How To Live Safely In A Science Fictional Universe Part 3

from How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

capital city Eighty-seven percent of the nonrobot population of Universe 31 lives in the capital city, the full legal name of which (used only by nonlocals due to the fact that it is printed that way on maps) is, officially, NEW ANGELES/LOST TOKYO-2 The name is abbreviated in governmental regulatory usage as NA/LT-2, and is sometimes, though not frequently, referred to informally as Lost City or Verse City or New Tokyo, but is known to virtually everyone other than tourists and bureaucrats as Loop City.

The formation of Loop City occurred in two steps. Step one: the cities of New York and Los Angeles, 2,462 miles apart, much to the surprise and consternation of residents and property owners and munic.i.p.al officials and parking lot owners and westsiders from the eastern half and eastsiders from the western half, slowly and invisibly and irreversibly merged into each other, in the process swallowing up what was in between, leaving one metropolis that contained, within it, what had been America. Alaska and Hawaii were included as well.

The second phase began a short while later, when the sprawling city of Greater Tokyo spontaneously bifurcated along a spatio-temporal fault line. Half of this bifurcated Tokyo moved across the world and wrapped itself around the perimeter of the recently formed New York/Los Angeles chimera. This half is referred to as Lost Tokyo-2.

The other half, Lost Tokyo-1, has not been located yet, although presumably it exists out there somewhere in the universe, a mega-demi-city of eighty-five million people, a city fractured, cracked in half, torn, ripped not cleanly, but shredded, ragged, ripped along living rooms, plans, meetings, dates, conjugal beds in prisons, family dinner tables, secrets being whispered into ears, couples holding hands, separated in an instant without warning or explanation, leaving two halves, bewildered, speaking j.a.panese to instant neighbors from the other side of the world, unable to understand what has happened, or if things will ever go back to the way they were, hoping its other half might someday find its way back.

The hub is jammed, so subs.p.a.ce 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, 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, but then I'm thinking, Eh, who am I kidding, I like those hot dogs 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 s.p.a.ce 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 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 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 s.h.i.+fting 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, a.s.sembling 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, s.h.i.+vering, 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 c.u.mulative 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 How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

corporate owners.h.i.+p 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 a.s.set 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 s.p.a.ce for their slightly damaged inventory, including experimental species, s.p.a.ce 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 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 s.p.a.ce.

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 sc.r.a.ppy 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 Sat.u.r.days, 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 winds.h.i.+eld. 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 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 pa.s.sing by, each one a perfect machine.

As he described his invention to me, I found it hard to look at him. He was talking a little too loud, for one thing, which, if you knew my father, was alarming all by itself. My father was quiet, but not meek, soft-spoken but not unsure. It was more than that. Quiet speaking was more than just a controlled softness of the voice, more than the virtues of decorum and tact and propriety. Quiet speaking was more than manners, or a personal preference or style, or personality in total. It was a way of moving about the world, my father's way of moving through the world. It was a survival strategy for a recent immigrant to a new continent of opportunity, a land of possibility, to the science fictional area where he had come, on scholars.h.i.+p, with nothing to his name but a small green suitcase, a lamp that his aunt gave him, and fifty dollars, which became forty-seven after exchanging currency at the airport.

And here he was, voice raw, talking fast, excited in a way that made me uncomfortable, hopeful in a way that worried me. I didn't believe it, or maybe I didn't believe in him, maybe I'd absorbed enough defeat in my short life from watching him, the look on his face as he pulled into the driveway every night, that I already doubted my own father. I thought he was brilliant, of course, he was my father, and a hero, but would the world understand him? Would the world give him what he deserved? There were opposing vectors, stress from the tensors pulling between what was and what could be, between his science fictional hopes and the reality of the station wagon we were sitting in.

He spilled out his secret theory in an excited rush, and part of me was thrilled that he wanted to tell me this, that I mattered to him, that I was grown-up enough to trust with his idea, with his hope, with his plan, but I couldn't show any of that to him, so I just stared straight ahead, through our grit-coated winds.h.i.+eld, at the posters in the window for Back to the Future Back to the Future and and Peggy Sue Got Married Peggy Sue Got Married and and Terminator Terminator. All of those stories about time travel, they were comforting, and at the same time it bothered me how they always made it seem fun and how everything fit into place, how things could only ever be how they were supposed to be, how the heroes found a way to change the world while still obeying the laws of physics.

I remember my mind drifting to the last time our family had gone into the video store, together, how my mom and dad took forever picking a movie and I'd wandered off and found, next to the licorice and cardboard boxes of chocolate-covered raisins, a comic book. The story itself was a trifle, some sort of third-cla.s.s superhero, a forgettable guy with some useless power. It was something else in the book that caught my attention.

Way in the back of the comic, in the advertis.e.m.e.nt pages, in the lower left-hand quadrant of the second to last page, a little box, there was a rectangular ad, maybe four inches by five, that read at the top, in bold all-caps: CHRONO-ADVENTURERSURVIVAL KIT

There were no exclamation points or any squiggly lines indicating weirdness or jokiness, or any other graphics to signify, This is for kids, this is a toy, this is just make-believe. It just had those words, and it was dead serious. Finding that little box of text, with those words in there, felt like I'd found a secret, a technology no one else knew about, something that might help me be the hero of the block, that might help my dad be the hero at his work, that might even help my dad and mom.

For five dollars and ninety-five cents, plus a self-addressed stamped nine-by-twelve envelope, sent to a PO box somewhere in a faraway state, the good people at Future Enterprises Inc. would send you a survival kit "of great use and convenience for any traveler who finds himself stranded on an alien world."

Half of me knew it was stupid. I was old enough to know better, but on the other hand, that font! Those letters in all-caps. It didn't look attractive and well formatted, the kind of thing a kid's eye would be drawn to; it looked like it came from a typewriter, unevenly s.p.a.ced, like there was too much text, too many ideas and words and things that someone had to say, had to let people know about, it looked like it came from the mind of a brilliant, lonely, forty-year-old man, sitting somewhere in his bas.e.m.e.nt in that faraway state, half crazy, sure, but on to something on to something.

According to the ad, the kit had over seventeen pieces, but from the picture I could only see a plastic knife and a Chrono-Adventurer patch to sew on your clothes, and a map of the terrain of the science fictional universe, and what looked like a decoder, which I figured was for translating languages spoken by different life-forms-all of which totaled four pieces. I wondered what the other thirteen pieces were.

The ad said the kit was your only chance for survival in the harsh environment of an alien universe, but what I remember the most was the picture in the ad, not even a picture, but a tiny line drawing of a boy and his father, holding hands, not smiling, just staring out at you from their little box in the text, buried in the corner of the back page of that comic, and the ad didn't say, but it was reasonable to a.s.sume, to a ten-year-old me, that they were unlucky enough to have been stranded, but at least they had gotten the kit.

This is what I was thinking about when my father, a little out of breath, finished telling me everything he had kept bottled up inside, when he had finally confessed his most guarded dreams and stopped talking. For a long moment, it was silent in the car, and then he turned to me.

"So," my father said, "what do you think?"

I shrugged and kept my eyes fixed on the families in the window of the video store choosing their movies together, ready for a night of fun and popcorn.

"Dad," I said, "are we poor?"

I remember he was just starting to look disappointed that I wasn't at least a little bit excited. Then I said it. To this day, I don't know why I said it, where it came from. I was ten years old, he was my father, I wouldn't want to hurt him, couldn't know cruelty yet, what or why or how to be cruel. Could I? Did I? Of course I did. Maybe I'd learned it from the kids at school, had already incorporated it into my own growing theory of the world. Maybe I'd absorbed the capacity to hurt someone by listening to my parents every night, who were under the impression that turning the volume on the television all the way up somehow drowned out the voices, when the truth was and is (and my father, of all people, should have known this about the physical properties of materials, about what goes through walls, what moves through houses, what is m.u.f.fled and what makes it through): everything gets transmitted. Call it the law of conservation of parental anger. It may change forms, may appear to dissipate, but draw a big box around the whole s.p.a.ce, and add up everything inside the box, and when you've accounted for everything you find that it's all there, in one phase or another, bouncing around, some of it reflected, some of it absorbed by the smaller bodies in the house. The edge in their voices and turning up the TV only meant that I listened to them destroy each other to a sound track of Fantasy Island Fantasy Island or or The Incredible Hulk The Incredible Hulk or or The Love Boat The Love Boat.

Even now, to this day, I don't know if I said it because I was thinking about that survival kit, which I knew I couldn't ask him for, although I wasn't sure why, exactly, not this month, maybe for Christmas, or maybe next year. I didn't know why exactly, I just knew not to do it without anyone having to tell me, and that made me sad for my father, but at the same time it made me a little mad.

Maybe I just wanted a reaction from the man, who was so often cold and distant with Mom and even sometimes with me, the same man who had just now spoken to me about math and science and science fiction with more pa.s.sion than I had ever seen him speak about anything. I wanted a reaction and I was sure I'd gotten it. He had to be mad now, I thought, but I was wrong again. He just started the car and backed out without a word.

I spent the rest of the drive home with a puddle of melted Popsicle juice pooling on the top of my tightly clenched fist, afraid to move, surprised that he didn't even look a little mad. He just looked embarra.s.sed. Or really, he looked crushed.

And in truth, I was half asking and half not-really-asking-but-knowing-the-answer, and I think that mixture of genuinely not understanding and half starting to understand the reality of our family, of my father and his job and his dreams and our car and our neighborhood, it did something to him. It hurt him deeply, but maybe also lit a fire in him, it put a distance between us that would persist for years into the future, and yet it opened up something between us, a channel, an axis, a direct line for honest communication.

from How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

socioeconomic strata Minor Universe 31 is composed of three basic regions, which are sometimes informally referred to as neighborhoods neighborhoods.

At the lower end of the scale are the unincorporated areas, which have, as the name suggests, no particular look and feel, no genre.

Although sometimes referred to as "reality," it should be stressed that this layer of Universe 31 is quant.i.tatively, but not qualitatively, different from the other regions. The difference is one of degree, not nature.

On the other end of the scale, the affluent inhabitants of the upper-middle to upper-end neighborhoods, perhaps searching for authenticity, or nostalgic for a different age, devote significant amounts of their time and resources to the creation of a simulated version of the unincorporated areas. Considerable expense is required for the upkeep of these highly stylized "reality" gardens, with the verisimilitude of one's personal family garden being a point of pride and a symbol of status among this stratum of inhabitants.

The remainder of the SF jurisdiction is occupied by the large, stable, middle-cla.s.s regions, i.e., the subdivided science fictional zones, which make up the bulk of Universe 31.

A few decades ago, it became permissible for families to emigrate from the unincorporated areas of "reality" into the science fictional zones.

Permissibility, however, has not necessarily translated into economic permeability.

Despite improvement in recent years, successful transition into the SF zone remains difficult to achieve for many immigrant families, and even after decades of an earnest and often desperate striving for acceptance and a.s.similation, many remain in the lower-middle reaches of the zone, lower-middle reaches of the zone, along the border between SF and "reality." along the border between SF and "reality."

Although technically SF, the look and feel of the world in these borderline neighborhoods is less thoroughly executed than elsewhere in the region, and outcomes of story lines can be more randomized, due to a comparatively weaker buffer from the effects of 31's incomplete physics. As a result, the overall quality of experience for the residents of these striving areas is thinner, poorer, and less substantial than of those in the middle and upper regions, while at the same time, due to its mixed and random and unthemed nature, less satisfying than that of reality, which, although gritty, is, at least, internally consistent.

You can get into a lot of trouble in the city when you live like I do.

I've been on the job for a decade of my life now, but it's only been a week since I was last in the city. All the techs talk about how weird it is. You forget that your life is a short window, that you are stuck in the present, forget how your life is still here, waiting for you, wondering where you are, going on without you. You forget that people know who you are, think about you, might even be happy to see you.

I don't feel like running into anyone now, though. I'm only here for a night, and I have nothing to show for my lost decade except for biweekly paychecks from the company that, year after year, broke my father's heart.

I take the subway uptown, to the second-to-last stop. I find my way through the old neighborhood, around the all-concrete park where it's a bad idea to walk this late, up the little hill near where the subway comes above ground, turn the corner and there it is.

From where I'm standing near the dumpsters, I can see my mom in the window of the kitchen. It's two thirty-one and fifty-eight seconds in the morning. At two thirty-two she will look up, smile. She looks up, smiles. She's was.h.i.+ng vegetables.

She's on the second floor. I jump and catch the ladder, pull myself up onto the fire escape, get a footing on the outside rail, and jump over. She's got her back to me. I duck down, watch her moving around the kitchen, setting the table for two.