How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

by Charles Yu

  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 transmuted 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.

  “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-assed 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 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 passenger, 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 space. 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 space 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.

  from How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

  capital city

  Eighty-seven percent of the nonrobot population of Universe 31 lives in the capital city, the full legal name of which (used only by nonlocals due to the fact that it is printed that way on maps) is, officially,

  NEW ANGELES/LOST TOKYO-2

  The name is abbreviated in governmental regulatory usage as NA/LT-2, and is sometimes, though not frequently, referred to informally as Lost City or Verse City or New Tokyo, but is known to virtually everyone other than tourists and bureaucrats as Loop City.

  The formation of Loop City occurred in two steps. Step one: the cities of New York and Los Angeles, 2,462 miles apart, much to the surprise and consternation of residents and property owners and municipal officials and parking lot owners and westsiders from the eastern half and eastsiders from the western half, slowly and invisibly and irreversibly merged into each other, in the process swallowing up what was in between, leaving one metropolis that contained, within it, what had been America. Alaska and Hawaii were included as well.

  The second phase began a short while later, when the sprawling city of Greater Tokyo spontaneously bifurcated along a spatio-temporal fault line. Half of this bifurcated Tokyo moved across the world and wrapped itself around the perimeter of the recently formed New York/Los Angeles chimera. This half is referred to as Lost Tokyo-2.

  The other
half, Lost Tokyo-1, has not been located yet, although presumably it exists out there somewhere in the universe, a mega-demi-city of eighty-five million people, a city fractured, cracked in half, torn, ripped not cleanly, but shredded, ragged, ripped along living rooms, plans, meetings, dates, conjugal beds in prisons, family dinner tables, secrets being whispered into ears, couples holding hands, separated in an instant without warning or explanation, leaving two halves, bewildered, speaking Japanese to instant neighbors from the other side of the world, unable to understand what has happened, or if things will ever go back to the way they were, hoping its other half might someday find its way back.

  The hub is jammed, so subspace traffic control pushes us out into a holding pattern, where we end up spending almost two hours of bio-time in the XPO loop. By the time I get clearance to an open channel, I’m hungry and tired and then they tell me the first available channel for my reentry into time is a few minutes before midnight. Which, at first, I’m thinking, That’s just great, what that really means is that my choices for food are the all-night corner deli or the gritty little two-bucks-for-two-hot-dogs place on 72nd and Broadway, but then I’m thinking, Eh, who am I kidding, I like those hot dogs.

  After landing, we taxi from our time capture cage over to the maintenance facility. Ed and I climb out of our TM-31 and into the cavernous space of Hangar 157.

  The repair bot—they program these bots with Simulated Mechanic Guy personality—takes one look at my TM-31 and raises his eyebrows at me.

  “What is that?” I say. “Don’t do that.”

  “Do what?”

  “You know what. With your eyebrows. What am I saying? Those aren’t even real eyebrows.”

  “Someone’s a little defensive.”

  It kills me to admit it, but he’s right. I am defensive about my machine. You can tell a lot about a person by the wear pattern on his chronodiegetic manifold. It’s really nothing but your anxieties and tendencies and thought patterns, etched in chromium dioxide.

  He tells me to come back tomorrow. I say what time. He says before noon.

  “Can you be a little more specific? I mean, you’re a robot. You do have Microsoft Outlook Seventy-three-point-zero loaded into your brain.”

  “Fine,” he says. He rolls his eyes in simulated contempt and beeps out a calculation.

  “Eleven forty-seven. Your machine will be ready at eleven forty-seven on the dot tomorrow. Don’t be late.”

  On the subway, the guy next to me has his head in a news cloud. Paradox is up 16 percent. If I lean in a couple of inches, I can just make out what it says. Up 16 percent in the fourth quarter on a year-over-year basis. If everyone would just stop trying to kill their grandfathers, maybe we could get things under control. We may not be able to change the past, but nevertheless, we still manage to screw things up fairly well.

  The guy reaches his stop and gets off, leaving his news cloud behind. I love watching the way these clouds break up, little wisps of information trailing off like a flickering tail, a dragon’s tail of typewriter keys and wind chimes, those little monochrome green cloudlets, a fog of fragments and images and words. On busy news days, the entire city is awash in these cloudlets, like fifty million newspapers brought to breathing, blaring life, and then obliterated into a sea of disintegrating light and noise.

  Coming up the stairs out of the station and into the center of the city, the center of the universe, you can be forgiven for feeling, if just for a moment, that you are walking into a place where the ordinary laws of science fiction do not apply.

  You stand and walk and wait and move on a series of shifting colored neon platforms, each one drenched in a different trademarked color scheme, wrapped in all directions with a protected corporate logo.

  You’re a character at the beginning of a fully rendered, immersive environment video game, the world laid out before you, a series of challenges, an endless scrolling realm full of periodically oscillating dangers.

  Tonight, I feel small. An entire night in the city seems to be too much for me, too immense for me to not get lost in. By now it’s past one, the after-hours city is in full swing, and morning is a long way off. Between now and sunrise, anything could happen. And there it is, the feeling comes back, like a coldness in my legs, a tingling up the back of my skull and down my arms. I had forgotten: this is what it feels like to live in time. The lurching forward, the sensation of falling off a cliff into darkness, and then landing abruptly, surprised, confused, and then starting the whole process again in the next moment, doing that over and over again, falling into each instant of time and then climbing back up only to repeat the process. I almost missed this buzzing, gauzy field of vision, the periscoped consciousness, the friction and traction of being in my own life, of using it up, had almost forgotten the danger and pleasure of living in the present, the chaotic, slapdash, yet overproduced stage-scene of each moment, assembling itself then disbanding, each moment taking itself apart, just like that, the sets struck, each instant in time falling apart just as it is coming together.

  I stand there for a while, shivering, stuck, trapped, free, until I look down and notice that Ed looks a little cold. I get a hot chocolate from a guy with a cart, and two hot dogs, one with ketchup and one without, and Ed and I split everything, although if we’re being honest, I think he probably eats a little more than his share.

  Ed wants to see the meson-boson show, so we cross the street and stand outside for a while, watching a replay of the Big Bang. At the top of the hour, they open a box and every color in the universe comes pouring out, refracted and reflected, bouncing around inside the window display. Ed lets out a few sharp yaps of excitement, and a few people slow down to watch, but most have seen it before.

  We cross the street to the opposite corner where an old man and some kind of genius baby play eleven-dimensional music on a four-handed instrument. The air above our heads is a smoggy miasma: mostly a vaporous fog of news and lies, mixed in with gaseous-form gossip, meme-puffs, and as always, the mists of undirected prayers. Men on corners whisper about secret shows upstairs.

  I toss some change in the genius baby’s hat and we continue through the square, trying to avoid all the bots, selling memories, selling. The digital Doomsday Clock says the world will end on schedule next week. The Dirac Foundation has purchased its own billboard, a calculator, twenty stories high, showing the Cumulative Aggregate Error in the universe. Ed and I watch the number get bigger for a while.

  When Ed’s seen enough, we walk back uptown, toward the building where I rent a room. Not an apartment. Just a room. An icy little box for me and my things, a place for a mattress and a toothbrush and a small couch and an almost useless television. I don’t keep anything of importance in here. It just wouldn’t make sense to do anything more permanent in the real-time world. I’m not here enough.

  I get the key from the guy at the front counter. From his stationary, non-time-traveling perspective, he sees me almost every day, only each time he sees me, I’ve aged a year or two or five or nine. I rented the room when I got the job, ten biological years ago for me. To him, it was last Wednesday. My whole life will probably amount to about a month’s rent, by his calculations.

  I find a scratchy wool blanket in the closet, shake it out, and lay it on the couch for Ed. I go down the hall to the community sink to fill a dish of water, and even though he doesn’t actually need it because he has no actual physical body anymore, Ed’s appreciative. If I could be half the person my dog is, I would be twice the human I am.

  from How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

  corporate ownership of

  After its initial owner gave up any serious ambitions for Minor Universe 31, the property was placed into turnaround, where it languished for a while before being picked up by a new operator.

  Eventually, Time Warner Time, a division of Google, acquired the rights to 31 and completed the build-out, with visions of a middle-market to upper-middle-market asset and revenue stream, a
branded corporate experiential shopping center, and the main attraction, a sparkling new four-dimensional theme park, complete with monorail and gift shop.

  During the interim period, certain operators, especially those running major universes, used 31 as an unofficial storage space for their slightly damaged inventory, including experimental species, space stations, single-purpose planets that have been deserted or near deserted, and even entire genre system production facilities.

  Other operators used 31 for the still somewhat controversial but increasingly common practice known as hypothetical mining, also known as weird farming.

  The conditions of a place like 31, with its incomplete conceptual framework, regions of exposed wireframe structure, lack of complexity in terms of story line geometries, and dearth of heroes, provides an ideal environment for corporate operators to test out new ideas, allowing them to proliferate without worry of what will happen to the generally expendable, low-self-esteem human population within the space.

  Once upon a time, I am ten years old and my dad is driving me home from the park.

  We’re floating through the streets in our family car, a rust-red Ford LTD station wagon with the windows covered in a layer of dust and the loose suspension that makes it feel less like a car and more like a scrappy little boat sailing down the avenue. I am tired and sweat-crusted and eating half of an orange Popsicle.

  Sitting here in the front next to my dad, he in his uncomfortable-looking blue-gray slacks that he always wears, even on Saturdays, me in soccer shorts, sun beating down on my head, so hot even my hair is hot, my legs stuck to the vinyl seat, trying to concentrate on not letting the melting rivulets of orange-flavored sugar water run too far down the side of my skinny forearm, squinting through the windshield. I remember this day, I know what happens, and yet I still feel like I don’t know what will happen.