How to Live Safely in a Science Fictiona (2010) (8 page)

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.

“Kids at school say that you,” I start to say.

“That I? I’m what?”

“That you’re, uh.”

“Strange?”

“Crazy.”

I actually say this. I remember saying this. I remember regretting that I had said it even as I was saying it. I regret it even now. Regret what it started, regret all that came after.

He keeps his eyes on the road. I can’t tell if he’s mad. He doesn’t say anything. I’m scared I’ve angered him somehow; I have a ten-year-old’s crude sense of having found a subject that is dangerous, a son’s sense of having wandered into the line of fire, into some sort of yet-to-be-discovered axis running between my father and me, and yet, and still, for some reason I keep going. Not to hurt him, no, I keep going just because, for the first time in my young life, it feels like my father is here, in the car, with me, listening to me, that for the first time ever I have his attention not as a boy, his son, but as a person, as a future man, as someone who is just starting to go out into the world and bring parts of it back, parts that can remind him that I won’t always be his to teach, parts that may remind him of how small our family is.

I ask him if it’s true what they say.

He says what’s that.

“Do you really think it’s possible to travel to the past?”

He’s got to be mad now. He doesn’t get mad often, but when he does. Not good. I’m sure he’s mad, I’m positive, I’m considering how much it would hurt if I opened the car door and just jumped out, but then he just laughs and takes his foot off the gas and pulls into the slow lane. “We’re time traveling right now,” he says, the cars speeding by and honking in Dopplerized frequencies.

And then he pulls completely off the road into the parking lot of a video rental store and shuts off the engine and I am thinking he’s doing this to somehow prove his point even further, that he’s going to explain to me how even now, completely motionless, we are still time traveling, I am thinking I’m about to get a lecture about how I would understand this if I just kept up with my math homework, but instead, my father turns to me and tells me, in all seriousness, this idea he has had, a secret plan, an
invention
.

My father, the inventor. I had never thought of him that way before that afternoon, although a small part of me felt lifted, opened, as if the world was bigger than I’d imagined, that there were parts of my father I could never have guessed at. I thought of him as old, as someone with a job, as, well, Dad. Not someone with dreams or ideas. My father had ambition. Ambition he had never previously shared with me, and why would he, I was ten, but he also didn’t share it with my mother, or anyone else. He kept it inside, in his study, in a box, in himself.

My father had originally come from a faraway country, a part of reality, a tiny island in the ocean, a different part of the planet, really, a different time, where people still farmed with water buffalo and believed that stories, like life, were all straight lines of chronology, where there was enough magic left in the real, in the humidity of August and the mosquito and the sun and birth, enough magic and terror in the strangeness of family itself, that time travel devices were not only unnecessary, but would have diminished the world, would have changed its mechanic, its web of invisible dynamics. The technology of the day was enough, the technology of the sunrise and sunset, the week of work and rest in cycles, in rhythm, sixteen hours of hard rice-farming labor, the remainder of time in a day left for eating and sleeping, the seasons, the years passing by, each one a perfect machine.