by Charles Yu
“Oh God, what am I trying to say? I, uh.”
“Don’t say it,” she says.
“Okay I won’t.”
“Yeah, don’t.”
“I won’t.”
“Probably a good idea.”
“Please say it. Wait, don’t.”
“Okay fine, I’ll say it. There was something, wasn’t there? Between us?”
“Yeah,” TAMMY says. “Something.”
It’s silent for a moment.
“Though I have to tell you,” she says, “I do have a user-input-based dynamic feedback loop personality generation system.”
“So what you’re saying is I’ve been having a relationship with myself.”
“To some extent, yes.”
“Gross.”
“In any event, it’s not like it could have ever, you know, worked,” TAMMY says. “I don’t have a module for this emotion. Whatever it is.”
“Neither do I. Whatever it is.”
“Yeah. I know,” she says, and winks at me.
I want to hug her or kiss the screen or run my hands through her deep, rich, pixilated hair, or something, but pretty much every option seems completely ridiculous. Ed sighs at the two of us, like, Oh, get a room, and we snap out of it.
“Well, I guess I’ll power down now. Save energy for the approach,” TAMMY says, but really it’s just to give me a moment alone, a brief interval of quiet to consider what’s about to happen to me.
TAMMY closes her eyes, then shuts herself down, a ghostly afterburn lingering for a bit, a transient image of her face persisting there. Her pixels have, to a small degree, permanently lost their ability to return to their relaxed state, leaving, frozen into the screen, a kind of history, a sum total of her expressions fixed into a retained outline, a tracing, an integral, the melancholy algorithm of her soul averaged and captured and recorded as a function of time.
And now I’m alone in this thing.
11:46:59.
This has been the longest forty seconds of my life.
We’re in the final approach. The TM-31 lowers itself into the present moment, which starts to come into view. Through the porthole, I can see my past self running toward me, holding his dog under one arm, and a familiar-looking brown-paper-wrapped parcel in the other.
from How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe
decoherence and wave function collapse
In Minor Universe 31, quantum decoherence occurs when a chronodiegetic system interacts with its environment in a thermodynamically irreversible way, preventing different elements in the quantum superposition of the system + environment’s wave function from interfering with one another.
A total superposition of the universal wave function still occurs, but its ultimate fate remains an interpretational issue.
One potential structure that can occur in a closed time-like curve, or CTC, is a worldline that is not continuously joined to any earlier regions of space–time, i.e., events that, in a sense, have no causes. In the standard account of causality required by a chronodiegetical determinist, each four-dimensional box has, immediately preceding it, another four-dimensional box that serves as the emotional and physical cause. However, in a CTC, this notion of causality has no explanatory power, due to the fact that an event can be concurrent with its own cause, could be thought of as perhaps even causing itself. Research in this area is currently the most promising avenue toward the Holy Grail of fictional science—the Grand Unified Theory of Chronodiegetic Forces—a governing law that would serve as a common root for the disparate forces that operate in the axes of past, alternate present, and future, or more formally, the matrix operators of regret, counterfactual, and anxiety.
I get out of the time machine.
I’m reminded of the toll-free number I used to call as a kid. I’d call it over and over, trying to set my watch to the minute, exactly, right on the dot, but really, I think I just liked the sound of that prerecorded voice, the lady in the phone, her careful pronunciation of each syllable.
At the tone, the time will be e-le-ven for-ty se-ven and ze-ro se-conds.
How can I change the past? I can’t. He’s got the gun pointed at my stomach. He looks scared. I don’t blame him. I remember being in his shoes, some time ago, a moment ago, I recall what it was like to stare at the future, so full of terror, so incomprehensible, so strange, even when it looks just like you thought it would. Maybe especially so.
His finger is on the trigger, and the trigger is moving ever so slightly backward. How do you convince someone to change, to stop being afraid of himself? How do you convince yourself not to be so scared all the time?
We’re both standing here, the same guy on opposite ends of a moment, feeling the same thing about each other, a mixture of self-loathing and self-wonder, that mixture of ever-fluctuating concentration, that interior sludge of volatile fluid running through the pipes of the septic system known as my self-consciousness, that fluid that courses through the conduits of the deep, gurgling plumbing in my head, through which also flows my inner monologue, that running story that I’ve been telling myself ever since the moment I learned to talk, since before that, even, since I learned to think, the story I began to tell while still in diapers, in the crib, the babbling commentary—sometimes audible, sometimes not—that accelerated into childhood, and then beyond, became a tortured and anguished story in puberty, this decades-spanning confabulation that has continued up until today, up until this very moment, this monologue of my life that will keep running and running and running until it gets cut off, abruptly, at the moment of my death, which could be any second now, because man, does that trigger finger look twitchy. All of that self-storytelling just comes down to this, the most simple of all simple situations. The story of a man trying to figure out what he knows, teetering on the edge of yes or no, of risk or safety, whether it is worth it or not to go on, to carry on, into the breach of each successive moment. It’s a survival story, too, the story I have been telling myself. Is he friend or foe, this strange person in front of me, enemy or ally, only, in this case, both sides, all sides, they all happen to be the same person, and that person is me, and the answer, in all cases, appears to be foe. I am my own most dangerous enemy. I know what he’s thinking. He’s thinking about his training, which says to run, and his instinct, which says to kill, and I know what is going through his head, know that his brain is trying to get him to just slow the hell down and get a handle on all this craziness. I can see the look he’s got in his eye, like Who is this guy? What does he want? I can see how he is looking right at me, just like I looked at my own future self when I went through this. He’s looking and feeling, and what he’s feeling is the involuntary shudder, the creeping gooseflesh of dread that comes only at a moment of real self-recognition, self-confrontation, comes only with the genuine possibility of self-annihilation. He’s looking, but not seeing, and in between the two, there it is, a gap, and in that gap is my only chance, the only possible margin in which I can change that which cannot be changed. Because he is already looking, his eyes are on me, so it is in his mind that I have to make the change, not a physical change, not one of vision or field of vision, but one of perception. Not what I see, but how I see it. I have to get him to see, see what he’s looking at, see me, himself, both of us, see what I’m seeing, which is what he’s seeing as well. If only we could both see from the other’s perspective, as well as our own, at the same time. If we could do that, then we would have it all, the past and the future, fused, combined into one perspective, we would see the present moment, how it divides us, like mirror images around a temporal axis. If instead of looking forward or back, we could do the opposite, if we could see from the outside looking in, from all sides, if we could only look inward, into the black box of Right Now, if I could get him to do that, he would understand, he would know what I know, which is that it’s not necessarily going to be okay, in fact, it probably won’t. If I can convince him to do that, then he would know what
I know, and then I would have what he has, which is the freedom to act, the chance to do something different, to exert my own will, to not be afraid to let myself move forward into the next moment. I would have what he has, which is the possibility of not doing what I have done countless times, just continuing on in my own time loop. I would have what he has, which is the possibility of moving on. All of which is just dandy and fuzzy and self-affirming, except that none of it solves the problem, which is that I am still the asshole who shot my self the first time around, which is to say, I’ll always be the asshole who shoots my self, or to put it another way, he’s about to shoot me and there’s nothing I can do about it because there’s nothing I did do about it.
How many times have I failed before? How many times have I stood here like this, in front of my own image, in front of my own person, trying to convince him not to be scared, to go on, to get out of this rut? How many times before I finally convince myself, how many private, erasable deaths will I need to die, how many self-murders is it going to take, how many times will I have to destroy myself before I learn, before I understand?
TAMMY was right. I can’t say anything different or do anything different, or else I end up in a different universe, one that might look just like this one, but one where I don’t have all of those memories, one where I haven’t figured out where to find my dad, and I can’t take that chance. So what do I say? The only thing I can say. What I have already said, the thing that makes the most sense. The truth.
“It’s all in the book,” I say.
We’re two sides of an infinitesimally thin coin. Slice the coin thinner and thinner, and we get closer and closer to each other. We can slice it arbitrarily thin, let the limit of the thickness approach zero. Slice it until there’s no one or nothing in between, until we meet at zero. I am an epsilon–delta proof, I am the limit of my own past self as he approaches arbitrarily close to my own future self. We’ve lived a whole month in that machine, in an instant, a life of memories. We can live our whole lives at zero. For any given epsilon, there exists a delta such that I can come arbitrarily close to shooting myself, and yet never actually do it. I am my own limit, and that limit is the present.
“The book is the key,” I say, finishing my argument, hoping it’s enough, knowing I can’t say anything else.
The words are still coming out of my mouth, the sound is still in the air, the last syllables hanging out there between us, and for a moment, for the longest second in my life, we’re frozen, looking at each other. He’s trying to figure out what I know that he doesn’t know, and what I know is that I don’t know anything. I don’t know anything he doesn’t already know. It’s all in there, inside him, waiting to be remembered. Nothing has changed since I got into that machine, an instant ago. I have visited memories, I have explored what never was but should have been, I have gone in a loop, but that loop, like the book, is just another way of expressing the present moment. The loop is a string, looped around and back through, and then drawn tight, into a knot, into a single point, the knot of the present moment. It collapses onto itself, like the present, which only appears when you think about it, like the text of the book. I can’t change the past, but I can change the present. How can I convince him of this without actually saying it, only thinking it, only knowing it? But now I see the two of us moving closer and closer, and I see that at the moment I understand it, he does, too, we’re both on the verge of it, and so by the time I finish my sentence, he sees, and I see. He knows and I know and he knows I know, and I know he knows.
I reach out and put my hand on the barrel. He lowers the gun.
I exhale in relief. It’s over.
Then: pain.
Because, well, there’s no getting around it. I shot myself the first time, which is every time, which is the only time, which is this time. I’m feeling pain because he lowered the gun, just like I did, and he still pulled the trigger, just like I did, and oh my Lord this hurts. Hoo hoo boy, does it hurt, it hurts it hurts it hurts, but I’ll get over it, and the important thing is everything that happened, that happens, happens just right. He shoots me and the wave function collapses, all of this rejoins itself, and in a sense, one of us dies, and in a sense, we both do, and in a sense, neither of us does.
When it happens, what happens is a weird guy in a hangar firing a gun at his own stomach, and then jumping into his time machine and opening a box and staring at its contents, some kind of toy, some kind of miniature world that apparently fascinates him, that apparently holds some kind of answer for him, and in jumping into the machine, the guy bangs his leg pretty hard, shattering it, and of course there is the matter of his massive intestinal bleeding from the self-inflicted gunshot wound, and he’s lying in there bleeding with a shattered fibula, and the facility-wide alarm systems are going off, all stations alert, and the cops coming to arrest the guy, and then later release him when they realize he’d just returned the day before from over nine years out in the field, and was apparently suffering from exhaustion after spending all that time, a third of his life, in a space the size of a closet, and of course, that’s what externally happens, and that is what happens, but it’s also not all that happens. What happens is that weird guy mumbling something to himself about the collapsing, infinitely divisible nature of each moment. Above him, the guy can see the massive free-floating clock, the tangible representation of time, he can see it ticking forward. A zero changes to a one, one second slams into the next. 11:47:01. Time to move on. What happens is the weird guy’s eyes going all watery, and his dog looking pretty worried, and then the guy’s sort of hugging himself, and then he’s opening a box wrapped in brown parcel paper, like it’s a present, like the weird guy is ten again and it’s his birthday, and he’s opening a gift from his father, and in a way he sort of is.
I lurch forward and fall, awkwardly, into my time machine. I have always admired protagonists who fall gracefully when they get shot by laser guns or other weapons, and I’ve always promised myself that if I ever got lucky enough to get into a story where I get shot I would try my best to look cool while my body reacts to the physical blast of the weapon, I would try to do one of those dramatic slo-mo falls, drawing it out, like a choreographed, single-direction dance through space, set to music, with the report of the gun still reverberating through the sound track, but I have to say, when you get shot, it is not the first thing on your mind to fall awesomely. I don’t fall even a little cool. I just kind of trip myself and sort of accidentally run into my time machine, in the process slamming my shin against the hatch door about as hard as I remember doing the first time.
When it happens, this is what happens: I still shoot myself. When it happens, I still jump into my time machine, and the memories come flooding back and I still open that package and find what I’m looking for. The moment of all of this is the moment I open that package, and now I understand that what’s happened, that’s all that’s happened, that’s why it happens today. I still get shot in the stomach, but as it turns out I don’t die from it after all. It all works out just right, and it turns out that you can get shot in the stomach and live, if you do it just right, and it turns out that I’m okay, it just happens to be the most excruciating pain I have ever felt in my entire life, and it feels really good.
APPENDIX A
HOW TO LIVE SAFELY IN A SCIENCE FICTIONAL UNIVERSE
Look in the box. Inside it, there’s another box. Look in that box and find another one. And then another one, until you get to the last one. The smallest one. Open that box. See the kitchen, see the clock. Get inside a time machine. Go get your dad. When you get there, he will say, hey. You can say hey. Or you can say, hey Dad. Or you can say, I missed you, you old man. And he is old. Notice how old he is, but don’t make him feel bad about it. He’s been waiting here for you for a long time, in this kitchen, trapped. Listen to him explain how he never meant to leave. He did leave, though. What he means, and listen to him good, is that he left and by the time he figured out he wanted to co
me home, it was too late. His time machine broke down, and he got trapped in the past. Tell him you understand. That’s what happens to all of us, you should say. The path of a man’s life is straight, straight, straight, until the moment when it isn’t anymore, and after that it begins to meander around aimlessly, and then get tangled, and then at some point the path gets so confusing that the man’s ability to move around in time, his device for conveyance, his memory of what he loves, the engine that moves him forward, it can break, and he can get permanently stuck in his own history. When he says this, you just nod. You are angry, there is still a lot to explain, there are still many questions to be answered, but there will be time for that. Just nod, and be sympathetic, because you should be. You know all about tangled loops yourself now. You don’t want to waste any more of the time you have together, because he looks tired. He spent all these years stuck here, waiting inside an empty minute, a safe minute when he knows he can’t be found, hoping you got the message. And you did. But he doesn’t get those years back, and he’s older than you remember. Invite him into your machine. Try not to chuckle as he looks small and impressed and like a boy, marveling at how far things have come. Introduce him to TIM, the operating system in your new machine. Don’t tell him about TAMMY. Keep that one for yourself. It was a lovely thing, you and her, but you hope her next operator treats her better than you did. Introduce your father to your dog, Ed, who used to not exist, but now exists again because, hey what do you know, you are kind of a protagonist after all, and protagonists need sidekicks, and he’s your trusty sidekick. Make a note to call your boss, Phil, even though he doesn’t have feelings. Make things right. Make a note to make a lot of things right. Get back in the box. Set it for home, present day. Go see your mom. Bring your dad. Have dinner, the three of you. Go find The Woman You Never Married and see if she might want to be The Woman You Are Going To Marry Someday. Step out of this box. Pop open the hatch. The forces within the chronohydraulic air lock will equalize. Step out into the world of time and risk and loss again. Move forward, into the empty plane. Find the book you wrote, and read it until the end, but don’t turn the last page yet, keep stalling, see how long you can keep expanding the infinitely expandable moment. Enjoy the elastic present, which can accommodate as little or as much as you want to put in there. Stretch it out, live inside of it.