Twenty futures in which something ordinary has gone, or arrived. No cars in the city. No sugar in industrial food. A night sky you can see stars from. Where each sits was worked out from what it is about, so no part of this chart was arranged for you.
Plate I · The EphemerisEpoch 1
Plausible → feral20 plotted
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Futures that sit near each other here were put there because they read as being about similar things. It is a rough sort, not a verdict — plenty of near neighbours have nothing to do with each other, and those accidents are usually the interesting part.
Where a star sits is what it is about. Futures that read as being about similar things end up near each other. The arrangement was worked out once and then locked, so a future written next year takes its place among these without shifting any of them — which is why this is somewhere you can come back to rather than a picture that gets redrawn.
Colour is how much of a stretch it is — cool where it has visibly begun somewhere already, warm where it would take some arguing. The two ends are matched for brightness on purpose, so a bolder future never looks like a better-liked one.
Brightness is judgment, not traffic. A star brightens when someone holds it or keeps something printed from it. Being looked at earns nothing, and visits are recorded nowhere. Today every star sits on the floor of the scale, because nobody has chosen anything yet — the chart lights up as people do.
Only the camera moves. Nothing on this chart twinkles or drifts. An engraved plate does not scintillate; you move over it.
None of this is prediction: a prediction tells you which future arrives, and every star here only says what would have to be true for one of them to. Each names the place you would first see the difference — a street, a shelf, a skyline — because a future nobody can picture standing somewhere is an argument rather than a future. Deal your own →
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