As you may have gathered, like a lot of authors, I’m a melancholic. You might not guess it to see me chuckling as I type this—for I consider this to be an amusing book, deliberately sunny and forward-looking. Still, all too often, even in these pages, I find myself having a whale of a good time savoring events and possibilities that are, by any conventional measure, quite grotesque or sad. Even though I’ve been favored by fortune, my imagination has an irretrievably cyberpunk, Gothic, matte-black-and-chrome cast. I am temperamentally attracted to dark, cranky, marginal figures.

  But not to Dr. Pangloss, because he’s too shallow and bland. Nor to Cassandra, for she lacks a genuine interest in human survival. And not to the Insurance Salesman, for though he pays well, he’s got only one agenda; a meeting with him is everyone’s byword for boredom.

  Though human attitudes toward our prospects may differ, whenever tomorrow becomes today, Pangloss, Cassandra, and the Salesman live there at the same time. Today is cheery for some, grim for many, and in some sense always business as usual.

  Tomorrow is another day, so for the sake of Tomorrow Now, I’ve decided to introduce a new futurist character as our guide and inspiration in the pages that follow. He’s a famous and accomplished time-traveler, dressed for the long term, for he wears dark, hipster silks and satins equally suitable for the court, the jail, or the wilderness. He is “the melancholy Jaques” from Shakespeare’s As You Like It.

  The word “tomorrow” appears in As You Like It thirteen times. It’s a great play for futurists becomes it smoothly combines contradictions. It’s a cheery “comedy” in which all the good-guy characters are grim dissidents in political exile. The status quo is changing quickly and violently, because the central authority figure, Duke Frederick, is a paranoid lunatic.

  One by one, the characters flake out and defect from the duke’s cramped version of reality. Some are kicked out; others just scram; sometimes they run off in teams. They flee to the Forest of Arden, where they hope for better while living on venison, rather like Robin Hood. They all claim that they really enjoy this highly unstable situation, even though it’s dirty and freezing.

  Except, that is, for the melancholy Jaques. Jaques doesn’t have to pretend to like this uprooted life of exile and uncertainty. Because he genuinely likes it. A consummate observer, he feels quite at home at the edge of futurity. The other characters are stagily getting close to Nature and pretending to find “sermons in stones,” but Jaques is the guy who is putting the sermons in there.

  Despite the fact that he’s a black-clad aristocrat, the melancholy Jaques has a contradictory hankering to be a colorful court jester. “Invest me in my motley,” demands Jaques,

  give me leave

  To speak my mind, and I will through and through

  Cleanse the foul body of th’ infected world,

  If they will patiently receive my medicine.

  Spoken like a true subversive. For all his arty theorizing, this guy wants real-world results.

  Eventually Duke Frederick has a major mental breakdown. His time is up and his regime collapses. Somehow a pagan goddess arrives, and everybody gets married. Then they all scrub off the dirt of the wilderness and head for the cozy certainties of their restored status quo.

  Except, that is, for Jaques. Jaques is staying out there. At the play’s end, he prophesies happy endings for the other folks, literally brushing them off the stage. But Jaques himself isn’t leaving the Forest of Arden. Instead, he placidly hangs around to debrief the insane duke. He has no reason to leave his permanent uncertainty. For him, it’s the very best dwelling place.

  Jaques is best known for his famous set-piece lecture. This is his telling disquisition on the stark relationship of time and human beings. It goes like this:

  All the world’s a stage,

  And all the men and women merely players;

  They have their exits and their entrances,

  And one man in his time plays many parts,

  His acts being seven ages. At first, the infant,

  Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms.

  And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel,

  And shining morning face, creeping like snail

  Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,

  Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad

  Made to his mistress’ eyebrow. Then a soldier,

  Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard,

  Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,

  Seeking the bubble reputation

  Even in the cannon’s mouth. And then the justice,

  In fair round belly with good capon lin’d,

  With eyes severe, and beard of formal cut,

  Full of wise saws and modern instances;

  And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts

  Into the lean and slipper’d pantaloon

  With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;

  His youthful hose, well sav’d, a world too wide

  For his shrunk shank, and his big manly voice,

  Turning again toward childish treble, pipes

  And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,

  That ends this strange eventful history,

  Is second childishness and mere oblivion,

  Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

  (As You Like It, 2.7.147–174)

  This is the future as it is felt and understood: via human experience.

  My intent in writing this book is to come to terms with seven novel aspects of the twenty-first century, situations that are native to that epoch and no other. These are seven challenges, driving forces, opportunities this century possesses that make it distinct from the past. I’m presenting these future possibilities in the way that people experience time: in thematic stages.

  Stage One: The Infant concerns genetics, reproduction, and microbiology. Stage Two: The Student is about information networks and new paradigms for the scholar. Stage Three: The Lover takes its cue from Pygmalion; it is about postindustrial design and our fiercely passionate relationship to our own creations. Stage Four: The Soldier is a war story about the growing New World Disorder, the new century’s greatest security threat. Stage Five: The Justice tackles media and politics. Stage Six: The Pantaloon is a primer on twenty-first-century information economics. Stage Seven: Mere Oblivion is about our struggle with mortality and our technical assault on human limits.

  The years to come are not merely imaginary. They are history that hasn’t happened yet. People will be born into these coming years, grow to maturity in them, struggle with their issues, personify those years, and bear them in their flesh.

  The future will be lived.

  And one man in his time plays many parts,

  His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,

  Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms.

  The infant personifies the future. You place your children into history. You are their past.

  Futurists like to study population growth and trends in demographics, which is to say, people having children. The infant is no mathematical abstraction, though; a baby is the future howling aloud. Tomorrow now, born naked.

  The delivery room is a place of primal hope and fear. It’s a dramatic arena of suffering and risk. Few things are as common as a human child born all right, but when the futurist’s own child is the hostage to fortune, there are very few comforts found in statistics. What if the baby dies? What if the mother dies? What if the baby is born deformed, with decades of sorrow ahead? The clock ticks, a child comes into the world, and no amount of rational analysis will stop that process. People must live with the consequences—because people are the consequences.

  I like to think that as a father-to-be I fully deserved my many anxieties. Childbirth was certainly the most profound encounter with the future I have ever had. But unlike millions of jittery fathers in the past, I had a benefit in my possession that lacked historical precedent. I had a pocket photo of my child, taken before she was born.

  I had a sonogram. It was a printout from a medical scanner. Its sonar nozzle had slid all over my wife’s distended midriff, greased with clean medical jelly. The doctor had to wiggle this device about a bit, and peer and head-scratch through its Delphic, futuristic blurring, but he did it in real time and right in front of us. The child’s limbs were in order, the growth numbers looked right, and to judge by the sonar shadows of her little pelvis, she was a girl.

  What comfort we took from that technological artifact. With a sonogram at hand, you can abandon half the book of baby names. You can spin new plans for the colors of the curtains and the bassinet. This sonogram was like prenatal radar, full of swimming promise. Primeval darkness had left the womb. Its silent inhabitant was no longer a “pregnancy.” “It” became “her.”

  That is how I first glimpsed my daughter: through an instrument. But my daughter did not, in fact, begin as an infant, or even as a sonogram. She began, just like her dear mom and dad, just like you, as an anonymous entity the size of a pencil dot. Humanity’s origin is in the realm of the microscopic. That is the true start of our story.

  Human eggs are minuscule, but we moderns can see them. They’re no longer metaphysical, they’re not folk legend or fertility ritual. They have become the province of rapidly advancing biotechnology. Single cells can be measured and manipulated, extracted and preserved. What we can see, we can sort, shape, and sell. We penetrated the realm of the microscopic with ever-growing technical sophistication. In the twentieth century we came to realize, with growing excitement, that the general business of life on Earth all runs on the same hardware. It’s all cells, and at the centers of cells, it’s always DNA. The business of life is Life-on-Earth Incorporated and Unlimited, a wholly owned subsidiary of deoxyribonucleic acid.

  Genetic engineering is the twenty-first century’s own new baby. In the century’s dawn, biotech is its star turn. Biotech is by no means tomorrow’s only major technology. The twenty-first century has the whole technological family crammed under its roof, fork in hand at the trestle table, a vast clan of hungry transformations, many of them centuries old: printing, clocks, railroads, electric power, radio, television, air flight, nuclear fission, satellites, and computation; it has the works. It’s an orgy of sibling rivalry. But genetic engineering is tomorrow’s native-born contribution to that family. It’s the newest, the riskiest, and if it survives and flourishes, it will become the most powerful. Biotech is a baby Hercules that wants to kick the slats out of the crib.

  Babies don’t stay babies. My first daughter, for instance, is for the moment a thriving teen. Her rocketing passage toward maturity is written all over her; every day sees her blatantly learning and growing. Biotech is the baby industry now, but when it’s big, it will reshape reality. To describe a biotech world, a world with a mature genetic technology, requires a new language. A new vocabulary, a new set of assumptions, a new literacy.

  A baby, once she gets going, does not stop. It’s a very different world, the future, but we’re never going to “get there.” There’s no place “there” for us to get. The future is a process, not a theme park. The future itself has a future. We, in this present moment, are part of the future’s past. The future is not an alien world, it is this very world, with different people, at a different time. Yesterday, today, or tomorrow, the clock never stops ticking. Every new stage must grow on the mulch of the last.

  Bearing that in mind, let me introduce you into a biotech world. Here you are, let us say, reading a book. Not this book (unless you’re some kind of antiquarian) but a similar one. Are there books in your biotech world? Yes. Made of paper? Sort of. Is that ink? Not ink as ink was previously understood, no; but why would you bother to notice that?

  Let me make a few impolite personal observations as you sit there reading. By twentieth-century standards, you don’t look very clean. In fact, you look rather greasy, and you’re somewhat odd-smelling. But you are impressively robust and glittery-eyed, and full of animal vitality. Even though you are a harmless reader of late-twenty-first-century pop-science books, praiseworthily engaged in the intellectual trends of your own decade, you don’t look especially scholarly. On the contrary: basically, you look like an athlete or supermodel. You look that way not because you’re all egotistically eager to stand out from the norm but because that is your norm. An athlete or a supermodel is what men and women are willing to pay to look like. In your epoch, flesh and the processes of its construction are very ductile. You have no tooth decay, no dandruff, no enlarged pores. Though you read too much, you have no glasses.

  Your home is snug and elegant. Its walls, floors, and furnishings are made of warm, organic substances that resemble cork, bamboo, and redwood, although they aren’t. The lawn outside your membrane window has eight or nine hundred species living in it. It is a biodiverse menagerie.

  You’re just a normal person in a biotech world. You are not some grand chrome-dome master of biotech—no single mind can ever master such a broad field. Biotech is not even your personal line of work; you just live there. Your lawn is aswarm with living things because of social pressure from your neighbors. A mowed lawn is a scandal; you wouldn’t subject the neighborhood to such a sight any more than you’d shave your children’s heads to eradicate lice. You don’t go out there and garden it, either. The lawn tools know more about plants than you do. And they work by themselves. It’s a city lawn, not a wilderness. It’s autogardening. The “wild” animals living in it don’t know they are under surveillance.

  Out on the street are scarab-colored nonpolluting vehicles that run on hydrogen. Like most industrial objects, they rot on command and return to harmless compost. Then there’s your plumbing, or, as people put it nowadays, your “waterworks.” In a biotech world, water networks are a bigger deal than bit streams. You’re not made out of digital bits—like all living things, you are made mostly of water. So that’s where you sensibly place your high-tech investments.

  You don’t have a “shower stall.” You have a standard, everyday body-imaging system that gives you complete interior and exterior health scans every morning as it washes you. Your toothbrush scans the contents of your mouth and catalogs its microorganisms. Your toilet is the most sophisticated network peripheral in the home. It provides you with vital metabolic information about your body—the substances that enter and leave it and the vital processes within it. Only fools are squeamish about this.

  Your bathroom cabinet is full of unguents, greases, and perfumes. There are some pills in there, but most of them do not contain drugs. Instead, they contain living, domesticated organisms that make drugs while living inside you. Some of the “pills” are cameras, with tiny sensors and onboard processing. Nothing in your medicine cabinet is sterile, not even the bandages. Modern bandages contain living organisms that are good for wounds.

  “Sterility” is what people do need when they don’t know what’s happening on a microbial level. In a biotech world, sterility is a confession of ignorance. It’s a tactic of desperation.

  In your kitchen, the mops have more processing power than twentieth-century national bureaucracies. Your kitchen is mostly a place of filters and membranes and films; it is certainly not a butcher shop or a place to process raw vegetable matter. You eat delicate and tasty knickknacks that differ radically from grotesque historical foodstuffs. You have no fridge, because nothing in your house ever rots without your permission.

  Even though this is a genetically altered world, there are no weird-looking “mutants” or “monsters” in your house, neighborhood, or city. You don’t have, for instance, a six-legged dog. The cop on the beat is not ten feet high, and she does not look like RoboCop; if she has a baton, it doubles as a swab. It’s not that such things are impossible for you and yours. Of course they are possible, but they are also crude publicity stunts dating from the eye-goggling infancy of biotech. In a mature biotech world, such nine-day wonders are considered crass and corny. They make no common sense.

  Back in the early days of harnessing DNA, people were always fussing about full-grown multicellular beings—genetically altered humans, plants, or animals. There was a lot of anxious talk about clones (genetic duplicates) or chimeras (creatures with fused cells, whose bodies are mosaics of different species). Genetically modified organisms contained snippets of alien DNA, such as the artist Eduardo Kac’s rabbit “Alba.” That arty little rabbit, infused with jellyfish genes, could glow bright green in public. Alba the rabbit made a well-nigh perfect art-world cause célèbre at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Alba really panicked the bourgeoisie and was a nice succès de scandale, a worthy credit to the social insight of the artist. But once you’d manufactured a glowing green rabbit and shown it off, why would you ever want or need more than one?

  For you, a modern DNA-literate person, weird animals have very little to do with the actual, real-world genetic industry. Frankly, the flesh of full-grown plants and animals just gets in the way. They might be dramatic examples of the concept (the way humanoid robots were once dramatic versions of the concept of automation). But the “threat” of “automation” turned out to be mostly hokum, and there were never any humanoid robots clanking around in real life, working on assembly lines. The same objection goes for monster Frankenstein animals. Yes, they sound really cool and scary, but go ahead, make one. Where is the market?

  Expressing DNA in the genomes of large organisms is slow and clumsy. Creating an animal means deputizing some large and reluctant multicellular bureaucracy to carry out your will. That is not where the action is. It doesn’t take efficient, industrial advantage of the raw power of DNA as a means of production.

  Livestock requires long, solemn months of growth and delivery, just like a human baby. That is not industry, that is traditional unskilled labor.