RU4 Real?

If Philip K. Dick had his way, you might wake up every morning with the help of a Mood Organ. This thoughtfully designed device would set your mood for the entire day, depending on all your (mundane or sublime) requirements. If you had an important meeting that day, it could make you masterful and confident. On the other hand, if it was a holiday, it could make you relaxed and happy. A whole lot better than that morning cup of tea—unless you put something in it. And how many of us do that?

Assuming that you’re now in the mood, the next step would be breakfast. It could go in a wide variety of directions, depending on which school of thought you belong to. If you’re a Dystopian ("The world is going to the dogs. Hear them bark!"), it’s likely to be grim. It could be reconstituted seaweed, assuming we have exhausted all potential food sources on land. It could be a single tablet, with the nutritional value of an entire meal. Efficient, but not quite the same as poori-sabzi. Then again, maybe man will become man’s best source of nutrition, solving the population problem and the food problem at one go. We’d probably come in cans, in different flavours. The raw material could be political dissidents. Let’s hope the Chinese don’t figure that one out. If you find this disgusting, don’t blame me. I’m just the messenger. The film Soylent Green was based on this premise, and did quite well, actually. If you’re a Utopian, your meals are likely to be better. You might have a Magic Food Machine—a key feature of Star Trek and the five-part Hitchhiker’s Guide trilogy, to name but two. This machine has two unique qualities. One, its database stores the exact composition of every form of food and drink known to man, and a few other species besides. Two, it can construct these items from basic molecules, of which it has an unlimited store. Every good restaurant should have one.

So now we are well-fed and ready to go off to work. We have a wide range of transportation to choose from. We could hop into that old favourite, beloved of all 12-year-olds—the Flying Car, whether it’s the one boy scientist Tom Swift invented, or the Weasley car in the Harry Potter books. With the whole sky to choose from, road rage becomes a thing of the past. Of course, three-dimensional traffic, with ‘lanes’ stacked vertically, comes with a new set of problems, as Bruce Willis, playing a 30th century taxi driver, discovers in the Fifth Element. Alternately, you could use an Instant Teleportation Device—something we’ve all wished for at some point or the other. In this, you step into a conveniently located booth, punch in your location, and voila, there you are. As Larry Niven points out, this device could make instant riots one of the big problems of the future. Say there’s a riot going on, with lots of yummy looting. CNN beams this worldwide. Within seconds, looters can arrive from all parts of the globe, pick up a few goodies, stone the odd policeman, and zip back out to anywhere on the planet. Luckily for the rest of us, the police would have the same device, thus taking the concept of high-speed chases to an entirely new level.

But there’s more to travel than just going to office, although this may not always be apparent. Supposing you want to go on holiday, or emigrate? The whole universe becomes your oyster. Unfortunately, the speed of light and the lifespan of the average human are inconvenient barriers to roaming freely. SF writers have solved this in three ways. One is FTL or Faster Than Light Drives, which enable a spacecraft to travel at speeds well in excess of light. Authors of this school of thought tend to be a little fuzzy on the details, and they hope that the wild and wonderful planets they take you to will stop you from nitpicking.

Alternately, you could be on a colony ship, and put in Deep Sleep, using cryogenics and the like. This slows down the aging process, and you get woken up close to your destination, refreshed and happy (but slightly damp). There are two potential problems with this. Firstly, somebody still has to fly the ship, alone, surrounded by coffins. This can turn that person a little weird. Alternately, the ship could be run by an artificial intelligence, and those AIs tend to get even weirder, given the opportunity. Ever since I saw 2001: A Space Odyssey, I take great care to switch off my computer before going to bed.

A third way of solving this problem is by simply living longer. There are various ways to do this. You grow a series of clones, and have your intellect and memories transferred into a new body every time the old one wears out. You could prolong the life of your existing body by getting older parts replaced. In an ugly world, this would be by getting those parts from other, less fortunate people. In a nicer one, the spare parts could be synthetic, in which case you gradually turn into a Cyborg or Cybernetic Organism, like Arnie in the Terminator films. Most Cyborgs tend to be fairly nasty, which is another compelling argument in favour of natural products.

If you’re lazy, like me, you may not want to go to all this trouble just to experience all that the universe has to offer. If so, False Memory Implants are the way to go, as Philip K. Dick told you in We Can Remember For You Wholesale, which they made into a film called Total Recall. For a fraction of the cost of the real thing, kind doctors will fill your mind with memories of a trip to Pluto, or marriage to your favourite film star. To you, it will seem like the real thing, and they will even give you accessories, like wedding photos, to add richness to the whole experience. Perhaps this technology already exists, and we just don’t know about it. Certainly when I discuss my childhood with my mother, it seems that way to me. Step back and consider your own memories for a moment. Could all those things really have happened to you?

As the X-Files tell us every week: The truth is out there. Trust no one.