A Seamless Future – Bear, Greg

Book Preview

http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

Spreadsheets at the Fifth Decade

© 1989 by Greg Bear, originally published in Lotus Magazine I’m eighty and sitting alone in a room. I’ve never been much of a mathematician, preferring to dabble rather than to plunge deep into the discipline. But I’m experiencing a kind of math unknown to even the most brilliant before my generation. I’m navigating through what might have once been called a “spreadsheet,” a space where objects perform like numbers; the algebras and calculuses of non-number data is a sea I can swim in. Number plays a small part too; Amy, my home thinker, relegates number to a side channel I seldom notice.

Images drop from the thinker space I share, results made up as picts–meaning-packed icons that can change and flow to suit my needs and my questions. I wish to understand the present state of the economy of greater metropolitan Seattle to decide whether to shift assets into tax-free bonds. The resulting pict–a three-dimensional creature more bear than bull, its horns sporting a yellow CAUTION! SLOW road sign–is green with red edges.

When I ask for the thinker’s best guess, the first pict reappears, telling me that the investment is “Maximal within four years given predicted downturn.”