The Future We Left Behind by Mike A. Lancaster Read Free Book Online Page A

area and the hubbub of voices around us fell into a respectful silence. I opened my mouth, as if I was just going to tell Perry the details he wanted, then closed it and shrugged.
    He rolled his eyes at me and mouthed: ‘Later.’
    I turned away and watched my father getting ready to speak.
    He looked calm, relaxed even, which is something I’m not really used to seeing in him. For my father, I’m sure, anxiety is the fuel that drives him. That and anger.
    As he checked his LinkPad for the playback for his presentation I even think I saw him smile.
    Suddenly the room went into darkness.
    Total darkness.
    There were a few whispers around us, and someone coughed.
    Then my father’s voice said: ‘Imagine this. The moment before the universe sprang into being. Nothingness. Void. Blackness. Emptiness. It was a special kind of nothing that we can’t even begin to describe. Because, I’m afraid, we weren’t there. No one was.
Nothing
was.’ He paused. ‘Then: it happened.’
    Suddenly a tiny dot appeared, holographically, in the middle of the darkness, and the contrast made it seem painfully bright.
    ‘A billionth of a second into the Big Bang, this tiny bubble was formed.’ My father’s face was illuminated on one side by the light. He looked a bit sinister, if I’m honest. ‘It was a fraction of the size of a single atom, yet it contained everything our universe is, everything it would become.’
    The bubble started swelling outward, and coloured dots accelerated outward from within it. Red ones and yellow ones, brown ones and black.
    ‘Everything in the universe,’ he continued, ‘was packed into something that small: every atom in the universe, theseeds of planets and stars. Some people find that utterly amazing. Others find it terrifying. But do you know what I say to myself every time I consider the Big Bang?’
    The image changed, suddenly, to a view of the planet Earth, seen from space, then quickly zoomed out to show our solar system; then the galaxy that we are but a tiny part of; and finally thousands of galaxies sitting in coal black space.
    ‘I think:
all that information, in something so small; I want to
make
one of those
.’
    The image of the universe faded out and the chamber’s lights gradually came back on.
    My father looked around at the faces staring at him and smiled.
    ‘OK, that’s just me, I guess,’ he said. ‘But we do have a serious problem.’
    A beautiful hologram of the Earth, spinning in space, appeared in front of us.
    ‘This world of ours is awash with information that needs both processing and storage.’
    An image showing coloured lines representing that information appeared around the Earth. It didn’t take longbefore the Earth itself was obscured by all that information.
    ‘Our Smart Cities are built around huge computer networks that control everything from lighting to heating to the environment. Our medical computers are so very sophisticated that they require vast resources just to manage the systems that keep us healthy.
    ‘Then there’s the Link. It is the most complex computer network ever created, managing billions of pieces of information every second, and each entry made in a LinkDiary carries not just text, but pictures, sound files and video.
    ‘We are reaching a point where the demand for space for our physical data is overtaking our supply. We are being saturated with data, and we are reaching the limits of the Link’s capacity.’ My father pressed a stud on his Pad and a large display appeared in the air, something that looked like a read out from a heart monitor – a line that blipped upwards and downwards from a central line, creating a jagged pattern of mountains and valleys.
    ‘Example,’ he said. ‘This jagged line. It’s a measurement, in real time, of this room, now. Each peak and trough is simplya graphical representation of the Link activity in this room.
    ‘It’s telling us that there are more than 4,000 pieces of data of a size over