Version Control

by Dexter Palmer

  For whatever reason, once I got the idea, suicide seemed not like an escape from this dilemma, but like an act of genius. Clever. Cunning, even. There was a clear goal to achieve, and a multitude of possible paths that would take me there. My adviser would come in one morning to find my body slumped at my desk, and he would be impressed by my lateral thinking. At least this is what my demon gave me to believe.

  I am not saying it made sense. Even the man I am now has trouble empathizing with the man I once was, though we share the same memories. It doesn’t make sense. It never did. That’s the thing. Nonetheless, I was sure that once I completed the deed, the logic behind the compulsion would reveal itself to me, confirming that my instincts were unerring. But only then.

  At a certain point the demon moved beyond strong recommendations of the best course of action, and began to deal in hypotheticals. Suppose we do this, and I’m not trying to get you to agree to anything, just putting this on the table, suppose we do this, what would be the method, what would be the time. Morning, noon, or night. Knife or pill or rope or high window. The hypotheticals were a Trojan horse for negotiations, and if you accept the legitimacy of negotiating with the demon you have lost. To negotiate is only to attempt to dictate the terms of your own surrender.

  —

  I should not have tried to weather this alone. I should have gotten help from someone else. Picked up the phone or sent an e-mail. I rarely talked to my parents even though they were nearby. I’d lost touch with most of the people I went to college with, and I didn’t really make many new friends in grad school. All of the grad student activities I got invited to centered around drinking, and going to the Friday beer hour and the inevitable nerdy shenanigans that followed was not science, I thought.

  If I had it to do over again. Just saying what was going on in my head to someone when it mattered would have gone a long way toward shutting the demon down.

  —

  Eventually the thing that wore me down was the suggestion, from either the demon, or myself, or the demon that I was becoming, that it wasn’t success that mattered, so much as making the attempt. But it was then that the part of me that still realized that suicide was not an escape began to see another way out.

  I reasoned, if “reasoned” is not too complimentary a word for the kind of thinking I was doing, that the preferable suicide method would be the one that had the highest chance of failure. And evolution and technology have combined to make human beings extremely difficult to kill. What seemed like a potentially intractable problem transformed into an easy one.

  Lateral thinking. My specialty.

  —

  I ended up settling on a box cutter. I researched the method for weeks, keeping the secret of my intent to fail from myself, hoping that the demon that sat in my mind and that had my face and voice would not overhear my thoughts. With each apparent step toward my goal, a perusal of a web page, a purchase of an implement, the demon’s insistent commands to quit fooling around and nut up and get this done would relent for a while. A few hours. Half a day sometimes.

  —

  I spent a week before the event rehearsing the moves I’d need to make, with the blade of the box cutter sheathed. Economy of movement would matter. Time would be of the essence. The first time I went through the motion of swiping the imaginary blade at my wrist the demon almost shut up completely. And for a while I thought that might be enough.

  But of course it wasn’t.

  —

  Finally, the night came. I did it in the lab, at my desk. I waited DeWitt out, wanting his last memory of me to be that I was a good student, putting Science above all things. On the way out of the office he saw me processing the detector’s data from the day before. The results were shaping up to be perfect yet again, consistent with the day before, so perfect that they seemed fictional.

  DeWitt looked at my monitor. “Beautiful. Beautiful.”

  I said, “Thank you.”

  He said, “No need for thanks. I should be thanking you.”

  Then he left.

  Then it was time.

  I pulled the necessary materials out of the desk drawer where I’d stored them. Through my eyes the demon saw the things I’d purchased, the things in addition to the box cutter that I’d told it I’d bought for completely different reasons. It took on a version of the voice of my adviser, rich and smoky and full of command. “What are you doing? Can’t you see you’re crippling your chances of success before you even get out of the gate? This is nonsense! Is this the best you can do?”

  I spread the towel out on the desk and lined up the implements on it, left to right. With a flick of my thumb I unsheathed the blade of the box cutter. Last-minute thing, the demon said. Last-minute idea that I have. Instead of just tracing the blade across your wrist once, why don’t you go up and down with it a few times. Dig in deep and do it right.

  I turned my left wrist upward and, committed to my well-rehearsed course of action, I lightly, very lightly, drew the tip of the blade across. It bled. It bled a lot. I didn’t take time to stare. I didn’t panic. For once I was determined to fail. To fail was to swim against the stream. I slipped on the one-handed tourniquet that I’d picked up from a military surplus shop and yanked it tight, watching the flow of blood from my wrist drop to a merciful trickle. I wound my wrist in a dozen turns of gauze and applied a compressed bandage. Then, holding my left arm in the air, I dialed 911, leaving bloody fingerprints on the telephone’s buttons.

  Then I waited, safe in the knowledge that I’d outsmarted them all. DeWitt. The demon. Science itself.

  I don’t remember much of what came just after. Some of what I remember I don’t want to write down.

  One thing I remember is that in the hospital they wouldn’t let me have dental floss. Confiscation of shoelaces and belts I could understand. But I couldn’t imagine how you could even begin to kill yourself with dental floss. You would have to be some kind of genius to pull that off. And for some reason, this was probably a day afterward, clean teeth were very important to me. I tried to cajole the nurse by mentioning the importance of getting back to daily rituals. I told her about the checkup I had coming in a month, and the disappointed look on the face of my hygienist as she noted the recession of my gumline in my record.

  The nurse laughed right in my face. “Not twenty-four hours ago you were ready to pour out your own blood all over the floor, and now you’re worried about a little gingivitis. You’re getting better already! Still ain’t getting that dental floss, though. You can do without for a few days.”

  That laugh, and that carefree mockery. She probably could have been fired for it if anyone had overheard, but it felt good. I hadn’t felt so human in a long time.

  After I left the hospital I returned not to the lab, but home, to my parents. My withdrawal from Nicolls seemed to have been presumed by someone, and quietly taken care of. I don’t recall being asked. I may have signed something.

  For the next few months I read fantasy novels, nine-hundred-page paperbacks that were one of a series of three or seven or ten, full of invented languages and imaginary races and shifting alliances between factions, on continents that were perpetually at war. Not wasted time. It kept my mind busy and helped it get strong again. And I spent hundreds of hours playing video games. Not arcade racers or fighting games, but the expansive role-playing games that required making detailed maps of dungeons and forests and ruined castles, where you were someone else, somewhere else, and your ascent to godhood was more or less a matter of time because you could save and reload after a death, and control the way the world worked by changing the settings in a menu. That was good for me, for a while.

  —

  Eventually I started to miss Science again. It was the one thing I was cut out for. It was hard to talk about with my parents, but I had the calling, and they were behind me. They were determined not to let me fall down the rabbit hole again, though, and they insisted that I only apply to places near enough so that they co
uld get to me easily by car or train.

  My CV had a suspicious barren spot and didn’t end the way it should have. A crucial recommendation letter was missing. And the field was small. Word got around. I didn’t get into Princeton or Rutgers, but I did get accepted to Stratton, the university where I made my home as a graduate student and then a post-doc and then a tenured professor, unlike the average physics student, who spends most of his twenties and thirties bouncing from one place to another. This place has been good to me. Few physicists could claim to be as fortunate in their careers.

  —

  When I had my first meeting with my new adviser there, he closed the door to his office and sat down in the chair next to mine, so that his desk would not be between us. He said, “I talked to your old adviser at Nicolls. I happened to run into him. He had nothing but the highest praise for you.”

  “Thank you,” I said, though that didn’t seem like quite the right response.

  “He really wanted you to know that,” he said.

  I never spoke to Peter DeWitt again.

  I lost interest in gravitational wave research after that. DeWitt never managed to produce credible evidence of direct detection. I don’t know if my name, or Claudia’s, is on any of the papers he published after I left his lab. I didn’t bother to look them up, and I don’t care.

  The three-hundred-million-dollar interferometer in Louisiana never picked up any gravity waves either, at least not during the seven years it ran once it started. It was shut down and retooled in the second decade of the twenty-first century, and relaunched in a more advanced version, ten times as sensitive. The paper published by the interferometry team a couple of years ago read as if every word in it had been argued over at length by a committee—even its title, “Observation of Gravitational Waves from a Compact Binary Coalescence,” struck a careful balance between brazenness and bet-hedging—but those with eyes to see could detect a confidence that was missing from earlier papers on gravitational waves that had made bolder claims. The smoke is still clearing, but at this point few would be surprised if the authors of that paper picked up a Nobel Prize in a few years for their efforts.

  So raise a glass to all the failures who blazed their trail.

  —

  I read about Claudia Pierson in the New York Times a couple of years ago. The article was in the Real Estate section. She and her husband were part of a trend piece about people who were buying adjacent apartments in Manhattan high-rises, knocking down walls to make two small spaces into one large one. Claudia was a vice president at a company that scraped data from social media networks and used it to tabulate credit scores. Her husband was a novelist.

  I guess DeWitt’s advice worked out for her.

  —

  I have a little scar on my wrist that’s concealed by a wristwatch my wife gave me. Most days I don’t even think about it. My mind is in a good place now.

  Every morning before work I get up and do push-ups to the point of failure, on the floor next to the bed. If I didn’t do them to the point of failure, I’d probably be stronger. But getting stronger isn’t the point. The failure is the point.

  —

  Every day I think of something DeWitt said to me. He said, “As a scientist you never know when truth may come to you and you alone, and when it will call on you to be alive, and brave.”

  Halfway there.

  30

  LOST TIME

  The wristwatch that Rebecca gave to me as a gift several years ago is powered by stored kinetic energy instead of a quartz battery, and reliably loses forty-nine seconds each week. I set it the first time I put it on my wrist and then left it alone. I have worn it every day since then. It is now a little over six hours behind.

  I am afraid that I may not have been as appreciative as I could have been when she presented me with it. I saw it as an imperfect timepiece, one that valued aesthetics over accuracy. But later I reasoned that although it might be bad at keeping accurate time, it could serve another purpose. If the watch kept time inaccurately, but the degree of that inaccuracy was itself regular and predictable, then I could use the seconds gained or lost to measure the time elapsed since she had given me the watch. Therefore I could carry with me an empirical demonstration of the durability of her love, one that also had the secondary benefit of concealing the faint scar on my wrist that reminded me of a time in my life I perhaps could have done without.

  The watch is a little over six hours slow now. When it says it is six a.m., it is time for lunch. This means it has been roughly 8.5 years since Rebecca gave me the watch.

  We married soon after that. It feels like a long time ago. The watch will lose seven more seconds today, the record of our love growing one day older.

  Machines do not always serve the purpose well for which they were intended by their designers, but sometimes they make themselves useful in some other unexpected, singular way. The Michelson-Morley interferometer was built in order to produce evidence of matter moving through the “luminous aether,” but ended up being a principal contributor to the development of special relativity.

  The causality violation device may be like that. It may not be capable of doing that which we intend it to do, just as the Michelson-Morley experiment could not detect movement through aether that did not exist. The causality violation device may be doing something else. May have already done it. Something wonderful and terrible.

  I worry about Rebecca. And I worry about myself and what I may have done to her, if anything, by marrying her, wedded as I am to this Great Work. To agree to a marriage is to consent to a mutual act of transformation, to promise to ensure that the versions of yourselves that you will become will always remain in harmony, though you yourselves can never stay the same. I may have failed here somewhat. I may not have admitted the extent to which the Great Work would be a third partner in our marriage with whom she would have little in common, and that it would always pull me away, always change me so that I could change it in return.

  When I look at her over the breakfast table, in the increasingly rare times when we have breakfast together, I see the glass of wine in her hand, and the slow accumulation of regret in her eyes that has changed their shape, making them liquid and heavy-lidded where they were once sparkling and bright. I see her fading and blurring. The way her hand drifts to the bottle reminds me of my own as it went for the knife. But I do not speak.

  As my son grows older he becomes more of a puzzle to me, more so than the causality violation device that takes up ever more of my life. If I could get my head clear I might indulge myself in the pleasure of making sense of him. Rebecca seems to have accepted that he is different from her, and yet they manage to communicate in a meaningful way. He shows her drawings that look to me like abstract scribbles, and she says she can see the President in them, or the character of Ophelia from Hamlet, or me, sitting at my desk.

  I could tell him about causality violation sometime. But I stay silent. I watch Rebecca pour another glass, and then another to follow that one, and I stay silent. The Great Work is always calling. Speech carries the threat of initiating conversation, and idle talk means time away from my truest love.

  I am beginning to consider seriously the possibility that completion of my task is not possible, though not because the construction of a functioning causality violation device would defy the laws of physics as we understand them. There are two separate but related tasks that I wish to accomplish. One is the construction of the device. The other is the production of evidence that a working device had been constructed, evidence that would be accepted as valid by skeptical experts in the scientific community, who would then assure the outside world of the evidence’s validity in turn.

  It may be the case that accomplishment of the former must necessarily obviate the possibility of accomplishing the latter.

  Consider the scientific method. There is the observer, and the world. The observer acts in a manner that is intended to alter the world. He drops a weight or tur
ns a dial or types a command. He observes what, if any, change occurs as a result of the act, and attempts to come to a conclusion about the way the world functions that is based on the nature of the observed change.

  The scientific method entails two assumptions that are so basic that, even if you spell them out, they are still difficult to keep in the mind. First: that the observer stays the same while the world changes. Second: that cause precedes effect.

  But the very nature of the experiment we are conducting means that the second of these assumptions is thrown into doubt. We are deliberately attempting to engineer an event in which effect chronologically precedes cause.

  If one of these assumptions is under threat, why not the other?

  This idea needs to be developed further. But life is taking me away from my work. I need to pick up my misbehaving son from school. Rebecca called me on the phone to tell me this. She says she cannot do it. There were unexpected long silences between her words when she spoke, and I had the impression that she was fighting back tears. Not sure why.

  31

  VERSION CONTROL

  Leaving the phone on the nightstand next to the bed was a mistake. Its light punched through Rebecca’s eyelids and woke her as its jittering vibration began to carry it off the tabletop. She rolled over and caught it just before it dropped to the floor. Who was calling at this unearthly hour? Wasn’t even light out yet.

  What the hell?

  She answered. “Alicia. Why are you—”

  “Hello!” Alicia said cheerfully, as if it were not six forty-five on a Saturday morning.

  “Good morning?”