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turns trying to change the immutable future.

    Hazzard said, in an interview several months later: ‘At first, it seemed like some kind of perverse reaction-time test: instead of having to hit the green button when the green light came on, you had to try to hit the red button, and vice versa. And at first, I really believed I was “obeying” the signal only because I couldn’t discipline my reflexes to do anything so “difficult” as contradicting it. In retrospect, I know that was a rationalisation, but I was quite convinced at the time. So I had the computer swap the conventions
    — and of course, that didn’t help. Whenever the display said I was going to open the shutter — however it expressed that fact — I opened it.’

    ‘And how did that make you feel? Soulless? Robotic? A prisoner to fate?’

    ‘No. At first, just . . . clumsy. Uncoordinated. So clumsy I couldn’t hit the wrong button, no matter how hard I tried. And then, after a while, the whole thing began to seem perfectly . . . normal. I wasn’t being
    “forced” to open the shutter; I was opening it precisely when I felt like opening it, and observing the consequences — observing them before the event, yes, but that hardly seemed important any more. Wanting to “not open” it when I already knew that I would seemed as absurd as wanting to change something in the past that I already knew had happened. Does not being able to rewrite history make you feel “soulless”?’

    ‘No.’

    ‘This was exactly the same.’

    Extending the device’s range was easy; by having the detector itself trigger the shutter in a feedback loop, two seconds could become four seconds, four hours, or four days. Or four centuries — in theory. The real problem was bandwidth; simply blocking off the view of Chen’s galaxy, or not, coded only a single bit of information, and the shutter couldn’t be strobed at too high a rate, since the detector took almost half a second to lose enough charge to unequivocally signal a future exposure.

    Bandwidth is still a problem, although the current generation of Hazzard Machines have path lengths of a hundred light years, and detectors made up of millions of pixels, each one sensitive enough to be modulated at megabaud rates. Governments and large corporations use most of this vast capacity, for purposes that remain obscure — and still they’re desperate for more.

    As a birthright, though, everyone on the planet is granted one hundred and twenty-eight bytes a day. With the most efficient data-compression schemes, this can code about a hundred words of text; not enough to describe the future in microscopic detail, but enough for a summary of the day’s events.

    A hundred words a day; three million words in a lifetime. The last entry in my own diary was received in 2032, eighteen years before my birth, one hundred years before my death. The history of the next millennium is taught in schools: the end of famine and disease, the end of nationalism and genocide, the end of poverty, bigotry and superstition. There are glorious times ahead.

    If our descendants are telling the truth.

    * * * *

    The wedding was, mostly, just as I’d known it would be. The best man, Pria, had his arm in a sling from a mugging in the early hours of the morning — we’d laughed over that when we’d first met, in high school, a decade before.

    ‘But what if I stay out of that alley?’ he’d joked.

    ‘Then I’ll have to break it for you, won’t I? You’re not shunting my wedding day!’

    Shunting was a fantasy for children, the subject of juvenile schlock-ROMs. Shunting was what happened when you grimaced and sweated and gritted your teeth and absolutely refused to participate in something unpleasant that you knew was going to happen. In the ROMs, the offending future was magicked away into a parallel universe, by sheer mental discipline and the force of plot convenience. Drinking the right brand of cola also seemed to help.

    In