I was talking with a buddy of mine about gadgets, and the discussion turned to that most important gadget of all, the PIM. What would be the ultimate device that we could take along with us?
We of course came up with a 10 mega pixel camera, video camera, voice recorder, and, well, you know how the list can go on and on. So, instead of making up a list of features, we decided to go into the future to get a first-hand look at what is up and coming.
As you may know from experiences with your own time machines, you can’t always control where you want to land. As it turns out, we ended up in the middle of a computer convention.
Other than the huge number of people ogling the various displays, something seemed to be wrong. No-one was carrying a cell phone, note pads, bags of goodies, or anything except perhaps lunch. Then we noticed there were no garbage bins, and no garbage was strewn on the floor. This is geek paradise, for crying out loud, a place where every one shows off with geeky bravado not only that they can afford the latest gadget, but how well they can use it.
There were the usual demonstrations, talks by great industry leaders, and booths bordered by beauties. Sales people were shaking hands with each-other and eager patrons, yet nothing was being exchanged.
Then I noticed something strange—everyone had a little tattoo on their foreheads, often just above the hairline. It looked like an icon on your Windows desktop. There were three or four main styles, but each one had its own embellishments. Some were on the left, some on the right, but all above one eye or the other except for the few that were in the middle. When I first saw these I thought they were tattoos that had come into style, but people seemed to be talking about them, pointing out each-others’ embellishments, and sometimes laughing. So I took the liberty of listening in on one of these conversations.
“… and IEEE AlphaWave 805.11 n, which supports a, b, and g,” said a large redheaded fellow who had plaid embellishments around a yellow icon above his right eye. “And it stores two terabytes of data.”
“Mine stores three, and beta wave emulation,” said a short stocky woman with the same yellow icon surrounded by light blue ribbons.
A skull and crossbones surrounded a blue icon of a young lanky fellow who seemed to be amused by the conversation. After listening for a while, he turned away from the group and nearly bumped into me. “Excuse me,” he said, then looked at us—or our foreheads—rather quizzically. Then he looked embarrassed for us, and turned away to walk off. He would have been long gone if I hadn’t said something.
“Excuse me,” I said, assuming a fellow with a skull and crossbones tattoo would be friendly.
To my surprise he turned around and said, “yes?”
“What is that tattoo on your forehead?” I asked.
He stared at us for a couple of seconds, then pointed to his icon and asked, “you mean this PIM?”
“Yes.”
“It’s a Macrohard multicast transceiver unit with two teraquads of storage and full integration of alpha and beta wave routing to my office.”
“You mean it’s a computer?” I asked naively.
He looked bemused. “Of course it’s a computer.”
“Sorry, but we just landed here, and we don’t know what those icons represent, yet everyone is talking about them.”
“This is a beta version. You can’t buy it,” he tried to explain.
“A beta version of what?” I asked, trying to impart the vastness of my confusion. “We’re from the past. I’ve never seen these before.”
He started to look impatient.
“I’m serious. We’ve just come in from a place that has old computers from the early twenty first century. We’ve never seen them before. We still use paper.”
He suddenly looked surprised, and stared at us in an expression that was either horror or admiration. “You can afford paper? What trees are you using for that?”
“It’s just recycled stuff,” I explain, thinking he might be able to summon a lynching squad. “And only rarely.”
He stared, then said, “you really are from the past, aren’t you?”
We nodded.
“Follow me, and I’ll show you a bit of history, or, in your case, future,” and he strode off in such a pace we had to run to keep up. We branched off into a hallway that wasn’t so crowded, and finally into a room that had been set up for interviews.
He began his speech as soon as we closed the door. “About a hundred years ago—2050—paper became so expensive that using creating a document on a computer, showing it to someone, then throwing the computer away was cheaper than printing the document. Now we have these devices implanted into our heads, and we can ‘see’ the documents without a display or paper. Today the multi-spectral imagery that we see far surpasses anything paper could possibly portray anyways.”
He paused for a sip of water. “It caused paper and ink companies to go bankrupt over night.”
We listened and asked questions for fifteen minutes before we had to get back to the time machine or the time-shifting molecular variance would cause our nuclear structure to destabilise. You know how that is.
My buddy and I had a rather animated conversation on our journey back to the present time. We came to the conclusion that ultimate PIM was one that was implanted into our heads. However, we agreed, there is a catch—the ultimate PIM kept us too connected to the office, there was too much media intrusion, and we wouldn’t be able to turn it off.
“And,” my buddy interjected, “I’d have to buy the white album again.”
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