Future Visions: Original Science Fiction Inspired by Microsoft

David Brin The Tell

You can read much of the human saga—a stark history of extravagant hopes and stunning defeats—on the face of any gambler…

…the same story told by Judean hills, where towns and villages gradually piled atop one another, layer after layer, each stratum spelling yet another tale of confidence and ambition that inevitably failed. Till someone else arrived to build upon that dust. An upward sedimentary process, mounting ever higher. Generations, separated by the babble of language and culture and centuries, but united by one aim—to reach Heaven by dint of hard work, hope, and pain.

“Here, we have trenched through an augury,” our guide explained, while leading us along plank bridges that crisscrossed over the Tel Ain Makor dig. “An important ceremonial center, it apparently remained in use across the Hellenistic period till it was burned and abandoned under the Hasmoneans, then restored during the Roman era.”

She gestured toward a broad, shallow excavation where ancient ashes and debris had been removed—slowly and painstakingly—by archaeology students from all over the world. One cluster of young folks crouched at the north end, murmuring to each other, alternately in English and in Hebrew.

“Here, priests would come to apply the arts of prophecy, divining future events from haruspication—studying animal entrails. Or else by reading auspices—interpreting the flight and behavior of passing birds. From inscriptions on tribute medallions, it appears that people came from all over the region—even dignitaries from Caesarea and Jerusalem—to have horoscopes read or to learn what the gods intended.”

Another group of students, closer to us, argued in Arabic over which tool to use on an obstinate outcrop. I didn’t understand a word, but from their expressions I could easily tell the debate was just theater, for us visitors. Or for the guide. And it worked. A twitch of a smile showed she was pleased with their industriousness.

I don’t delve time. I dig faces.

“You mentioned horoscopes. So they also did astrology here?”

That was Ludmilla Kilonova. Of course that would interest her. Stars and such. Especially those on the verge of exploding.

“Good question. I don’t believe there was an observatory here. At least, we’ve seen no traces so far.” Our Ministry of Antiquities guide gestured at the extent of the dig, almost twenty meters long by thirty, under a tent canopy that flapped slightly in an inadequate breeze, staving off the harsh Levantine sun. Beyond, surveyor stakes pocked the dun-colored hilltop with laser-pinned accuracy, proposing sites for further excavation.

“Tel Ain Makor may seem vast when you are crawling so close to the ground. But in fact, it was a minor municipality, more a pilgrimage shrine than a large, urban center. I would wager that they acquired their star charts from Alexandria. Or maybe Babylon.”

Babylon. I perked up at the mention. My home.

At least that’s what they call Vegas, sometimes: New Babylon.

The parallels ran deep. Both sin capitals featured hellish desert heat. Though we’re clever enough to use air conditioning. Take that, Hammurabi.

Both nursed the same delusion. That our gaudy works will stand up to time.

And an identical, all-too-human ambition. To peer forward. To catch a warning glimpse of what’s ahead.

Was that my real reason for coming halfway around the world? To traipse through dust amid proof that humans always fool themselves?

As if further evidence were needed.

“You are needed,” Sophia Van Took said, almost two years earlier, cornering me after my second Saturday show. Bigger stars get helpers and dressers and private quarters. I shared a backstage alcove with Teresa, my “beautiful associate” (I could no longer say “assistant”), whose makeup table and privacy screen left little room for the headliner—me. Well, well. It still beat working for a living.

I took advantage of Sophia’s presence by handing her my glitter-dusted jacket, slightly pungent from sweat. (Hey, those lights are hot.)

“Hang it over there, please?” I indicated the cupboard that served as my wardrobe closet. Sophia held the garment gingerly by the collar, clearly pondering whether to let it fall, then shrugged and tiptoed for a hanger. Diminutive, and thanks to her last name some wiseacres called her “the hobbit.” But no one in her presence. Who wanted to live.

My shirt went into a laundry hamper, to be dealt with by the Tuscany Hotel staff. Hey, this may not be the Strip, but my name drew enough customers to merit some amenities. While toweling off, I asked Dr. Van Took, “How’d you like the show?”

“Didn’t pay much attention,” she admitted. Or was that a brag? Sophia had a pretty good poker face. During the performance I glimpsed her at the comp table, sipping occasionally from a grapefruit juice while tapping the rim of her specs—the latest model from Anson Aiware. Even from the stage I could tell that images flickered along the inner surfaces. She must have been grunting, clicking, scrolling, and deciding the fate of nations the whole time I was levitating Teresa, or catching a bullet with my teeth.

Or doing my mentalist routine, guessing which cards had been chosen by five randomly selected guests, all by reading giveaway tells: The dilating iris. A cheek tremor. A nervous grin. Or the clenched, flat expression of a college kid absolutely determined not to show a thing—and thus revealing everything.

Ah, well. Van Took had uses for a stage magician, but entertainment never entered into it.

“So what’s the scam?” I asked. “Another perpetual motion machine? Cold fusion? A vacuum energy propulsion system?”

Those were the big three—perennial favorites—though others had been climbing lately: SETI “signals” and water desalinization miracles and microbiota guaranteed to cure your bowels of all that ails ’em. Along with a dozen other skilled illusionists, I served on a Skeptics Society alert squad to help investigate such claims, separating auspicious assertions from deceptive ones. Because it turns out that scientists and engineers aren’t very good at penetrating hoaxes.

We stage magicians know the tricks, though. Well, most of them. Ways to deliver power without wires, to make things fizz or bubble or rise without any visible means of support. They say it takes a thief to catch one. Anyway, it helps pay the bills, off-season. And Mom and Dad seemed a bit more proud of me when I mentioned this sideline. As if I was a kind of private eye. Or something else respectable.

“None of that, this time.” Sophia shook her head.

I admit feeling some disappointment. Those tech-hoax gigs are cool, hanging around top science types and showing them whatever trick was afoot—or mistake, since some of the cold fusion guys are actually sincere, just way too eager and prone to fooling themselves. Then there are those rare occasions when the strange new thing actually turns out to be…but I’m drifting off-topic.

“What? No warp drive?” I asked. “Or teleport—”

Holding up a hand, Sophia scotched my hopes.

“No, this job is all about prediction.”

I blinked, my facial expression as readable as any mark’s.

“Again?”

Sophia shrugged. “They do keep trying.”

Perhaps the simplest example of reality mining is the analysis of automobile traffic congestion by using the global positioning system (GPS) data collected from the mobile telephones carried by the automobile drivers. These data provide minute-by-minute updates on traffic flow, allowing for more accurate predictions of driving time. Congestion patterns can be predicted days in advance, and traffic jams detected hours before they become serious…

—Alex Pentland, Reality Mining of Mobile Communications: Toward a New Deal on Data (2008)

It’s said to be embedded in our prefrontal lobes, twin nubs above the eyes that let us think about the future. Somehow, a bunch of clever apes fell into the habit of fantasizing about what might happen next…

…if I enter that thicket…

…if we refuse the other tribe’s ultimatum…

…if I propose this idea at today’s meeting…

…or wear this outfit…

…or declare this new rule…

…or try to run that yellow light…

Einstein called it the gedankenexperiment, or thought experiment. We’re good at telling ourselves stories about what lies ahead. And certainly the habit does help, a bit, exposing obvious errors to avoid…

…though only up to a point. Anticipation all too easily becomes hallucination, envisioning, and then expecting what we want to happen. That’s fine in a novel, film, or stage show. But it’s a damn poor way for leaders to make policy.

Hey, I just explained the saga of endlessly repeated blunders called “history.” Nonetheless, we do keep trying. Tea leaves and priestly pronouncements gave way to primly mechanistic war games—which convinced Czar Nicholas and Kaiser Wilhelm to charge ahead, destroying both empires.

War games transformed into scenario-based planning. (So now you had a decision tree of diverse ways to be wrong!) Then clever mathematical models fought each other for relevance—a darwinnowing that did help to expose this or that danger, but almost never pointed to solutions.

Are your models flawed? Add more variables! Or more data…big data sets. Humongous ones. Gather and collate everything!

And feed it to AI…but what kind of AI? There are so many, all disappointingly far from omniscient, all just as confused as the rest of us when they try their hand at prophecy. Especially the “quants” who would get rich exploiting market models—preying on those who are just one step behind—then wreck their own trading house by pressing the wagers too far. Just like a Vegas gambler, so sure that his winning streak is something ordained to last forever.

Always lurking like a chiding ghost is the shade of Hari Seldon, Isaac Asimov’s fictional “psychohistorian,” who made prediction look so easy on the pages of a 1940s wish-fantasy novel. The archetype seer whose models of civilization—the rise or fall of whole empires—might finally reduce all irksome human chaos and variability to cool numbers and equations. How many economists, sociologists, politicians, and/or psychopaths started out by lifting their gaze from a Foundation book, staring ahead, and murmuring: “Hey, I could do that!” Paul Krugman. Osama bin Laden. Milton Friedman, Shoko Asahara, Carl Sagan, Newt Gingrich…. The sheer range of nerdy Asimovians, from brilliant to crazy but all drawn to the same dream, would be amazing if it weren’t frightening.

But, heck, why not blame Karl Marx, whose followers felt so sure they sussed the driving forces of humanity? Or believers in the greatest (if heretical) acolyte of Marx—Ayn Rand—whose seductive incantations followed all the master’s patterns to reach opposite conclusions.

And so, “laws of sociology” grew less fashionable. Simulations improved only glacially, while choking on tsunamis of Big Data. At which point the powers of the world—desperate for guidance—rediscovered Adam Smith.

Maximize the number of participants! If individual models and modelers can fool themselves, then make them compete with one another in a marketplace of ideas. Utilize the same competitive forces that propel evolution—the most creative force in the universe! The same driver as markets. As science.

Hence the “wisdom of crowds” became the next fashion in prognostication. And there were good initial signs! Wikipedia, Kickstarter, Duolingo, and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk all showed promising outcomes from lateral cooperation and competition, so much more agile than hierarchical command.

Crowd-sourced analysis started with SETI@home, when thousands lent their home computers to a network that analyzed radio telescope data, sifting for alien signals—an approach that expanded to genome research, protein-folding problems, and a myriad other collaborations between scientists and “smart mobs” of amateurs, like the Zooniverse Project, where amateur aficionados help identify lunar craters, translate old ships’ logs, identify galaxies, and find planets round other stars.

Clearly, some sort of distributed wisdom was at work. But the sixty-four-trillion-dollar question loomed. Can it be applied to peering ahead? To prediction?

Again, look at human history. Sure, arrogant human leaders proved foolish, nine times out of ten. But were there cases, in the past, when mobs or mass movements did any better? Could mobs be made much, much smarter?

—M.N. Plano, How We Did It (2025)

Kilonova took care of the most dangerous cameras, and a good thing too. Mazella’s mob would recognize me in two heartbeats. Quicker than that, now that all casinos employed computerized face recog. Sure, Sophia Van Took would offer me a new identity—and face-job—if things went wrong tonight. But I like Vegas. And showbiz.

The Feds had better be one step ahead this time, I thought, glancing at my clandestine companion, then kissing our little drone for luck and letting it go. The machine would swoop about, barely more noticeable than a gnat, noting every lens and biometric scanner along our path, then latch-spooking those we could not evade. Unless Sophia’s people had missed a step in the perpetual tug-of-info-war. One mistake and the least of my problems might be hiding under Witness Protection. Johann Mazella played for keeps.

The drone hovered just outside our hiding place, under a buffet table where a bribed busboy had wheeled us as the Golden Palace kitchens were closing. The little flier took its time, then confirmed that we truly were in a surveillance shadow.

I glanced at my companion. Ludmilla Kilonova owned a pleasant smile, though I had never seen her eyes. Those windows to the soul were always hidden by shades—high-tech specs that overlaid the world with augmented reality data. But I suspected another reason, a flattering one. She knows what I can do.

We’re on. Her specs picted to mine. A more secure channel than whispering.

Fine, I replied, scrolling words with my tongue. You first, Mata Hari.

I couldn’t see the eye roll, but twitches of cheek muscles confirmed one. Well, well, fair enough. Kilonova’s cover story was genuine—she really was in town to give a talk on late stellar evolution at the astronomical convention. Still, I never had the slightest doubt about her real profession.

Follow me, magic man.

She wriggled her way out of the buffet table, then slithered across a tile floor inset with gilt GP casino logos. I might have enjoyed watching her graceful moves, had I not been worried about my own ass. The specs showed a very narrow tunnel for us to crawl along. It wouldn’t do for my jeans to bump the boundary.

Our path led up some carpeted stairs, drawing ever closer to a most familiar sound, the background music of my life: the tinkling jangle of slots.

Someone in casino security should lose his job, I pondered as we took shelter under a kiosk where addicts could tap their savings and max out their credit cards to refill their gambling accounts. Even at 4 a.m., there were players about, though none in this area right now. As if wee-hours slot junkies would pay us any notice.

It occurred to me that the tunnel-of-unobservance down which we had come might be a great path to rob this very kiosk. Could that even be the intention? Someone gets himself hired as a consultant for GP security, then sets up a route…. Hey, at minimum it could make a cool movie pitch.

Hold that thought, I noted, as Kilonova signaled for us both to slide along a narrow cleft and stand up, another entirely necessary quasi-erotic slither that pressed my body along hers. Again, it might have been enjoyable, but for her faintly audible sigh, that I easily translated.

Men.

OK, so now we were standing. And, according to plan, we then simply stepped into view, striding side by side like a couple on holiday, returning from a very late show…with the drone warning us to turn our faces just-by-coincidence away from any and all cams—all but one, which the drone conveniently caused to malfunction, using methods that were well beyond my security clearance.

Of course, if casino security ever cared to do so, they might backtrack images and discover that a certain couple had appeared in one area, without any record of them getting there. Hence, this all had to go smoothly, with no one ever suspicious enough to backtrack.

Time for the switcheroo. I caught sight of another couple seated together at a Simpsons-themed slot machine. They stood up and Maggie Simpson complained with a soft whimper—one of a hundred cues the mechanisms used to tweak human emotions, with one aim: to keep players in their seats. Seats containing sensors sent biodata to giant processors, helping adjust the slot experience—all the sights and sounds and payouts—in just the right way, so that humanity’s most susceptible members would find it nearly impossible to leave.

I’ll know civilization is growing up when the people behind all this are labeled psychopaths. Predation on the weak-willed will be gone when we get to Star Trek.

Still, I’ll miss the colors. The sound and flash of outrageous dreams. The smell of boundless—if groundless—hope.

This couple ignored the comeback cues as they got up and turned away from the machine. He complaining about back pain from bad posture. She griping about the size of tip he gave the pretty cocktail waitress—as she sloshed from too many complimentary beverages. They staggered a little, converging at an angle toward Kilonova and me, while I focused on memorizing the man’s voice, his walk.

Next blind spot, just ahead.

Outlined in the specs’ percept-overlay, it didn’t look like much of a blind spot. A fat pillar, supporting a tall, 4K screen advertising Golden Palace shows and events. There was at least one camera—from that unoccupied blackjack table, over there—staring right at us as we rounded the corner, on collision course with the drunken slot addicts, just as the display screen shifted to images of Penn & Teller, the casino’s featured magic and comedy act.

Sudden warmth and a faint electric prickle erupted along my left side as pixelated garments came to life, matching the screen duo perfectly as Kilonova and I did a rapid dance around the other couple, whose own garments flickered just so.

The man straightened up as I slouched. The woman’s step became serene as Kilonova slumped and seemed to slosh, now clothed in a completely different style…and we parted ways again, under Penn Jillette’s knowing grin.

The journey continued. None of our other evasions were quite as dramatic or high-tech as that fancy identity swap. Mostly we were just pretending to be a pair of prey animals—precisely how the casino owners viewed their slot herds—taking a bathroom break (where I fetched a spool of fiber-optic cable out of the trash bin), then strolling over the famed Golden Palace catwalk, and finally vanishing in a shadow behind the casino’s Sports and Events Betting Parlor, where I quickly pulled out a svelte packet of burglary tools and got to work, while Kilonova and the drone kept watch.

Some professions prepare you well for a job like this one. Those demanding utter hand and eye coordination. Brain surgeon, perhaps, snaking your laparoscope up a patient’s sinus to operate on an occlusion in the parietal lobe—yeah, I guess that would come in first place. But a master at sleight-of-hand magic would make a close second.

In a cranny behind one of the betting booths—where customers might pick a team and spread to bet on, or an election result, or the odds against a terrorist attack happening this week, whatever seemed worth laying down a wager for—I drilled through the wall, then used a waldo probe to fish around, till finally I found a fiber-optic cable encased in a triple-security conduit. One false move would release helium gas, revealing that someone had been tampering.

Nerves of steel? Yeah, that’s me. Fortunately, I only had to deliver Sophia’s nanos under that first, pressurized layer, using a special hypodermic flex-needle. The microscopic spy machines then did the rest, tying in a repeater tap so my employers could track and identify every photon.

And here’s the ultimate answer to all those fools who think they can protect their private secrets forever: Go ahead. Encrypt every bit and blip and bloop on your computer—or in the Cloud or even in the DarkNet, BlackHoleNet, and SingularityNet—under a maze of ciphers and steganography images and even quantum-entangled trip wires. All those tricks may thwart the corporations or even Big Brother, for now. But next year? When they have much bigger quantum processors? Or when they can listen to voice vibrations in your glass windows? Or fly in a drone that watches you type? Or that logs each letter electronically, on its way from keyboard to tablet? Or reads the nano-flashes emitted by your own brain?

Right. Preserve safety, freedom, and privacy…by hiding. Show me one time in history when that worked, with any consistency or for very long. Ever.

Better to prevent Big Brother in the first place! There are ways to do that. By keeping an eye on Sophia Van Took’s employers, for example. So that Sophia can keep an eye on bad guys on our behalf. Without becoming one herself.

Anyway, that’s the hope. And, sure, it felt ironic, thinking about all that while engaging in tech-wielding skulduggery. But just ask Kilonova about her exploding stars. Why do stars explode? Because irony sits at the bottom of all natural processes. Irony sucks the energy out of absolutely everything.

Get it? Neither do I. But it was the one time I heard her tell a real joke, guffawing at her own cleverness. And I swear, someday I’ll figure out the punch line.

Something flashed in the corner of my spec-percept. The drone, yelping for attention. But I had to concentrate.

Ludmilla whispered urgently. The casino’s AI must have noticed two customers passing out of sight here, taking too long to emerge. A security guard was coming. Getting closer.

“I’m almost done…almost…”

I could sense her nearby, scanning both VR space and reality for escape options. It wouldn’t do to knock out the guard if the whole reason for our mission was to raise no misgivings! Even if he suspected nothing but just escorted us to the security office, or even took our retinal scans, the game would be up. They’d know we weren’t the same couple. They would then scour all the cams, detect the switch, work their way back, back, back in time from image to image…

Even if Mazella didn’t seek to make an example of me, I’d be through in this town.

“There! I’m closing up now…criminy!”

I left the self-sealing wall patch to dry, grabbing my tools and hopping back—

—as Ludmilla Kilonova knelt and barfed all over the floor, including my left shoe—

—just before a giant person wearing Golden Palace livery turned the corner and stopped short, staring in ill-concealed disgust.

“Uh, we need an auto-mop in section forty-seven,” he murmured into a shoulder mike. “Yeah, third one tonight. Better tell food services.”

I folded away my tool kit behind my back—one-handed as the other hand stroked my “wife’s” head.

“I guess she had too much,” I started to explain, slurring to disguise my voice. “We’ll clean it up. Sorry. So sorry.”

The guard shook his head and made shooing motions.

“Don’t worry, sir. It happens. Maybe you should head up to your room now. Get some sleep.”

Solicitous guard. I busied myself helping Ludmilla stand and then shuffle on, giving us both an excuse to divert our faces from every camera as we followed a path chosen by the drone, supporting each other, moaning and grumbling.

Only when we were finally ensconced in room 1245 on the second floor, where the other couple had checked in yesterday—and when the flitting drone confirmed there were no bugs—did we both straighten up.

“Smooth move,” I commented while peeling off the pixelated suit. “But did you have to throw up on my shoe? I like this pair.”

“Oh, quit bellyaching,” she replied from the bathroom, between gargles. “You try doing that on command.”

I shrugged and refrained from commenting that I’ve given tougher performances. Still, she ranked several notches higher in my esteem. Especially now that, for the very first time, I could see her eyes, uncovered by specs, glittering with adrenaline rush.

“So,” she commented, wiping her mouth with a washcloth. “What’ll we do until checkout time?”

Feigning fatigue and nonchalance—though I knew she could read me, too—I faked a yawn.

“I wonder what’s on pay-per-view.”

The Mazellas were on to something with their betting system. Word spread among bookies—Vegas and online—not to try nibbling at the Golden Palace oddsmakers.

Thanks to the tap that Ludmilla and I planted, Sophia Van Took’s team quickly zeroed in on the GP secret sauce—an improved algorithm for weighting wagers from a crowd. An incremental improvement, then. No transcendent or magical leap. Not this time. I could read relief on Sophia’s face, plus disappointment.

That was the holy grail, of course—the combined hope and dread that propelled interest by so many groups, from Amazon and Google to NASA. From Palantir and TIBCO to Goldman-Sachs, to the Vatican and the Chinese People’s Liberation Army. Humanity badly needed better predictive methods. But if one group or secretive elite ever got their hands on something truly effective, it wouldn’t matter much whether they were corporate, criminal, or some foreign alliance. Human nature being what it is, even Sophia’s agglomeration of academics and civil servants might be tempted to leverage such power, rationalizing they were only acting for the common good.

And her team operated under safeguards. Multiple paths of civilian oversight. I shivered at the thought of a true anticipation engine being discovered and monopolized by the likes of Johann Mazella.

Is such a machine or system even possible? The dream of every prophet, fortune-teller, priest, planner, investor, protector, and lover, ever since our brows got pushed forward by those lamps, the prefrontal lobes.

In modern times, much of the investment went into “intelligent” computation, fed with massive information. Ideally, all information. The World Meteorological Model consumed more computing power than some major cities, dividing Earth’s surface, atmosphere, and oceans into ever smaller cells, transforming those pathetic old four-hour “weather reports” into a finely meshed gas-vapor-energy sim that lets folks plan what to wear on vacation, ten days ahead. A miracle so routine that several billion ingrates take it for granted, then diss the genius scientists who built the WMM for believing climate can change. Don’t get me started.

And yet, even the best modeling programs kept bumping against their twin enemies, complexity and chaos. The famous butterfly effect, where time (our ancient foe) amplifies even tiny perturbations—say, the flapping of a monarch’s wings—into a hurricane of downstream variations. Later efforts to push the WMM forward by even one more hour threatened to double the system’s computational needs.

How about quantum computers? Arrays of qubits processing fine skeins of possibility in parallel. Spectacularly parallel—if mystically inclined cyberneticists are right that quantum machines tap networks of entangled computers in alternate universes. And yet…

…yet the mesh models seemed helpless when it comes to analyzing human affairs.

Clearly, the problem was not in the machines, but software. Lacking a Hari Seldon, but swamped with all kinds of Big Data, we didn’t know how to mix and stir and bake all the ingredients.

From ancient warlords to insurance companies seeking better underwriting formulas; from investment arbitrage to handicapping political races, to predicting the next move by terrorists or strategic powers, to planning a new store for your doughnut-shop chain, there would be no end of eager customers for improved foresight services.

Only, even if you solve the complexity and chaos problem, there’s another rub. If you keep the method secret, you’ll eventually turn the whole world against you, or else fall into multiple traps of overconfident delusion. But if you share it, adversaries will apply every new forecasting method and cancel each other out! We’ve seen that happen to every brilliant stock market analytics tool.

The cancellation effect can be a good thing! What was it Sun Tzu said about war? Or maybe Clausewitz? Conflict only becomes violently physical when one side is mistaken about the other’s abilities or intentions. It’s why Eisenhower, humanity’s second most underrated statesman, made such a point of “open skies,” pushing development of spy satellites so both sides might see and predict better, calming their worst fears.

As Sophia’s team calmed when they evaluated data from the tap that Kilonova and I installed at the Golden Palace.

All right, so the Mazellas hadn’t made an epic breakthrough. But what kind of breakthrough had they made?

Sophia’s project caught my curiosity, so her top analyst—Simon Anderson—gave me reading materials. Books by Poundstone and Rebonato and Hanson and Pentland and MacLean shed some light on quantitative analysis and risk assessment. The details went way over my head—especially since I still had nine shows a week to perform—but I dug some of the gist. Enough to realize the quants had bitten off way more than they could chew. The better their models got, the more likely they’d prove brittle when some fickle, human factor veered unexpectedly.

“You get a more robust system when there’s diversity,” Anderson explained. “With scenarios, the storyteller often pushes one part of the narrative, trying to make a point. But that tendentious tendency eases when you increase the number of contributors.”

“Like with Delphi?” I asked, poking deliberately.

Simon shrugged. “OK, sure. Back in the 1950s, the Rand Corporation tried simply polling large numbers of people, getting them to vote on what they thought might happen in the future. John Brunner’s 1960s book The Shockwave Rider portrayed that method working better than it ever wound up performing in real life. Outside a novel, the results weren’t impressive.”

“Um. Duh? Delphi just measured the average opinion of a herd. Herds follow whatever’s fashionable. That’s no way to build a smart mob.”

“Oh? Then how would you do it?”

“Competition! That’s what wagering has always been about. It’s why the Golden Palace oddsmaking system had you spooked.”

“Hm. Then why haven’t statesmen and politicians and captains of industry long ago adapted, using competitive wagering systems to predict, and to make better policy?”

“Beats me. Maybe because betting always had such a low reputation. And it was vulnerable to cheating. Money is a good incentive, but it also warps everything, like gravity around a black hole. Anyway, haven’t there been efforts to adapt the approach lately, by setting up prediction markets?”

“Sure. Professor Robin Hanson established one of the first modern versions, with later variants run by everyone from SAP and Intrade to the Long Now Foundation. Start by gathering a large number of savvy volunteers. Only, instead of polling or voting, you get them wagering against each other—usually with pride-points, or else small charitable donations—just enough to get their competitive juices flowing. When it’s adversarial, folks care more, pay closer attention, maybe study a bit, before betting.

“IARPA then took things a bit further with their Good Judgment Project, creating a large pool and giving the volunteers access to lots of unclassified background material, tracking outcomes and seeking individuals with good predictive success. Some amateurs outscored top CIA analysts! The best were then put together in teams of various kinds—”

I leaned forward. “And the results?”

“Good. It’s partly classified. But a moderate step forward.”

“Still, only another incremental step.” I pondered for a moment. “Jeez, one would think that this IARPA approach ought to get the most investment of all.”

“Oh?” Simon glanced at his watch, then looked back at me archly. “The overall outcomes weren’t that much better than other predictive systems.”

“Yes, but you’re missing the big picture. We should be sifting the largest pool possible, not for the predictions themselves, but in order simply to find out who is right a lot.”

“Well, sure, I get that—”

“Do you? The IARPA program appears to have preselected by all sorts of criteria. How big was their pool?”

“It started at about a thousand.”

“A trifle. It should be hundreds of thousands, and with very loose criteria, with just one aim—find out who’s right more often than not. Then study the heck out of those people.”

“You’re talking about a predictions registry,” Simon said with a sigh. “It’s been tried, on a small scale. One Utopian goal was to give added credibility to people who are—as you say—right a lot. So that it translates into reputation.”

Utopian, indeed, I thought. And for once, Simon and I agreed about something.

“Like the way Nate Silver vaulted from nerdy number cruncher to media star for his election forecasts. Yeah, we should be scanning and scoring millions, so that being right a lot counts more in building credibility than money, charisma, or connections.”

“Or sleight of hand and illusion spinning?”

I lifted both shoulders in a quick shrug. Fair enough.

Simon stroked back his thinning blond hair.

“Look, I need to get back to work. And don’t you have a show to do?”

His face was easier to read than a ten-year-old playing poker for the first time. Frustration and eagerness to get away. And wondering why his boss had saddled him with a stage magician, saying “answer all his questions.”

I checked my specs. “Yeah, I gotta go. Still, I think I know why competition—markets and all similar approaches—has proved disappointing so far.”

“Oh, yes?”

“Because all systems that’ve been tried so far are voluntary. Folks who participate are already engaged, involved. They approve and want the experiment to work.”

“And what’s wrong with that?”

“Everything! In life, you don’t get to pick and choose when to compete. I can’t miss a show. A ballplayer has to try to make every game. A company that skips a year without a product is in trouble. A politician who skips an election—”

“And what does this have to do with prediction markets?”

“It’s simple, Simon. There are thousands, maybe millions of folks who make their living by pushing confident prognostications about the future. Stock analysts, cable news pundits, religious doomcasters…none of whom ever wants to be scored on the basis of accuracy! They smooth-talk others into betting on their forecasts…sometimes every penny the suckers own. They hedge their language and even say contradictory things, so they can point later at “successes.” What breakthrough tech could possibly do society and civilization more good than if we started tallying that army of persuasive arm-wavers and ranking them by how often—or how rarely—they were right?

“If it’s Utopian to imagine sifting millions of blithe predictions and applying market-like accountability for failure—giving positive reputation cred to people who are right a lot—then how much better to hold accountable those persuasive jerks who never seem to get dinged when they keep on being wrong!”

Vehemence. I seldom indulge, but this time it boiled up from within. Of course I hate such charlatans far more than the scientific hoaxers I’m called upon to help expose. As a professional liar, I concoct illusions that folks knowingly bought and paid for, fully aware that they are being fooled. But I can spot signs—the tells—when someone at a pulpit or on a pundit program or public policy forum is fibbing so smoothly, perhaps swaying millions. Warping a civilization that’s been pretty good to us.

Simon Anderson blinked at me.

“Utopian indeed. How on Earth would you construct a predictions market that’s not voluntary?”

OK, so that’s how I got the idea for Liar-Outer…and its more flashy competitor FIBuster. And it led to the reason I had to leave Vegas, running for my life.

Heck, I wouldn’t be in so much trouble if FIBuster weren’t so successful. Me and Simon and a few others started with just a few million from some Silicon Valley moguls, creating an online system where folks can post predictions made by any public figure, with or without the person’s cooperation. Starting with direct quotes, but getting past all the hedging and hemming and hawing and bullshit. Specially made AI semantics programs help distill out an essence, the gist, paraphrasing for simplicity. For what scientists call falsifiability.

When a public figure complains, he or she is given three chances to refine the paraphrasing, so long as the outcome remains clear and falsifiable. Predictors are welcome to give odds, as well. Only at that point, well, they’ve volunteered and become part of the system’s economy.

And if he or she won’t cooperate? Then it goes up anyway, as a bet. Stakes are chosen from a grid based on how rich and/or pushy the would-be Nostradamus was, and how many other folks believed ’em. Win or lose, the result is posted, with most lost wagers assigned to various charities. And if they refuse to pay? Well, that’s fine. There’s no legal obligation. But it’s funny how quickly a sense of moral obligation took shape. And cable TV con artists started taking the worst hits on their cred.

Unlike fact-checking sites, Liar-Outer and FIBuster became ever more interactive. A game. A participation sport. A market.

And, of course, the Savonarola-Rasputin caste hated it!

But that’s not what sent me packing.

I was doing my magic shtick at the Tuscany; off-strip, if still classy. But I was starting to see the writing on the wall. More and more customers were coming to the shows armed with electronic augmentations. Specs that could zoom-expand and record your quickest hand movements, for example, encouraging smart alecks to shout gotcha when I palmed a card or made bouquets of flowers appear out of midair. At one point our Illusionist Guild threatened to strike if augmented reality goggles weren’t banned during show time.

That helped for maybe a year or so. But soon the AR gear merged with regular eyeglasses. Then folks started showing up with smart contact lenses. Oh, you could counter with some techie tricks—e-dazzlers and such—but all that did was create a hostile audience. So the jig was up for traditional sleight of hand.

I could still wow ’em with my mentalist stuff. Reading facial micro-expressions and tells and all that. But now folks just assumed I was cheating with augmentation gear! Using infrared and backstage implements and Ekman readers. I wasn’t! But the clock was clearly ticking, making me start to feel obsolete. An old-style craftsman in an age of machines. But then my skill found one more application.

Saving my damn life.

Was it coincidence that it happened the same evening Kilonova came to watch my show, first time I’d seen her in months? Of course not. Van Took’s correlation programs sensed something, and Ludmilla came by to have a closer look. Maybe (I flattered myself) to rekindle something with her “magic man.”

She sat at my comp table with an untouched drink, wearing specs shamelessly along with an expression of concentration. Jeez, if you aren’t going to enjoy the performance, you could’ve waited for me backstage.

Something had her nervous. At one point, when I glanced her way, she tapped the edge of her specs in a way that said she wanted to pict me a percept-message. I shrugged, blinking twice to indicate I was bare-eyed and it would have to wait…then went back to telling a fellow from Portland how much money he had in his wallet.

Then came a part of the act where I make water run uphill inside a clear container. A trick that had an extra step, ever since some wise guy publicly accused me of using one of the new room-temperature superfluids. From that day forth, Teresa would hand me the crystal pitcher and I’d theatrically pour some into my mouth, taking a great big swallow.

While reciting my standard patter, drawing out audience suspense, I noted that Kilonova was like an electrified wire—the proverbial watch spring, humming. She removed her specs, staring at me bare-eyed, and I could tell she was asking me to see.

Not her, I realized, tracking Kilonova’s gaze. But Teresa. Still reciting and flourishing, I looked at Teresa.

Holding out the pitcher, my beautiful associate was her usual smiling self. Moreover, after several years together, she had picked up on a lot of the tricks and cues. The cheek twitches and blink patterns and iris dilations and breath pauses that made the average mark so easy to read—these were all under control.

Too much control. Now that my attention included her, I could read more subtle body tells of deceit.

But over what?

Simple, let’s start by altering the patter. When you have a smooth and practiced stage routine, any variation can make your partner break stride. Cause her to make eye contact. Send a questioning look.

“So is this one of them there room temperature superfluids?” I asked the audience while flourishing both hands toward the pitcher in her grasp. “Or how about ectoplasm! Phlegm? Phlogiston? Fairy blood? Luminiferous ether?” I ran down a long list, made up on the fly. Teresa’s smile froze, exactly as one would expect if I were being a routine-wrecking jerk.

But there was no questioning look. No eye contact. In fact, her gaze flicked away…and I read guilt.

I read fear.

I guess I could have “accidentally” spilled the pitcher right then, ruining the trick but earning forgiveness from the audience with some performance lagniappes. Instead, I called for a volunteer.

“Hey, I get a lot of repeat customers, and I’ll bet some of you out there have seen this shtick before, right?” A smattering of applause. “OK then, how about one of you out there come up and take a gulp to prove it’s water? I’m getting older, and this bladder of mine is already full. Anyone? How about you, sir?”

Grinning sheepishly for his friends, and almost stumbling in eagerness, the tourist hurried forward, onto the stage…and it only took a glance to see plain panic in Teresa’s eyes. Good. The villains who blackmailed or bribed you into this will study the recording and see your shock, your dismay. They’ll know you tried and failed. That you didn’t tip me off. You’ll live.

I owed her that much. Nothing more.

As the tourist shuffled forward, dazzled by the lights, I teased laughter from his pals by suggesting that maybe this time the fluid might not be water! That I had summoned a mark onstage to do the taste test in order not to take the risk myself. He guffawed nervously, assuming that it was part of my new, mischievous patter.

Kilonova blanched, as pale as a ghost. Would I really be such a bastard?

The mark reached out to receive the pitcher, overcoming nerves with macho and a sense of fun. I loved the guy…and motioned for Teresa to hand him the crystal decanter—

—which, trembling, she fumbled at the last instant, letting it slip.

I dived after and caught it. Bumping heads with the eager, clumsy-helpful customer, I bobbled the heavy pitcher, losing hold, recovering…then taking a huge pratfall as the goblet fell crashing to the stage. Amid the splash and flying fragments, our volunteer hopped back, cussing amiably.

Rolling to my feet, I apologized, brushed off his jacket, handed him a couple of passes to the Horsefeathers Revue, and caught a final glimpse of my beautiful associate, disappearing behind the curtain.

During the next few minutes, Kilonova made repeated let’s get out of here motions. But no way I’d flee the stage, too! There were replacement tricks up my sleeve. And I remembered how to perform alone. And these good people—some of them—had paid good money to see me. Or at least deserved a break from the cybernetically enhanced parasitism of the casino floor.

Anyway, the show must go on.

“These distributed sensor networks have given us a new, powerful way to understand and manage human groups, corporations, and entire societies. As these new abilities become refined by the use of more sophisticated statistical models and sensor capabilities, we could well see the creation of a quantitative, predictive science of human organizations and human society. At the same time, these new tools have the potential to make George Orwell’s vision of an all-controlling state into a reality. What we do with this new power may turn out to be either our salvation or our destruction.” —Alex Pentland, Reality Mining of Mobile Communications: Toward a New Deal on Data (2008)

So there I was a few days later in Israel, presumably accompanying my new bride to an astronomical conference in Haifa, then taking a honeymoon trip to archaeological sites, culminating at the Tel Ain Makor dig, northeast of Jerusalem. Kilonova believed in realism, so I quite enjoyed the pretense. Indeed, I was pondering the possibility of proposing an indefinite extension of our ruse, which so far seemed—in addition to other advantages—to stave off more assassination attempts.

This meant that the powers intent on keeping me alive were at least evenly matched with those wanting me dead.

But why? This can’t be just Johann Mazella. Even if that ruthless mogul caught wind of our spycraft at the Golden Palace (and by now I doubted he ever would), time would surely have dissipated any rage down to the “you’ll never work in this town again” range. He’d know that was plenty punishment for a guy like me.

As Milla and I made our way back to the tour van, past layer after layer of failed civilizations, I pondered.

No, it has to be about Liar-Outer. A lot of powerful people have been inconvenienced. Some even had their careers ruined by our credibility scoring system. Could it be revenge?

But that didn’t make sense either! I’d broken no vows to members of the diffuse oligarchy. I had behaved as a member of an opposing team. You don’t kill honest adversaries out of pique, lest it turn into a tit-for-tat bloodbath. Revenge? No, there was something else. Something much more likely to propel murder.

Prevention.

I confronted Milla with my suspicion that evening, over dinner at our hotel near Ramallah.

“You know something I don’t know.”

She nodded, with a guarded expression, and gave an evasive answer.

“How would you know something that I know but you don’t?”

No, no. Evasion doesn’t make for good marriages.

“You and Sophia. Your predictive engines. You figure that I’m going to do something. And that potential future action would put me in danger. That’s why you showed up last Sunday at the Tuscany.”

A glint in the eye. She knew a subtle tell was all the confirmation needed, as I worked at the logical chain.

“Moreover, it’s something strong. A future condition attractor state that others were likely to detect, as well. Others who would not approve of my future course of action. Hence, you came to rescue me. My knight in black-spandex armor.”

This time a slight smile. A tight nod.

“The least service I could perform for a magic man.”

“And this thing I am about to do…can I assume it has to do with prediction?”

Another nod.

“Well, then,” I started to fume. “If you ladies are so good at fortune-telling, why don’t you go ahead and invent whatever-it-is yourselves! Why do you need me? I could’ve gone on, oblivious and perfectly happy—”

All right, that was a lie, and Milla could read it well enough. In fact, I never felt better about being alive than right there by a glittering swimming pool at the edge of the miraculous Israel-Palestine Economic Development Zone, looking at her and doing verbal jousting.

“It doesn’t work that way,” she explained in a very low voice, out of habit, since we had good anti-eavesdropping gear. “Our newest method is very person-specific. We focus on creative people and tell when they are having what’s called an aha moment…when they’re working on a tough problem and seem utterly confident they have a brilliant answer.”

I had to blink.

“So, I’ve been a lab rat. Watched. Studied.”

“Ever since your success with Liar-Outer. You and ten thousand other creative types. And, sure, it’s somewhat of a privacy breach—”

“Somewhat!” Of course, face recognition was by now old hat. Initial public revulsion quickly passed when folks realized that banning such systems would never prevent governments or corporations or criminals from using them. But this was the first I ever heard of “aha” detection…zooming in on people at the very moment of triumphant realization.

“But aren’t those types of people always under scrutiny?” Milla asked. “By the curious? Or by competitors? Or by those hoping to ride the next thing? Anyway, the science came out a year ago, and in another year everyone will have the Aha! app on their specs. It’s the interim between that’s dangerous.”

The danger interval. That period between when techies develop something and the public owns it. Before it gets into the open, there’s a span when elites get to monopolize the breakthrough. Use it to their advantage. Maybe even prevent it from becoming public at all.

“Unfortunately, some bad people and groups have been aha scanning too,” she went on. “There’ve been situations where powerful men didn’t want a problem solved. We’re still investigating the case of an inventor who was working on a new kind of solar power. One day, she absolutely radiated her aha moment. By nightfall—before presenting to her colleagues—she was dead.”

“But science doesn’t work like that!” I protested. “Her team…they’ll fill in the gaps, have their own aha moments—”

“Of course they will. But in the world of Big Money, as in gambling and war, sometimes even a small delay can be worth many millions.”

I chewed on that a bit…before experiencing a mini-aha.

“But I don’t recall having such a moment recently! You say this was after Liar-Outer became successful.”

“That horse is out of the barn. It’s fast becoming part of civilization. Some cable news professional deceivers may want you dead for spoiling their meal ticket, but they’ll never act on it. No, this is something new.”

“And you have no idea what it is?”

Kilonova shrugged. “What do you think we are? Magicians? Mind readers? We can just tell that you’ve seen the light, so to speak. Had a great big idea. And that it has to do with the prediction problem. And you’re confident it’ll be a game changer. Alas, there are others—who also saw your moment—who don’t want the game changed!”

I threw up my hands.

“My life is being fought over by crazy people. I swear, I’ve had no such aha moment! Don’t you think, if I did have one, that I’d know about it?”

Milla offered up one of her rare, genuine smiles.

“Oh, sweetheart, of course not.”

The unconscious. It’s always there. Young Sigmund Freud, in his Introductory Lectures, brilliantly demonstrated the existence and power of that inner realm, hidden from our surface veneer—the theater of conscious awareness. (Alas, that younger scientist gradually transformed into a tendentiously warped guru-bully; but that’s another story.) Although it’s not currently fashionable to talk about the unconscious, in this era of drugs and electrode probing and organic meddling, we know it’s down there, fizzing and popping and sometimes pushing us in directions we would never choose, logically, to go. Multilayered and many-faceted, it probably makes up the vast majority of thinking that goes on in our complex brains.

All right. So my aha moment must have been unconscious, but so strong and so close to the surface that I was blaring a specific kind of pleasure—realization tells—for maybe a week or more. Huh. So much for pride in my poker face.

Looking back, I could vaguely recall feeling great. Happy and confident. But over what? My head is always so full of stuff! Fantasies and passing schemes and thoughts that sci-fi authors call what-ifs. Heck, I’m lucky ever to make sense of that jumble of half-formed ideas. Hence, it took me some time—despite Kilonova’s blithe confidence—to zero in on the thing.

Freud (the young-smart version) offered methods. Like free association—allowing words, phrases, and images to roll out of the imagination, writing them down, and doing a little detective work. Correlating and finding common threads. For example, I already knew the aha must have to do with predictive methods.

Not tracking and scoring of would-be public prophets. Liar-Outer and FIBuster were already doing that and had a full head of steam, with thousands of eager players innovating new methods daily.

And not the aha moment detection system, either! I knew nothing of that a week ago.

What I had been thinking about, lately, were those prediction markets of Sophia’s, how to utilize the wisdom of crowds. Find potential errors and opportunities—land mines and diamond mines—in the murky realm ahead. Despite some progress, results from existing markets were still disappointing. They didn’t measure up to what math-ists said prediction markets ought to be accomplishing.

Of course, the problem was obvious. People were hedging. Failing to commit. Hemming and hawing and letting mass opinion influence them. It was all very good to harness human competitiveness, but conformity could be just as strong. What we all needed was a way to get their most honest predictions, free of superficial repressions. The frank, candid, even rude opinions bubbling out of the great calculation engine of—

I sat up in bed, so fast that dizziness made me sway, before my pounding heart caught up.

The great calculation engine of the unconscious, of course.

Moreover, I knew how to do it! I had known for a couple of weeks, in fact. And the realization had almost killed me.

Kilonova rolled over, opened one eye to glance at me, and sighed. A sigh that said: Ah, dummy’s finally figured it out.

“Milla, I think I know—”

“Great.” I could tell that her rapid evaluation swiftly settled on no danger and, losing interest, she floated back toward sleep. “Proud of you…tell me in mornin’.”

And she rolled over the other way.

I sat back, letting this secondary aha settle in. Unlike a passing dream, I wouldn’t have to write it down.

You see, the human face is a window into those lower realms, beneath conscious awareness. We all use facial cues to some extent…except for unfortunate folks whose brains skip that innate skill. Meanwhile, a few in every generation—some priests, merchants, charlatans, healers, magicians, con artists—learn how to peer through that window for opportunity, truth, insight, or advantage.

All of which is being automated. First machines learned to recognize that a face is there. Then to recognize one face out of billions. Simple biometric scans led to perceiving smiles and frowns, then lip-reading words.

They say we’ll soon have visage-based lie detection. And if only elites get to use that, then we’ll have Big Brother forever…

…but if instead all citizens can apply such tools on politicians and oligarchs and salesmen? Then we’ll have Big Brother never.

So many threads coming together, almost all at once. The Singularity, some called it, though day to day, month by month, the process of adaptation always felt like—well—normality. Always vexing. Always verging on the new. Life. Not the future at all.

And now we were all going to get apps to detect each other’s aha moments. Yeesh.

But all of it came together when I thought about prediction markets. The problem was that participants kept squelching their answers for reasons like conformity, timidity, or fear of being judged immoral for betting on a dark possibility. Was there a way to get past all that, and learn what the participant really thought, deep down?

The tell. I had been using it all my adult life, from poker games to mentalist shows, to helping skeptics solve hoaxes. My art form was reading human faces. And now, all my tricks and tools were going online, available to any Tom, Ahmed, and Sally. And to Sophia or any competitor who wanted to set up a predictions market. So long as the wagering participants did so over a video link, revealing their faces.

Let them make one bet consciously…but also take note when their unconscious clearly disagrees! Let both sides of the participant play and make wagers. Including the side that doesn’t care about social niceties, or tact, or conformity. The side that some autistics tap into so easily. A side of you that knows when you’re lying to yourself.

Of course, I was absolutely determined that this could only be voluntary. Participants have to know, top to bottom. But then—after some initial, reflexive outrage, why would they refuse? It’s just another modern tool. Another means of self-expression. Only this time for another, inner you.

Another way, possibly, to win your wagers.

Oh, this won’t solve the prediction problem. In fact, nothing ever will. Not sheep entrails nor the flights of birds. Nor quantum computers, chewing on ginormously Big Data. Not finely meshed cellular automata models. Nor improved systems to find folks who are right more often, giving them more cred than charlatans. Nor science fiction extrapolations, nor finely crafted scenarios. And not even vastly improved prediction markets. Some or most of those methods will help us navigate, as individuals and societies, anticipating a bit better, evading a higher fraction of mistakes. But the fantasy goal of real prophecy will always elude us, slipping just ahead, like an alluring wraith.

The future will always leap out to bite us, no matter how compulsively hard we try to penetrate its shadows with those prefrontal lamps on our brows. How much wiser, then, also to invest in resilience, not just anticipation.

Still, we are what we are. Children of Prometheus, whose name meant “foresight.” It’s how we’re built.

Magic men. Magic women. We shuffle the cards, then spread them out, like a fan. Like the many branches of a dimly lit road.

Pick one.