How to Live Safely in a Science Fictiona (2010) (7 page)

My personal clock shows that I’ve been in here, more or less, for almost ten years. Nine years, nine months, and twenty-nine days, according to the subdermal biochronometric chip inserted just under the skin on my left wrist. That’s how much time has passed for me, for my body, in my head. A rough measure of how many breaths I have taken, how many times I’ve closed and opened my eyes, how many lunches I have had in here, how many memories I have formed.

I guess that makes me thirty. Thirty-one-ish.

Probably goes without saying, but time machine repair guys don’t get a lot of action. Had a one-night stand with something cute a couple of years ago. Not human exactly. Humanish. Close enough that she looked awesome with her shirt off. We hung out a few times, tried messing around but in the end I couldn’t quite figure out her anatomy, or perhaps it was the other way around. There were some awkward moments. I think she had a good time anyway. I did. She was a good kisser. I just hope that was her mouth. Or at least her mouth-analogue.

In the end, it wasn’t going to work. I don’t think she had the brain chemistry for love. Or maybe that was me.

I don’t even get much sexbot these days.

When you are thirteen, you spend all your time imagining what it would be like to live in a world where you could pay a robot for sex. And that sex would cost a dollar. And the only obstacle to getting sex would be making sure you had four quarters.

Then you grow up and it turns out you do live in that kind of world. A world with coin-operated sexbots. And it’s not really as great as you thought it would be. Partly because it doesn’t make you any less lonely in the perpetual dark of total vacuum and partly because, well, it’s gross. Your friends, your neighbors, your own family, they know what you are doing in the kiosk. They know because they do it themselves. Partly because sexbot technology hasn’t really improved much since the first-generation consoles. No one cares enough. For a dollar, it’s pretty hard to complain.

Living like this means the year stops making sense, and the month and the week. The dates fall away from the days, like glass punched out of window frames, or ice cubes out of a tray into a sink, identical, dateless, nameless durational blobs, melting into an undifferentiated puddle. Is that a Saturday, a Friday, a Monday? Is that an April 13, or a November 2? Living like this means you don’t have a container anymore for the different days, can’t hold in a little twenty-four-hour-sized box a set of events that constitute a unit, something you can compartmentalize, something with a beginning and an end, something to fill with a to-do list. Living like this means that it all runs together, a cold and bright December morning with your father or a lazy evening in late August, one of those sunsets that seem to take longer than is possible, where the sun just refuses to go down, where the hour seems to elongate to the point that it doesn’t seem like it can stretch any farther without detaching completely from the hour before it, like a piece of taffy, like undersea molten lava forming a new island, a piece of time detaching from the seafloor and floating up to the surface.

It’s not comfortable in here. But it’s not
not
comfortable, either. It’s neutral, it’s the null point on the comfort–discomfort axis, the exact fulcrum, the precise coordinate located between the half infinity of positive comfort values to the right and the half infinity of negative values on the left. To live in here is to live at the origin, at zero, neither present nor absent, a denial of self- and creature-hood to an arbitrarily small epsilon–delta limit.

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.