How to Live Safely in a Science Fictiona (2010) (13 page)

Life is, to some extent, an extended dialogue with your future self about how exactly you are going to let yourself down over the coming years.

There is a sense in which I am the author of this book, and a sense in which I am merely its first reader. I am writing this book at the same time I read it, I am typing while reading it, while thinking it, switching at will among all three modes, both actively and passively receiving and creating it, this book that matches the moment-by-moment output of my consciousness, gaps and all, and even as I attempt to fill in these gaps, and interpret my own life story before I know what happens, I am learning about what my life will be, what it is now, what it already has been, I am seeing this book for the first time, word by word, reproducing it from sensory data with my eyes and fingers and brain and voice, while also seeing it from direct experience exactly as it is, while at the same time interpreting it, a story about my father and me and the various time machines, all of the machines we have been in together, a story given to me by my future self.

I am editing this book even as I write it, writing it as I read it, now I am repeating myself, even as I create it, I know it is flawed and possibly even inconsistent, and yet all I can do is to go forward and see where it takes me, all I can do is to go backward and see where it takes me, all I can do is read it to see what happens to my father, what happened to him, to us, to see if it is true, to learn what I am apparently thinking right now, to learn what I will think, to see if I can make any sense out of his life. Which is what sons do for their time-traveling fathers, act as biographers for them, as science fictional biographers, as literary executors, taking the inheritance of the contents of their fathers’ lives, given to them in an unprocessed jumble, out of order and nonsensical. Sons do this for their fathers, they use their time machines and all of the technology inside, and they see if it is possible to put those contents into a story, into a life, into a life story. There is a sense in which I am pretty sure this makes no sense. I don’t know where this is going. I don’t know how it ends.

from
How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

residual objects in closed time-like curves

In any coherent time loop, there are certain objects that are created during and exist within the time loop. One common example of such an item is the hypothetical Book from Nowhere: A man brings a copy of a book with him back in time, giving it to himself, and instructing himself to reproduce the book as faithfully as he can. The book is then published, and after its publication, the man then buys the book, gets in a time machine, and starts the cycle all over again. The book is a perfectly stable physical object that actually exists, despite the fact that it seems to come from nowhere.

Less certain is whether human memory works the same way.

“Why can’t I just give up now?” I ask TAMMY.

“I don’t think it works that way,” she says, but I don’t see why it shouldn’t. Today should be the first day of the part of my life where I can stop caring. Right? I can just go around in this loop, because in the end, I’m going to end up where I know I’m going to end up anyway, and that’s that. It literally does not matter anymore. Today is the beginning of the end. Or the end of the beginning. I killed my future, I am my future, I am going back to my past to do it all over again. A tidy loop.

“Wait a minute. Don’t you go through the loop? Should you have some kind of record, some residual memory, some counter for each iteration? How many times have I done this? A hundred? A thousand? Do I ever learn anything from it? Do I ever become a better person?”

“My records show that this is the first time.”

How many times have I even been through this loop? TAMMY says just once. She says this is the first time she has been on this path. This may be a time loop, but it’s the first time through.

I say she’s lying. She reminds me that she’s incapable of lying to me, and I realize her answer makes sense. If the loop is exactly the same set of events every time, she wouldn’t have any way of distinguishing them. To her, it’s only one set of events that occur in a set period of time, and there’s no marker, no higher-level counter, no internal-state reflector that records separate impressions. Her memory doesn’t work that way, is what I realize, and then I realize something about what I just realized. My memory doesn’t work that way, either. I have no way of knowing how long I’ve been in this loop, and I’ll never know. I’m just going around and around on this thing, however long it is, an hour, a day, my entire life, each time as oblivious as the last time, each time as scared as if it’s my first.

I am a passive observer in this, this record of my own time loop. But why? Why should I be passive? Why not go straight to it, straight to the thing I am driving at, the thing I am being driven toward, to the heart of it, the heart, his heart, the truth, the end, the only thing that matters? Why not go to the moment when this all ends and I say what I end up saying, and let that be what it is? Why bother with all of this outer shell, this casing, this surrounding bulk of matter, this envelope, this container, these words, this intervening buffer between now and the time I want to go to? What is stopping me? As far as I can tell, nothing. Nothing is stopping me from just jumping ahead to the end in my reading/writing/whatever-it-is-I-am-doing in “creating” this whatever-this-object-is. This book, this autobiography, this self-instruction manual (self-coercion manual, self-creation manual), this set of operating parameters for a time machine, this laboratory space for the design and performance of what appears, so far, to be an ill-advised and poorly conceived chronodiegetic experiment.

But what if I were to skip forward? Just cut out all of this filler in the middle. After all, as my self told me, I am the author of this. Whatever it is. I am its author and its only reader.

I want to know what happens. I want to know if I’ll ever get out of here. I want to know if I’ll ever see my father again. My mother again. I want to know if this is how my life will go, until it just ends.

TAMMY says: not a good idea.

TOAD says: not a good idea.

I punch in the instruction: go to the last page.

Not a good idea. Immediately after sending the instruction, I begin to feel a vibration, slight but detectable, of the walls of the TM-31.

I hit a button and the hatch decompresses. I pop open the door. This is what I see:

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And now the TM-31 starts to vibrate, at first gently, then more vigorously, like an unbalanced centrifuge. Indicator lights are blinking.

TAMMY informs me, in a neutral but slightly concerned tone, that I have set the time machine on a noncomputable path.

What was I thinking? Because, if I’m being honest, I’m not sure I would even know what I do with myself. Even if you could skip to the end of it all, what would I do the next day with my life that would be so different from all the days that came before? What miraculous change would I make, after getting out of this rut, what new kind of person would I choose to be that next day? And the next? And how about the day after, and all of the days after that?

The TM-31 is shaking pretty good now. The tone of TAMMY’s voice has modulated from mild concern to slight alarm. What have I done? Oh, crap, duh. It’s Time Machine Circuitry 101. Overriding TOAD’s analysis algorithm has tripped the causal wiring between TOAD and TAMMY, which is something I wish I’d thought of a few minutes ago.

(At this point, the vibration of the machine, up until now low and erratic, speeds up to what must be a resonant frequency, because the entire unit starts to rattle. The housing for the decoherence module comes loose and crashes to the floor, leaving the guts of the machine slightly exposed, the naked physicality of the thing, the purely material bits, the wiring and the diodes of the randomness generator left vulnerable to damage, to being overwhelmed with data, the data of the world, the datum that is the world, all the other data from all possible worlds, all the could-worlds and should-worlds and would-have-been-worlds, the kind of tiny hidden world only detectable with the ultra-high-sensitivity receptors set to the exact specifications necessary to perceive it.)

Then: nothing.

I wake up in an enormous Buddhist temple. I am standing in the vestibule of what appears to be the main hall. The air is cool and smells of incense. It is dark. The small amount of sunlight coming through the space underneath and between the doors feels like an intrusion into this rarefied place.

There are no clocks in here.

Two wooden railings separate the vestibule from the main room. Between the railings is an opening, and to either side, people have left their shoes. There are small blue slippers available, into which I slip my tube-socked feet. The insides of the slippers are cool on the tops of my toes and the outside edges of my feet.

Among all of the slippers, I see a pair of worn brown men’s dress shoes, which look vaguely familiar.

I’m standing just at the edge of the large rectangle that makes up the main space of the room, at the end of what feels like two square miles of deep burgundy carpet. Three Buddha statues sit at the far end of the room, raised up on platforms, looking over my head, out toward infinity. Not looking, I suppose, but seeing.

On the left and on the right are doors into side rooms, each one dedicated to a subsidiary higher being, specialized Buddhas: the Buddha of Familial Relations, the Buddha of Safe Passage, the Buddha of Everlasting Memory. Other than the statues in front, and a few other ancillary statues by their feet, and a few pictures on the walls, there is nothing in the room. No material objects, and a deep pile carpet that I am half sinking into, half floating on top of, slippers that add to the sensation of being immersed into the room, not touching anything, yet deeply embedded into it, almost snuggled into the fabric of it, as if my self, the self, were dissolving right into the universal solvent, pure and clear and odorless and tasteless and invisible and weightless, neither gas nor liquid nor solid yet all three. As if I were an incense stick incrementally burning off, first into smoke, and then becoming a part of the room. My thoughts, normally bunched together, wrapped in gauze, insistent, urgent, impatient, one moment to the next, living in what I now realize is, in essence, a constant state of emergency (as if my evolutionary instincts of fight or flight have gone haywire, leading me to spend each morning, noon, and evening in a low-grade but absolutely never-ceasing muted form of panic), those rushed and ragged thoughts are now falling away, one by one, revealing themselves for what they are: the same thought over and over again. And once revealed for what they are, these hollow thoughts, these impostors, non-thoughts masquerading as thoughts, memes, viruses, signals fired off, white noise generated by my brain, they are gone.

And it is quiet. Quiet in a way I have never experienced before. As if quiet were a substance, and it were thick, as if that substance were now in my head, filling it like a viscous fluid, some kind of gel. Desire is suffering. A simple equation, and a nice catchphrase. But flipped around, it is more troubling: suffering is desire. Not a unidirectional arrow, not causal, as in, desire leads to suffering. Desire
is
suffering, and therefore, by axiom, suffering
is
desire.
Ting.
A bell rings. I look around for the ringer. A nun, a monk, anyone. But no one seems to have rung the bell. It rang itself.
Ting. Ting. Ting.
The sound is clarifying, purifying, even. It erases every thought from the room, wipes the slate clean. I had been polluting the room with my ideas and they are all gone. And in front of me, I am, for some reason, unsurprised to see my mother, or at least some version of her, standing at the front of the room, just off the center, incense held at the very end, with each hand, between the index and the middle fingers, and hands raised to her forehead, slightly bent at the waist.