The headquarters of SciFuture, another central player in this nascent industry, sits just above the Psychic Eye Occult Bookshop, on the second floor of a small business complex on Ventura Boulevard that smells slightly of incense. The company’s office is mostly one large, open, naturally lit room and a small bookshelf, where Neal Stephenson titles line the top row. Ari Popper, CEO of SciFuture, is thin and unimposing, with an easy smile and an undercurrent of nervous energy. He grins as I come up the stairs.

Popper started SciFutures in 2012; he had burned out on his previous market research job and idly taken a writing class at UCLA. “I did this course, and it was — click — one of these epiphany moments: Maybe I can use science fiction to help companies,” he says. SciFutures offers clients custom-built science fiction stories and scenarios, courtesy of the 200 writers the company keeps on tap. The talent ranges from aspiring scribes still looking to break out to Hugo-winning heavyweights like Ken Liu.

“It’s science fiction based on science fact. It’s used as a way to prototype the future, and sci-fi is about people.”

Popper says he relies on a process called “science fiction prototyping.” The man who literally wrote the book on the method is Brian David Johnson, a professor, engineer, and sci-fi author based in Portland, Oregon. In his book Science Fiction Prototyping: Designing the Future with Science Fiction, Johnson outlines “How to Build Your Own SF Prototype in Five Steps or Less.” It begins by exhorting practitioners to “Pick Your Science and Build Your World,” moves on to instructions on how to identify the inflection point upon which that science or technology will collide with people, and suggests a framework for considering the ramifications. It’s sort of a basic sci-fi writing prompt guide through the lens of business management literature. “It’s science fiction based on science fact,” Johnson says. “It’s used as a way to prototype the future, and sci-fi is about people.” The best example, he says, is Intel, where until recently he served as chief futurist. “It took Intel 10 years to design and deploy a chip, so they needed to know 10 years out what people would do with computers.”

For an initial fee in the range of $50,000, SciFutures will take a prompt from a client — say, the Future of Sustainability for Naked Juice, or the Future of Home Improvement for Lowe’s — and farm it out to 30 or so writers. Popper and company read the stories, which usually clock in around 1,000 words (he typically pays writers $300 to $500 for each one, though more seasoned writers can command more), and scan them with an eye to intellectual property, novelty, and technology. Then they’ll choose five or so and polish them up for delivery to the client, often translating them into graphic novels or other media. If the client is hooked on a specific science fictional idea, SciFutures will help them develop further blueprints, even actual prototypes.

“The program we helped set up for Lowe’s is a phenomenal case study for how science fiction prototyping can transform culture, bring genuine innovation into the business,” Popper says. The hardware chain told him it was having trouble getting customers commit to home improvement projects, so SciFutures put forward the idea of decorating in virtual reality. “This was before Oculus — VR wasn’t a thing, AR wasn’t a thing.”

The story prototype follows a couple who try to renovate their house the old-fashioned way but keep running into problems. “The husband thinks he can solve it all, the wife is fed up, and the contractor is going ‘hehehe.’ The client loved it.” In virtual reality, the couple, of course, try out various options beforehand, without committing to a disastrous color scheme or ill-fitting marble counter. “So it’s a science fiction prototype,” Popper says, “and the client hands this to Lowe’s board. Literally the board of this Fortune 50 company. And they said, ‘Let’s figure out how to make this real.’ So we rapid prototyped three versions, and the first one was built. From sci-fi to reality in 18 months, just like that.” The project resulted in Lowe’s rolling out its Holoroom to about 20 stores in 2015. The concept has since been developed into an augmented reality app. In 2017, Fast Company named Lowe’s the number one most innovative company in AR or VR.

SciFutures has prototyped similar futures for Hershey’s (edible 3D printing), Ford (the future of car ownership), and Visa (the transactions of tomorrow). Few of the stories are true narratives; most are sketches of product-oriented futures. One involves a grandmother getting outfitted with a haptic VR system for her birthday present so she can feel her far-flung family giving her hugs across cyberspace. Many feel like ads set in the future. Nobody would sit down and read a volume of this work, and Popper knows that; it’s not the point. He’s mass-assigning the same speculative prompt to dozens of writers, selecting for best futures, and harvesting the results for IP.

Johnson calls dystopian prompts threat-casting. Recently, he worked in collaboration with stakeholders including the U.S. Army Cyber Institute, Citibank, the NYPD, and Cisco’s own Hyperinnovation Living Labs (CHILL) to develop “Two Days After Tuesday,” a graphic short examining a scenario in which the digital infrastructure undergirding our physical supply chains gets hacked. The art has a familiar anodyne corporate tint, but it’s something of a remarkable document, part company threat analysis, part dystopian fiction, part fear-driven commercial pitch.

“In terms of stopping those futures from happening, they’re spending real money and resources.”

Basically, hackers identify a weakness in a small shipping company’s cybersecurity and use an A.I. botnet to hack into the greater New York port system, overwhelming the inspection system. The hackers, who are also terrorists, exploit the confusion to slip a bomb into the city. Then, well: “It’s a busy morning rush hour in NYC… The terror group detonates a dirty bomb in Manhattan… the city sees massive casualties… Markets fall…,” and the final page is given over to a full-screen portrait of the city occupied with tanks and soldiers and streets lined with body bags. “Chaos reigns.” This is a corporate document, remember, that concludes with the Cisco logo. The section ends with: “ONLY YOU CAN SECURE THE FUTURE OF THE SUPPLY CHAIN! Stay Tuned… as Cisco, Citi, GE, Intel, and DB Schenker battle to save the world’s tomorrows.”

As a result, “Cisco ended up coming with five different business ideas and put a quarter of a million dollars into developing those businesses,” Johnson says. “In terms of stopping those futures from happening, they’re spending real money and resources.”

The military, which was involved in “Tuesday,” is perhaps the largest organization reliably spending real money and resources on science fiction prototyping. (This isn’t new: Winston Churchill credited H.G. Wells with “coming up with the idea of using aeroplanes and tanks in combat ahead of World War One.” Ronald Reagan’s Star Wars initiative was guided by (and publicly lobbied for) Robert Heinlein and Jerry Pournelle, two of the genre’s most hawkish writers. In 2016, hoping to help its leadership prepare for a future with an unknown portfolio of threats, NATO’s Allied Command Transformation commissioned SciFutures to produce an anthology of stories about the near-future of combat, called Visions of Warfare: 2036. A sample synopsis: “A child cyber-soldier fires missiles from thousands of miles away while being pursued by a NATO operative trained in facial and behavioral recognition.” Another: “A Chinese soldier genetically altered to emit fear-inducing hormones contemplates his role in the great expansion during an invasion of Pakistan.” After each story, there’s a list of questions intended to prompt discussion.

“The Army uses sci-fi prototyping as a way to get cadets and leadership to think about cybersecurity threats,” Johnson tells me. “They’ve taken one prototype, called Hero, and they’re teaching it at West Point.”