by Charles Yu
“You were a cute kid,” TAMMY says, still giggling about the Penthouses.
I see myself pretending to work on the program, pretending even though I was alone, I remember how I would always pretend that I wasn’t listening to whatever was going on in the living room, the outpouring of anger in a constant stream, ebbing and rising in waves, punctuated by bursts of outright screaming. I remember how I would sit there thinking, Who am I trying to fool, sitting there as if I wasn’t fazed by it, every day, for years, ever since I was a small child, as if it had no effect on me, as if it didn’t hurt.
I remember thinking all of this and still, and yet, and for whatever reason, continuing to stare at the screen, pretending in my room alone, pretending to myself, as if someone was watching me from above, some semi-omniscient, bird’s-eye view observer was watching over me, and what I didn’t realize then was that there was an observer, and in fact, it was me, it’s me now, looking back at myself from inside this time machine.
from How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe
TM-31 Recreational Time Travel Device
Standard-issue chronogrammatical vehicle, rated for personal, private use.
Operating system generally reported to be helpful, even if a bit down on itself.
One notable quirk is the word recreational in the product’s name, which can be read either of two ways, with a hyphen or without, which some have suspected to be an implicit acknowledgment of the fact that “recreational” use of the machine is also, in a sense, “re-creational” use as well.
This idea is consistent with the current understanding of the neuronal mechanism of human memory, i.e., every time a user recalls a memory, he is not only remembering it, but also, from an electrochemical perspective, literally re-creating the experience as well.
It was a moonshot, that first trip. It was a soda bottle rocket with a crumpled bottle, it was the Wright brothers’ test run, it was a wobbly and earthbound arc, it never got free of the pull of the gravitational present. It lasted all of a minute, less than a minute, maybe fifty-five seconds. Once we climbed in, we couldn’t get out, but in the mirror we had placed in the garage (in order to be able to position the cooling element on top of the unit), we could see ourselves, sitting there, we saw what we looked like, a scientist and his know-nothing assistant, two guys in a garage next to a makeshift box, a crate really, with a piece of sheet metal stapled twice as a kind of door, except that it didn’t open.
This was how we built it. After fourteen straight days of silence and Star Trek reruns, one Saturday morning I went down to the garage and stood there, watching my father work while I ate a bowl of cereal. I couldn’t tell if he was mad at me for taking my mother’s side, or for not coming down sooner, or something else altogether. I thought I was the one who was supposed to be mad at him. He didn’t say anything all day, and we repeated it again the next day.
The next morning, I came down, prepared for a third day of watching him measure things wrong and curse at himself and make trips to the hardware store. This time, though, he handed me a fistful of nails and pointed to a piece of sheet metal leaning against the wall.
“Hammer that,” he said, still looking pissed. I did my best to look pissed, too, or as pissed as a ten-year-old can look, but eventually I hammered the nail, and then another, and before long, it was dinnertime. We worked mostly in silence for the next two months, only talking to each other when deciding what to eat for lunch.
By the end of the summer, the UTM-1 was ready. Or so we thought. We stood there in the garage, looking over our contraption, odd pieces of sheet metal sticking out here and there, little gaps where surfaces weren’t flush, the general overall slumpy, homemade look to our machine.
“That doesn’t look like it’s going to work,” TAMMY says. “But you guys did a nice job.”
She’s right. Although we did leave the present moment, and so in that sense we traveled in time, in every other respect we failed. We looped around in a short circuit, but we had no control over the machine. We couldn’t get out, we couldn’t even stop the thing, it was just a swinging, fishtailing 180, an out-of-control joyride, a minute into the past, and then back, but it took us much longer than a minute to get there, it took us, well, we don’t even know how long it took that first time because we didn’t know to bring a watch or timepiece. We thought we would appear instantaneously at our destination. We would later find out that even in science fiction, it takes time to travel through time, that there is no instant poof, no shazam, that a vehicle is a vehicle, regardless of what kind of vehicle it is, and that the whole point of transport through some amount of space–time is that it is a physical process. Even if it has metaphysical and fictional implications, it is still a physical process.
This was before, before it all, before we learned all that we would learn in the next few years. Before others would make breakthroughs in chronodiegetics, before I abandoned my studies to become a repairman for a large conglomerate, before we had made our rudimentary maps of the science fictional world. Before he got lost.
“We’re doing it,” he said.
“The rig is holding up,” I said, noting that it was only vibrating slightly. We’d been worried that it might hit a resonant frequency in the acceleration phase and vibrate itself into pieces, just blow itself apart, throwing us into who knows what or where or when.
We were in the garage, with the garage door open, I remember, so I park my TM-31 just outside, behind the basketball hoop and trash cans, so I can watch from here.
“Imagine,” my father said, “if we could just stop.” If we could just stop at any point in time. If we could stop right now in this subspace, if we got out and well, what?
If we could just stop at any moment in time and change our lives. Rearrange them.
What could we do? What would we do? What would we have done differently? Instead of the ordinary problems of life, the problem of what to do next, of what to do first, of what to do ever, at all, even the smallest step, we would also have the problem of what to do yesterday, of what to do last year, of how to justify anything, ever. There we were between minutes, between moments. We sat there in the crate, unsure of what or when we were, knowing only that we were in transit, in a space between space, a time between times, in some sort of interstitial gap between moments, a subspace occupied by only the two of us.
We sat there for some indefinite and unmeasured period of time realizing our error, our wrongheaded assumption, marveling at what we had learned: time travel takes time. My father was so excited he almost broke our craft, banging on the front door, such as it was, with both fists in celebration of the discovery. Of course, he said, why hadn’t he thought of it? Living is a form of time travel. Time travel is a physical process. It has to be. Although we hadn’t remembered to bring a timepiece on our maiden voyage, we had remembered to bring a notepad and pencils and even a quarter sheet of graph paper. We thought we would record something, anything, sensory data, our impressions, our physical conditions. But when the time came, we couldn’t bring ourselves to move. We just stared at each other. Even in my anger at him, my indignation, I couldn’t help but smile, if for no other reason than just seeing my father smile. It was so strange and unsettling to see him like this, to see him happy, strange because I realized I had never seen him like this before, not in our house, not with my mom, not when we were all together in the car taking a drive, never. Not like this. We were doing science. Together. In here, in our little box, in our laboratory separated from the rest of the world. For some period of nontime time or a thousand moments, or maybe just one, we were in there, and he was happy and I was part of it. I remember the goose bumps on my arms and the back of my neck, the excitement at seeing this, at doing something right, for once in our lives, succeeding.
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 wha
t 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.