Author’s notes
I am at an age where I don’t feel the need to look back, to rebuild, I prefer to force myself to imagine the future, so I will make an Album with new characters. I will talk about my generation grappling with a pervasive technological revolution. I will talk about the attraction and distrust towards it, about the resurfacing of manual labor as a resistance to digital. I will talk about biology and other languages, but I will do it following the thread of a longer story that perhaps I will tell in installments as I did with the first Albums. Marco Paolini
The story
In the space station in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, there are telephone booths available to travelers; they are very modern, comfortable, and allow you to make video calls, but they are fixed. None of the film’s protagonists use a mobile phone or a PDA. In 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Jules Verne imagines the use of energy, materials, and technologies that are very similar to those that were actually used for modern submarines. But the most astonishing and accurate predictions about the future seem to be those contained in the Thousand and One Nights: the invention of the password “open sesame” and the touch-screen of Aladdin’s lamp.
We can therefore confidently await the arrival of the flying carpet in a reasonable time. It seems to me that I can conclude that it is much more difficult to make predictions about the short-term future than about the long-term. Yet the near future should be part of a horizon to which we look carefully. A dilated present like the one we live in risks both erasing the memory of the past and inhibiting any reasoning about the future, taking for granted that it is an update of the present, an update “compatible” with the present.
Telling stories set in the near future is an exercise confined to one genre: science fiction. There is a tradition of science fiction in literature and cinema, but it is not very widespread in the theater. To cut to the chase, it is best to immediately say that Prime Number is an experiment in science fiction narrated in the theater, but the authors do not like to call it that. Prime Number is a story that tells of a probable future made of things, beasts and humans shuffled together like cards before playing. Prime Number is also the nickname of the protagonist, son of Hector and an uncertain mother. But even things and beasts have voices and thoughts in this story. Paolini and Bettin, co-authors of this work, started from some questions: What is the relationship of each of us with the evolution of technologies? How much time do they occupy in our lives? How much are we interested in knowing about them? What questions do we ask ourselves and which ones do we not about the pace of adaptation they impose on us to keep up with them? How thin is the line between biological intelligence and artificial intelligence? If there is a direction, is there also a destination for all this movement? New technologies are fashionable by definition, but they often age quickly, generating new expectations. What if it were not only the things and scenarios around us that were changing rapidly, but ourselves, partly by choice and partly by necessity? And in that case towards which direction or destination? Perhaps we should ask fashion. The narrator on the scene has the task of making credible things that are possible tomorrow, but that today seem unlikely. The imagined time horizon concerns the next 5,000 days and just thinking about how much the world of things has changed in the 5,000 days just passed, it is at least necessary to look to the future with the benefit of the doubt with respect to what is still unlikely today.
