How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

by Charles Yu

  The lettering on the box top is just how I imagined it looked from the ad in the back of the comic book, slightly fuzzy red-orange block letters, all-caps, blazoned across the top in a sans serif font:

  I set the box top off to the side, facing up, and check off the items one by one against the picture on the box. There’s the plastic knife and the Chrono-Adventurer patch, just as I remember, and a map of the terrain and a decoder that is a pair of concentric cardboard disks fastened together concentrically, so that the disks can be turned around relative to each other inside their plastic casing such that if the larger circle, with the encrypted letter, is lined up with the smaller circle, with the decoded letter, a secret message can be sent or translated to a fellow Chrono-Adventurer in the field. There’s also a lot of filler, items that, not surprisingly, weren’t advertised, like an eraserless No. 4 pencil (labeled SPACE PENCIL), and a protractor (labeled MOON APPROACH ANGLE TRIGONOMETRIC DEVICE), and a little notepad with five sheets of paper, which apparently counts as five items toward the total, cheats, really, cheap items that a ten-year-old me would have found half lame and half still-pretty-cool and possibly endowed with some kind of secret technological features just by virtue of their inclusion in the kit.

  I count all seventeen items, look at them spread out, separate from one another, just objects lying there. A bit of a letdown from what I’d hoped for, but then again, I am thirty years old. My father was such a practical man, and this kit no doubt seemed silly to him, which makes the fact that he bought it mean that much more to me. Laid out like this, the contents of the kit remind me of times in our garage laboratory workshop, our version of the director’s fancy research institute on the hill, our makeshift center for father–son studies filled with dollar items from the plastic bins at the hardware store. Maybe this is what he wanted me to see. Maybe looking at these items himself, he came to some kind of acceptance himself of why we never made it, the destined-to-fail nature of our little future enterprise. Still, it’s hard to believe that he got this kit just so I might someday think back about our work together.

  I look inside the empty box and notice something I hadn’t seen before. What I had thought was a cardboard structure to hold the packed items in place is really a little box within the box, a compartment someone had built into the box, with a keyhole on the side.

  “The key from the book!” I exclaim, like a boy detective.

  “Nothing gets past you,” TAMMY says.

  “I don’t remember you downloading the sarcasm upgrade.”

  “There are a lot of things you don’t know about me,” she says, and I feel like a jerk, because it’s true.

  “Well, are you just going to stand there until it’s time to go back and get shot in the stomach, or are you going to stick that key in there?”

  The key fits, thank goodness, because otherwise I’d have been all out of ideas, and I open up the secret compartment to find the eighteenth item.

  “What is it?” TAMMY asks.

  “A diorama.”

  It’s a little scene, in three dimensions, a miniature version of our family kitchen. He’d taken care to make it proportionally correct. Not only were the height and length of the room to scale, but the depth as well, and it was that third dimension that brought it to life, made the illusion complete. The whole kitchen could fit in the palm of my hand, but it seemed that no important detail was missing. For dinner plates he’d used circles of paper, collected from inside the three-hole punch, glued onto tiny pieces of card stock and then affixed to the miniature kitchen table. There was a miniature refrigerator, and even a miniature calendar, a word-of-the-day calendar with a new science term each day. He hadn’t re-created the word of the day, which would have been too small to read, but he had made a little date, April 14. I remember the year we had that calendar I was in fifth grade, which was 1986.

  He hadn’t made people, too difficult, and maybe that was the point. We weren’t there anymore, in the room where we spent all those nights, quiet, tense dinners, the occasional good nights when my parents would tease each other, which always made me feel awkward, and weird, the scene of so many of their epic screaming matches. The kitchen is empty, had been for some time.

  “Look,” TAMMY says. “The clock.”

  Inside the miniature kitchen, my father had built a tiny replica of the blue circular clock that hung above the door to the backyard. A tiny working clock. It had an hour hand and a minute hand and a ticking second hand, just like the one we had at home. At that moment, in the diorama kitchen, the time was seven fourteen and about twenty seconds.

  The calendar. The working clock. My father is sending a message. He’s telling me where he is.

  “TAMMY,” I say, just starting to feel it, some kind of answer, like a cracked egg, slowly spreading on the top of my head and dripping down all sides of my face. Is this why I’m in the loop? Was it a coincidence that I spent almost a decade drifting, with no tense, with no clock, and the very next day after reentering the world, I got trapped in a time loop? Was it a coincidence that this message from my father, in the form of a miniature kitchen scene, was delivered to me on that very same day?

  “TAMMY,” I say again.

  “I get it,” she says.

  How many times have I gone around this loop, refusing to move forward? How much of my life have I spent cycling through these events, trying to learn from them, attempting to decipher the meaning of this tableau in front of me, this cross section of our kitchen in that house, this little model of this room in our home, the site of all of those good times and not-so-good times. What is this called, what I am doing, to myself, to my life, this wallowing, this pondering, this rolling over and over in the same places of my memory, wearing them thin, wearing them out? Why don’t I ever learn? Why don’t I ever do anything different?

  Do I always open the package too late?

  Is the loop always the same?

  Will I ever figure it out in time, early enough to actually do something about it?

  Of course I do. Of course it is. Of course I won’t.

  “We have to go there. Now.”

  I say this to TAMMY, trying to sound as authoritative as I can, but I already know the answers to my questions, already know what she’s going to tell me.

  “I wish we could,” she says, sounding really bummed, “but the fact is, we didn’t.”

  I look up from the diorama and see what she means. We’re circling over the present moment in Hangar 157, banking our descent into eleven forty-seven a.m., where another me, earlier-me, is waiting his turn to do this, to do all of this, all over again.

  (module ε)

  from How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

  theorems, miscellaneous

  At some point in your life, this statement will be true: Tomorrow you will lose everything forever.

  When it happens, this is what happens: I shoot myself.

  He’s waiting for me. Down there. The man who is going to kill me. The man I once was.

  I know it happens, already happened to me, and yet, somehow, I have to stop it. I know, I know, I can’t. But it’s different when it’s happening to you.

  We’re in the approach.

  TAMMY arranges her pixels into a sad-faced clock.

  11:46:00.

  I have one minute left.

  Feels like a month, maybe, but if you told me it was less, I’d believe you, and if you told me it was more, I would believe that, too.

  I ask TAMMY to calculate the diameter of our path.

  “I’m sorry?” she says, and I say I’m sorry, too, for everything and for not being better to her and all that good stuff. The fact that I’m in my last minute of life is making me mushy.

  “No,” she says. “Not I’m sorry like I’m always sorry. I’m sorry as in I don’t understand your question.”

  “Let me rephrase that,” I say. “Objectively speaking, how long were we in the loop?”

  “I’m afraid I still don’t
know what you mean.”

  TAMMY makes a confused-face clock.

  11:46:20.

  “What is your problem?” I say. “It’s a simple question. How long has it been since we left?”

  “The answer to the question of how long it has been since we left,” she says, “is that we haven’t left yet.”

  “Oh my God,” I say. “You’re right.”

  “You shot yourself, and then you jumped into the machine at eleven forty-seven a.m. that day. From there, you tried to skip ahead, go into the future, but when you did that, you encountered nothingness. There was no future. You hadn’t been there yet. And you still haven’t. Instead, you got shunted off into that temple, which is completely outside of time, and then your zombie mom gave you the creeps and you spazzed out.”

  “I didn’t spaz out.”

  “You did, and then you got shuttled back into time, into the father–son memory axis. Which is the past. Which means.”

  “Which means.”

  “Which means.”

  “Which means what?”

  “Sorry, I had too many programs running. Which means that, from the point in time at which you shot yourself, you haven’t actually ever moved forward. Not one second. Not one moment.”

  Holy Mother of Ursula K. Le Guin. She’s right again.

  “But I’ve aged, haven’t I? Haven’t I? Don’t I have some way of proving it? Five o’clock shadow?” I inspect my face in the mirror.

  “Have you eaten anything since jumping in here?”

  I think about this for a second. “I guess not,” I say. “But wait, aha. I’ve talked to people!”

  “Yeah? So?”

  “So talking takes time.”

  “Who have you talked to?”

  “My zombie mom.”

  “Not a real person. Also, exists on a plane outside of temporal existence.”

  “Shuttle guy.”

  “Doesn’t exist in time.”

  “My dad.”

  “Those were memories. Not events. Also, that’s the past. We’re trying to figure out if you’ve moved at all into the future.”

  Right. Hmm.

  “I’ve been jabbering away with you.”

  “I’m a computer program. We talk fast. Plus, more important, you talked to me inside this TM-Thirty-one. Which we’ve already established never moved forward in time after eleven forty-seven.”

  “I talked to Phil.”

  “Also a computer program. And again, you talked to him while inside this box.”

  “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 passively 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 space 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 assured of failure.

  From the outside, these two choices would look identical. Would 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.

  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, 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.