How To Live Safely In A Science Fictional Universe Part 2

YO DOG YOU KNOW I'M YOUR BOY BUT, HEY, UH, YOU'VE BEEN OUT THERE AWHILE NOW, DOG, AND I DON'T KNOW, MAN, YOU KNOW?

Of course not. I monkey around with the Tense Operator for ten years and right when it starts breaking down is when I have to bring it in. I'm going to need to figure out how to fix it if I want to keep my job.

ALL RIGHT, DON'T SWEAT IT, PHIL. I'LL BRING IT IN. ANYTHING ELSE?YO DOG, THAT'S TIGHT. WE'RE COOL, RIGHT? I'M STILL YOUR HOMIE? MAYBE WE CAN GRAB A BEER WHEN YOU'RE IN THE CITY. IS THAT RIGHT? GRAB A BEER? GRAB. GRAB. GRAB. GRAB. GRAB.

Phil crashes a lot, midsentence. Sooner or later, they're going to upgrade, and then no more Phil, and yeah it's true I could do without all the small talk, but I'm pretty sure I'll miss him.

Client call. I punch in the coordinates and now I'm in the kitchen of an apartment, in Oakland, in Chinatown, sometime in the third quarter of the twentieth century. A pot of oxtail stew burbles on the stovetop, fills the room with a deep, rich cloud of stewiness, fills the room like a fog bank rolling over the bay.

I go into the living room and find a woman, a little younger than I am, maybe twenty-five, twenty-six. She's kneeling over a much older woman who lies still, in an awkward position, legs slumped off the couch, left arm dangling down to the floor, mouth slightly open as if she has lost control of it, eyes looking up at the ceiling, or whatever's beyond the ceiling, filled with a clear-eyed awareness of what's happening.

"She can't see you," I say to the younger woman.

"But I can see her," she says. She doesn't look up at me.

"Not really. This didn't really happen. You weren't there when she died."

Now the younger woman looks at me. Angry.

"Your mom?" I say.

"Grandmother," she says, and I realize in my time away from time, spent idling in my machine, I've become terrible at guessing someone's age.

I nod. We both watch the old woman lying there, coming to terms with whatever she was coming to terms with.

TAMMY discreetly beeps to remind me we have a job to do, rifts in the underlying fabric to repair. If we stay too long, the damage could get worse.

"I'm not saying this to hurt you," I say. "All I'm saying is that since you weren't there when this actually happened, you can't be here now."

She ignores me and doesn't take her eyes off her grandmother and for a while, I'm not sure she's heard or maybe she heard me but doesn't understand, but then she looks at me.

"So what is this? An illusion? A dream?"

"More like a window," I say, and I see that she gets it. "By using your time machine this way, you are creating a small porthole into another universe, a neighboring universe. One almost exactly like ours, except that in this alternate world you were were there when she died. This living room, right now, is the vertex between Universe Thirty-one and Thirty-one-A, and you are bending s.p.a.ce and time and light to see into the past, a false past, a past you wish you could go to. Although you can see, through this porthole, what happened back then over there, you're not really standing next to her. You are in your own universe, our universe. You are infinitely far away." there when she died. This living room, right now, is the vertex between Universe Thirty-one and Thirty-one-A, and you are bending s.p.a.ce and time and light to see into the past, a false past, a past you wish you could go to. Although you can see, through this porthole, what happened back then over there, you're not really standing next to her. You are in your own universe, our universe. You are infinitely far away."

She takes a moment to digest this. I open up a side panel and immediately see the problem.

"You tampered with your tau modulator."

She gives me a guilty look.

"Don't worry," I say. "I see it all the time."

She looks back at the scene in front of us. "I was a soph.o.m.ore in college. She was the only reason I even made it there," she says. "She called and I could hear something in her voice. I should have known. I should have known to come home."

"You had your own life to start."

"I could have come home. My dad told me it would be soon. I could have come home."

Grandma closes her eyes. A look of something unresolved twists across her face, and then a flicker of what could be disappointment, and then, exhausted, she takes her last breath, alone, the pot of stew untouched in the next room.

I wait for what I hope is a respectful interval of silence, then quietly finish the repair and go back into the kitchen to allow her a few more minutes. I can hear crying, then low talking, then what sounds like a song, once sung to a little girl maybe, now sung one final time. The stew smells really good. I'm trying to figure out if it will cause a paradox if I have a bowl when the young woman comes into the kitchen.

"Thanks for that," she says.

"Yeah, take all the time you want. Well, not all the time."

"I suppose I can't stay here."

I shake my head. "If you bend too much and for too long, the porthole becomes an actual hole, and you might end up over there."

"Maybe that's what I want."

"Trust me. It's not. That's not home. I know it seems like home, everything looks the same, but it's not. You weren't there. It will never be the case that you were."

A typical customer gets into a machine that can literally literally take her whenever she'd like to go. Do you want to know what the first stop usually is? Take a guess. Don't guess. You already know: the unhappiest day of her life. take her whenever she'd like to go. Do you want to know what the first stop usually is? Take a guess. Don't guess. You already know: the unhappiest day of her life.

Other people are just looking for weird. They want to turn their lives into something unrecognizable. I see a lot of men end up as their own uncles. Super-easy to avoid, totally dumb move. See it all the time. No need to go into details, but it obviously involves a time machine and you know what with you know who. General rule is you want to avoid having s.e.x with anyone unless you are sure they aren't family. One guy I know ended up as his own sister.

But mostly, people aren't like that. They don't want trouble, they just don't know what else to do. I see a lot of regular offenders. People who can't stop trying to hurt themselves. People who can't stop doing stupid things because of their stupid hearts.

My vocational training was in the basics of closed time-like curves, but what they should have taught me was how that relates to people's regrets and mistakes, the loves of their lives that they let get away.

I've prevented suicides. I've watched people fall apart, marriages break up in slow motion, over and over and over again.

I have seen pretty much everything that can go wrong, the various and mysterious problems in contemporary time travel. You work in this business long enough and you know what you really do for a living. This is self-consciousness. I work in the self-consciousness industry.

from How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

nostalgia, underlying cosmological explanation for Weak but detectable interaction between two neighboring universes that are otherwise not causally connected.

Manifests itself in humans as a feeling of missing a place one has never been, a place very much like one's home universe, or as a longing for versions of one's self that one will never, and can never know.

Sometimes I think back to when my father and I were first starting to sketch it out in his study at home, just ideas on a pad, just lines and vectors and tentative inequalities, first starting to realize what might be possible, and I suspect that he knew even then that he would get lost. It was almost like he was trying to get lost, like he knew what it would all lead to, this machine. He wanted to use it for sadness, to investigate the source of his own, his father's, and on and on, to the ultimate origin, some dark radiating body, trapped in its own severe curvature, cut off from the rest of the universe.

I remember the graph paper we used, the pattern of one-centimeter squares in a light green grid. My father would open a package of five pads, each one a hundred sheets thick. He used to open the package with his company-logo letter opener, pulling the letter opener out of its holder in the heavy bra.s.s piece sitting on top of his desk (I can still picture the black box it came in, with fancy gold cursive lettering on it-EXECUTIVE DESK SET-how at first, the words seemed like a kind of promise, a looking toward the future, a rare admission of his hope and ambition, and I can also picture the dust that gathered on the box, how, with each pa.s.sing year that layer of dust thickened into a visible acc.u.mulation of embarra.s.sment, how I wished I could have snuck into his office when he was at work and thrown that box away, or hidden it from him, so that word wouldn't have to be right there on this desk, staring him in the face every day, EXECUTIVE EXECUTIVE, a thoughtless word, a thoughtless gift from the company for ten years of unappreciated service).

He would worry the cellophane in a spot just a bit, just enough to pinch between his fingers a bit of the clear wrap and tear the membrane, making that delicate, fine-structured sound of it being torn.

"Ahhh," he would say, half smiling, enjoying the sound. He would hand me the wadded-up ball of cellophane, so I could crunch it in my hands and listen to it crackle back a bit, then crunch it harder and toss it into the gray wire wastebasket, where it would sit atop a sliding sheaf of bills and return envelopes for bills and credit card offers, an unstable mountain of debt and credit, an avalanche waiting to happen.

"Choose a world, any world," he liked to say. It was a stack of planes, an n n-dimensional s.p.a.cetime, ready to be filled. I would take out one of the five pads and then he would put the rest back into his cabinet. The squares of the grid went all the way to the top, and the bottom, and the edges on either side, which was pleasing and Platonic and right. If there had been any sort of margin on the sides, or at the top, or any other kind of break in the Cartesian plane, something would have been lost, the ability of that graph paper to represent the total, the universal, the conceptual s.p.a.ce would have been destroyed.

Where the pad was bound at the top there was a red, waxy strip, and sometimes my father would tear off the top sheet, so we could work on it without leaving impressions from our pen on the two or three or four (depending on how hard we pressed our pencil or pen) sheets below, and that sound would be somewhat similar but in many ways quite different from the ripping-cellophane sound, this one heavier, coa.r.s.er, deeper, but more often my father wouldn't rip off a sheet at all, and instead leave the paper on the pad.

"Look at that," he said. "How the ink bleeds." He loved the way it looked, to write on a thick pillow of the pad, the way the thicker width of paper underneath was softer and allowed for a more cus.h.i.+ony interface between pen and surface, which meant more time the two would be in contact for any given point, allowing the fiber of the paper to pull, through capillary action, more ink from the pen, more ink, which meant more evenness of ink, a thicker, more even line, a line with character, with solidity. The pad, all those ninety-nine sheets underneath him, the hundred, the even number, ten to the second power, the exponent, the clean block of planes, the s.p.a.cetime, really, represented by that pad, all of the possible drawings, graphs, curves, relations.h.i.+ps, all of the answers, questions, mysteries, all of the problems solvable in that s.p.a.ce, in those sheets, in those squares.

"Today we will journey into Minkowski s.p.a.ce," and with a few casual sweeps of his hand across the known world, what had been empty world was now a place full of direction and distance and invisible forces.

"Consider a body," he said, while drawing vectors and truths, "maybe a boy separated from his twin, and moving at the speed of light. Or a lonely astronaut, missing home."

I loved the way he used the paper, the whole paper, as a s.p.a.ce, when he would write notes in the corner, or label the axes, or create a symbol key in the lower left-hand corner, or, best of all, draw a curve on the x xy plane and then write the equation for the curve plane and then write the equation for the curve f f(x) equals one-half x x cubed plus four cubed plus four x x squared plus nine squared plus nine x x plus five, up in the upper left-hand corner of the graph, floating there in quadrant II of the Cartesian plane, that equation existing in science, in science fiction, in the realm of science fictional equations. I loved seeing his lettering, so neat, practiced from thousands upon thousands of hours of problem sets no doubt, both in school and after school and in his spare time and in his work and in his after-work brainstorming, and now with me, his son, his student, his would-be research a.s.sistant. Lettering so uniform, letters so straight and consistent in size and well lined they looked like words in comic book dialogue bubbles. I loved how my father set down the letters, mindful of the s.p.a.cing, not fitting one to each box, which would have looked too structured, too planned, too spread out, not aesthetically pleasing, those letters would have looked like prisoners, each in solitary confinement, but rather, using the horizontal lines as a guideline, the words, the letters, crossing through and over and on top of the lines, no explanation, no protective underlining or boxing or any other kind of markings indicating a setting-off or a differentiation between text and curve, between s.p.a.ce and commentary on the s.p.a.ce. The words were right in there, close to the curve, close to the plus five, up in the upper left-hand corner of the graph, floating there in quadrant II of the Cartesian plane, that equation existing in science, in science fiction, in the realm of science fictional equations. I loved seeing his lettering, so neat, practiced from thousands upon thousands of hours of problem sets no doubt, both in school and after school and in his spare time and in his work and in his after-work brainstorming, and now with me, his son, his student, his would-be research a.s.sistant. Lettering so uniform, letters so straight and consistent in size and well lined they looked like words in comic book dialogue bubbles. I loved how my father set down the letters, mindful of the s.p.a.cing, not fitting one to each box, which would have looked too structured, too planned, too spread out, not aesthetically pleasing, those letters would have looked like prisoners, each in solitary confinement, but rather, using the horizontal lines as a guideline, the words, the letters, crossing through and over and on top of the lines, no explanation, no protective underlining or boxing or any other kind of markings indicating a setting-off or a differentiation between text and curve, between s.p.a.ce and commentary on the s.p.a.ce. The words were right in there, close to the curve, close to the y y-axis, just floating in the plane along with the graph, this s.p.a.ce the Platonic realm, where curves and equations and axes and ideas coexisted, ontological equals, a democracy of conceptual inhabitants, no one cla.s.s privileged over any other, no mixing or subdividing of abstractions and concrete objects, no mixing whatsoever. The words an actual part of it, the whole s.p.a.ce inside the borders, the whole s.p.a.ce useful and usable and possible, the whole, unbroken s.p.a.ce a place where anything could be written, anything could be thought, or solved, or puzzled over, anything could be connected, plotted, a.n.a.lyzed, fixed, converted, where anything could be equalized, divided, isolated, understood.

My personal clock shows that I've been in here, more or less, for almost ten years. Nine years, nine months, and twenty-nine days, according to the subdermal biochronometric chip inserted just under the skin on my left wrist. That's how much time has pa.s.sed for me, for my body, in my head. A rough measure of how many breaths I have taken, how many times I've closed and opened my eyes, how many lunches I have had in here, how many memories I have formed.

I guess that makes me thirty. Thirty-one-ish.

Probably goes without saying, but time machine repair guys don't get a lot of action. Had a one-night stand with something cute a couple of years ago. Not human exactly. Humanish. Close enough that she looked awesome with her s.h.i.+rt off. We hung out a few times, tried messing around but in the end I couldn't quite figure out her anatomy, or perhaps it was the other way around. There were some awkward moments. I think she had a good time anyway. I did. She was a good kisser. I just hope that was her mouth. Or at least her mouth-a.n.a.logue.

In the end, it wasn't going to work. I don't think she had the brain chemistry for love. Or maybe that was me.

I don't even get much s.e.xbot these days.

When you are thirteen, you spend all your time imagining what it would be like to live in a world where you could pay a robot for s.e.x. And that s.e.x would cost a dollar. And the only obstacle to getting s.e.x would be making sure you had four quarters.

Then you grow up and it turns out you do live in that kind of world. A world with coin-operated s.e.xbots. And it's not really as great as you thought it would be. Partly because it doesn't make you any less lonely in the perpetual dark of total vacuum and partly because, well, it's gross. Your friends, your neighbors, your own family, they know what you are doing in the kiosk. They know because they do it themselves. Partly because s.e.xbot technology hasn't really improved much since the first-generation consoles. No one cares enough. For a dollar, it's pretty hard to complain.

Living like this means the year stops making sense, and the month and the week. The dates fall away from the days, like gla.s.s punched out of window frames, or ice cubes out of a tray into a sink, identical, dateless, nameless durational blobs, melting into an undifferentiated puddle. Is that a Sat.u.r.day, a Friday, a Monday? Is that an April 13, or a November 2? Living like this means you don't have a container anymore for the different days, can't hold in a little twenty-four-hour-sized box a set of events that const.i.tute a unit, something you can compartmentalize, something with a beginning and an end, something to fill with a to-do list. Living like this means that it all runs together, a cold and bright December morning with your father or a lazy evening in late August, one of those sunsets that seem to take longer than is possible, where the sun just refuses to go down, where the hour seems to elongate to the point that it doesn't seem like it can stretch any farther without detaching completely from the hour before it, like a piece of taffy, like undersea molten lava forming a new island, a piece of time detaching from the seafloor and floating up to the surface.

It's not comfortable in here. But it's not not not comfortable, either. It's neutral, it's the null point on the comfortdiscomfort axis, the exact fulcrum, the precise coordinate located between the half infinity of positive comfort values to the right and the half infinity of negative values on the left. To live in here is to live at the origin, at zero, neither present nor absent, a denial of self- and creature-hood to an arbitrarily small epsilondelta limit. comfortable, either. It's neutral, it's the null point on the comfortdiscomfort axis, the exact fulcrum, the precise coordinate located between the half infinity of positive comfort values to the right and the half infinity of negative values on the left. To live in here is to live at the origin, at zero, neither present nor absent, a denial of self- and creature-hood to an arbitrarily small epsilondelta limit.

Can you live your whole life at zero? Can you live your entire life in the exact point between comfort and discomfort? You can in this device. My father designed it that way. Don't ask me why. If I knew the answer to that, I would know a whole lot of other things, too. Things like why he left, where he is, what he's doing, when he's coming back, if he's coming back.

Where has he been all these years? I'm guessing that's where he is now.

I don't miss him anymore. Most of the time, anyway. I want to. I wish I could but unfortunately, it's true: time does heal. It will do so whether you like it or not, and there's nothing anyone can do about it. If you're not careful, time will take away everything that ever hurt you, everything you have ever lost, and replace it with knowledge. Time is a machine: it will convert your pain into experience. Raw data will be compiled, will be translated into a more comprehensible language. The individual events of your life will be trans.m.u.ted into another substance called memory and in the mechanism something will be lost and you will never be able to reverse it, you will never again have the original moment back in its uncategorized, preprocessed state. It will force you to move on and you will not have a choice in the matter.

Phil was right. I was overdue for maintenance. The Tense Operator is pretty much kaput.

TAMMY doesn't think we have enough power to even get back to corporate HQ. Ed is licking his own stomach like crazy, like he's trying to hurt himself. Which is what he does when he's nervous. He gives me a look like, You're the human. Do something You're the human. Do something.

"Is it my fault?" TAMMY says. She always thinks everything is her fault.

"No, it's my fault."

"Is it my fault that it's your fault?"

"I don't even know what that means. I guess so. If that's what you want."

"Thanks," TAMMY says, and she seems pleased.

The truth is, I broke the Tense Operator by living in between tenses. I broke it through my cheating, wishy-washy way of moving through time. It used to be that you could cheat the machine by leaving it between gears, living in a kind of half-a.s.sed way, present and at the same time not quite in the present, hovering, floating, used to be you could avoid ever pinning yourself down to any particular moment, could go through life never actually being where you are. Or I suppose, more accurately, being when when you are. That's what P-I allows, a convenience mode. you are. That's what P-I allows, a convenience mode.

But I abused it. It's not supposed to be used as the primary driver of chronogrammatical transport. It isn't designed for that kind of use: the Present-Indefinite isn't even a real gear. It's like cruise control. It's a gadget, a gimmick, a temporary crutch, a holding place. It is hated by purists and engineers, equally. It's bad for aesthetics, bad for design, bad for fuel efficiency. It's bad for the machine. To run in P-I is to burn needless fuel in order to avoid straightforward travel. It's what allows me to live achronologically, to suppress memory, to ignore the future, to see everything as present. I've been a bad pilot, a bad pa.s.senger, a bad employee. A bad son.

Ed sighs. Dog sighs are some form of distilled truth. What does he know? What do dogs know? Ed sighs like he knows the truth about me and he loves me anyway.

I ask TAMMY what her optimism is set at. She says very low. I tell her to just move it up one notch, to normal low, and recalculate.

"What do the numbers say now?"

"We'll make it to HQ. But just barely. There is an eighty-nine percent chance the machine will be damaged in the crash."

I tell her she can do it. That I believe in her. I say it sincerely, because I do believe in her.

"You are good," I say.

"No I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not," she says. "I'm no good."

And then, softly, to herself: "Am I?"

True to her calculations, TAMMY gets us there.

Flying into the center of the universe, even a smallish universe like this one, is something you never get used to.

It's like flying into LaGuardia at sunrise, which is no coincidence, since a little over one-third of the greater metropolitan area of the capital city of Minor Universe 31 just happens to be made up of what used to be New York City.

As the machine banks into its approach and we angle into our steep descent spiral, looking down into the city, I have, for a minute or two, some clarified sense of scale, the proper balance of awe and possibility, a kind of airplane courage. Perspective. That's what I have, only it's not in s.p.a.ce. It's perspective in time. Instead of gliding down over and then into the skyline, we glide down over, and then into, the present, and what always gets me is the quality of the light, the way it just starts to reach my eyes, to gather around me, gather itself up, to see what light looks like as we slow down from relativistic speed.

Sliding into the time corridor, you can see it all, the spiky skyline, high and low points in the overall texture and layout of the past and future of this place, the mix of styles and the clash of lines and planes. All of these people, all so small and compartmentalized. In s.p.a.ce and time. You see the paths of moving objects: people in high-rises, people in their office buildings with the fake plants and the elevators going up and down and at their desks and moving around, an entire day's worth of movements, an entire day all at once, not a blur, not an average, but the totality of a day.

All these people with so much less control over their own velocities than they think they have.

All these people who go on like this, moving around in their patterns, and I am one of them, stuck in my own pattern, I am perhaps the worst of them, but for now, in this instant, I can see what I am.

Even the stationary objects, you see how they sway and torque, shear and bend, how they wear down slightly, erode even within the course of a day, they become averages of themselves over time.

As I'm landing I focus in particular on one man, a stranger, someone I can pick out maybe because he looks like me, about my height, my weight, my age, but unlike me he's wearing a suit, he looks like a family man, coming home from work. I can see this man at the end of his day, but at the same time I can see him waking up this morning, and I can see what happened to him in between, how he started with a hope of what today would bring, and how it didn't bring that, and how he doesn't know that yet, and how he already does. I can see him in the day, and see the day in him, see how he doesn't move through time so much as he is made of time, or at least his life is, and what that means, I can see it not as frames in a movie, not as the flicker of a flipbook, but the whole flipbook itself.