Stross claims, apart from one technology (quantum computers), every single gadget depicted in the book is commercially available today, although most gizmos are not as widely used these days as they will probably be in 2018. Cell phones connected with augmented reality binoculars, laptops, RFID tags, location-based online services – all of this is here, no matter how recent or uncommon.
I am old enough to remember people without mobiles and cars with no GPS devices. Apartments sharing single analogue phone line (you asked your neighbours for a permission to make a call or vice versa), BBS services instead of Internet (later including the Web) – all this is not that far away. Fortunately I am also still young enough not to get overwhelmed. But who knows, once I hit forty, hopefully more, I may become incapable of keeping up with change and wake up in a city that still looks the same but works in a way I am unable to grasp anymore.
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