How To Live Safely In A Science Fictional Universe Part 10

"It seems you've got an answer for everything."

"It seems I do," she says, sounding a little sad about it, although I can't figure out why just yet.

"Aha," I say. "But what about the book?"

"You mean the magical book that you somehow read and write and it transcribes what you say and think and read all at the same time, seamlessly switching among modes? The book that mysteriously records the output of your consciousness on a real-time basis? That book?"

"Well, when you say it like that, it does sound kind of out there."

"I'm not saying it doesn't exist. It does. I'm just saying, what am I saying? Oh yeah, sorry, I'm a little scatterbrained this morning. Here, let me prove it to you. Open the book up now."

I open it.

"See that? See how the little squib there just coincidentally happens to thematically match what we're talking about now? Don't you think that's weird? The book, just like the concept of the 'present,' is a fiction. Which isn't to say it's not real. It's as real as anything else in this science fictional universe. As real as you are. It's a staircase in a house built by the construction firm of Escher and Sons. It's fiction, not engineering. It's a self-voiding fiction, an impossible object and yet, there it is: the object. The book. You. Here it is. Here you are. They are both perfectly valid ideas, necessary, even, to solve the problem your human brain has to solve: how to determine which events occur in what order? How to organize the data of the world into a sequence that appeals to your intuitions about causality? How to order the thin slices of your life so that they appear to mean something? You're looking out a window, a little porthole in fact, just like the one on the side of this time machine you're in, and out your window you see a little piece of the landscape, and you have to somehow extrapolate from that what the terrain of your life is like. Your brain has to trick itself in order to live in time. Which is great, which is necessary, but the flip side of that is, see how long I've been talking? It's been more than forty seconds, hasn't it? And yet it hasn't."

She makes her face into a clock.

11:46:55.

11:46:56.

It comes down to this: three choices.

Option number one: I could stay in here. I could change the past. All I would have to do is move that shifter up one notch, put this device back into neutral for one extra second, wait until one moment after my designated arrival time. I'd get out and who knows what would happen. Everything would be different. I will have just missed my self. I could, without incident, just slip out of this universe and into the next, just like the girl in Chinatown wanted to do. Escape my life. But that would mean not moving forward. That would mean giving up on my father, leaving him trapped, wherever he is.

Option number two: I can keep on doing things just as I have been, let myself be tugged onward by the pull of narrational gravity, the circular path of my own toroidal vector field. Nothing would be easier than to stay the course, this course of minimal action, moving right down the path of least resistance. Would that be so bad?

And then there's the third choice. I could get out of this machine and face what is coming. Instead of just pa.s.sively allowing the events of my life to continue to happen to me, I could see what it might be like to be the main character in my own story. The event: I have to confront myself. The truth: it is going to be painful. It will end in death, for me, it will not change anything. These are the givens. These are the received truths. I can go through the motions of being myself, ceding responsibility for my actions to fate, to my personal historical record, to what I know is already going to happen. My arms and legs will not change in their movements. I can't change any of that. Nor can I change the path of my body, the words from my lips, not even the focus of my eyes. I have no control over any of it. What I do have control over is my own intention. In the s.p.a.ce between free will and determinism are these imperceptible gaps, these lacunae, the volitional interstices, the holes and the nodes, the material and the aether, the something and nothing that, at once, separate and bind the moments together, the story together, my actions together, and it's in these gaps, in these pauses where the fictional science breaks down, where neither the science nor the fiction can penetrate, where the fiction that we call the present moment exists.

This, then, is my choice: I can allow the events of my life to happen to me.

Or I can take those very same actions and make them my own. I can live in my own present, risk failure, be a.s.sured of failure.

From the outside, these two choices would look identical. Would be be identical, in fact. Either way, my life will turn out the same. Either way, there will come a time when I will lose everything. The difference is, I can choose to do that, I can choose to live that way, to live on purpose, live with intention. identical, in fact. Either way, my life will turn out the same. Either way, there will come a time when I will lose everything. The difference is, I can choose to do that, I can choose to live that way, to live on purpose, live with intention.

11:46:57.

11:46:58.

"I had it backward," I say.

TAMMY lets out a confirmatory beep. Very official-sounding. And then she makes a blue kind of face at me.

"Yeah." She sighs.

"This whole time I'd thought that my father was the key to my escape from the loop. That he would save me, he would be the answer, when in fact, the answer all along was not an answer but a choice. If I want to find him, then I need to leave this loop. If I want to see him again, I have to get out of this box."

"You realize that you can't do or say anything different," she says. "Or else you enter a new timeline. You have to do what you have to do."

"I know."

"You're going to get shot in the stomach," she reminds me.

"I know."

Now she makes her pixels into a lovely and soft and slightly knowing face. Part sad, and part I-thought-this-day-would-never-come. It's about time, It's about time, she seems to be saying. It's a side of TAMMY I've never seen before, and for a moment I understand that there are parts to TAMMY I've never activated, modules I've never engaged, questions I've never asked and answers I therefore have not received. I never even knew how to use her correctly. I wasted her capabilities. she seems to be saying. It's a side of TAMMY I've never seen before, and for a moment I understand that there are parts to TAMMY I've never activated, modules I've never engaged, questions I've never asked and answers I therefore have not received. I never even knew how to use her correctly. I wasted her capabilities.

"So, well, uh, yeah, I don't know how to say this-" I manage to get that far before TAMMY starts to lose it. I've said it before and I'll say it again. You haven't experienced awkwardness until you've seen a three-million-dollar piece of software cry.

I should have been nicer to her. I was pretty nice, though. Nice. What is that? Nice. That's just not enough. I should have taken care of her. I should have taken better care of everyone, of my mom, my dad, my self, even Linus. Even lost girls in Chinatown.

TAMMY has been more than the operating system for my recreational device. She has been, for all these years, my brain, my memory, running all of life's functions for me. Kept me alive. Like a better half. Like the better part of me. She took care of me. Unconditionally. Now I get it. She was, in her own way, The Woman I Never Married, the woman waiting for me if I'd been good enough to deserve her. She was my conscience, she kept me honest about what I was doing in here, or not doing in here.

"I've got to go," I say.

"I understand. I'm happy for you."

"You know," I start to say.

"Yes?" she says, with an eagerness that, for once, she doesn't bother to mask with any kind of simulated emotion face.

"Oh G.o.d, what am I trying to say? I, uh."

"Don't say it," she says.

"Okay I won't."

"Yeah, don't."

"I won't."

"Probably a good idea."

"Please say it. Wait, don't."

"Okay fine, I'll say it. There was something, wasn't there? Between us?"

"Yeah," TAMMY says. "Something."

It's silent for a moment.

"Though I have to tell you," she says, "I do have a user-input-based dynamic feedback loop personality generation system."

"So what you're saying is I've been having a relationship with myself."

"To some extent, yes."

"Gross."

"In any event, it's not like it could have ever, you know, worked," TAMMY says. "I don't have a module for this emotion. Whatever it is."

"Neither do I. Whatever it is."

"Yeah. I know," she says, and winks at me.

I want to hug her or kiss the screen or run my hands through her deep, rich, pixilated hair, or something, but pretty much every option seems completely ridiculous. Ed sighs at the two of us, like, Oh, get a room, Oh, get a room, and we snap out of it. and we snap out of it.

"Well, I guess I'll power down now. Save energy for the approach," TAMMY says, but really it's just to give me a moment alone, a brief interval of quiet to consider what's about to happen to me.

TAMMY closes her eyes, then shuts herself down, a ghostly afterburn lingering for a bit, a transient image of her face persisting there. Her pixels have, to a small degree, permanently lost their ability to return to their relaxed state, leaving, frozen into the screen, a kind of history, a sum total of her expressions fixed into a retained outline, a tracing, an integral, the melancholy algorithm of her soul averaged and captured and recorded as a function of time.

And now I'm alone in this thing.

11:46:59.

This has been the longest forty seconds of my life.

We're in the final approach. The TM-31 lowers itself into the present moment, which starts to come into view. Through the porthole, I can see my past self running toward me, holding his dog under one arm, and a familiar-looking brown-paper-wrapped parcel in the other.

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

decoherence and wave function collapse In Minor Universe 31, quantum decoherence occurs when a chronodiegetic system interacts with its environment in a thermodynamically irreversible way, preventing different elements in the quantum superposition of the system + environment's wave function from interfering with one another.

A total superposition of the universal wave function still occurs, but its ultimate fate remains an interpretational interpretational issue issue.

One potential structure that can occur in a closed time-like curve, or CTC, is a worldline that is not continuously joined to any earlier regions of s.p.a.cetime, i.e., events that, in a sense, have no causes. In the standard account of causality required by a chronodiegetical determinist, each four-dimensional box has, immediately preceding it, another four-dimensional box that serves as the emotional and physical cause. However, in a CTC, this notion of causality has no explanatory power, due to the fact that an event can be concurrent with its own cause, could be thought of as perhaps even causing itself. Research in this area is currently the most promising avenue toward the Holy Grail of fictional science-the Grand Unified Theory of Chronodiegetic Forces-a governing law that would serve as a common root for the disparate forces that operate in the axes of past, alternate present, and future, or more formally, the matrix operators of regret, counterfactual, and anxiety.

I get out of the time machine.

I'm reminded of the toll-free number I used to call as a kid. I'd call it over and over, trying to set my watch to the minute, exactly, right on the dot, but really, I think I just liked the sound of that prerecorded voice, the lady in the phone, her careful p.r.o.nunciation of each syllable.

At the tone, the time will be e-le-ven for-ty se-ven and ze-ro se-conds.

How can I change the past? I can't. He's got the gun pointed at my stomach. He looks scared. I don't blame him. I remember being in his shoes, some time ago, a moment ago, I recall what it was like to stare at the future, so full of terror, so incomprehensible, so strange, even when it looks just like you thought it would. Maybe especially so.

His finger is on the trigger, and the trigger is moving ever so slightly backward. How do you convince someone to change, to stop being afraid of himself? How do you convince yourself not to be so scared all the time?

We're both standing here, the same guy on opposite ends of a moment, feeling the same thing about each other, a mixture of self-loathing and self-wonder, that mixture of ever-fluctuating concentration, that interior sludge of volatile fluid running through the pipes of the septic system known as my self-consciousness, that fluid that courses through the conduits of the deep, gurgling plumbing in my head, through which also flows my inner monologue, that running story that I've been telling myself ever since the moment I learned to talk, since before that, even, since I learned to think, the story I began to tell while still in diapers, in the crib, the babbling commentary-sometimes audible, sometimes not-that accelerated into childhood, and then beyond, became a tortured and anguished story in p.u.b.erty, this decades-spanning confabulation that has continued up until today, up until this very moment, this monologue of my life that will keep running and running and running until it gets cut off, abruptly, at the moment of my death, which could be any second now, because man, does that trigger finger look twitchy. All of that self-storytelling just comes down to this, the most simple of all simple situations. The story of a man trying to figure out what he knows, teetering on the edge of yes or no, of risk or safety, whether it is worth it or not to go on, to carry on, into the breach of each successive moment. It's a survival story, too, the story I have been telling myself. Is he friend or foe, this strange person in front of me, enemy or ally, only, in this case, both sides, all sides, they all happen to be the same person, and that person is me, and the answer, in all cases, appears to be foe. I am my own most dangerous enemy. I know what he's thinking. He's thinking about his training, which says to run, and his instinct, which says to kill, and I know what is going through his head, know that his brain is trying to get him to just slow the h.e.l.l down and get a handle on all this craziness. I can see the look he's got in his eye, like Who is this guy? What does he want? Who is this guy? What does he want? I can see how he is looking right at me, just like I looked at my own future self when I went through this. He's looking and feeling, and what he's feeling is the involuntary shudder, the creeping gooseflesh of dread that comes only at a moment of real self-recognition, self-confrontation, comes only with the genuine possibility of self-annihilation. He's looking, but not seeing, and in between the two, there it is, a gap, and in that gap is my only chance, the only possible margin in which I can change that which cannot be changed. Because he is already looking, his eyes are on me, so it is in his mind that I have to make the change, not a physical change, not one of vision or field of vision, but one of perception. Not what I see, but how I see it. I have to get him to see, see what he's looking at, see me, himself, both of us, see what I'm seeing, which is what he's seeing as well. If only we could both see from the other's perspective, as well as our own, at the same time. If we could do that, then we would have it all, the past and the future, fused, combined into one perspective, we would see the present moment, how it divides us, like mirror images around a temporal axis. If instead of looking forward or back, we could do the opposite, if we could see from the outside looking in, from all sides, if we could only look inward, into the black box of Right Now, if I could get him to do that, he would understand, he would know what I know, which is that it's not necessarily going to be okay, in fact, it probably won't. If I can convince him to do that, then he would know what I know, and then I would have what he has, which is the freedom to act, the chance to do something different, to exert my own will, to not be afraid to let myself move forward into the next moment. I would have what he has, which is the possibility of not doing what I have done countless times, just continuing on in my own time loop. I would have what he has, which is the possibility of moving on. All of which is just dandy and fuzzy and self-affirming, except that none of it solves the problem, which is that I am still the a.s.shole who shot my self the first time around, which is to say, I'll always be the a.s.shole who shoots my self, or to put it another way, he's about to shoot me and there's nothing I can do about it because there's nothing I did do about it. I can see how he is looking right at me, just like I looked at my own future self when I went through this. He's looking and feeling, and what he's feeling is the involuntary shudder, the creeping gooseflesh of dread that comes only at a moment of real self-recognition, self-confrontation, comes only with the genuine possibility of self-annihilation. He's looking, but not seeing, and in between the two, there it is, a gap, and in that gap is my only chance, the only possible margin in which I can change that which cannot be changed. Because he is already looking, his eyes are on me, so it is in his mind that I have to make the change, not a physical change, not one of vision or field of vision, but one of perception. Not what I see, but how I see it. I have to get him to see, see what he's looking at, see me, himself, both of us, see what I'm seeing, which is what he's seeing as well. If only we could both see from the other's perspective, as well as our own, at the same time. If we could do that, then we would have it all, the past and the future, fused, combined into one perspective, we would see the present moment, how it divides us, like mirror images around a temporal axis. If instead of looking forward or back, we could do the opposite, if we could see from the outside looking in, from all sides, if we could only look inward, into the black box of Right Now, if I could get him to do that, he would understand, he would know what I know, which is that it's not necessarily going to be okay, in fact, it probably won't. If I can convince him to do that, then he would know what I know, and then I would have what he has, which is the freedom to act, the chance to do something different, to exert my own will, to not be afraid to let myself move forward into the next moment. I would have what he has, which is the possibility of not doing what I have done countless times, just continuing on in my own time loop. I would have what he has, which is the possibility of moving on. All of which is just dandy and fuzzy and self-affirming, except that none of it solves the problem, which is that I am still the a.s.shole who shot my self the first time around, which is to say, I'll always be the a.s.shole who shoots my self, or to put it another way, he's about to shoot me and there's nothing I can do about it because there's nothing I did do about it.

How many times have I failed before? How many times have I stood here like this, in front of my own image, in front of my own person, trying to convince him not to be scared, to go on, to get out of this rut? How many times before I finally convince myself, how many private, erasable deaths will I need to die, how many self-murders is it going to take, how many times will I have to destroy myself before I learn, before I understand?

TAMMY was right. I can't say anything different or do anything different, or else I end up in a different universe, one that might look just like this one, but one where I don't have all of those memories, one where I haven't figured out where to find my dad, and I can't take that chance. So what do I say? The only thing I can say. What I have already said, the thing that makes the most sense. The truth.

"It's all in the book," I say.

We're two sides of an infinitesimally thin coin. Slice the coin thinner and thinner, and we get closer and closer to each other. We can slice it arbitrarily thin, let the limit of the thickness approach zero. Slice it until there's no one or nothing in between, until we meet at zero. I am an epsilondelta proof, I am the limit of my own past self as he approaches arbitrarily close to my own future self. We've lived a whole month in that machine, in an instant, a life of memories. We can live our whole lives at zero. For any given epsilon, there exists a delta such that I can come arbitrarily close to shooting myself, and yet never actually do it. I am my own limit, and that limit is the present.

"The book is the key," I say, finishing my argument, hoping it's enough, knowing I can't say anything else.

The words are still coming out of my mouth, the sound is still in the air, the last syllables hanging out there between us, and for a moment, for the longest second in my life, we're frozen, looking at each other. He's trying to figure out what I know that he doesn't know, and what I know is that I don't know anything. I don't know anything he doesn't already know. It's all in there, inside him, waiting to be remembered. Nothing has changed since I got into that machine, an instant ago. I have visited memories, I have explored what never was but should have been, I have gone in a loop, but that loop, like the book, is just another way of expressing the present moment. The loop is a string, looped around and back through, and then drawn tight, into a knot, into a single point, the knot of the present moment. It collapses onto itself, like the present, which only appears when you think about it, like the text of the book. I can't change the past, but I can change the present. How can I convince him of this without actually saying it, only thinking it, only knowing it? But now I see the two of us moving closer and closer, and I see that at the moment I understand it, he does, too, we're both on the verge of it, and so by the time I finish my sentence, he sees, and I see. He knows and I know and he knows I know, and I know he knows.

I reach out and put my hand on the barrel. He lowers the gun.

I exhale in relief. It's over.

Then: pain.

Because, well, there's no getting around it. I shot myself the first time, which is every time, which is the only time, which is this time. I'm feeling pain because he lowered the gun, just like I did, and he still pulled the trigger, just like I did, and oh my Lord this hurts. Hoo hoo boy, does it hurt, it hurts it hurts it hurts, but I'll get over it, and the important thing is everything that happened, that happens, happens just right. He shoots me and the wave function collapses, all of this rejoins itself, and in a sense, one of us dies, and in a sense, we both do, and in a sense, neither of us does.

When it happens, what happens is a weird guy in a hangar firing a gun at his own stomach, and then jumping into his time machine and opening a box and staring at its contents, some kind of toy, some kind of miniature world that apparently fascinates him, that apparently holds some kind of answer for him, and in jumping into the machine, the guy bangs his leg pretty hard, shattering it, and of course there is the matter of his ma.s.sive intestinal bleeding from the self-inflicted gunshot wound, and he's lying in there bleeding with a shattered fibula, and the facility-wide alarm systems are going off, all stations alert, and the cops coming to arrest the guy, and then later release him when they realize he'd just returned the day before from over nine years out in the field, and was apparently suffering from exhaustion after spending all that time, a third of his life, in a s.p.a.ce the size of a closet, and of course, that's what externally happens, and that is what happens, but it's also not all that happens. What happens is that weird guy mumbling something to himself about the collapsing, infinitely divisible nature of each moment. Above him, the guy can see the ma.s.sive free-floating clock, the tangible representation of time, he can see it ticking forward. A zero changes to a one, one second slams into the next. 11:47:01. Time to move on. What happens is the weird guy's eyes going all watery, and his dog looking pretty worried, and then the guy's sort of hugging himself, and then he's opening a box wrapped in brown parcel paper, like it's a present, like the weird guy is ten again and it's his birthday, and he's opening a gift from his father, and in a way he sort of is.

I lurch forward and fall, awkwardly, into my time machine. I have always admired protagonists who fall gracefully when they get shot by laser guns or other weapons, and I've always promised myself that if I ever got lucky enough to get into a story where I get shot I would try my best to look cool while my body reacts to the physical blast of the weapon, I would try to do one of those dramatic slo-mo falls, drawing it out, like a ch.o.r.eographed, single-direction dance through s.p.a.ce, set to music, with the report of the gun still reverberating through the sound track, but I have to say, when you get shot, it is not the first thing on your mind to fall awesomely. I don't fall even a little cool. I just kind of trip myself and sort of accidentally run into my time machine, in the process slamming my shin against the hatch door about as hard as I remember doing the first time.

When it happens, this is what happens: I still shoot myself. When it happens, I still jump into my time machine, and the memories come flooding back and I still open that package and find what I'm looking for. The moment of all of this is the moment I open that package, and now I understand that what's happened, that's all that's happened, that's why it happens today. I still get shot in the stomach, but as it turns out I don't die from it after all. It all works out just right, and it turns out that you can get shot in the stomach and live, if you do it just right, and it turns out that I'm okay, it just happens to be the most excruciating pain I have ever felt in my entire life, and it feels really good.

APPENDIX A

HOW TO LIVE SAFELY IN A SCIENCE FICTIONAL UNIVERSE Look in the box. Inside it, there's another box. Look in that box and find another one. And then another one, until you get to the last one. The smallest one. Open that box. See the kitchen, see the clock. Get inside a time machine. Go get your dad. When you get there, he will say, hey. You can say hey. Or you can say, hey Dad. Or you can say, I missed you, you old man. And he is old. Notice how old he is, but don't make him feel bad about it. He's been waiting here for you for a long time, in this kitchen, trapped. Listen to him explain how he never meant to leave. He did leave, though. What he means, and listen to him good, is that he left and by the time he figured out he wanted to come home, it was too late. His time machine broke down, and he got trapped in the past. Tell him you understand. That's what happens to all of us, you should say. The path of a man's life is straight, straight, straight, until the moment when it isn't anymore, and after that it begins to meander around aimlessly, and then get tangled, and then at some point the path gets so confusing that the man's ability to move around in time, his device for conveyance, his memory of what he loves, the engine that moves him forward, it can break, and he can get permanently stuck in his own history. When he says this, you just nod. You are angry, there is still a lot to explain, there are still many questions to be answered, but there will be time for that. Just nod, and be sympathetic, because you should be. You know all about tangled loops yourself now. You don't want to waste any more of the time you have together, because he looks tired. He spent all these years stuck here, waiting inside an empty minute, a safe minute when he knows he can't be found, hoping you got the message. And you did. But he doesn't get those years back, and he's older than you remember. Invite him into your machine. Try not to chuckle as he looks small and impressed and like a boy, marveling at how far things have come. Introduce him to TIM, the operating system in your new machine. Don't tell him about TAMMY. Keep that one for yourself. It was a lovely thing, you and her, but you hope her next operator treats her better than you did. Introduce your father to your dog, Ed, who used to not exist, but now exists again because, hey what do you know, you are kind of a protagonist after all, and protagonists need sidekicks, and he's your trusty sidekick. Make a note to call your boss, Phil, even though he doesn't have feelings. Make things right. Make a note to make a lot of things right. Get back in the box. Set it for home, present day. Go see your mom. Bring your dad. Have dinner, the three of you. Go find The Woman You Never Married and see if she might want to be The Woman You Are Going To Marry Someday. Step out of this box. Pop open the hatch. The forces within the chronohydraulic air lock will equalize. Step out into the world of time and risk and loss again. Move forward, into the empty plane. Find the book you wrote, and read it until the end, but don't turn the last page yet, keep stalling, see how long you can keep expanding the infinitely expandable moment. Enjoy the elastic present, which can accommodate as little or as much as you want to put in there. Stretch it out, live inside of it.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Thanks are not enough but I offer them anyway for now, in lieu of a drink: To Gary Heidt, all anyone could ask for in an agent. Your creativity keeps me going. I would have given up a long time ago if not for you. It would be nice to actually meet you in person one day.

To Tim O'Connell, my editor at Pantheon, for about one hundred thirty-one different things. I showed you an area in the ground; you showed me where the book was buried. Then you took it out of the ground, dusted it off, and handed it to me. Then you explained what I was supposed to do with it. Basically, you did all the hard work.

To Josefine Kals, my publicist at Pantheon. We just started working together when I wrote this, but my future self says it's going to be awesome.