“Do they even have to put a licensing agreement on the packet anymore?” the applicant asked. “The last time I looked at one, it just said that a copy was available online. I put it back, obviously. I was mostly looking at it out of curiosity.”

“Yes, it’s getting quite scary out there. I’m just glad the Supreme Court stopped them from making their viruses opt-out instead of opt-in,” the interviewer said. “That was an increasingly rare victory for us. One hundred million Americans are now completely incapable of eating anything that hasn’t been genetically modified for the designer bacteria in their stomachs, and a hundred million more have eaten things that enter them into legally binding agreements that preclude the sort of work we do here. It takes an amazing amount of discipline… to say nothing of privilege and opportunity… to go your whole life and eat nothing but the few remaining natural heirloom foods or open-source alternatives in this country. Do you mind if I ask why you made that choice?”

“Well, it’s mostly my parents,” the applicant said. “Though of three children, I’m the only one who stuck with it past middle school, so maybe I shouldn’t give them all the credit. But if they hadn’t made the choices they did for me when I was a child, I’d be out there paying a licensing fee for my lunch, too. I guess that’s part of it. I don’t like the idea that a corporation can own our food. If we don’t own what we put into our bodies, do we own our bodies at all?”

“Excactly,” the interviewer said. “You know, free software proponents used to say they were talking about free as in ‘free speech’ rather than ‘free beer’.”

“That’s an interesting comparison,” the applicant said. “Since you can’t find beer that doesn’t have a binding license on it these days.”

“Yes, well, when’s the last time you saw any free software?” the interviewer said. “Of course, people also used to say ‘there is no such thing as a free lunch.’ Time has regrettably proven them right.”

“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?