THOUGHT (aka Centric's Blog)

You know the drill. Drag yourself into their office, laptop bag on one shoulder and projector on another, ready to run the latest brag reel and neat little Powerpoint about how you’re gonna cut through the clutter, reach that audience, engage them–

Ah, crap.

I was standing in a large bullpen office area, but it wasn’t like any I’d ever seen before. This one was a collision of cocktail lounge and open-plan office, with lots of low and stylish couches in bright colors, punctuated by comfortable chairs clustered around small tables. If an agency waiting room and cafeteria had staged a hostile takeover of their production floor, this is what it might have looked like.

"Hey, how’d you get in here?" said a guy, flipping a set of ugly designer glasses up onto his forehead.

Additional details assembled: the room was almost empty. A few people sat on couches, working on handsets, or clustered at one of the tables. A group of three people were looking over a packaging design for something that looked like an electric shaver. Flashing messages crawled over the package, like an animated texture on a Second Life prim.

"What year am I in? 2017?"

"2012," said another guy, walking up to me and the first guy who’d noticed my appearance. He wore the same ugly designer glasses, flipped up on his head. I could see a flicker of images through their dark glass and realized, in that moment, what they were.

"Dataspecs?"

He nodded. "Apple iSee."

"Who’s this guy?" the first guy said.

Walk-up guy sighed and did a little toggling gesture by his glasses. The first guy flipped them down over his eyes and sat, open-mouthed.

"I’m–" I said.

"We know who you are," the walk-up guy said, tapping his dataspecs. "Science fiction writer, started a meta-agency, disappeared 5 years ago. Wrote a lot of stuff about how it will be in the future. Got some stuff right, some is really lol-tastic. By the way, I’m Bret. That’s Sanjay."

"You know this because . . . you’re running Google Ambient or something?"

A quick laugh. "Close. AmbientData. Out of China. Better analysis, cheaper."

"I, um, I am from the past." It sounded completely idiotic.

Bret crossed his arms. Sanjay flipped up his specs. "Neat. I scanned the records. He just appeared. None of the handheld cams, floaters, reconstructors, or ambients have him before he just appeared, poof. The first proof of temporal displacement!"

"Yeah, whatever," Bret said. "So, man from the past, what do you want?"

"What do you mean?" I asked.

A flicker of irritation flashed across Bret’s face, then he pasted a smile over it. "Nobody comes out to do business in person, unless they’re trying to get a 10-million-RMB line of credit or something like that. What do you want, here, in our workspace?"

What did I want? I wondered. Would I flip back to 2007 like I did from 1997, or would I be stuck here forever?

"Uh, the lottery numbers?"

"Everyone says that," Sanjay said.

"How about a job?"

"Doing what?" Bret said.

"Strategy, uh, development, something in virtual worlds."

The two guys from the future glanced at each other. "What’s your specialty? Work environments? Brand gardens? Community co-creation? Global repnets? Tiering? Training? Advanced pedagogy? Immersive or non-immersive? Portable or not? Life-support-sustained, or casual use?"

I shook my head. I could guess what most of the applications were, but I didn’t know about others. "We weren’t so segmented when we were developing."

Bret grinned. "Yeah, the good old days of Second Life. And you were in HiPiHi, right?"

"Right."

"But that was before Amplifi, and NewCore, and . . . well, I mean, those are still players, but there are options. Depends on what you want to do. You’d need to spend some time retraining."

"I could do general strategy or creative."

Sanjay shook his head. "With zero rating on GlobalMarket, and no job record for the past 5 years? You’d have to start at GlobalMarket at the lowest crowdsourced tier, then work your way up into a trusted user sphere."

"Crowdsourced? You mean, like contests and things like that?"

Sanjay shook his head. "We’re not that cruel. GlobalMarket redistributes a percentage of all revenue based on participation and quality. Even if your work never gets chosen, you’ll make some money."

"It’s not much of a life," Bret said. "You can’t even afford a WeRU mechanical turk tier. But if you’re good, you move up to more trusted tiers or closed agency nets."

"So, you can’t just hire me? You’re a small company."

Bret laughed. "Are you kidding, we have over 10,000 people in our network, 1500 of which are full staff."

I looked around the small room. "So this is a satellite office? Your HQ is in China?"

"This is as big as any of our offices," Bret said. "Once in a while, people have to get together in flesh. Most of the time they work through the WorkCentric virtual world. Same thing, less fighting with your cubemates."

"I predicted that."

"Yeah, but your ideas on monetized content were pretty funny," Sanjay said.

"Hey, what did you predict lately?"

Sanjay chuckled and turned away. "Things are moving too fast for that. Too many directions. Even the ambientspace doesn’t give us a solid direction."

"Ambientspace?"

Sanjay took off his glasses and went to hand them to me, then paused and looked up at Bret. Bret nodded, and he held them out to me. I took them and slipped them on. A three-dimensional space full of colored threads twisted and snaked and tangled out to infinity.

"New trend visualization thing that some kids whipped up out of old libSL code, videoscrapers, and trend-engines. If you know the color code and follow along, sometimes you can pull some long-term trends out of it."

"Long-term?"

"6 months or so," Bret said. "Maybe. It’s only been around for 16 weeks or so."

"But it’s getting a lot of refinement," Sanjay said. "Many monkeys on the code."

I tried to follow the gleaming threads, their cryptic tags. It was meaningless. I took off the glasses, handed them to Sanjay, and stood up.

"Where are you going?" Bret said.

"Back," I said. I hoped.

I went to the door and pushed it open. And then I was standing just at the front of the Eclectic Cafe, waiting to be seated. The familiar Treo Default Ring echoed in the lobby, and seventy percent of the people there grabbed for their purse or pocket.

I sighed and smiled. Sue was waiting at a table. "Look at this, I can do Google street view," she said, showing me her new iPhone. "Isn’t the future wonderful?"

"Yeah," I said, and picked up the menu.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 12th, 2007 at 12:49 pm and is filed under Ruminations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.