Make Magazine
In the quiet of the basement, Garvin readied his machine. It was round and flat, shelled in hard plastic, with a thin wide gap like the mouth of a clam. High up on the wall, half open skylights let drizzle through to wet the basement floor. On the old steel work-bench his calculations sat, twinkling on heaps of unlined paper. It was finished.
As he slipped into a figure-hugging silken body sock, Garvin Erasmus wondered at the future. He’d picked a hundred years ahead, enough time he hoped for profound, but comprehensible change. A dizzying melody of maybes ran through his head. Would America, perhaps the world, have fallen under the jack boot of Christian fascism; handmaidens waiting on feudal patriarchs and gays stoned in the streets, in a grimly literalist theocracy?
Perhaps nuclear attacks or a pandemic will have reduced the world to barbarism, he thought darkly. There were of course countless predicted futures. In preparation for the trip he’d read them all, from Alvin Toffler to Ray Kurzweil.
The singularity too was possible, a rapture of the geeks. Man empowered by the titanic potential of superhuman AI, to transform the world around him. Clouds of nanobots constructing real objects in concrete software. That, or a grey all consuming goo. A part of Garvin expected to emerge in space, the earth consumed for fuel by her departing children.
