How to Live Safely in a Science Fictiona (2010) (17 page)

Technically, that first time was a failure because we never actually landed, because we could not get the UTM-1 to touch down at our point B and instead, we got swung around in a boomerang path, and ended up back where we started, took a trip through the void and got close enough to see the bumps and rocks and pits and craters and gray, ancient, mysterious surface of the dark side of our own moon, but didn’t actually get to walk on it, not that first time. As we approached our destination we realized, too late, that we hadn’t actually built a control mechanism that told the machine how or when to stop, realized that, in effect, we had no conceptual landing gear, just before we got bounced back to where we started, there was a moment of suspension, of suspense even, at the top of our arc—a pause during which we were completely stopped, still in free fall but with zero velocity—a brief interval in which we were able to get a good look at our selves, our past selves, just a minute before, before our first flight, before we had gone through all of this, before we had taken that first step, before we knew what was possible and impossible and inevitable, and we looked at ourselves and we could see what was plain, could see what anyone else would have seen, that we looked like a father and a son, we looked like innocents, we looked terrified and stupid and naïve and alive and open to possibility.

from
How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

Weinberg-Takayama Radius

It is well established within the field of diegetic engineering that a science fictional space must have an energy density at least equal to the unit average level of a Dirac box, multiplied by pi.

However, a new and widely debated conjecture posited by two different researchers, Weinberg* and Takayama,† each working independently and without any knowledge of the other, sets forth the proposition that a universe, in order to sustain the conditions necessary for the development of narrational sustainability, can be no bigger than a certain maximum size, which has, in the literature, come to be referred to as the Weinberg-Takayama Radius (WTR).

*Professor, Center for Research in Advanced Narrative Dynamics, affiliated with the City College of New Angeles/Lost Tokyo-2.

^†
Professor, Imperial University of Lost Tokyo-1. Also known for his seminal work on the Shen-Takayama-Furimoto Exclusion Principle.

Stated simply, any world with a radius larger than the WTR will eventually dissipate, while any world with a radius smaller than the WTR has the potential, given the right initial conditions, to produce narrational truths in a unified emotionally resonant field.

My mother was calling for me when we got back. She had finally come back from her sister’s house, pulling up just as my father and I reentered time in the middle of the garage. She was afraid, I could hear it in her voice, how she was on the edge of panic, as she so often was.

On the return landing from our maiden voyage, the machine had fallen apart. In fact, it didn’t even make it back to our original starting point, reentering in a ball of heat sometime during the minute we had traveled over. We crash-landed somewhere in that lost minute, which was a good thing, maybe a necessary thing, since it meant that there weren’t two sets of us in existence at that moment, and going forward, but it did confuse things.

I didn’t understand it then, but now, watching her from up here, in the minute before we emerged, I see that she’d just gotten back, her sister was dropping her off, and as she struggled to get the broken and mismatched luggage out of the trunk I could see the look on my mom’s face, a look I recognized, half of her terrified of losing control and blowing up at my father, half of her hoping he might, contrary to all previous behavior, be waiting for her with unguarded love in his eyes.

What she probably hadn’t been expecting to see was a big hole in the middle of the cement in the garage floor, and half of the tools in the garage singed by a fire our machine had apparently ignited on launch, and most of the ceiling not so much singed as scorched, and a stack of old newspapers in the corner burning a nice, healthy orange flame near cans of old cleaning solution.

There she is, falling over her luggage, into the trash cans, screaming for us, wondering where we were, assuming the worst, as she always did, assuming catastrophe, just utter unimaginable worst-case disaster for our family, how in her state of anticipatory panic she had dropped a cake she had bought from the grocery store on the ground and her stocking had a run in it and her hair was a little crazy.

And now here we come, my younger self and my dad, our machine blinking into existence, and from this vantage point I can see what I didn’t see the first time, how I look to my mother as she watches me, climbing out of the machine, a little, skinny-armed boy, her boy, I can see how my dad looks to her, still in our device, smiling, and how stupid the machine looks as it falls apart, just as Dad is climbing out. Now I see why she is crying. My father doesn’t. He hardens his face against her, against the situation, which normally would bother me but this time I don’t understand why she is crying, either, and so I kind of harden my face a little, too, in my ten-year-old way, and she notices this, I think, she is holding me and getting me all wet and smeared with makeup and tears, and I am looking at her in her sweater with cats on it, thinking,
Pull it together, please, Mom, just for once, why can’t you let Dad see the side of you I see, not always like this,
and she looks up at me and I feel like a miniature version of my father and then she starts crying even harder, and I wonder if she even understands why she is crying. In school our class has been reading a story about a woman who falls into a hole and cannot get out and everyone in the town tries to help her out, but they can’t seem to pull her out and at the end, they all walk away one by one, and this is before I start to see commercials on television, with people staring out rain-streaked windows, commercials advertising medicine for some kind of condition, of what, I am not sure, a disease of the brain? Of the heart? Of the soul? This is before I learn to put my mother in that diagnostic box and label it, keep her in there, tidy and categorized, long before any of that, when I can still see her crying as what it is, in its raw, unnamed form, jagged, knife-like sobs, pure and intense, wonder why it is so powerful, why she needs to do it, why it bothers my father so much. I can still wonder if it might be a kind of bridge between what is and what could have been, what is and what isn’t anymore, what is and what never was, and that wouldn’t make the crying any less awful but it would make a kind of sense.

TAMMY makes her pixels into a sloppy, runny-nosed face. She loads her crying subroutine and tries it out, snuffling a little bit to herself, for my mom, I guess.

Then Ed farts and it is not good. TAMMY’s still crying but starts to giggle, and I’m gagging a little, and then TAMMY starts laughing so hard she almost crashes herself. Ed saves the day again.

A call comes in from Dispatch.

“What the hell?” I say.

“It’s Phil,” says TAMMY. “You should let it go to voice mail.”

“I know, right? He’s calling me? Now? What a dick.”

“No, it’s not that. You’re stuck in a time loop.”

“That’s what I’m saying. I’m taking a personal day, dude. Jerk boss. I’m going to tell him off.”

“No. Do not pick up that phone. I’m not talking about him being a jerk. I’m saying: you are stuck in a time loop. If you take that call, then you always took that call. You always take that call. It’s got to be self-consistent with the rest of this. If you pick up that phone, it’s just one more thing that we’ll have to do again. And who knows what complications it leads to.”

“Holy Heinlein,” I say. “What would I do without you?”

“Cease to exist,” she says, allowing herself a little smile.

I was sixteen when my father had his next breakthrough.

TAMMY takes note of my postpubescent form, notes the disparity from my present-day physique.

“Hey, you used to have muscles,” she says, surprised.

“Shut up. Just shut up.”

By this time in our prototype numbering scheme, we were up to the UTM-21. We had crashed the UTM-3, the UTM-5, the UTM-7, 9, 11, and so on, each odd-numbered model failing in some new, unexpected way. We’d spent hours, years in here, trying to improve our idea, but what was happening was simple: we kept crashing. It was easy to figure out what. What we couldn’t figure out was why.

My father was at the chalkboard.

“Pay attention,” he said. “We can figure this out. We have to figure this out.”

As much as anything else, he was trying to convince himself. I was ready to quit, to go upstairs, to leave the house, to be a man of my own. Or to just be a teenager. Anything else but watch my father any longer. I’d grown up. Didn’t he see that? I was already taller than him, had been for a couple of years, was too tall for my family. We’d been doing this for so long, since I was ten, and we’d had some good times, but where was this all going? What was his plan for this, us, our family?

“More research,” he would say. “We need more data points.”

His trajectory at work had already become apparent, had started to move sideways, and my mother, after a good year, was in a holding pattern herself. In some ways she’d started to regress, even picking up new habits, new ways of tearing my father down, tearing herself down, found a way to cry harder, more jagged, more raw. She would disappear into her room some Friday nights and not come out the whole weekend, and then emerge, Monday morning, and everything would be okay again. Things were livable, were bearable, but at sixteen, I felt old, I felt tired of this, of prototypes and going sideways, of back and forth, I felt mediocre, I could see where this was headed and I wanted to escape my own future.

At some point in that year together, the last year we were recognizable as a family, my father had started to sound different. He still spoke in the same manner, gruff, as if I were always on the verge of annoying him, but there was a subtle change in what he said, in the questions he asked. I could hear, within each one, another question curled up, folded up inside, hidden from me, perhaps not fully intentionally placed in there by him. They had gone from tests, games, teaching, to something else. Something like wondering. Something harder, more genuine. Asking.

“Do you think there’s something wrong?” he asked me once while I had my head buried in a control panel.

“Niven ring is cracked. We’ll need to fuse it shut.”

“No, not that. I mean with the theory.”

“I don’t understand.”

“The theory. My theory. Is it, did I take a wrong turn somewhere in the equations? Did I get it wrong?”

My father had begun asking my opinion about the world. He was admitting, in his way, what he didn’t know, what confused him, what frustrated him in this country, at work, in this town, both close and far from the center of everything. He was asking me if I was ready to be part of our family, ready to help him, ready to be a numerator.

I remember feeling small, unprepared, like I had to help him, feeling like how in the world could I possibly help him. I was angry at him for asking, sorry for him for having to, angry at myself for not being more prepared, for not being the gifted kid he once thought I was, for not being who he had hoped I would be.

The house became charged, a field of static potential energy, a kind of vectorless disappointment, a field of invisible isovoltaics, lines with arrowheads pointing in minute directional indicators, a bogglingly complex arrangement of single-point losses, the fine-toothed, fine-pixeled array, the heat map of a thermodynamic system whose ending was already foretold in the current steady state.

It wasn’t until well after midnight that it happened, by that point, we’d been staring at the chalkboard for nine and a half hours. It was cold, but to concede that to my dad would have brought I’m not sure what kind of reaction, so I just kept my mouth shut and my eyes focused on our neighbor, across the street, who was my age, kissing her boyfriend good-bye for what seemed like the entire night.