How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

by Charles Yu

  I will say, though, that it’s hard to stay in shape in a recreational time travel device. I eat a lot of Ramen. There isn’t enough room to do push-ups. Sometimes I pick up Ed and curl him a few times. He grumbles a bit but puts up with it.

  Because I have been living nonchronologically for so long, this device, this space in here is, in a way, for me, the world, the whole entire world. No other material entity has undergone the particular set and sequence of relativistic accelerations, of stresses and strains, of Lorentz contractions and time dilations, that this machine has. There is nothing in existence as similar to me as this TM-31. As a physical object, it encodes the history of my worldline. My personal time, as opposed to the external time of the world, exists inside here, and here only. The air in here, the molecules in here. My calculator, the shirt I’m wearing, my pillow, my quantum screwdriver, my Planck-length measuring tape. These are the objects that come with me as I move, as I tell the machine to move. The unit, this phone booth, this four-dimensional person-sized laboratory, I live in it, but, over time, through diffusion and breathing and particle exchange, the air in here, the air that travels with me, it is me, and I’m it.* The exhaled carbon dioxide that gets recycled and processed by the pump, the oxygen-rich air that is piped back in, these molecules* move around me, and in me, and then back out, all* of it* the same matter.* I breathe it* in, it* is in my bloodstream. Sometimes, they* are part of me, sometimes, I am part of them.* Sometimes, they* are in my sandwich,* sometimes in my hair,* sometimes in my blood*–brain* barrier,* sometimes in my foot,* sometimes even in my lungs* and stomach* and kidneys* and gallbladder,* sometimes in the on-board quantum* computer,* sometimes in my graph paper,* sometimes in the blood* coursing through my beating heart.* The photon,* the light* in here,* has been bouncing around for a while. It’s* old light,* it’s* new light,* it’s* all* the same age, it’s* all* the same light.*

  *In Feynman’s path integral formulation, a particle, any particle, a photon, say, is not so much a particular object at a particular location in space and time as it is an aggregate, a total, a sum over histories.

  Put another way: a photon takes every possible path through space–time to get from point A to point B. In a sense, every photon in the universe is everywhere in the universe at every time in the universe.

  Or, put yet another way: there is only one photon in the entire universe, and that photon, spread across all of creation in a vast probabilistic smear, that one photon is responsible for all the light we see.

  from How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

  reality, in relation to

  Reality represents 13 percent of the total surface area and 17 percent of the total volume of Minor Universe 31. The remainder consists of a standard composite base SF substrate.

  In terms of topology, the reality portions of 31 are concentrated in an inner core, with science fiction wrapped around it.

  While it was long thought that reality was simply a special case of SF (i.e., QoE factor = 1, i.e., the strangeness of experience is no greater or less than intuitive notions of how things should be), it is now believed that, in some geological sense, the SF layer is structurally supported by the non-SF core of “reality,” and researchers have recently begun to conduct experiments to study what they suspect may be an invisible, microscopic, but highly dynamic exchange of materials at the thin permeable boundary layer between the two regions.

  When you are a kid, playing with the other kids on your street, and everyone is fighting over who they are going to be, you have to call dibs early, as soon as you see one another, pretty much as soon as you step outside your house, even if you’re halfway down the block. First dibs gets Han Solo. Everyone knows that. You almost don’t even have to say it. If you are first, you are Han Solo, period, end of story.

  There was one time Donny, the kid from two blocks over (the other side of the freeway), got first pick and said he was going to be Buck Rogers, and everyone laughed at Donny so hard and for so long that he looked like he was going to cry. He begged to change his answer, but by then it was too late. Justin, who had second dibs, got to be Solo that day, which was like winning the lottery with a ticket he didn’t even buy, and he milked it for all it was worth. Donny was in agony, was in hell really, and everyone called him Suck Rogers until he peed his pants and then got on his blue Huffy bike and rode away, never to return.

  I was never totally sure why everyone wanted to be Han Solo. Maybe it was because he wasn’t born into it, like Luke, with the birthright and the natural talent for the Force and the premade story. Solo had to make his own story. He was a freelance protagonist, a relatively ordinary guy who got to the major leagues by being quick with a gun and a joke. He was, basically, a hero because he was funny.

  Whatever the reason, first place was always Solo, always, always, always, and second place was usually Chewbacca, because if you weren’t the one saving the galaxy, you might as well be eight feet tall and covered with hair.

  But no one grows up wanting to be the time machine repair guy.

  No one says, Hey, I want to be the guy who fixes stuff.

  My cousin is in accounts receivable on the Death Star, and whenever we talk he always says how nice it’d be if I joined him. He says they have a good cafeteria. So that’s an option. And there’s an opening for a caseworker at the social services bureau for noninteresting aliens. Government pension.

  But really, it’s probably just easiest to keep doing what I’m doing. You know how it goes. At first it’s just for the time being, until you can get your own story together, be the hero in something of your own. You tell people it’s your day job, you tell yourself it’s your day job, and then, at some point, without you noticing, it stops being your day job and just becomes your job.

  At least I get a gun. It’s standard-issue to us service techs, for the rare occasion when a client refuses to cooperate and endangers himself or the structural integrity of the fabric of space–time. It’s actually a pretty cool, semi-scary-looking gun, not at all wimpy. I’ve never used it, of course, but once in a while I’ll take it out of the holster and pose with it in front of the mirror, just to see what I would look like arresting someone.

  from How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

  attachment coefficient

  Inhabitants of Universe 31 are separated into two categories, protagonists and back office.

  Protagonists may choose from any available genre. Currently, there are openings in steampunk.

  Back office support workers must choose between retcon, accounting, human resources, time machine repair, or janitorial.

  In order to qualify as a protagonist, a human must be able to demonstrate an attachment coefficient of at least 0.75. A coefficient of 1.00 or above is required in order to be a hero.

  Factors used in calculating the coefficient include

  ability to believe

  fervency of that belief

  humility

  willingness to look stupid

  willingness to have heart broken

  willingness to see U31 as nonboring or, better yet, to see it as interesting, and maybe even important, and despite its deeply defective nature possibly even worth saving

  Any inhabitant with a negative attachment coefficient (in which case it is referred to as a coefficient of ironic detachment) will be placed on probation pending review of the individual’s suitability for continued inclusion within the U31 diegetic space.

  Chronodiegetics is the branch of science fictional science focusing on the physical and metaphysical properties of time given a finite and bounded diegesis. It is currently the best theory of the nature and function of time within a narrative space.

  A man, as the theory goes, falling through time at a constant rate of acceleration, will not, absent any visual or other contextual clues, be able to distinguish between (i) acceleration caused by a force that is diegetical in nature and (ii) an extra-diegetical force. Which is to say, from the poin
t of view of this man being pulled into the past, it is impossible to know if he is at rest in a narrated frame pulled by gravitational memory, or in an accelerated frame of narrative reference. The man experiences what is termed past tense/memory equivalence. In other words, a character within a story, or even a narrator, has, in general, no way of knowing whether or not he is in the past tense narration of a story, or is instead in the present tense (or some other tensed state of affairs) and merely reflecting upon the past. This equivalence forms the theoretical basis for an entire field, summarized as follows:

  The Foundational Theory of Chronodiegetics

  Within a science fictional space, memory and regret are, when taken together, the set of necessary and sufficient elements required to produce a time machine.

  I.e., it is possible, in principle, to construct a universal time machine from no other components than (i) a piece of paper that is moved in two directions through a recording element, backward and forward, which (ii) performs only two basic operations, narration and the straightforward application of the past tense.

  I remember there were Sunday afternoons in our house when it felt as if the only sound in the world was the ticking of the clock in our kitchen.

  Our house was a collection of silences, each room a mute, empty frame, each of us three oscillating bodies (Mom, Dad, me) moving around in our own curved functions, from space to space, not making any noise, just waiting, waiting to wait, trying, for some reason, not to disrupt the field of silence, not to perturb the delicate equilibrium of the system. We wandered from room to room, just missing one another, on paths neither chosen by us nor random, but determined by our own particular characteristics, our own properties, unable to deviate, to break from our orbital loops, unable to do something as simple as walking into the next room where our beloved, our father, our mother, our child, our wife, our husband, was sitting, silent, waiting but not realizing it, waiting for someone to say something, anything, wanting to do it, yearning to do it, physically unable to bring ourselves to change our velocities.

  My father sometimes said that his life was two-thirds disappointment. This was when he was in a good mood.

  I guess it was a kind of self-deprecation. I always hoped but was afraid to ask if I had anything to do with the remaining one-third.

  He had always been considered, by his colleagues and advisers and superiors, to be a very good scientist. I watched him through five-year-old eyes, and then through ten- and fifteen- and seventeen-year-old eyes, looked at him through a scrim of slight awe and fear.

  “The only free man,” he would say, “is one who doesn’t work for anyone else.” In later years, that became his thing, expounding on the tragedy of modern science fictional man: the desk job. The workweek was a structure, a grid, a matrix that held him in place, a path through time, the shortest distance between birth and death.

  I noticed, on most nights, his jaw clenched at dinner, the way he closed his eyes slowly when my mother asked him about work, watched him stifle his own ambition, seeming to physically shrink with each professional defeat, watched him choke it down, with each year finding new and deep places to hide it all within himself, observed his absorption of tiny, daily frustrations that, over time (that one true damage-causing substance), accumulated into a reservoir of subterranean failure, like oil shale, like a volatile substance trapped in rock, a vast quantity of potential energy locked in to an inert substrate, unmoving and silent at the present moment but in actuality building pressure and growing more combustive with each passing year.

  “It’s not fair,” my mom would say, setting his dinner on the table, trying to console him with a hand on his back. He’d flinch from her touch or, worse, pretend she wasn’t there. We would all sit and eat in silence, and then my mother would go to her separate bedroom to read herself to sleep.

  He kept index cards, three inches by five, in a metal box. They started as a kind of engineer’s Rolodex: sparse, efficient, joyless. On each card, on the top red line, was a person’s name, a friend or an acquaintance or a colleague, in his tight, clear, unerring hybrid of print and script. Underneath it, in the blue lines of the rest of the card, was written a phone number, and an address if he had one, and over to the right, some note on his relationship to, or the noteworthiness of, the person.

  As a kid, I saw those cards as the beginning of something. I saw their ordered state, their formality, each one representing a connection to some outside mind, to other scientists. I saw that metal box as a treasure chest.

  Looking back now, I realize how few cards there were, how carefully each one was written, I understand that this level of care was due to how sparse the contacts were, that the amount of time spent on each card was inversely proportional to the amount of connection my father actually had to the outside world.

  I remember him sitting by the phone, his small, compact frame tense with anticipation, waiting there for a call that would be a big deal to him, a slight courtesy for the caller.

  “I think the phone rang when you were out earlier,” I would say sometimes.

  “You didn’t get it?”

  “Just missed it.”

  “No message on the machine.”

  “I’m sure they’ll call back.”

  The books in his study, with their rigid cloth spines and their impenetrable titles, they seemed daunting and impossible back then, but now, thinking back, I can see how the books were all related, I can see how they were, collectively, a bibliography of a career in striving, in aiming, in seeking to understand the world. My father searched for systems of thought, for patterns, rules, even instructions. Fake religions, real religions. How-to books. Turn Three Thousand into Half a Million. Turn half a million into ten. Conquer Your Weaknesses. Conquer yourself. Inventory of Your Soul. Take an inventory of your own failings. Higher mathematics and properties of materials, somber, gray monographs on single, esoteric subjects were side by side with books with bright red titles, titles dripping with superlatives, with promises of actualization, realization, books that diagrammed the self as a fixable lemon, self as a challenge in mechanics, self as an exercise in bullet points, self as a collection of traits to be altered, self as a DIY project. Self as a kind of problem to be solved.

  When waiting by the phone got to be too much, he used to go to his room, change his clothes, and head down to the garage. I would wait a few minutes and head down there, stand near him, watch him tinker. If he couldn’t figure something out, he’d go to the hardware store, leaving me there to dribble a mostly flat basketball until he came back. Sometimes he didn’t come back for hours. When he did fix something, he would explain it to me, step by step. He was never happier than when he could walk me through a problem, from beginning to end, knowing at each juncture what the next step would be. I asked questions until I couldn’t think of any more, and when we’d exhausted the subject, we’d head back upstairs, wash up, sink ourselves into the couch in front of the TV.

  “What are we watching?” I would ask.

  “Not sure. I think it’s news from another world.”

  We’d watch in happy, tired silence. Mom would bring cut cubes of watermelon, pierced with toothpicks, and the three of us would press them into our mouths, drinking the cold juice.

  “How is school?” my dad would say.

  “Good, I guess.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  I would tell him about it, then we’d fall back into silence. After a while, he would lean back, close his eyes, smile.

  “What do you think . . . ”

  A long pause.

  “Dad?”

  My mom would raise the back of her hand to her cheek. Sleeping, she would mouth at me.

  Then all of a sudden: “Son.” He’d snorted himself awake.

  “You were saying something.”

  “Was I?” He would laugh a little. “I guess I’m a little sleepy.”

  “Can I ask you a question?”

  “Sure.”

  This is what
I should have asked him: If you ever got lost, and I had to find you, where would you be? Where should I go to find you?

  I should have asked him that, a lot of things, everything. I should have asked him while I had a chance. But I never did. By then, he had drifted back to sleep again, smiling. Dreaming, too, I hoped.

  My manager IMs me.

  We get along pretty well. His name is Phil. Phil is an old copy of Microsoft Middle Manager 3.0. His passive-aggressive is set to low. Whoever configured him did me a solid.

  The only thing, and this isn’t really that big a deal, is that Phil thinks he’s a real person. He likes to talk sports, and tease me about the cute girl in Dispatch, whom I always have to remind him I’ve never met, never even seen.

  Phil’s hologram head appears on my lap. I sort of cradle it in my hands.