The Tunnel Under the World

It's a truism to say that science fiction is about the present, not the future. It's not always true, though. J.G. Ballard's stories about Vermilion Sands were, according to the author, a genuine attempt to guess what the future would be like. However, intelligent science fiction often deals with contemporary concerns, and is all the better for it.

Which brings me to 'The Tunnel Under the World', by Frederick Pohl. I've managed to acquire both radio and TV adaptations of this classic Fifties story. If you don't know it, watching the extract from the British series Out of the Unknown above will give you some idea how it starts. You can also read the story for free here, and it seems to be a kosher download. Anyway, let's enter the realm of the SPOILER ALERT.

If you're still with me, the story goes like this. The place is Tyler Town, somewhere in the USA. The time is the near-ish future, in a world where robots do a great deal of manual/admin work. Ordinary company accounts clerk Guy Burkhardt wakes up on June 15th in a a bit of a state, having just dreamed of a terrifying explosion. Weirdly, his wife Mary has just had the same dream. Co-incidence? Telepathy? But the frightening shared dream is just the first in a series of weird events that beset  Burkhardt during the course of what should be an ordinary day in the accounts department of Contro Chemicals.

Firstly, an old friend, Henry Swanson, fails to recognise him on the bus to work. Secondly, there seems to be a lot of advertising material for new products around - new brands of cigarettes, new makes of household appliance. And the ads are in themselves strange, because they go for a more than usually hard sell...

"Have you got a freezer? It stinks! If it isn't a Feckle Freezer, it stinks! If it's a last year's Feckle Freezer, it stinks! Only this year's Feckle Freezer is any good at all! You know who owns an Ajax Freezer? Fairies own Ajax Freezers! You know who owns a Triplecold Freezer? Commies own Triplecold Freezers! Every freezer but a brand-new Feckle Freezer stinks!"

What is going on? Well, Guy  Burkhardt goes home after his odd day at work, has dinner with Mary, sits down to read before going to bed, and then... Wakes up screaming after exactly the same nightmare, and finds that he's reliving the same day, June 15th - only with subtle shifts in the type of advertising he's bombarded with. Oh, and this time Mary didn't share the dream...

This time on the bus to work Henry Swanson again pretends not to know Guy - but quietly arranges for them to meet later. Henry has a theory. The town has been taken over by some outside agency - Russians? Martians? - who have somehow brainwashed everyone. Henry has evidence - the tunnel of the title. A mysterious complex has somehow been constructed under the town. Further probing leads the friends to a control room, where data are being processed by robotic machines - information on the effectiveness of various advertising methods.

The whole town, they realise, is a behavioural laboratory. It's nothing to do with Martians, but with humans interested in developing the perfect marketing method. Burkhardt resolves to escape and get to the FBI, but then Dorchin, the chief market researcher, appears. After a violent struggle, the truth is revealed. Burkhardt and Swanson, and most of the population of their home town, are dead. They died on the night of the 14th after the chemical plant exploded. Their brain patterns have been recorded and imprinted on the electronic brains of life-like robots. And those robots live out one day over and over again.

"There were the homes where even the brains had been utterly destroyed, and those are empty inside, and the cellars that needn't be too perfect, and the streets that hardly matter. And anyway, it only has to last for one day. The same day—June 15th—over and over again; and if someone finds something a little wrong, somehow, the discovery won't have time to snowball, wreck the validity of the tests, because all errors are canceled out at midnight."

The final twist is that, quite logically, Dorchin and his experts haven't rebuilt the town to scale, but instead constructed it as a tabletop model. Burkhardt, Swanson, and all the rest are tiny, doll-like figures, switched off and reprogrammed nightly.

So, what we have is the first 'virtual reality' story. The 'hero' turns out to be nothing more than a dead man's memories, barely human at all, and his life consists of an endless round of experiments designed to make it easier for corporate interests to influence society. All this in a story published in 1955, slap-bang in the middle of America's post-war economic boom. It's still a powerful image today; modern society as a closed system, with no past and no future, in which we are all just little robots programmed to buy things.