Iris

By Norman Crane

Iris is an epic science fiction book about love. It's not written by a best-selling author and it hasn't topped any charts. But the reason for that is simple: this page doesn't exist yet.

If you can read this do not hit F5.

Listen to me. The next decade is going to be an exciting and hopeful time. You'll witness the birth of the eighth billion human on Earth and live through the revelation of Kurt Schwaller's theory of everything. It's important that you enjoy it, because in 2025 everything will change. I know. I lived through it. My friend Bakshi likes to say that we're locked into a single future. Iris used to say that no one can take away the past. I wish I knew what you looked like. I wish I knew then what I know now. But if Bakshi's right, at least you'll be prepared. You still have time. Between now and March 27, 2025, they'll try to tell you that a hundred different things are the most important. They'll be wrong. Live, love and imagine. And, if you happen to meet Iris, go ahead ask her about the theory. She'll blow your mind, too.

Hit F5.

Hit F5.

Hit F5.

• Language: English
• Publisher: XinXii
• Release date: Jun 29, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310048579

Book preview

Crane

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Dedication

This story is for M, who challenged me to write something about my feelings rather just my ideas. I know this isn’t what you had in mind, but maybe you’ll like it anyway.

Iris

The first person to ever tell me the theory was Iris. It was nighttime in 2015, and we were lying on an old mattress on the roof of a four-storey apartment building in a university town in southern Ontario. A party was going on downstairs to which we'd both been invited and from whose monotony we'd helped each other escape through an ordinary white door that said No entrance. It was summer. I remember the heat waves and the radiating warmth of the asphalt. Our semester was over and we had started existing until the next one started in the way all students exist when they don't spend their months off at home or touring Europe. I could feel the bass thumping from below. I could see the infinite stars in the cloudless sky. The sound seemed so disconnected from the image. Iris and I weren't dating, we were just friends, but she leaned toward me on the mattress that night until I could feel her breathing on my neck, and, with my eyes pointed spaceward, she began: What if...

Back then it was pure speculation, a wild fantasy inspired by the THC from the joint we were passing back and forth and uninhibited by the beer we'd already drunk. There was nothing scientific or even philosophical about Iris' telling of it. The theory was a flight of imagination influenced by her name and personalized by the genetic defect of her eyes, which her doctors had said would render her blind by fifty. Even thirty-five seemed far away. It's heartbreaking now to know that Iris never did live to experience her blindness—her own genetic fate interrupted by the genetic fate of the world—but that night, imagination, the quality Einstein called more important than knowledge, lit up both our brains in synapses of neon as we shared our joint, sucking it into glowing nothingness, Iris paranoid that she'd wake up one morning in eternal darkness despite the doctors' assurances that her blindness would occur gradually, and me fearing that I would never find love, never share my life with anyone, but soothed at least by Iris' words and her impossible ideas because Einstein was right, and imagination is magical enough to cure anything.

2025, Pre-

I graduated with a degree in one field, found a low paying job in another, got married, worked my way to slightly better pay, wanted to have a child, bought a Beagle named Pillow as a temporary substitute, lived in an apartment overlooking a green garbage bin that was always full of beer cans and pizza boxes, and held my wife, crying, when we found out that we couldn't have children. Somewhere along the way my parents died and Kurt Schwaller, a physicist from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, proved a grand theory of everything that rather than being based on the vibrations of strings, was based on a property of particles called viscous time force. I never understood the details. To me they lacked imagination. The overriding point, the experts on television told us, was that given enough data and computing power we could now predict the outcome of anything. The effect was that no one wanted to study theoretical physics and everyone wanted to make breakthroughs in data collection systems and biological hardware. Hackers created a version of Linux that ran from DNA. Western Digital released the first working holographic storage drive. The NSA, FSB, BND and other agencies rushed to put their suddenly valuable mass of unprocessed raw spy data to prognostic use. A Chinese bookmaker known only by the nick ##!! wrote a piece of Python code that could predict the outcomes of hockey games. Within a month, the NHL and KHL were scrambling to come up with ways of saving their leagues by making them more unpredictable. They introduced elements of chance: power plays without penalties, a tilting ice surface, fluctuating rules that sometimes allowed for icings and offsides and sometimes not, and, finally, a pre-game lottery by which the names of the players on both teams were