On Augury

Dear Readers,

What an auspicious date for you to read about Augury!

This is one of my posts that isn't really part of a series, or anything else like that. I feel like, in the course of what I've been writing about, I have not given a lot of attention to Augury, so I want to write a little about what it is and what it does for my work.

Don't expect me to get too technically detailed here, since I really am not a very technical person to begin with, at least when it comes to highly sophisticated pieces of technology that can look across timelines and uncollapse collapsed probability wave functions back into their original distributions. That's where it gets over my head.

What Augury does for me, though, I can wax a little more poetic about.  There are science fiction stories where technologies like Augury allow people to literally "see" the future, and then usually some kind of hijinks ensue which show the hubristic people that they should not have such technology.

These stories are absurd for a few reasons.  For one, they never really define what it means to "see" the future.  Do you see it in video, an eye onto wherever in the Universe you want to look?  Even for a device that can see the present, that would be pretty impressive.  Another problem is that I doubt such technology, if it were in the right hands, would really cause a problem.  The ability to see future possibilities would just allow people to make wiser decisions.  The uncertainty to the future remains.

The biggest problem, however, is that they always see the future, as if for some reason no one could imagine a technology that could view the past, alternate pasts, or alternate presents.  Augury does these things for me.

You see, the Augury technology that we use at the University is no simple futuroscope.  It's a complex beast.  First, you can't just "see" another time stream.  It does not work that way, though I wish it did.  All that Augury can pick up is cultural elements, emotional products.  Things driven by sentient personalities.  I can't "see" buildings unless they are depicted in some form of art.  It's only through records that Augury shows me day to day life.

Of course, some records give me snippets of everyday life.  Sometimes a video here or there shows something.  Surveillance records, unfortunately, are often deleted too quickly for us to pick up.  And the more copies there are of something, the stronger the signal.  This also makes it harder to pick up outlier time streams, but signal boosting is a highly technical matter that, as I said, I don't particularly understand myself.

What I do understand is the rich tapestry of cultural data that I can get from the Augury Department.  They feed me something raw, a slightly interpreted stream of video, photographs, writing, art, music, the lot of it.  The data come in in chunks from specific time streams, spread across a period of time in each stream.  I like to think of each piece of data as one of the Fates' threads, interwoven with the others initially, but now separated.  Augury feeds me the unraveled quilt of time, and it falls to the Anachronist to study the threads in order to learn how to sew it all back together.

I like the romanticism in that.  My newfound profession excites me because I am a kismet hunter, a spelunker in times long past and long to come.  And these disparate threads come together towards the pursuit of an age-old question that humanity struggles with every day: "What the hell is going on, and what does it mean?"

Always,

Dr. John Skylar
Chairman
Department of Anachronism
University of Constantinople