How To Live Safely In A Science Fictional Universe Part 5

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

d.a.m.n it all to h.e.l.l.

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 h.e.l.l 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 s.e.xbots 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 t.i.tle of this book, in my hands. It's called How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe.

from How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe 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 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 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 ma.s.s 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 c.u.mulative 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 h.e.l.l 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 s.p.a.ce and in chapter three of the coursebook we had covered this very scenario as a case study in this: Exceedingly Improbable yet Hypothetically Still PossibleStates of Affairs in a Coherent UniverseGoverned 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 a.n.a.lysis 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 s.p.a.ce. 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, t.i.tle, floating there.

"It has a reinforced t.i.tanium-un.o.btainium alloy nanofiber running through it, which allows it to record any changes you make to the text on a real-time basis."

And so I'm reading this book and somehow in act of reading it, I am, with the help of TOAD and TAMMY, creating a copy of it, in a very real sense I'm generating a new version, actually, that is being simultaneously written into and stored in TAMMY's memory banks. In doing this, I am making the book my own, in retyping a book that already exists in the future, producing the very book I will eventually write. I am transcribing a book that I have, in a sense, not yet written, and in another sense, have always written, and in another sense, am currently writing, and in another sense, am always writing, and in another sense, will never write.

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

At the present moment, I am, in fact, reading the text display generated by TOAD on the main screen in front of me, going along through the words and, noticing, here and there, that the words seem to slightly adjust themselves, sometimes a little ahead of where I'm reading, but usually just behind what I've read, as if the device is self-editing, modifying the text to fit as closely as possible the actual throughput of my conscious act of reading it. In essence, my reading is a creative act, the product of which is being captured by the TOAD. I'm typing, even though strictly speaking I am using the TM-31's cognitive-visual-motor-sound-activated recording module, which operates, as you might guess, by simultaneously tracking output from the user's neural activity, voice, finger movements, retinal movements, and facial muscle contractions. It's part keyboard, part microphone, part optical scan, and part brain scan. When I want to type, I raise my hands up in front of me, palms down, in a position approximating typing, and a virtual QWERTY layout materializes in front of me. When I want to switch to voice, I just start reading the book, and the unit switches to an auditory-recognition transcription system, converting my voice into modifications in the written text. If I get tired of typing and voice modes, I can simply read the text to myself, and the unit will track my eye movements to determine, with near-perfect accuracy, what word I am reading, based on the minute ups and downs, lefts and rights of my retinas, and then matching those movements, using brain activity data as a kind of rough double check, against the blood flow and heat output of various areas of my language- and concept-processing lobes and sublobes of my brain.

I can switch back and forth among these three modes seamlessly, sometimes even using more than one at a time, and even using all three, so that the machine is tracking my voice, my eyes, my mind, and my finger movements all at once. In the typing-only mode, the unit tracks just my fingers. The same goes for the voice-only mode, i.e., even though I necessarily must use my eyes and brain to read the text in order to p.r.o.nounce the words out loud, if I choose the voice-only mode, the device does not track my eye movements or brain activity, and only the microphone records the words I am speaking. There are advantages and disadvantages to each mode, and to the various combinations of modes.

Currently I am using both the reading and typing modes. This is because the copy of this book that my future self gave to me was apparently damaged at some point in time (perhaps, as TAMMY suggests, it was damaged in the very act of transferring it to me, a strange sort of loop indeed). As a result, some of the words are illegible. There are blurry areas where the paper has absorbed moisture, and portions that have faded due to the c.u.mulative effects of light over time. There are other places where the text has been scratched out, in some instances by what appears to have been, based on the seemingly random pattern of mechanical injury to the book, some sort of accidental sc.r.a.ping or sharp impact, as if it had been slammed against an extremely hard and thin object, like perhaps the edge of a table (or a time machine door), and in other instances by what seems to have been very deliberate redaction by way of defacement, as if an X-Acto knife or other implement had been applied with precision and intent to excise particular words and sentences.

For instance, right here, the next paragraph begins with the words what if, what if, and after those words there is a depression, where the fibers of the paper show evidence of having been pressed down and rubbed vigorously, and what remains is a gray smear of what may have been one or more additional words, as if someone, maybe a reader, maybe the previous owner of this copy, or maybe even me, at some point in the future, wanted to destroy or conceal or confuse the meaning of such a paragraph, so that the question that remains is only: and after those words there is a depression, where the fibers of the paper show evidence of having been pressed down and rubbed vigorously, and what remains is a gray smear of what may have been one or more additional words, as if someone, maybe a reader, maybe the previous owner of this copy, or maybe even me, at some point in the future, wanted to destroy or conceal or confuse the meaning of such a paragraph, so that the question that remains is only:

with no context or other indication of what the rest of the sentence was, or if there even was a rest of the sentence.

Perhaps even more disturbing than the fact that there are missing and damaged words and sentences in the text is that there are places where the book, this book, is simply blank (even though I am pretty sure this makes no sense, since how can I know there will be blanks when I have not, by my own admission, read ahead to see any blanks yet and there haven't been any so far, I'm still performing the read/write/self-edit process as faithfully as I can, in fact, even this parenthetical aside has been worded exactly as I am recording it, right up to the words I am typing right now and now and now and now, I am typing what appears to be somewhat digressive and extemporaneous rambling, all of which is starting to make me have serious doubts in terms of the whole free will versus determinism situation because even as I am typing from the copy I have in my hand, the text is matching my thoughts exactly, all the way down to-EUREKA!-that random word I just interjected there, or attempted to interject, that word, Eureka, Eureka, having occurred in the text at the precise moment I had decided, internally, to inject a random word in an attempt to diverge from the text, and now, having failed in that attempt, realizing I had better stop now and end this sentence before I dig myself any deeper into metaphysical trouble). having occurred in the text at the precise moment I had decided, internally, to inject a random word in an attempt to diverge from the text, and now, having failed in that attempt, realizing I had better stop now and end this sentence before I dig myself any deeper into metaphysical trouble).

There are gaps, blanks, throughout, which I will need to fill in. There are gaps in my autobiography.

Here is one such gap.*

*NB: This is how the text actually reads in the copy I am working from. The text also includes this explanatory (and somewhat self-referential) footnote, including this second sentence, which is itself a second-order meta-explanation of the already explanatory first sentence. It is unclear what the function of this self-referentiality is, other than to raise doubts in my mind as to the actual provenance of this ma.n.u.script, although I do note that this third sentence, just like the rest of this footnote, is also in the text I am copying from, verbatim, which makes it seem almost as if I am, in a way, telling myself what to think, that my future self has produced a record of the output of my consciousness, of my internal monologue. Or rather, a dialogue, between myself and my future self, in which my future self is telling my present self what I have already finished thinking but have not yet realized I thought.

This is consistent with Libet (1983) Libet (1983).

And here is another gap.*

*Let's suppose that I, being a volitional agent, am presented with a choice: I can have either a cookie from Jar A or a cookie from Jar B. After evaluating both cookies, at some point in time I form the intention to take a cookie from Jar A, and then, at a later point in time, I actuate the movement of my arm toward Jar A in furtherance of my choice. This is, intuitively, one might even say obviously, the order in which events occur.

Except that it isn't.

After Libet, we now know that I actually began moving my arm toward Jar A before I became aware of my own conscious decision to choose Jar A before I became aware of my own conscious decision to choose Jar A. In effect, I decided to reach for the cookie in Jar A before I realized that I made the decision. The question is, which I was I? Which I am I? Am I the decider-I or the realizer-I? Both? Neither?

I am currently reproducing this as correctly as I can, interpolating where necessary, based on my best guess about what I wrote, or would have written, or will write. As a result, I'm not sure this is going to turn out to be exactly the same book as the one I was given, prior to it being damaged and redacted. I doubt it is, or will be, or could be. My job, though, isn't to figure it out or create it, because it has, to the extent it ever will be, already been created, and figured out. I don't know the ending because, as I mentioned, I am reading along as I type this. This is a doc.u.ment that came from nowhere. This is a chunk of information created spontaneously out of nothing, filtered through my interpretation and memory.

Just to be sure, I have run this set of propositions, the text so far, through TAMMY's...o...b..ard Plausibility Verification Unit, and it has confirmed that my future self was telling the truth. The book, its existence, its creation, is the product of a causal loop. It comes from nowhere, has no unique origin, and yet its creator is me.

"This book," TAMMY says to me, "is a copy of a copy of a copy, and so on, forever, like that, I could keep going if you'd like." It is a copy of something that doesn't exist yet. It is a book copied from itself.

Life is, to some extent, an extended dialogue with your future self about how exactly you are going to let yourself down over the coming years.

There is a sense in which I am the author of this book, and a sense in which I am merely its first reader. I am writing this book at the same time I read it, I am typing while reading it, while thinking it, switching at will among all three modes, both actively and pa.s.sively receiving and creating it, this book that matches the moment-by-moment output of my consciousness, gaps and all, and even as I attempt to fill in these gaps, and interpret my own life story before I know what happens, I am learning about what my life will be, what it is now, what it already has been, I am seeing this book for the first time, word by word, reproducing it from sensory data with my eyes and fingers and brain and voice, while also seeing it from direct experience exactly as it is, while at the same time interpreting it, a story about my father and me and the various time machines, all of the machines we have been in together, a story given to me by my future self.

I am editing this book even as I write it, writing it as I read it, now I am repeating myself, even as I create it, I know it is flawed and possibly even inconsistent, and yet all I can do is to go forward and see where it takes me, all I can do is to go backward and see where it takes me, all I can do is read it to see what happens to my father, what happened to him, to us, to see if it is true, to learn what I am apparently thinking right now, to learn what I will think, to see if I can make any sense out of his life. Which is what sons do for their time-traveling fathers, act as biographers for them, as science fictional biographers, as literary executors, taking the inheritance of the contents of their fathers' lives, given to them in an unprocessed jumble, out of order and nonsensical. Sons do this for their fathers, they use their time machines and all of the technology inside, and they see if it is possible to put those contents into a story, into a life, into a life story. There is a sense in which I am pretty sure this makes no sense. I don't know where this is going. I don't know how it ends.

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

residual objects in closed time-like curves In any coherent time loop, there are certain objects that are created during and exist within the time loop. One common example of such an item is the hypothetical Book from Nowhere: A man brings a copy of a book with him back in time, giving it to himself, and instructing himself to reproduce the book as faithfully as he can. The book is then published, and after its publication, the man then buys the book, gets in a time machine, and starts the cycle all over again. The book is a perfectly stable physical object that actually exists, despite the fact that it seems to come from nowhere.

Less certain is whether human memory works the same way.

"Why can't I just give up now?" I ask TAMMY.

"I don't think it works that way," she says, but I don't see why it shouldn't. Today should be the first day of the part of my life where I can stop caring. Right? I can just go around in this loop, because in the end, I'm going to end up where I know I'm going to end up anyway, and that's that. It literally does not matter anymore. Today is the beginning of the end. Or the end of the beginning. I killed my future, I am my future, I am going back to my past to do it all over again. A tidy loop.

"Wait a minute. Don't you go through the loop? Should you have some kind of record, some residual memory, some counter for each iteration? How many times have I done this? A hundred? A thousand? Do I ever learn anything from it? Do I ever become a better person?"

"My records show that this is the first time."

How many times have I even been through this loop? TAMMY says just once. She says this is the first time she has been on this path. This may be a time loop, but it's the first time through.

I say she's lying. She reminds me that she's incapable of lying to me, and I realize her answer makes sense. If the loop is exactly the same set of events every time, she wouldn't have any way of distinguis.h.i.+ng them. To her, it's only one set of events that occur in a set period of time, and there's no marker, no higher-level counter, no internal-state reflector that records separate impressions. Her memory doesn't work that way, is what I realize, and then I realize something about what I just realized. My memory doesn't work that way, either. I have no way of knowing how long I've been in this loop, and I'll never know. I'm just going around and around on this thing, however long it is, an hour, a day, my entire life, each time as oblivious as the last time, each time as scared as if it's my first.

I am a pa.s.sive observer in this, this record of my own time loop. But why? Why should I be pa.s.sive? Why not go straight to it, straight to the thing I am driving at, the thing I am being driven toward, to the heart of it, the heart, his heart, the truth, the end, the only thing that matters? Why not go to the moment when this all ends and I say what I end up saying, and let that be what it is? Why bother with all of this outer sh.e.l.l, this casing, this surrounding bulk of matter, this envelope, this container, these words, this intervening buffer between now and the time I want to go to? What is stopping me? As far as I can tell, nothing. Nothing is stopping me from just jumping ahead to the end in my reading/writing/whatever-it-is-I-am-doing in "creating" this whatever-this-object-is. This book, this autobiography, this self-instruction manual (self-coercion manual, self-creation manual), this set of operating parameters for a time machine, this laboratory s.p.a.ce for the design and performance of what appears, so far, to be an ill-advised and poorly conceived chronodiegetic experiment.

But what if I were to skip forward? Just cut out all of this filler in the middle. After all, as my self told me, I am the author of this. Whatever it is. I am its author and its only reader.

I want to know what happens. I want to know if I'll ever get out of here. I want to know if I'll ever see my father again. My mother again. I want to know if this is how my life will go, until it just ends.

TAMMY says: not a good idea.

TOAD says: not a good idea.

I punch in the instruction: go to the last page.