We've been trying to elude GHOST HARDWARE
but as Tim Maughan discovers, this is easier said than done.
One thing every sane, sensible science fiction writer swears they'll never do is try and accurately predict the future. It's an especially unwise idea if you work on short, near-future timescales. Most likely you're going to get it wrong, and your work is going to look dated and naive. Worse, you might actually get it right - but way too early, making your work look conservative, your predictions blunted by a cowardly imagination. No: best to deny everything. To not even try. To scoff at the idea and waffle on about how you've no interest in making predictions, it's all about the story and characters, and anyway science fiction is never about the future, it's about the present. But. Occasionally, when you're looking at all the pieces, you can just squint and see some patterns emerge in between. I wrote Ghost Hardware about 18 months ago now, in a blur of collapsing marriages, tight deadlines, late-night filmmaking, and traditional Bristolian skunk smoke. Now it's finally out and I'm sat on the other side of the Atlantic, quietly proud to see it out in the open. I'm quite pleased with it. Or I was. Before the internet crept up behind me and in the space of a few tweets pointed out that the present was way ahead of my conservative little future. From "Ghost hardware", 2013:
Developed by Amsterdam-based Quartier Latin Studios, the Urban Archaeology spex app has already made headlines with its revolutionary, if often controversial, data mining technology. By cross-referencing archive imagery from Google Street View with publicly accessible web and social media content, it allows the wearer to step back in time while observing the urban environment around them. Particularly popular with street-art aficionados, its gesture interface allows users to peel away architectural surfaces to expose long-lost, painted-over or removed murals. In Excavating 3Cube, Anika Berhardt will be unveiling the app’s new “Ghost Mode”, currently in beta, which allows the user to see moving, 3D imagery of past events reconstructed from the unearthed data, in an attempt to finally reveal the identity of the elusive artist. The sky above Oudezijds Voorburgwal darkens, the canal’s waters turning black, neon reflections shimmering on the surface. She’s punched herself in at the date the clock was showing when she pulled the final layer away, 2am. Too early, but best to come in too soon. Her hand works an imaginary jog wheel and everything goes time-lapse - ghost figures walk up and down the pathways, moving impossibly fast, stopping too suddenly, blinking in and out of existence. 3 AM. The dark cloudscape above her shifts like water churned up by propellers. 3.45. The reflections on the canal start to strobe. 3.58. She releases the jog wheel as a ghostly figure appears in front of her, its translucent bulk blocking her view of the billboard. It’s him, she knows. His hands hang at his sides, fingers flecked with black and white, holding splattered cans. She follows one stormsuited arm – the weatherproof, boilersuit-like one-piece so baggy, it makes him seem amorphous, barely humanoid, limbs highlighted principally by the three-stripe Adidas branding that runs their length. She follows the arm up to his shoulders, but from behind. His head is hidden by a fur-lined hood. Beyond him, on the billboard, hang three shapes, insectoid and mechanical. Billboard beetles, his most infamous of tools, graffiti clean-up robots re-purposed, hacked into living paintbrushes, autonomous spray cans. They scurry away on the surface, their movement an unsettling melange of mechanical precision and animal eccentricity. In their wake they leave sections of the yet unfinished drone image, in the same black and white that has been painted onto their plastic shells in patterns that simultaneously evoke both barcodes and savannah grassland camouflage. She pauses time. Edges around the figure to try and catch his face, two of the micro-drones following her, but no luck. It’s unpixelised at least, but hidden by tinted spex and a bulky, paint-splattered industrial respirator mask that looks like a prop from a pre-millennial science fiction movie: nostalgia for a lost industrial future.
From The Guardian, 23rd April 2014:
Google has turned its Google Maps Street View into a time machine to let users travel back in time and see how places have changed. The new feature will let users track changes in landscape, buildings, roads and entire neighbourhoods from around the world since the Street View mapping program began in 2007. Users can now click on a new clock icon that will appear in the corner of the screen when using Street View on Google Maps on a desktop or laptop computer, firing up scrollbar-controlled time machine, changing the year and even season of the area or building they are currently looking at to see how it has changed over time. "This new feature can also serve as a digital timeline of recent history, like the reconstruction after the devastating 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Onagawa, Japan. You can even experience different seasons and see what it would be like to cruise Italian roadways in both summer and winter," he said. Street View has primarily been used as a way of visualising directions to help users find and identify locations they are looking for, but the service has become increasingly popular among "armchair explorers", who have used Street View to discover far away parts of the world without ever leaving home.
From "Ghost hardware", 2013:
There’s a rumble from Anika’s right as a semi-transparent VW camper van skids into the ancient square; it’s an old one, rusted and patched in places, glinting in sun. The neon solar panels on the roof are the only indication she hasn’t accidentally dialled back decades instead of hours. At first she can’t place where the rumbling is come from – the roof panels suggest the van has been retrofitted enough to discard the diesel engine. When the side doors pop open the origin of the sound is clear: sub-bass stabs vibrating through her spex’s bone-conductors and drilling into her skull. There’s a muffled shout and the music cuts out, not wanting to attract attention, as two figures disembark. There’s no time to fuck around, they have to work quickly. In less than a minute they’ve unloaded four large but low-walled boxes from the van, arranging them in a simple grid in front of the American Hotel. Lids are removed, but in the early morning gloom Anika still can’t see what’s inside. She doesn’t have to wait long, as one of the figures – him, she presumes – air-types at a virtual keypad. Things are rising out of the first box. Then the second, third, fourth. It takes Anika a second to realise what they are: micro-drones, tiny ones, half the size of the ones she’s broadcasting with today, probably 3D-printed. As the four groups lift into the sky they merge into one massive swarm, hundreds strong, dancing around each other in huge swirls, forming tighter, more solid shapes as they group together, spacing out into a wide net as they separate. There’s something joyous about it, something she recognises – at first she thinks it’s a quantum particle modelling simulation she saw at that tepid CERN art-meets-science conference, but then it’s all too obvious where she’s really seen this before – starlings flocking over Central Station in the fading daylight, thousands of them tagging the grey sky with graceful, ever shifting graf. The figure, him, is air-typing again. The swarm rises higher into the sky, then drops again, dive-bombing the hotel with a singular purpose, sweeping impossibly close to the huge IBM billboard. As it passes the grid of panels, each member unleashes its payload of paint-guano, splattering it white. It seems at first like an impossibly large space to fill, but after the fourth co-ordinated fly-by the whole area has been blotted out, colourless. More ghostly air-typing: the drones momentarily regroup above the deserted square, before another strafing run begins, quickly followed by a second, third. Each one leaves behind more and more black over the top of the white, the pattern slowly appearing, like a strangely, disturbingly organic ink-jet printer leaving its mark on the walls of a pristine paper castle. When the swarm rises into the air for the last time, the image is complete, just a few quad-rotor hummingbird stragglers left behind, spitting pressurised green ink into the olive branch shape. As elegantly as it rose, the swarm falls back into its boxes, and silence.
From The Guardian, 21 April 2014:
For street artists who don't have a head for heights, or who just can't be bothered to scale drainpipes, scamper along rooftops and dangle from parapets, help may now be at hand for tagging those hard to reach spots – in the form of a spray-paint wielding drone. Developed by New York graffiti artist, Katsu, who rose to fame in the 1990s by peppering the streets with his iconic skull tag, the device is the latest step in his pursuit to paint bigger than anyone else in the city. “Drones allow me to do what I had always yearned to do,” he told Bard College's Centre for the Study of the Drone. “I’ve always looked at a building or looked at a canvas and stretched my arms out with my eyes. My eyes have always been able to reach it but my limbs have never been able to touch and reach these spaces.” Lacking go-go-gadget arms, in the past he has used fire extinguishers to blast vast quantities of paint across huge areas, obliterating rivals' puny tags with building-sized letters. Now he hopes his pet paint-spraying drone will let him get to places others can only dream of reaching. “I have this little video game-inspired fantasy of lying in my bed, sending my drones out my bedroom window,” he said, “having them render my tags all over the city and then flying back home to me, like, in my bed.”
@timmaughan
"Ghost hardware" is published in Chromewash (Arc 2.2), out now.
Also in Chromewash (Arc 2.2): Steven Zorn set out to create software that addressed timeless human desires. What could possibly go wrong? By Adam Rothstein.
