4875 words Last update: 23-Mar-1998 by ABS.
It was Tuesday night, so I expected some lively yarn spinning, but El Ciervo Blanco was strangely quiet. I was nursing a beer with a goofy name -- I've forgotten now which one, maybe Inca or Crazy Coyote -- and looking around the little adobe bar. The signature white hart's head was mounted on a board above the hearth, tonight wearing a traditional white cone dunce cap. A dark wooden wall unit contained a large built-in aquarium, converted to a terrarium with a Gila Monster and some baby cacti. Another wall unit near the door held the coat closet and hat racks above. In an adobe all storage space is add-on. Outside I could hear the wind whipping fallen snow on the ground, swirling around the parking lot, and as it turns out masking the sounds of arriving cars.
Sitting quietly sharing two round tables pushed together were four regulars. I slowly surveyed them. There on the left was Santos, the proud, dark, mustached Spaniard who seemed to be permanently visiting the Santa Fe Institute where he researched mathematical chaos in economic systems. Sometimes he claimed the mythical banker's cartel, "The Gnomes of Zurich," provided his funding.
Beside Santos was Bingo, the wry, sandy-haired Australian computational chemist and surfer. His office was a little Quonset hut in one of the fern canyons at Los Alamos National Labs up on the side of the volcanic mountain to the west. Since he did work "outside the wire" they had him collaborating with industrial corporations -- mostly auto companies so far -- to do technology transfer of the lab's materials science. He said his goal was a 100 kilogram car.
Then there was Jim, iron-jawed and Irish and always in uniform, the Chief of Security of the Naval Weapons Labs near Patrick Air Force Base down south in Albuquerque. What kept him up nights was wondering how enemy spies and terrorists might be plotting to steal our plutonium this week, let alone our ZYXW technology. He could tell you what ZYXW was but then he'd have to shoot you.
On the right sat Jack, the big half-Indian ex-wrestler with a pony tail, now both a Santa Fe cop and sheep rancher. Jack wasn't a scientist; almost all of his knowledge was immediately practical, learned on the job. But he did claim once to know how to grind telescope lenses.
Behind the bar was Brook, the keen Scotsman who owned and operated this fine establishment. His bald head and always frowning face contradicted his "DINNER IS READY WHEN THE SMOKE ALARM GOES OFF" apron. He and I were the only ones in our bunch self-employed.
And I'm Wes, the Wisconsin German. I make my living by pressing the keys of this Macintosh, word processing science articles, textbooks, and sometimes science fiction. I was perched on a barstool that windy, snowy night in the winter of 1988.
Hmm, I thought, four out of seven of the diverse people present has a Ph.D. That seemed fairly typical for this region of New Mexico, and especially for this saloon on a Tuesday night.
The front door banged open. "Did any of you go hear Prigogine speak when he was in Albuquerque last week?" Hector broadcast to the room as he took off his coat and shook the snow onto Brook's indoor WELCOME mat. Now it was five out of eight.
"Prigo-who?" asked Brook from behind the bar.
"Nobel laureate in chemistry," Santos answered, "has a lot to say about entropy and time's arrow, the irreversibility of chaos, stuff like that."
"You lost me already," Brook complained.
"What Senior Santos is trying to say is that 'Time is just Nature's way of keeping Everything from happening at Once.' " Hector plopped down at the bar, which was unusual for the grizzled, warty old fluid mechanic. "Can you make a hot apple cider, Brook?" That was even more unusual. Hector usually drank Miller at a corner table, there to hoot in derision when he spotted the flaws in the stories of others.
It turned out nobody'd seen Prigogine in Albuquerque, but Santos had read his book.
"To sum it up," he explained, "Boltzman ultimately killed himself because he was never able to resolve the paradox between Newtonian mechanics being completely reversible and his own thermodynamics being irreversible. Mechanics said time had no arrow -- you could reverse the velocity vectors on all the particles in the system and it was still a valid system. Thermodynamics said time does has an arrow -- in the future, things are more disordered, more entropic; gases mix, temperatures even out..."
"Bottles break," Brook completed the thought.
"Yes, you got it. Prigogine wants to resolve that paradox. He claims he has, even."
"What do you think?" Hector wanted to know.
"I'm not convinced," Santos mulled, pinching his right mustache tip. "I'm not even sure you can really run the system forward, that the future depends uniquely on the past."
"You're getting too mystical for me," Hector complained.
Santos clarified, "I'm talking about the problem of prediction. How do you predict tomorrow given today?"
"I guess a lot of people have been pretty bad at it," Bingo opined. "You know, Lord Kelvin saying you couldn't build a heavier-than-air flying machine, or whatever." And that's when Shep walked in. I didn't think he had a Ph.D., but I realized I wasn't sure. Nobody knew much about Shep, except that he looked like a sheep dog and spun a fine tale if you bought him drinks. So much for my stats.
"Predicting the future?" Shep said rhetorically as he unwrapped his snow-frosted muffler. "Wes, that's your line of work, right?" as he pointed to me and sat at the bar as well.
"I didn't know you were a swami, Wes," Hector interjected.
"I'm not, I write science fiction, remember?" I replied. There were murmurs of assured recollection. "In fact, I'm sort of struggling with a story right now about a man who predicts the year 1988 to people in 1888, and they put him in a sanitarium."
"Why?" asked Brook.
"Well, not only for the wild technological predictions, but because of the rate of social revolution, especially sexual freedom. He tells the folks in 1888 about phone sex and coed dorms, and they take him for a sociopathic sex fiend. I'm trying to write it in the form of a mental evaluation by a doctor of the time, but I'm having problems. Basically it has no second act."
"You know," said Shep, "if you told the folks in 1978 about this year, 1988, they might think you were crazy."
"Crazy about what?" Brooks wanted to know. "The death and rebirth of disco? Tom Jones singing vocals for The Art of Noise?"
"Well," Santos speculated, "it might surprise folks to see how the Apple One computer had evolved into the Macintosh, or how extremely expensive wire-frame computer graphics have become photo-realistic real-time rendering on today's Silicon Graphics workstations."
"Or like those space ship effects in The Last Starfighter, done on a Cray I think," Jim opined. "Most people who saw the movie thought it was done with physical miniatures."
"Well," I interjected, "that might amaze one of us, but the general public isn't paying any attention to that stuff. In 1978, it seemed like everybody was trying to get over the fall of Nixon and Saigon by snorting Coke in disco bathrooms and then trying to get laid on the dance floor. Even executives, soldiers and politicians. But then consider the big stories of the last ten years: the hostage crisis in Iran, the Soviets downing KAL flight 007, Reagan elected twice, Grenada and Panama, the Strategic Defense Initiative. There's been a whole shift."
"Yeah" added Brook, "and we went from The Devil in Miss Jones to the retro-virus that killed Rock Hudson."
"And from 'Whip Inflation Now' to 'Greed is good,'" chimed in Santos.
"And from Hair to D.A.R.E." Jack quipped.
"How's that?" asked Hector.
"You know, the musical Hair, and that program, Drug Awareness, uh, R-something and Education? That program with the cops talking to kids in the schools. They keep calling me. Resistance!" He snapped his fingers.
"Why did you say resistance?" asked Hector.
"That's what the R-something was. Drug Awareness, Resistance and Education." He smiled.
"So," Shep addressed the group, "how much weirder could it get?" He spread his hands for emphasis. "What will they have in 1998 that would amaze us today?"
"Do you think we'll ever have two-way wrist TVs and air cars, like in Dick Tracy comics?" asked Jim.
"No," said Santos, "and don't think we'll ever have Rosie the Robot Maid like in The Jetsons cartoons, either."
I noticed that Shep was idly scribbling on a pad of paper next to him. Only the three of us at the bar, or Brook standing behind it, would see this. Without looking up, Shep asked Santos, "Hey, Senior Spaniard, what about our world economic system? You guys are supposed to be doing predictions at The Institute, aren't you?"
"I don't know what to tell you, mi amigo, because my models didn't predict that little cliff we fell off of last October. We're gonna be studying the crash of '87 for a long time. I can tell you that the guys with the models that have been retrofitted to match the data say, the Dow will climb up to 5000 in about ten years, then crash back to pre-1970 levels. But I'm not buying it. I think their models are now too crash-prone."
Shep looked up from his scribbles, and then leaned over to ask Brook a question on the sly. I heard "...that old security camera..." being whispered. Then they leaned closer and conspired some more, after which Shep hopped up and headed out in the direction of the men's room, and the back door. He had the pad of paper with him.
"Gentleman!" Brook exclaimed, "do any of you need another?" There were some affirmatives, and the barkeep made the rounds refilling glasses and setting out peanuts as we awaited Shep's return, if any .Then Brook stepped back behind the bar, reached up, and turned on the TV, setting the channel to 3. "And now, if you will direct your attention this way, we are privileged to have right on this screen, a newscast from ten years in the future.
The snowy screen focused into an image of Shep, standing by the dumpster in back under a mercury vapor lamp, staring into that old security camera that came with the place when Brook bought it, wearing his mittens and wool hat against the cold and reading from that pad.
"News of the next ten years, January, 1998. Our top story tonight," he panted, and fog breath obscured his face. "The collapse of the Soviet Union. Statues of Lenin and Stalin have been pulled down, and Leningrad has been named back to Saint Petersburg. 'Even the fragments have fragmented,' said a State Department spokesman, 'and the Balkans have Balkanized.' Viewers of Johnny Carson's monologue one fall evening in 1989 were surprised by a special news bulletin showing demonstrating Germans disco-dancing on the Berlin Wall, which they had just torn down and spray-painted with psychedelic graffiti. This occurred within a few days of the date predicted by Dan Rowan in a segment about 'The News 20 Years in of the Future' on the TV show Rowan and Martin's Laugh In in 1969.
Shep took a thermos out of a jacket pocket and took a gulp from it, then continued his future newscast. "In other international news, China blatantly abuses human rights, runs over pro-Democracy dissidents with tanks on world TV, tears down a 'statue of liberty' in Tiananmen Square in the capital city Beijing while the world watches on television, later shoots dissidents they have caught, again on world TV, retakes Hong Kong and begins threatening Taiwan, and yet is granted Most Favored Nation status by the US, first by a Republican President facing a Democratic Congress, and again by a Democratic President facing a Republican Congress.
"Dateline, January 1998. National news. Riding on Reagan's coat-tails, the Vice President he once dismissed as 'a preppy, a Yalie and sissy,' wins the Presidency in 1988. George Bush goes on after the Gulf War of 1991 to become the most popular President in US history. Then, in 1992 he is defeated by a southern Democratic contender who is an admitted dope-smoker and draft-dodger, and by 1998 during his second term will admit under oath to adultery, and have his popularity soar.
"Dateline, January, 1998. Media news. The largest television studio in the world is in Brazil, but in the United States there are now six broadcast television networks, and viewership in key demographics is down due to an upsurge of something called 'Web surfing,' which is a kind of hypertext based loosely on Internet Gopher services, but suddenly immensely popular with forty million Americans and a billion dollar commercial industry. Addresses of so-called 'Web pages' are routinely listed in TV commercials, in magazines, and even on product packages, such as soda cans. NBC President Brandon Tartikoff leaves the television industry to become head of a new Web based soap opera company, believing it is the future of media, and drops dead a few months later."
The wind picked up, and Shep's pages fluttered in his mittens. I knew he had to be freezing his ass off out there. But he pressed on. "Dateline, January, 1998. Technology news. A former Japanese playing-card company takes over the video game market, abandoned by market founder Atari after the ET game fiasco, and grow it to an industry bigger than theatrical motion pictures. The company's name becomes synonymous with video-games, so much that when news footage is shown of the US smart-bombing of targets in the first days of the 1991 Gulf War, it is christened the first 'Nintendo War.' In other technology news, the hottest consumer electronics item is the Virtual Pet, and the highlight of the decade is stamps you don't have to lick.
"Stardate, 1998. In space news, NASA, facing reducing budgets and enthusiasm for its planetary missions, announces that it has proof that life once existed on Mars. 1998 brings a deluge of planetary water discoveries, as NASA announces that water once flowed on Mars, liquid water exists now on Jupiter's moon Europa, just as predicted by Arthur C. Clarke in the novel 2010, and there are definitely billions of gallons of water ice on the moon, these last two discoveries coming within three days of each other.
"Dateline, January 1998. Ten years in the future. Back on earth, peace is breaking out in new abundance. Israel and the Palestinians are negotiating towards a peace treaty, as are Britain and the IRA. In both cases the biggest obstacle is anti-peace terrorists. Even Apple Computer founder Steve Jobs and Microsoft chairman Bill Gates are seen buddying up on the covers of Time and Newsweek. After Jobs' triumphant return to Apple, he's convinced Gates to have Microsoft, now the world's largest software company, invest in now-ailing Apple."
"Hah!" said Santos, inside the bar, but of course Shep couldn't hear him.
"Dateline, January 1998. Economic news. After five years of recession, and the collapse of the aerospace industry due to the end of the Cold War, the economy springs back, powered by fax paper sales, video rentals, Internet access charges and theme park admissions. The Dow crests 6000 in the middle of 1997, then tops 8000 later in the year. Tom Peters, of In Search of Excellence fame, writes a management book for the 'nanosecond nineties' in which he advises, 'destroy your company before your competition does.' Rolling Stones credit cards appear. And our stock tip for the decade sell IBM, buy Disney -- which is now listed as a Dow-Jones Industrial, used to compute the average."
"The company that gave us The Black Hole, The Black Cauldron and Tron?" I wondered aloud.
"Hey, I though Tron was pretty good," Santos countered. "Very... spiritual."
Shep charged on. "Dateline, January 1998. Sports. In football, the big story was that former NFL star and movie actor O.J. Simpson was arrested and tried for the double murder of his ex wife and a friend of hers, but he beat the rap, despite a months-long televised trial that convinced a majority of Americans of his guilt. Also in the NFL there has been unprecedented expansion and team movement, including the St. Louis Cardinals to Arizona and the LA Rams to St. Louis, nevertheless leaving the lucrative Los Angeles area media market with no team.
"In basketball, NBA salaries have gone out of sight. Out of a league of 410 players, 242 have annual salaries over a million dollars, and five each make over ten million. Michael Jordan makes over thirty."
"In hockey, The Walt Disney Company has been pouring money into its own NHL team, The Mighty Ducks, named after the silly kid's movie, and managed to improve the public image of the sport right up until the '98 Olympics in Japan, when the American all-pro hockey team lost too many games to win a medal and then trashed their dorm rooms in the Olympic Village.
"In baseball, players struck for higher pay in '94 and got into loggerheads with owners, which turned off fans big-time, to the detriment of the sport. But Nolan Ryan managed to keep on playing for another five years, and three ball clubs retired his uniform in '96.
"In golf, a black/Asian man who always wanted to be a pro golfer won the Masters, in the processing setting seven records including youngest winner and greatest margin of victory, and minority group spokespersons on public radio argued over who he was a role model for.
"In boxing, Mike Tyson disgraced the sport by biting off a piece of his opponent's ear."
"In figure skating, one American Olympic contender was banned from the sport for participating in a plot to club one of her competitors, and public interest in the sport in the U.S. went way up, giving the '94 winter Olympics on TV a big ratings boost. In '98 a great US women's figure skating team gave the Olympic Site on the Web a big ratings boost.
"Dateline, January 1998. In the fine arts, Post-Modern Architecture and corresponding movements in other arts came and went, replaced by Deconstructivist movements based on the French Freudian-Marxists Foucalt, Baudrillard, Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard, and Saussure. Their influence on academia in the west is pervasive, turning all non-rigorous disciplines into the spouting of deconstructivist gibberish. One architect with an extreme approach to this new style designs a building with interior plywood bolted to the extererior where it will de-laminate from exposure to the elements. Ultimately the contractor forced to execute this plan sues the architect for damage to his reputation as a builder.
"In entertainment news, material girl Madonna poses nude on the streets of Miami and then gets a $60 million media deal from Time-Warner and brings out a new act that seems to be pro-domestic violence." I saw sweat forming on Shep's forehead on the TV screen, even though I knew it was sub-zero out there with wind-chill. Was he okay?
"In other entertainment news the new concept of 'Location-Based Entertainment' or LBE, formerly known as the 'Theme Park,' is hugely successful. Orlando has grown exponentially, and Las Vegas has transformed itself into an LBE zone, with huge castles, pyramids, pirate ships, domes, giant guitars, Venetian canals, and a growing collection of architectural re-creations of the wonders and cities of the ancient and modern world, and now has more hotel room beds just on the corner of Tropicana and Las Vegas Boulevards than there are in all of San Francisco. The most poplar television series in the world is a syndicated David Hasselhof production about lifeguards on LA beaches. Will Smith, once star of the TV show "The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air," has become a box-office star romantic hero in films. Heavy metal music has almost vanished off the face of the earth, except for Pat Boone, who did an album of metal covers, and the band Metallica which saved itself by becoming 'Alternative.' The so-called 'Alternative' style had a huge boom starting in 1992 with the new 'grunge' sound from Seattle, but then in the late nineties went completely bust. Sales of all types of music are down, except for Rap. Rock supergroup U2 has transformed itself into a dance band, and appears in concert singing a song called 'Discotheque' dressed as The Village People. The largest selling record of all time has turned out to be the song from the funeral of Princess Diana, who died in a car crash along with Dodi Al Fayed, the son of an Egyptian billionaire and a producer for American TV, who she was on a date with after divorcing Prince Charles for flagrantly keeping a mistress.
"In a special report, Los Angeles, the entertainment capital of the world, has experienced severe rioting -- the most expensive in US history -- huge firestorms, mud slides, a major earthquake, severe flooding from the El Nino weather pattern, and the region was economically especially hard-hit by the collapse of the aerospace and defense industries. Nevertheless, overall for the ten year period population and tourism continue to grow, and entertainment has taken up the aerospace slack. At a time when a majority of movie and television special effects are done with computers, the high tech entertainment sector has helped to drive LA's unemployment to record lows.
"Dateline, January 1998. Computer news. Microsoft came out with a more Mac-like version of Windows in 1995 called Windows 95, which immediately became an enormous hit, sold a lot of new computers and upgrades, garnered over a 95% market share in desktop operating systems for Microsoft, and made Bill Gates a multi-billionaire many times over. Moore's law has continued to hold, even without Gallium Arsnenide chips -- CPU speed doubles every 18 months. Sorry, still no cheap flat screens. We do have really cheap used computers. A Macintosh model SE is a hundred bucks. An old 486-based IBM PC is less than that. There are now more computers that people in the US. And bandwidth is going through the roof: it's tripling every 18 months. Today's modems get 56K Baud over standard phone lines, and new cable modems now deliver a hundred times that affordably to the home. Meanwhile AT&T has run out of commercial T1 connections in 1998. Demand is soaring. One reason is that ever since about 1992, it's been hipper and hipper to be into computers, or 'cyber' as some fashion monkeys now call it. Oh, and Silicon Graphics Inc. bought Cray, which was about to implode, and now some think SGI is about to implode as well."
"That man is a raving lunatic," said Hector.
"In weather news, dateline January, 1988, I mean 1998," Shep was dripping with sweat, and slurring his words. "Scientists continue to debate whether a global warming trend is caused by human activity. Meanwhile, a large hole in the ozone layer has threatened the young, old and weak, especially in low latitudes, with increased skin cancer. Scientists also debate whether this ozone hole is cause by us.
"And in medical news, still no cure for... still no cure for HIV, the Human Immuno-- immuno--" Suddenly, Shep fell out of view. Jack bolted for the back door. After all, he was on duty. I was right behind him. Shep is my friend.
We found him sprawled on the snow. We sat him up. He started to come to. Jack sniffed the thermos. "Mescal, is this?" he asked. Shep didn't answer. "Let's get him inside," the policeman said to me.
We plopped him in a chair. Brook wiped his face with a damp cloth. Slowly he regained awareness.
"That was quite the newscast you gave us, there," I said to him.
"Huh?" he responded.
"That news of the future?" I prompted.
"I don't remember anything after walking outside and looking up into the camera," Shep finally said. I looked at his pad. It had a few fragmented words, "faster cars," and "bigger bombs," but none of the material he'd actually delivered.
"You don't remember the collapse of Communism? Six TV networks? The Gulf War of 1991? You never told us which Gulf. Gulf of Mexico? Persian Gulf? Gulf Oil?"
"I told you," Shep reiterated, "I went outside and fell down. The end."
"Maybe he was channeling the future," Brook suggested.
"Oh, man, that is exactly what he wants you to believe." Santos was irate. "Our friend here is a raving lunatic, at least he was for a few minutes. Gopher addresses on consumer products, indeed."
I drove Shep's truck home that night, following right behind Jack's black and white, where Jack had Shep in the passenger seat directing. The inside of Shep's truck cap seemed covered in some kind of flannel lint followed by a layer of shredded plastic fiber, overlaid with a vague presence of mildew. A lidless toolbox overflowing with parts, tools and rags rattled around on the right floor panel, and the seat above was piled with what looked like astronomy magazines. The truck was tricky to start and tricky to shift gears. It was the first time I'd driven it. I was glad just to follow Jack's lights in the snow flurries.
That was also the first time I got to see Shep's house, though it was in the dark. It also smelled of mildew. It was a rambling little place with lots of glassed in porches and connecting solarium rooms full of potted vegetable plants, and outdoor terraces full of snow covered flowerpots. Indoors he had teetering bookshelves overflowing with books everywhere, books on philosophy and psychology and technology and religion... I browsed while I waited for Jack, who was putting Shep to bed. He emerged, and told me, "he wants to talk to you for a minute. Don't let him get up."
I found Shep in his bed, covered in what looked like a quilt that covered half the room and climbed the walls. It was hard to see by the sea shell night-light. "I told Jack I had some bad food," Shep confided, "but I think it was something else. My ex-wife the medicine woman came by tonight, and she gave me booze and mad a pass at me, seemed real sweet, but I think she tried to poison me. I don't want to press charges just now, but if I croak any time soon, you make sure there's an autopsy and if it's poisoning, have the bitch arrested! You promise me." He collapsed into sleep.
"I promise, Shep," I told him.
Then Jack gave me a ride back to El Ciervo Blanco to get my car. "So, what do you think?" asked Jack. "Santos called him a raving lunatic."
"Well he sure looked like one. I hope he's okay. And yes, everything he said sounded farfetched," I agreed.
"But wasn't that your point earlier, Wes?" Jack reminded me. "If someone did predict the future, right on, we wouldn't believe it. What's to say his story is more preposterous than anybody else's?"
"Hmm," I pondered, "good point. But remember the old saying, 'Everyone knows that one horse can run faster than another. But which one?' Just because he sounds crazy doesn't mean he's right."
Jack grunted. After that he drove me in silence.
Well, I certainly didn't believe that channeling theory at the time. Sure, I, along with the others, thought Shep was in at least some state of temporary insanity, whether clinical, poison-induced or pretended. But as one and then another of his predictions has come true, I've had plenty of cause to wonder. And I sure wish I'd sold IBM and bought Disney.