The subject of John Titor came up in conversation today. In case you never heard, he showed up in early 2001 claiming to be a time-traveler from the year 2036.
Sadly, many people believed him, and many still do.
Apparently, the world in 2036 is recovering from a global war in which American civil liberties eroded to the point that, in 2004-2005, there were “Waco-type events” on a weekly basis, and the country finally fell into civil war, the opposing factions being centralized urban areas and organized rural militias. Then the militias allied themselves with the Russians, who subsequently nuked the urban areas, leaving the United States a semi-nuclear wasteland.
Yep. It gets better.
This war escalates and draws in China and the EU, and by Titor’s time, a shaky and traumatized US is split into five regions, each governed by a separate president but united under a central Constitution. The economy is largely agrarian, and technology is scarce. Despite this, Titor joins an elite legion of time-travelers, and he’s sent back to 1975 to acquire (get this) an IBM 5100 computer.
Why? Because, as we all know, Unix will stop functioning in 2038 due to the 4-byte time stamp in C, and since the engineers of the future haven’t heard of GCC and don’t know how to compile from hand, all computers in the world will explode in flames and civilization as we know it will crumble. Apparently, the old 5100, which doesn’t exist in the future (because all the geeks with computers and porn collections in their basements are dead, I guess) has some undocumented and magical ability to translate between C, APL and machine-code. All praise Mr. Titor, savior of what’s left of the free world.
Of course, Mr. Titor came somewhat prepared to deflect most of the skepticism that came his way. He refused to answer any questions about the near-future, on account of the fact that knowing the future can restrict free-will. Only problem is, he himself acknowledges the Heisenberg-Everett multiple-world problem, which means that any such concerns are irrelevant. So, if our enigmatic time-traveler’s so lonely that he’s posting on crackpot bulletin-boards, why not have a little fun predicting the future? After all, it’s impossible that it’ll be his future that’ll be affected.
Titor gave only vague answers, claiming that the America of 2036 is a pretty bleak place, where most prejudices have been erased by the need to work communally, but lifespans have been shortened and medicine has reverted to 19th-century standards (yet they have the resources to manufacture time-machines). He claims that religion and the media exist in similar but less centralized forms, that most languages have not changed, and basically everyone exists in a sort of Wild-West casting party. He predicted that the Olympics would cease to be after 2004. This is the first of only two concrete, verifiable predictions he made.
Of course, Titor posted pictures of his time machine, which looks suspiciously like an old SKS ammo box with some Radio Shack dials attached. Like fellow time-traveler Michael J. Fox, he uses the device in his car. He claims the device operates on a micro-singularity black hole, which will apparently be created and harnessed by the folks at CERN later this year. This is the second concrete prediction.
Well, 2004 is three-quarters over, so we’ll see what happens. He also posted this as proof:
Supposedly, this is a device that creates the Kerr singularities that warp gravity and bend light, thereby making time-travel possible. Of course, notice that while the “laser beam” seems bent, none of the objects behind it are distorted in the least. Theoretically, all the light in the vicinity of the device should be distorted. Hm.
Given the predictions of our rapid descent into police-state and man-vs-government 2nd-amendment worst-case scenarios, it’s easy to see where some folks could take off and run with the idea that it’s an allegory to our current post-1911 situation. Here are a few quotes that come off as a bit scary:
((Does the civil war start in such a way that with this foreknowledge those willing will have time to remove themselves to safer locations?))
Yes. You will be forced to ask yourself how many civil rights you will give up to feel safe.
((Will you readily be able to identify the enemy?))
They will be the ones arresting and holding people without due process.
As far as the war goes, my best advice is to find at least 5 people within 100 miles of you that you trust with your life.
Yes, EMP took out a great number of electronic devices. That’s one of the reasons why we don’t have reliable technology laying around. However, in the opening hours of N Day, the Russians did not launch any high altitude detonations. They knew we would most likely clean up after them so they wanted everyone outside the cities to be able to communicate. Most of the warheads that hit the cities came in threes and exploded close to the ground. The heavy EMP damage was isolated to those areas.
So, all ribbing aside, where does this leave us? Sure, Titor’s story could be any of a hundred generic science fiction paperbacks littering the used bins, but the larger story of him trying timidly to convince folks makes for a neat sort of open-ended storytelling with no clear narrator. Titor’s not the messiah screaming to deaf crowds from the rooftops: either you believe him or not, and to hear him tell it, he doesn’t care. He portrays himself as a lonely man who’s hooked up with his family in the present and just feels like reaching out to somebody, even as he feels compelled to hold back.
If this was just a book, it’d be moderately interesting, but taken in the wider context of Titor’s narration, his claims, and the reaction of many people to it, it becomes something altogether more arresting. Time-traveler or not, John Titor’s given us a very new and hopefully not unique way to write a neat sort of distributed fiction that gains as much from its periphery as it does from the telling itself.