Melanie McGrath - Hard, Soft and Wet

‘Let’s hope so,’ Nancy said.

Sitting in bed in Nancy’s room, watching the shadows play about her books, I decided to give myself a mission. I would hunt down the future, starting with the everyday intimations of tomorrow – the games, gadgets and consumer fads – that were already an invisible part of so many young lives and I would work my way up to the networks, which will, in their turn, become a mundane part of the lives of those children’s children, and perhaps also of my own children. If digital culture was going to be the new frontier, I had an urge to become one of its pioneers, to comprehend it from the inside, to feel less like an observer and more like a participant. To be truly honest, I wanted to be sure there would be a future – of almost any sort.

Three days later I’m driving back across the Golden Gate Bridge towards San Francisco admiring the heaped up pile of the city stretched silver white across the bay. Streaks of sun are beginning to slice through the morning mist on the ocean side and the weatherman at KCBS radio has promised it’s going to stay sunny and dry until the weekend. Traffic stammers along at 19th Avenue, stop-starting and banging about for breath, before picking up speed south of the city and unwinding into two skeins at the exit to Silicon Valley and San Jose. America feels ordered and uncomplicated today.

Alex Rothman and his dad are expecting me the other side of lunchtime.

Twenty miles further on at Millbrae the mist is all burned off. By the time I’ve reached the Valley town of Redwood City I’m popping the first of the morning’s root beers and thinking about how the world must have been when I was three, the same age as Alex. I say must have been, because all I have by way of memory from that time are vague impressions of age-long days and months, spiked at regular intervals with odd intrusions of anxiety and our neighbour Mrs Ivan’s treacle toffee. I remember my dad buying me a clockwork duck when he won the football pools and I can taste the toffee apples Mrs Ivan made on fireworks night. But of the larger world around about I can recall almost nothing.

The events of the year spanning ’67 and ’68 when I was three passed me by. While the Paris uprisings raged, Woodstock rocked, Vietnam was plundered, my generation was regardless, too busy being fed and formed by our mothers and – maybe – our fathers too. Too busy with Alphabetti Spaghetti and Top of the Pops , the TV and David Cassidy and all our clockwork ducks and toffee apples.

So I wonder what Alex will remember of now, of this week, this month, this year, of this day even, in twenty years from now?

Somewhere in Palo Alto I take a wrong turn and end up driving around the suburbs before finding myself by some miracle back at Page Mill Road from where my directions begin again. With the map spread out on my lap I head west towards the Santa Cruz Mountains. Up at 6000 ft on Skyline Road a wispy grey foam appears to have crept back over the Valley, hinting at rain, but the radio weather reports continue to promise a dry day. I wonder if the mist might be a smog cloud spilled over from San Francisco or San Jose, if such a thing ever happens. By the time I reach Boulder Creek my head feels as thick as a plate of dumplings left to boil too long.

I explain to the man in the Boulder Creek General Store that I have a migraine coming on.

‘That’ll be a thunderstorm, I expect,’ he replies, wrapping a packet of painkillers in a brown paper bag with a missing persons message on it, then dumping the change on the counter. I mention that the weather reports are insisting it’s going to stay dry.

‘The two most unpredictable things in this world are weather and women,’ the man says, turning away.

Boulder Creek was a logging town until the Silicon Valley suits started moving in, and though it still has some of the tarry conservatism and pine-needle neighbourliness left over from those days, the racketing confidence of new money runs through its veins.

In the driveway where Alex lives a woman is loading bags into a station wagon. She looks up at me, wary, and gestures with her arm towards the porch but before I’ve reached the door a man has already opened it and ushers me in, muttering, ‘My wife is running into town to pick up some supplies because friends of theirs think there’s going to be a storm.’

Alex’s father, Peter, is one of those gently cumbersome, ursine men peculiar to North America; a biter on life, a big-eating, big-earning human Panzer tank. According to Nancy, he develops virtual reality software for financiers and the US military, through which connection they are on waving terms at industry parties. His job is to write code so complex that it can trick a person into imagining he’s moving through a stock exchange, or crouching in a bunker and surveying the horizon, when all he is really doing is processing data projected on to a screen and held fast in front of his eyes by a helmet.

Wasting no time on niceties, the human Panzer waves me into an armchair, surges over to a cupboard by the kitchen, dives in and comes up for air minutes later with a black strip of a thing trailing cables from its sides. Plugs it into a computer on the table.

‘This,’ he announces, ‘is a total immersion VR helmet.’

The thing in his hands shines like a black ball of insect eyes. He urges me to put it on. Inside the helmet a blue room rises. For a moment it feels as though I’m in a deep sea diving bell, listening to the steady purr of my breath and drinking in the first view of a newly discovered territory.

‘It’s great isn’t it?’ Peter tips me very gently with the ridged track of his palm. ‘Look, when you move your head, the computerized world of images inside the helmet moves with you.’ I glance down at the depths, and look up at the heights. All blue. Too blue to belong to for long. I lift the helmet from my face to find a little boy watching impassively, marking time in the way that children often do. This is Alex. A regular-looking three-year-old. Matt brown hair, Bermudas and a sweat shirt, nothing like the grinning future-creature I’d envisaged at the weekend. I’m shamefully disappointed.

‘So, Alex, buddy,’ says the father to his son, ‘say hello.’ He gestures towards me.

‘Hello,’ obeys Alex, inching forward. We cross gazes for a moment then I open with a question.

‘What’s your favourite colour, Alex?’ I’m imagining that it must be blue. VR blue. But Alex merely looks at me, turns tail and toddles back to his room. He returns with a Bart Simpson doll.

‘Bart Simpson, great,’ say I, taking the doll, ‘but you play with computers, too, don’t you Alex?’

The boy scampers back to his room. Returns with a Bugs Bunny wind-up toy. Winds it, sets it pacing and begins squealing in time with the clockwork.

‘Do you have any electronic toys you could show me, Alex?’

Alex contemplates, snatches Bart Simpson, flees back to his room. Five minutes later he comes running out clutching a Power Ranger.

‘Look,’ says Alex, sprawling on the carpet and using the Power Ranger’s face to shovel out some of the shag pile. ‘Cool.’

‘So it is,’ I chirp, then more sly, leaning down to whisper in the boy’s ear, ‘but I bet it’s not as cool as the games you play with Dad’s computers.’

Alex pushes my head away in disgust. The head incidentally which is booming along the temples in time with my breath and pulse.

Peter returns from putting away the VR helmet. ‘Alex first wore one of those things on the fourth of July 1992, when he was just over a year old. The youngest kid ever. He loves it. Navigates through buildings, whole star systems in virtual reality. Doesn’t even know the alphabet yet. Now, Buddy.’ Peter turns his attention to his son and lifting the boy onto his knee, silencing the squeals, whispers ‘tell us what you put on when you’re playing special games.’