“Well… I’ve got this new thing,” the pusher said. “Don’t know if it would be in your line, though. It’s a little different.”

“What, is that supposed to make me want it more?”

“No,” the pusher said. “It’s honestly just not to everyone’s taste. If I recommended it to everybody, I’d have a lot of unhappy customers.”

“What is it?”

“It’s called ’sleep’,” the pusher said. “Synthetic neurochemicals that activate some kind of vestigial brain function that no one’s used in a couple hundred years.”

“‘Sleep’? Like a computer?”

“Yeah, basically,” the pusher said. “It puts you into power saving mode and runs a screen saver inside your brain… sort of like hallucinations, sort of like memories. It’s hard to describe. But not everybody has them all of the time.”

“What happens if you don’t?” the kid asked. “You just… sort of stand there until you come down?”

“No, you wanna make sure you’re sitting down or preferably reclining somewhere before you take it,” the pusher said. “Because your whole body goes kind of limp, you see. You’ll end up on the floor if you try to take it standing up.”

“So this stuff makes you lie down on the floor, unable to do anything? And sometimes gives you some kind of visions? Doesn’t it get really boring if you don’t have them?”

“Not really,” the pusher said. “Your consciousness is sort of… shut off. You’re not aware of anything that happens outside your head or the passage of time, at all, when you ’sleep’.”

“That’s some lame trip,” the kid said. “Why would anybody want that?”

“To get out of their lives for a while maybe? I don’t know,” the pusher said. “Some people who take it regularly say they feel more relaxed, sharper during the rest of the day, but I don’t know that you’d that notice that after one trip.”

“How long does it last?”

“About eight hours, give or take,” the pusher said.

“Shit, I can’t do that,” the kid said. “I’ve got stuff to do.”

“Like I said, it’s not for everyone.”

Some objected to this on practical grounds. There was no proof, they said, that trends in increasing processor power would actually be able to continue unabated indefinitely. There was no way of being certain that computers that were more powerful would be well-suited to the tasks that were imagined for them.

There was no way of knowing if they would even be cooperative. The very term “singularity” had first been proposed to denote the fact that there was no way to predict how a superintelligent computer would function without being so intelligent ourselves. The closer we came to actually reaching it, the more our models for how things should go would break down.

Fearing that it was just as likely that computers would become our masters or destroyers, some few people undertook an even more difficult task than teaching computers how to think.

They taught them how to love.

God help us all.

Like clockwork they clattered around their tracks, reaching each destination exactly at the appointed minute and hour. Not a second sooner. Not a second later. The Yeats™ brand entropy engines were powered by the flow of time itself, whose inexorable passage could not be halted or even slowed appreciably.

At least, not at the speeds at which the trains traveled.

There were few problems at first. But then some undesirable aspects of this relentless efficiency became apparent. That the trains could not be halted was as much a curse as it was a blessing. Any time there was an accident down track, it became a race against time to prevent the arrival of the next implacable locomotive from compounding things. Once the schedules were set, it was impossible to alter the railroad timetables in the slightest… the 8:15 from Newark would always be the 8:15 from Newark. If this was no longer convenient or desirable for the men who had built the train, it was necessary for them to bend around it, altering their schedules and even clocks and calendars.

Time, after all, waits for no man.

As inconvenient as these small things were, they were nothing compared to the trouble that loomed. One of the selling points of the entropy engine project had been to reduce the dependency on non-renewable energy sources, but no one has the luxury of assuming they have unlimited time. Time may be running out. Many of the busier rail lines are already running on borrowed time.

But say what you will… at least the trains run on time. Would anybody willingly go back to the old way, now?