How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

by Charles Yu

  I get my clipboard out, tap my knuckles on the hatch. I’ve never met Linus Skywalker before, but I’ve heard stories from other techs, so I feel like I have a good idea what to expect.

  What I don’t expect is a kid. A boy opens the hatch and climbs out, pushes the hair out of his eyes. Can’t be a day older than nine. I ask him what he was doing when the machine failed, and he mumbles something about how I would never understand. I say, Try me. He looks down at his anti-gravity boots, which appear to be a couple of sizes too big, then gives me a look like, I’m a fourth-grader, what do you want from me?

  “Dude,” I say. “You know you can’t change the past.”

  He says then what the hell is a time machine for.

  “Not for trying to kill your father when he was your age,” I say.

  He closes his eyes, tilts his head back, pushes air out through his nostrils in a super-dramatic way.

  “You have no idea what it’s like, man. To grow up with the freaking savior of the universe as your dad.”

  I tell him that doesn’t have to be his whole story. That he can have a new beginning.

  “For starters,” I say, “change your name.”

  He opens his eyes, looks at me as seriously as a nine-year-old can, says yeah maybe, but I know he doesn’t mean it. He’s trapped in his whole dark-father-lost-son-galactic-monomyth thing and he doesn’t know any other way.

  A lot of the time, the machine isn’t even broken. I just have to explain to the customer the basics of Novikovian self-consistency, which no one wants to hear about. No one wants to hear that they went to all this trouble for nothing. For some people, that’s the only reason they rented the thing, to go back and fix their broken lives.

  Other people are in the unit all sweaty and nervous and afraid to touch anything because they are so freaked out about the implications of changing history. Oh God, they say, what if I go back and a butterfly flaps its wings differently and this and that and world war and I never existed and so on and yeah.

  This is what I say: I’ve got good news and bad news.

  The good news is, you don’t have to worry, you can’t change the past.

  The bad news is, you don’t have to worry, no matter how hard you try, you can’t change the past.

  The universe just doesn’t put up with that. We aren’t important enough. No one is. Even in our own lives. We’re not strong enough, willful enough, skilled enough in chronodiegetic manipulation to be able to just accidentally change the entire course of anything, even ourselves. Navigating possibility space is tricky. Like any skill, practice helps, but only to a point. Moving a vehicle through this medium is, when you get down to it, something that none of us is ever going to master. There are too many factors, too many variables. Time isn’t an orderly stream. Time isn’t a placid lake recording each of our ripples. Time is viscous. Time is a massive flow. It is a self-healing substance, which is to say, almost everything will be lost. We’re too slight, too inconsequential, despite all of our thrashing and swimming and waving our arms about. Time is an ocean of inertia, drowning out the small vibrations, absorbing the slosh and churn, the foam and wash, and we’re up here, flapping and slapping and just generally spazzing out, and sure, there’s a little bit of splashing on the surface, but that doesn’t even register in the depths, in the powerful undercurrents miles below us, taking us wherever they are taking us.

  I try to tell people all this, but no one listens. I don’t blame them and in any event, it could be worse. I mean, human nature is what keeps me employed. I fix time machines during the day (whatever a day means for me—I’m not sure I even know that anymore), and at night I sleep alone, in a quiet, nameless, dateless day that I found, tucked into a hidden cul-de-sac of space–time. For the past several years, I have gone to sleep every night in this same little pocket, the most uneventful piece of time I could find. Same exact thing every night, night after night. Total silence. Absolutely nothing. That’s why I chose it. I know for a fact that nothing bad can happen to me in here.

  The earliest memory I have of my own dad is the two of us, sitting on my bed as he reads me a book we have checked out from the local library. I am three. I don’t remember what the story is, or even the title of the book. I don’t remember what he’s wearing, or if my room’s messy. What I do remember is the way I fit between his right arm and his body, and the way his neck and the underside of his chin look in the soft yellow light of my lamp, which has a cloth lamp shade, light blue, covered by an alternating pattern of robots and spaceships.

  This is what I remember: (i) the little pocket of space he creates for me, (ii) how it is enough, (iii) the sound of his voice, (iv) the way those spaceships look, shot through from behind with light, so that every stitch in the fabric of the surface is a hole and a source, a point and an absence, a coordinate in the ship’s celestial navigation, (v) how the bed feels like a little spaceship itself.

  People rent time machines.

  They think they can change the past.

  Then they get there and find out causality doesn’t work the way they thought it did. They get stuck, stuck in places they didn’t mean to go, in places they did mean to go, in places they shouldn’t have tried to go. They get into trouble. Logical, metaphysical, etc.

  That’s where I come in. I go and get them out.

  I tell people: I have a job and I have job security.

  I have a job because I know how to fix the cooling module on the quantum decoherence engine of the TM-31. That’s the reason I have a job.

  But the reason I have job security is that people have no idea how to make themselves happy. Even with a time machine. I have job security because what the customer wants, when you get right down to it, is to relive his very worst moment, over and over and over again. Willing to pay a lot of money to do it, too.

  I mean, look, my father built a sort of semi-working proto-time-machine years before pretty much anyone else had even thought of it. He was one of the first people to work out the basic math and the parameters and the limitations of life in the various canonical time travel scenarios; he was gifted or cursed, depending on how you look at it, with a deep intuition for time, an ability to feel it, inside, viscerally, and he still spent his whole life trying to figure out how to minimize loss and entropy and logical impossibility, how to tease out the calculus underlying cause and effect; he still spent the better part of four decades trying to come to terms with just how screwed up and unfair it is that we only get to do this all once, with the intractability and general awfulness of trying to parse the idea of once, trying to get any kind of handle on it, trying to put it into the equations, isolate into a variable the slippery concept of onceness.

  Years of his life, my life, his life with my mom, years and years and years, down in that garage, near us, but not with us, near us in space and time, crunching through the calculations, working it out on that chalkboard we mounted on the far wall near the tool rack. My father built a time machine and then he spent his whole life trying to figure out how to use it to get more time. He spent all the time he had with us thinking about how he wished he had more time, if he could only have more time.

  He’s still doing it, for all I know. I haven’t seen him for some number of years. I would be more precise, but I can’t. Or really, I won’t. I don’t feel like being more precise about it. Some number of years. Some number. I’ve spent long enough in P-I, in this gear, inside this TM-31, that figuring out how “long” it has been is more an exercise in science fictional math than anything else.

  Sure, there’s a partial differential equation I could use to calculate the Aggregate Loss of Possibility, or Quantity of Wasted Father–Son Time, but what’s that going to do? Put a number on it? Sure. I could. I could put a number on something but that isn’t going to make any of it any better, a number that doesn’t correspond to what my mother felt, all the way right up to the end, before she stopped having new feelings and became content to have the old feelings over and over again
. I could come up with some answer to it, but putting a number on it won’t quantify what that amount of lost years feels like. So, yeah, I think I’m happy here in the Present-Indefinite, not being precise about it. I know what I know. I know I’ve been looking for him for a while, spent a good portion of my life trying to untangle his timeline. Trying to bring him back home. What I don’t know is why he would want to untangle his worldline from ours. What I don’t know is what that will mean for us all, when we get to the ends of those worldlines, when we’re supposed to be knotted up together. Is he alone? Is he happier where he is? Does he think about us before he goes to sleep at night?

  . . .

  You learn a lot of things in this line of work.

  For example: If you ever see yourself coming out of a time machine, run. Run away as fast you can. Don’t stop. Don’t try to talk. Nothing good can come of it. It’s rule number one, and it is drilled into you on the first day of training. It should be second nature, they tell you: Don’t be a smartass. Don’t try anything fancy. If you see yourself coming at you, don’t think, don’t talk, don’t do anything. Just run.

  And the best way to comply with rule number one is rule number two, which is actually more of a conjecture, long believed by science fictional theorists to be true, but still as yet to be rigorously proved: the Shen-Takayama-Furimoto Exclusion Principle. Roughly stated, it goes something like this: A self auto-dislocated by at least one-half phase shift from his own subjective present will not, under ordinary conditions, encounter any other version of his self in a controlled story space environment, which is to say, if you hide inside this box and don’t look out the porthole, you can, if that’s what you want, manage to get through middle age without ever learning anything about yourself.

  This can be achieved in a number of ways, some of which have been explored in the literature on self-dislocation techniques, but the easiest method that I’ve found is technology-aided. Live like I do. Don’t get locked in to your own timeline, don’t commit to any particular path, don’t be where you are. My father pioneered this technique. As he often was, my father was ahead of his time without even realizing it.

  But this is where that gets you. This is where things are today, for me, right now, here, so to speak: my mom is locked in a Polchinski 650 Hour-Long Reinforced Time Loop, the midmarket offering from Planck-Wheeler Industries, a lifestyle architecture firm specializing in small-scale living solutions. It’s the sci-fi version of assisted living. My mother, the Buddhist, who used to believe that through meditation it is possible to escape the temporal prison of myopic self-consciousness, has chosen to spend the rest of her life trapped in an hour of her own choosing. She gets to relive the same sixty minutes, over and over again, for as long and as many times as she likes.

  She chose a Sunday-night dinner, a hypothetical dinner, not an actual memory. She’s living now in her new home, on the second floor of a five-floor walk-up, one-bedroom, one-and-a-half-bath with a combination living/dining room and a cramped little kitchen and a small enclosed patio area where she tends to her plants and flowers and the occasional seasonal vegetable or two.

  The 650 isn’t bad. It’s got the standard features, voluntary exit, all that. What I really wanted to get for her was the Yurtsever 800, which has an extra half hour to the loop and better illusion of free will, but it was in the Gold Tier, a bit outside my price range. I remember taking Mom to the Planck-Wheeler showroom, remember sitting in that sales office with her, drinking weak coffee from Styrofoam cups, looking at the brochure, neither of us saying what we were both thinking, both of us pretending that the Gold Tier wasn’t there.

  Sometimes I go visit her, watch her happily making dinner, having a conversation with an imaginary version of me. I could interrupt, of course, I could ring the doorbell, and I imagine she’d open it, happy as ever, like it was the first time. She might give me a kiss on the cheek, finish cooking, and call out to the holographic version of my father while I set the table. I could do that, but I never do. So she gets by with this ghost-image, this set of data encoded with a simulation of my physical likeness, my personality. He probably treats her better than I do anyway.

  It’s not ideal, obviously, but I guess it’s what she wants, to live in a kind of imperfect past tense, in a state of recurrence and continuation, an ambiguous, dreamlike state, a good hour, a family dinner we could have had, on a good day, but never actually did, an hour that continually repeats, is always happening and yet is fixed in its already having happened. She’s in it for the long haul now, having cashed out her retirement for ten more prepaid years. I don’t know what happens after that.

  So yeah, my mother’s in a Polchinski and my father is lost, and me, I live in a box. I live in a box that I constructed with my father. That’s what we did. Growing up for me was a series of boxes. We worked in our garage, a box of cold air and the harsh light cast by that single lightbulb, encased in its orange plastic safety housing, hanging from the hook my father had anchored up into the ceiling, with the extension cord running down and around the car and looped over the hood ornament and plugged in to the socket on the far wall. That wasn’t ideal, but it worked. Nothing about the setup was ideal, but that was okay with us. It was our homemade laboratory. It was where we were going to make something, where my father was going to make something of himself.

  We drew on boxes, in boxes, we graphed on graph paper with the world subdivided into little boxes. We made metal boxes and put smaller boxes inside, and onto those boxes were etched little two-dimensional boxes, circuits and loops and schematics, the grammar of time travel. We made boxes out of language, logic, rules of syntax. We made the very first crude, undiscovered, uncredited prototype of this box that I’m sitting in now. We made equations. Equations that had sadness as a constant, whose escape velocities seemed impossibly out of reach. A lot of strange variables went into those equations, got imprinted onto the boxes, onto us, onto him. He was trying to make the perfect box. A vehicle to move through possibility space, a vehicle to happiness or whatever it was he was looking for. We trapped ourselves in boxes, inside of boxes in boxes, inside of more.

  All that got encoded in my box, too. You live like this long enough, a life without chances, you lose your bearings. A life without danger. A life without the risk of Now. In any event, what do I need with Now? Now, I think, is overrated. Now hasn’t been working out so great for me. Now never has.

  Chronological living is a kind of lie. That’s why I don’t do it anymore. Existence doesn’t have more meaning in one direction than it does in any other. Completing the days of your life in strict calendar order can feel forced. Arbitrary. Especially after you’ve seen what I’ve seen.

  Most people I know live their lives moving in a constant forward direction, the whole time looking backward.

  from How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

  size of

  Thirty-one is a smallish universe, slightly below average in size. On the cosmic scale, somewhere between shoe box and standard aquarium. Not big enough for space opera and anyway not zoned for it. Despite its relatively modest physical dimensions, inhabitants of 31 report a considerable variance in terms of psychological scale, probably owing to the significant inconsistency in conceptual density of the underlying fabric of this region of existence.

  Universe 31 can feel claustrophobic some nights, like it’s an overgrown city of insomniacs, crowded and noisy and suffused with a background illumination that glows purple in the sky, in the east sky and the west sky and in the north and the south, in the early sky and the late, high and low and in every corner of every sky, and on nights like these, no one ever sleeps in this city-sized universe, everyone just stares up at their vast yet tiny piece of the connected sky, listening to the still-humming hum of the primordial radiation.

  Other nights, it’s the opposite. It’s so dark that every single person in the universe feels lonely, at the same time, even if they are holding someone or being held, and no one sleeps,
because it’s too quiet, too dissipated, everyone just lies awake feeling puny, feeling the enormity of what there is and what there isn’t, everyone just stares upward at the heavens, watching their little corner, their swath of the frigid black cloth that swallows all warmth and light.

  The usable interior volume of the main compartment of the TM-31 is a bit bigger than that of a phone booth. There isn’t much extra room in here; in fact it’s hardly a room at all, closer to a snug envelope of space–time that fits me like a second body. When I am looking through the viewfinder and I have the Frame of Reference filter set just right, I can, if I choose to, relax my mind in such a way as to imagine that I have actually become one with the device, have merged with it, and after a while the distinction between my vehicle and me gets a bit confused.

  I guess I could describe this space as closest in size to, though not quite as large as, a hotel shower, not the kind with a curtain, but the cross-sectionally-square-shaped kind that is see-through from floor to ceiling, except that the main hatch to the TM-31, while it can be made transparent like a shower door (if that’s what you’re into), also happens to be a super-cooled magnetic compression system, designed to insulate against temperatures ranging from, at the low end, about half a degree above absolute zero to, at the high end, about a million degrees Kelvin. Hot, cold, people’s opinions. All of it just bounces off. In addition, you can install an aftermarket cloaking device, so that the unit can be made invisible with the flick of a switch. You can just sit in here, impervious and invisible. So invisible you might even forget yourself.

  Standing one way, with my arms outstretched, I can touch the sides of the unit with my palms flattened, but turning the other way, along the vehicle’s lengthwise axis, I can’t touch both sides with my full wingspan, and in fact, lying down in the unit along that axis, with my hair lightly brushing one wall, if I point my toes, I can just barely touch both ends with the entire height of my body. So that’s how I sleep in here, i.e., quite comfortably. It’s a bed, an office, a living room, and a tool shop. I take it to go to work, I use it for work, I go home from work in it, I live in it until the next day. If, in connection with a repair job, I have to do some back-of-the-envelope physics, nothing fancy, just some rough-and-ready number crunching, there’s a space–time simulation engine with a touchscreen interface that offers dropdown menus with easy-to-use partial differential equations; all I need to do is click on what kind of geometry the universe has in the local region (Euclid/Riemann/Lobachevsky) and I’m off to the races. I have everything I need to move through time in here, and nothing I don’t.