How to Live Safely in a Science Fictiona (2010) (11 page)

(module β)

from
How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

in the event you find yourself trapped in a time loop

(i) See if you can figure out the sequence of events that make up the loop.

(ii) The thing to remember is this: the fact that you are in a time loop is most likely your fault.

(iii) You are the one who interacted with yourself, for whatever reason you thought you had.

(iv) Assuming you want to stay in your current universe, you will need to be able to reproduce your actions exactly in order to avoid inadvertently changing your own past and thereby diverting yourself into a different, alternate universe.

(v) Once you have established the sequence of events, see if you can figure out why these things are happening.

(vi) Try to determine what, if anything, you can learn about yourself from this time loop.

(vii) In most cases, you will not learn anything. You will just go around and around, until you get bored enough that you decide to escape, even if it means losing your own life, exiting the universe for another one.

Back in my time machine. My leg is throbbing. I am trying to pull up my pant leg to inspect the damage.

Damn it all to hell.

This is not good.

It’s the day everyone dreads. Your life stops moving forward and starts going in a circle.

I’m in a time loop.

TAMMY tells me not to beat myself up. She says it happens to everyone, some even by choice. I say my mom doesn’t count. Moms don’t count. I say, Yeah, but usually it happens to action heroes, to people with stories to tell. It doesn’t happen to people so young, who’ve done so little with life, usually it doesn’t happen in such a dumb way. I shot my own future. In the stomach.

I’ve gotten myself into a time loop and I guess I can stop caring now, realizing that my path is set.

On top of all of that, as I’m pulling out of the hangar, I see Ed down there, looking up at me, tongue hanging out, confused.

 . . . 

Phil calls.

He doesn’t IM, he actually calls, uses his simulated human speech syllabic conversion mimicry feature to talk to me, but being Phil, he doesn’t know that’s what it is. He just thinks it’s his voice.

“Hape al, wha ta ha pend b-b-back there?” he says, sounding a little bit like a Speak and Spell, and a little bit like a five-year-old boy doing his impression of a robot.

“I don’t know, man. I just freaked. I saw myself coming toward me and I thought no way I’m going to let this idiot trap me in a time loop.”

“There is no ree zun to run. I said it! Did you hear that? That was a good sentence I said. You doan tuh have to run. Come ba-a-ack to huheadquarters.”

“You know I can’t do that, Phil.”

“S-s-sure you can. Wee ull have a beer, we’ll work ih tout.”

“We can’t, Phil. We can’t have a beer. You know why?” And here it goes again. Ever catch yourself in the middle of saying something you know you’ll regret? Something so mean you know you should stop immediately but some part of your brain kicks in and won’t let you stop?

“You’re a computer program, Phil. Didn’t you know that? You never noticed that about yourself? Go ahead, I’ll give you a second to check.”

And then there’s an awful silence while he checks. It’s like that day in the car in front of the video store with my dad, that day all over again.

When he comes back, he’s given up using the voice.

IT APPEARS YOU ARE CORRECT. I AM A MANAGER PROGRAM. I GUESS I SHOULD PROBABLY GO TELL MY WIFE.

JESUS. PHIL. I’M SORRY. I SHOULDN’T HAVE SAID THAT. I WAS KIDDING.

WAIT. OH. SHE’S NOT REAL, EITHER, IS SHE? I SUPPOSE I DON’T HAVE ANY KIDS, THEN?

PHIL, LISTEN. I’M SO SORRY. FORGET I SAID IT. LET’S GO BACK TO BEFORE I TOLD YOU THAT.

I CAN’T FORGET IT. I’M INCAPABLE. THAT MUST BE NICE, BEING ABLE TO FORGET. IS IT NICE?

The worst part is that Phil isn’t even mad. He can’t get mad, he doesn’t have that feature.

WELL, I GUESS IT’S FOR THE BETTER THAT YOU TOLD ME THIS. THE TRUTH IS ALWAYS BETTER, I SUPPOSE. I SHOULD GET GOING. MAYBE WE’LL HAVE THAT BEER SOON. HA HA. JUST KIDDING. I KNOW THAT’S NOT POSSIBLE. YOU CAN HAVE A BEER AND I’LL JUST, UH, ADD SOME NUMBERS UP OR SOMETHING.

TAMMY makes the face for Slightly Disapproving, which is about as harsh as she knows how to be. “What the hell are you looking at?” I say, too mean, meaner than I mean to be, just way too mean.

 . . . 

TAMMY hibernates in order to cool off, leaving me alone, drifting in my own time-free silence. I guess in a way, this is what I want. To push everyone and everything away. I have this way of doing this. There are so few moments when the opportunity presents itself to really make a choice. So often, it’s just the story line of the world propelling me forward, but there are these key nodes, branches in the timeline, when I can exercise some free will, and they always seem to turn out this way, always seem to end up with me hurting someone I love, someone I should be protecting. I’m nice to strangers who break their time machines, nice to random sexbots who ask for money, but when it comes to the people I care about the most, this is what I do. My mom, Phil, my dad.

I can blame this stupid defective universe where everyone is always so sad there aren’t even any bad guys anymore, but what if there never were any bad guys? Just guys like me. I’m the bad guy. No heroes, either. I’m the hero. A guy who just shot his own future in the stomach.

Maybe that’s what my future was trying to tell me. That it’s not worth it. Maybe he was trying to end it all. Either he shoots me and creates a paradox, or I shoot him, and cut off my own future. Either way, problem solved, no more having to worry about anything. I wish I could take it back, go back to just before I ruined Phil’s day, ruined his whole life, and let myself shoot me, since I’m the one who deserves it. But I guess all things in due time. At least I know I’m going to get what’s coming to me.

I notice there’s a book on my console. I pick it up, run my hand over the back cover. I’ve never seen it before, but it feels familiar already, a part of me already knows what this is. I turn the book over and read the title of this book, in my hands. It’s called
How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe
.

from
How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

page 101

In the book, right at this point, my future self has written these words:
There exists a time in which you will have written this book
.

In the next paragraph, he goes on:
I know none of this seems very believable. It probably doesn’t even make sense. But for once in your life, please, I am asking you to trust me. Trust yourself
.

It’s a slim, silver-colored volume with a metallic-looking sheen, relatively modest in size but with a surprising heft, as if it acquired some amount of relativistic mass in its journeys around time. It has the kind of unexpected density that academic press books (even the paperbacks) often have, due in part to a thicker paper stock and in part to the weight of a more substantial ink, the sneaky heftiness of the book being the aggregate cumulative effect of hundreds of thousands of individually insubstantial little markings, letters and numbers, commas and periods and colons and dashes, each symbol pressed upon the page by the printing machine with a slightly greater-than-expected force and darkness and permanence.

Apparently, I’m going to write this book, which appears to be, as far as I can tell, part engineering field manual and part autobiography. Or rather, I already wrote it. Now I just have to write it, which is to say, I have to get to the point in time when I will have written it, and then travel back in time to get shot and then give it to myself, so I can write it. Which all makes sense to me, except for one thing: why the hell would I want to do any of that?

Normally, when someone says trust me, I find it hard to trust him anymore, and this is doubly true for when it is my self who is saying it, but as it turns out, in my science fictional studies, I once took a course on the topological properties of possibility space and in chapter three of the coursebook we had covered this very scenario as a case study in this:

Exceedingly Improbable yet Hypothetically Still Possible

States of Affairs in a Coherent Universe

Governed by a Consistent Set of Fictional Laws

and in fact, for a while I even considered writing my thesis on a minor but novel approach to proving, with only ZF+CH (Zermelo-Frankel set theory plus the Continuum Hypothesis), that this exact fact pattern, the one happening to me right that moment, was in fact (i) grammatically allowed, (ii) logically permitted, and (iii) metaphysically possible. And of course, my future self would know all of this, and he would know that I would know that he would know this, and that’s why he knew it would be worth it to give me this book. And so he’s written, in his handwriting, handwriting I recognize as my very own, these words:

Read this book. Then write it. Your life depends on it.

TAMMY says that I’m supposed to place the book within the TM-31’s read/write device. She opens up a panel on my right side I’ve never actually seen before, and out from it comes a clear Lucite block.

“This is the TM-Thirty-one Textual Object Analysis Device,” she says, or TOAD for short.

Who’s in charge of acronyms on these things, I say.

The TOAD opens up on hinges, like a book itself, revealing a carved-out rectangular space. TAMMY tells me to put the book in there.

The hinged cover closes, and the TOAD retracts back into the side of the unit, so that it is flush, and all that’s left visible is the silver cover, title, floating there.