This week, Futures is delighted to welcome Zach Chapman with his trip into virtual reality, The console. Zach is a gamer and editor, and you can catch up with his work on his website or by checking him out on Facebook and Twitter. Here he reveals what inspired his latest tale — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing The console

I was born with a video game controller in my hand.

Well, that’s not exactly true. My parents actually refused to buy me a Super Nintendo, so I mowed lawns and did chores until I could afford a system. By that time, the big thing was the N64. Anyways, I’ve been a gamer almost all of my life. So, being the gamer that I am, I’m fascinated by virtual reality.

VR gaming has come a long way. The HTC Vive is a far cry from the Virtual Boy, and if the technology can evolve that much in 20 years, what will VR be like in another 20? How will it change people? Society? I asked myself these questions before I started writing The Console.

The VR device in that story generates a reality based on the user’s memories. Except memory is never a literal recount of past experiences and so Rachel’s console is never able to perfectly recreate her dead wife. Memories are malleable. As far as I know, all humans are susceptible to confabulation. And this universal distortion of memory could have profound consequences for VR (or AR). Ultimately, my story ends with Rachel’s console rendering her confabulation.

Well, not all of them can have happy endings!

This week, Futures brings you a vision of the future in the shape of The coded messenger by Andrea Kriz. Andrea spends a fair amount of her time in a biology lab (though she did take some time out to write the story Chrysalis for us last year). In The coded messenger, she offers an intriguing take on how scientific advances might be put to use. Here, she kindly gives us an insight into what inspired her tale — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing The coded messenger

I got the idea for this story after reading a recent Nature article in which researchers describe encoding a movie into a bacterial genome (Nature 547, 345–349; 2017). Late night in lab, the thought popped into my head — how much information could be encoded in the human genome using similar technology? What kind of state would the world have to be in to make it even remotely acceptable to use genome editing in that way? And what could lead a scientist to use another human, rather than synthetic DNA or bacteria, for this purpose?

Probably everyone who uses CRISPR in their research has thought of a similar slippery slope at one point or another. Gene-editing technology has already been used to correct devastating genetic diseases in embryos. The world is understandably hesitant about taking the next step, making edits to ‘improve’ human traits. But what happens if someone does it first? And, after a few years, if it looks like the kids are okay, even outperforming non-genetically modified children? If one country embraces the technology, others may follow out of fear that their next generation will fall behind if they don’t. Add an on-going world war on top of this, and it becomes an arms race. Eventually, the changes to the genome become so experimental and extreme that it could be disadvantageous to let them spread to the general population. In the United States, a governing authority arises and oversees the implementation of a safeguard (a ‘gene drive’) in the genomes of genetically modified soldiers to prevent this from happening.

Of course the scenario remains firmly science fiction. Currently, many technical issues limit even the theoretical use of genome-editing technology in humans (for example, most human traits are not the result of one gene but incredibly complex gene networks as well as environmental factors). But even if these could somehow be overcome, I don’t think that genome-editing technology should be feared. Instead I believe it should seen for its potential to improve the lives of everyone on Earth — if used in a compassionate and ethical way. Hopefully that’s the story all of us are writing with our research now 🙂

First contact could take many forms, and in this week’s Futures, Marissa Lingen explores one such potential outcome in her story Planet of the five rings. Regular readers will know Marissa’s work (for the uninitiated, a list of her other Futures stories is at the foot of this post). If you’d like to explore her universe further, you should head to her website or follow her on Twitter. Here, Marissa reveals the inspiration behind her latest tale — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing Planet of the five rings

We’re sending it all out there.

That’s how the electromagnetic spectrum works, TV as much as anything else. Out it goes. And as anyone who has ever been around a toddler knows, they pick up what you don’t know you’re showing them at least as much as what you hope you’re teaching them. On one occasion, a 15-month-old I know produced the word “Al-coholic!” just when his parents really, really wished he wouldn’t. (Honey, don’t tell Grandma … okay, too late, well, we’ll be dealing with how you learnt that one I guess.)

So it’s a big Universe, and we’re teaching it the things about us that we want it to know, the Brandenburg Concertos and so many lovely things we’ve figured out how to do with pigment. We’re teaching it the horrors of war and the relief of peace. We’re showing it how we react to natural disaster.

How we report sport may be one of the most patterned and repetitive things we’re giving the cosmos. The rote conversations of the introductory language textbook have nothing on the interviews for sporting events. And then *you* say … and then *she* says …

I don’t know who’s paying attention, but I hope they like women’s ice hockey. That’s my favourite.

Other Futures stories by Marissa Lingen

Running safety tips for humans| The most important thing | The many media hypothesis | Boundary waters | Maxwell’s Demon went down to Georgia | The stuff we don’t do | Unsolved logistical problems in time travel: spring semester | Entanglement | Quality control | Search strings | Alloy

The prospect of armed conflict seems to be permeating the news at the moment, so this week’s Futures story Alice in Peaceland arrives at a timely moment. Written by Natalia Theodoridou, who has previously introduced us to Ajdenia, the tale takes a look at how war might be avoided in the future. When she’s not speculating about artificial intelligence, Natalia can be found at her website or on Twitter. Here she reveals the inspiration behind her latest tale — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing Alice in Peaceland

Lately I have been consistently drawn to the work of futurists, particularly companies such as SciFutures that use sci-fi storytelling as a jumping-off point for prototyping innovative technologies. This is science-fictional thinking at its best: imagining solutions to existing problems and pre-empting the problems presented by imagined futures. Now, coming from a humanities background, I am inevitably drawn to the ‘softer’ side of ‘hard science’ (excuse my liberal use of scare quotes here): the social, the inter-personal, the cultural, how reality is mediated. Conflict and war are topics that invite, demand even, both these kinds of thinking. 

Alice in Peaceland came to be when I took the idea of a war to win the hearts and minds of people literally. What if new technologies were used to do just that, through a new kind of advanced psychological warfare? Could trauma, however induced, ever be a path to resolution? This resulted in the AI in my story having to grapple with a paradox: what if the only way to achieve peace were to have everyone affected by the trauma of war? Alice’s answers, alas, were limited by the morality of its creators.