And in fact Germany was the country with the most innovative car technologies that had ever been left to slumber in a drawer. Hardly any market worldwide was fonder of petrol motors and speedsters. While in Asia and the USA the number of hybrid cars on the roads had been steadily dropping in favour of ever more sustainable designs, in Germany the hybrid itself had never even made a dent. Nowhere else were hydrogen, fuel cells and electric cars condemned to such a miserable waking death. And nowhere else in the world did men set such store by having a big, imposing car, and by driving it themselves – despite the availability of sophisticated and totally safe autopilots. It was as though whenever the Germanic national character set out to find itself, it always ended up, with tiresome predictability, behind the steering wheel. The only thing less popular hereabouts than the compact car was the future itself.
All of which explained why the Nissan crept along so slowly. Vogelaar swore, and slapped the wheel. When he finally turned into the car park at the Crystal Brain, he was bathed in sweat. He leapt from the cabin and strode hurriedly across to the main entrance.
Einstein looked him square in the face, briefly.
The building had been put up in 2020, not far from the government quarter, but it still looked as though it had just landed. It was a cubist glass UFO with dozens of perfectly faceted surfaces where the logo ‘Crystal Brain’ came and went, glowing like a passing thought. Worlds showed like ghosts in the façade as you approached, different from every angle: raptors loping across the Jurassic savannah, Stone Age hunters hurling their spears at mammoths, Assyrian kings holding court. He saw Greek hoplites, Roman emperors, Napoleon on horseback and Egyptian princesses, pyramids and Gothic cathedrals, the Kon-Tiki and the Titanic, satellites, space stations, moon bases, the stern face of Abraham Lincoln, Shakespeare’s bald head and smiling face, Bismarck, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Konrad Adenauer, Marilyn Monroe, John Lennon, Mahatma Gandhi, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Helmut Kohl, Bill Gates, the Dalai Lama, Thomas Reiter, Julian Orley, geocentric, heliocentric and modern representations of the universe, abstract diagrams of quantum worlds on the Planck scale, molecules, atoms, quarks and superstrings like model building blocks, the invention of the wheel, of printing, of curried sausage. All this and infinitely more was there, holographically embedded in the huge walls; it came to life, breathed, pulsated; the figures turned their heads, winked, smiled, shook hands, walked, flew, swam and vanished again as the viewer moved around them. The exterior alone was a masterpiece, a wonder of the modern world, and yet it represented barely a fraction of what was hidden within.
When Vogelaar stepped inside the Crystal Brain, he was entering the world’s greatest concentration of knowledge in the smallest space.
He walked through the foyer’s shimmering dome. Lifts rose and fell to either side of him, seemingly unsupported, a sophisticated optical illusion. They were a fractal representation of the building itself, just as everything in the Crystal Brain was built using the principle of self-similarity. The smallest component, the memory crystal, resembled the largest, the building itself. A crystal in a crystal in a crystal.
The world’s memory.
The tales that mankind had to tell about the world could fit either in one single book, or into so many that even a whole extra planet full of libraries would not be enough to hold them. The Bible, the Qur’an and the Torah knew nothing of evolution, or of the tangled chains of causality, or of Schrödinger’s cat, nothing of the uncertainty principle or standard deviation, nothing of non-linear equations and black holes, nothing of the multiverse, of extra-dimensional space or of how time’s arrow could be made to point backwards. These books were sturdy, impregnable vehicles of faith driving down a one-way street to the absolute truth; they made vast claims, but they were compact.
Look beyond these, though, and the planet was bursting with information.
History alone was a vast academic discipline: millions and millions of works dedicated to deciphering the past, like a cloud chamber filled with the trails of fleeting elementary particles. It was almost impossible to determine their speed and direction, regardless whether they had to do with the colour of Charlemagne’s hair or with whether he had ever even existed. There was huge variety in the fields of physics, philosophy, futurology. The dizzying number of all articles published to date, all the essays, novellas, novels, poems, song lyrics, the works of Bob Dylan alone and then all the commentary about them! The verbiage of assembly instructions for stainless-steel barbecue grills, the meteorological data that had heaped up since records began, the collected speeches of the Dalai Lama, the totality of every menu from every Chinese restaurant from Cape Horn to the Bosphorus, the avaricious words from every one of Uncle Scrooge McDuck’s speech balloons, the angry, exasperated replies that his hapless nephew quacks in turn, the careful record of every leaflet from every packet sold of haemorrhoid cream or anti-depressives…
There was definitely a storage problem.
The book was definitely not the answer.
But CD-ROMs, DVDs and hard drives had also run up against the limits of their capacity, helpless in the face of the exponential growth of information. They were threatened by digital oblivion. Given how long chiselled stone slabs could last, Christianity could take comfort in the thought that the Ten Commandments still existed somewhere. Books could only last about two hundred years, unless they were printed with iron-free ink on acid-free paper, in which case their life expectancy was triple that. Celluloid film was estimated to last about four hundred years, CDs and DVDs maybe one hundred, while floppy discs lasted maybe a decade. Even so, floppies were still in theory better than USB sticks, which showed signs of amnesia after only three years, but then again there were no floppy disc drives any longer. There were thus three principal obstacles to a permanently accessible and truly compact global memory: limited storage capacity, rapid storage decay, rapid hardware obsolescence.
Holographics had solved all three problems at one blow.
The eight storeys of the Crystal Brain housed racks of crystals and laser reading desks, roomy lounges for historical sightseers; it was an El Dorado for an alien who might happen along one day far in the future, clearing away the rampant vegetation in search of human artefacts. Vogelaar, though, blind to the glories around him, made for one of the lifts and rode it down to the second sub-basement, where storage space could be rented for private data. He authorised himself – eye-scan, hand-print, all the usual – and was let through to an atrium glowing with diffuse light.
‘Number 17-44-27-15,’ he said.
The system asked him if he wanted a place at the lasers. Vogelaar declined, saying that he would take his data away with him.
‘Aisle 17, section B-2,’ the system said. ‘Do you know your way about, or would you like directions?’
‘I know my way.’
‘Please retrieve your crystal within five minutes.’
A glass door slid back at the end of the atrium. Behind it, aisles branched off to either side, their walls apparently smooth and featureless. Lines ran along the floor, marked with aisle and section numbers. Vogelaar went to his aisle, stopped after a few steps and turned his head to the left. Only the closest examination revealed that the mirror-smooth wall was in fact divided up into tiny squares.
‘17-44-27-15 is being prepared for delivery,’ the system said.
A faint mechanical click sounded from the mirror. Then a thin, rectangular rod slid out. The transparent object inside was about the size of half a sugar cube. One of millions of crystals that made up the totality of the Crystal Brain, high-efficiency optical storage media with integrated data processing and encryption. They had no moving parts and were practically indestructible. Memory crystals had a storage capacity of one to five terabytes, and were readable at several gigabytes per second. Access time was well under a millisecond. The storage was written in by lasers, etching electronically readable data patterns into the layers of the crystal. A single layer could hold millions of bits; one crystal could hold thousands of pages. Vogelaar’s dossier took up only a tiny fraction of that.