Future Spirits The future is coming, and if you’ve been built with the right kind of bones, you can feel its echoes on the atmosphere, and taste its dreams on the air. This is the moment all possible futures converge to, but the question is, where is the future diverging to? There are realities where humanity has outpaced evolutionary processes, and personal modifications create unique species often enough to keep step with the ticks of the clock, variations going extinct as they’re replaced with new and different animals. In these worlds the Kama Sutra is rendered irrelevant as the organs and positions it describe cease to exist and the concept of written suggestions prove silly in the face of unceasing experimentation. On another, disorder and ingenuity are curbed through legislation and enforced moral homogeneity. Sparks of chaos are tempered through the rigid application of order, instituting a predictable, orthodox existence. Authority virtually eliminates passionate crime, and a thorough bureaucracy has made crimes of necessity superfluous, and greed is held largely at bay by a widely accepted code of social justice. Another consists of a spiritual compromise where reality changes little, while information is freed to become the sole vehicle of language, communication, commerce and life. Electric blood flows unseen through homes and offices and personal transports and machines, while electric brains perform the thoughtful tasks that free our minds to fuel an economy of ideas. And the variants run together like a spilt tray of wines, mixing, diluting, loosing fresh bouquets and tastes both sweet and savage. Some ripen with age, others become stale, and others breed new life and new possibility. And like many discussions best held over wine, only the giddy enjoy these exchanges, and only the drunk understand them.