Portal 1986

Now that Neuralink is coming online: let's look at the skiffy story in which I first read it. That'd be Portal. That's Rob Swigart's 1986 game for the Commodore 64; our family got this one in 1987 for the PCjrTandy 1200. I hear the Amiga had the better graphics, despite Tandy being good for it. In 1986 nobody was designing for the Tandy's graphics-card; so games like this and King's Quest and Starflight went out on PCjr settings, looking worse than they should have, and also not having mouse support. Below the Root would be another one looking better on the Commodore 64 than it ever did on PC.

Portal is an interactive-fiction. Interface is, like Starflight, windowed; but I had to use the keyboard. It is at heart a dialogue-tree... not unlike that Kharak manual. Your job is to expose exposition and story, between-which this "game" makes little distinction. Swigart also wrote a novel for those who didn't want the interface. The novel can be LibreOffice'd from the LRF file here, legally apparently.

Here's the plot: player is back from some trip to space, as in Planet of the Apes per Serling. Uh oh; nobody's home but us robots. The player learns, from the robots, about the genius teenaged protagonist Peter Devore, stand-in for the physics-GCSE part of the target audience. Devore believed he was in psychic FtL contact with a hibernate on her way to Alpha Lyrae Vega. (Less because of any decent planets there; more because it's poetic.) The transport-vessel then confirmed that the contact is reeeaal. Here is the irruption of magic (basically) into a supposedly-hard SF future. HP Lovecraft meets Robert Heinlein; both are namechecked.

As a fourteen-year-old, preGCSE (I didn't know about Lagrange et al.), I enjoyed King's Quest, and then Starflight and Below the Root. I did not enjoy Portal. The interface got in my way. If you play the DOS version, which is the PCjr version, you have to dial the clockcycle waaay back; after which, stuff loads too slow. Swigart tried a Kickstarter to republish this with a better UI but couldn't interest enough nerds; couldn't convince them "why not just a book".

- so now it's 2024. Let's check out the backstory. How [bad] was Swigart's crystal ball?

First up: space is hard. In our real timeline we did get a space-station on schedule - the ISS - but we didn't get any trips to the Moon or the "Elpies" (lagranges), much less Mars. (Although oddly Cassini went out before Swigart has his Saturn probe go out. And extrasolar planets are spotted just a few years later than spotted in our timeline.) Back in 1986 only governments could afford to get cargo into LEO, and badly at that. Kilos-per-dollar were ridiculous. Swigart I think assumed either that private costs would go down, or that governments would want to keep paying to it.

Swigart assumed that the USSR would hang around a few more decades; this USSR would form a check against NASA. That's even assuming Chernobyl, which is in the PCjr version of the story - I am guessing, rushed in, at the last moment. By May-June 1986, most of us in our juniorhigh figured that the Soviet system was a joke and wouldn't last in that form. I think no USSR meant no SDI and no pressing need for spaceflight at that price. Which all means I agree with Swigart we could have been running faster than we did; I blame politicians, not Sci-Fi. (Would've been nice if someone wrote Kerbal earlier. Not Swigart in 1986 obviously; but someone on a solid 486 in the mid1990s should have handled something.)

Medical-science is also lagging. We have many more vaccines. Most have come to us very recently; some question if we have good vaccines. And curing diseases once-caught is lagging behind Swigart's predictions. If space is hard, immunology and virus-fighting is/are for geniuses.

On the other hand Portal's gene-modding is good enough for furries (Swigart had a thing for... otters) and a "unisex" gender, although apparently not trans (ywnbaw).

Not lagging for Portal is computer-systems for personal use, but it's not much a plot-point. And there's cheap energy, beamed in from space and taken from fusion, on account fission is banned. In real-life of course there's no fusion and probably no space-energy either. Energy production itself is disliked in Davos because screw you, proles. We should have more energy than we have; again, Swigart had a rosier view of politicians than he should.

In Portal maglev is available in Japan by the early 2000s just like in real life. Liquid-nitrogen cars are supposed to take over from them but, LOL, no.

The best stuff Swigart was promising to us is now being delivered by Elon Musk . . . and only by Elon Musk. I already noted Neuralink, which, best I can tell, is on track for the story: 2020s. Tunnels under major cities weren't had in the 1990s but may be had now with the Boring Company. And then... there's space.