Part 2 (1/2)
YO DOG YOU KNOW I'M YOUR BOY BUT, HEY, UH, YOU'VE BEEN OUT THERE AWHILE NOW, DOG, AND I DON'T KNOW, MAN, YOU KNOW?
Of course not. I monkey around with the Tense Operator for ten years and right when it starts breaking down is when I have to bring it in. I'm going to need to figure out how to fix it if I want to keep my job.
ALL RIGHT, DON'T SWEAT IT, PHIL. I'LL BRING IT IN. ANYTHING ELSE?YO DOG, THAT'S TIGHT. WE'RE COOL, RIGHT? I'M STILL YOUR HOMIE? MAYBE WE CAN GRAB A BEER WHEN YOU'RE IN THE CITY. IS THAT RIGHT? GRAB A BEER? GRAB. GRAB. GRAB. GRAB. GRAB.
Phil crashes a lot, midsentence. Sooner or later, they're going to upgrade, and then no more Phil, and yeah it's true I could do without all the small talk, but I'm pretty sure I'll miss him.
Client call. I punch in the coordinates and now I'm in the kitchen of an apartment, in Oakland, in Chinatown, sometime in the third quarter of the twentieth century. A pot of oxtail stew burbles on the stovetop, fills the room with a deep, rich cloud of stewiness, fills the room like a fog bank rolling over the bay.
I go into the living room and find a woman, a little younger than I am, maybe twenty-five, twenty-six. She's kneeling over a much older woman who lies still, in an awkward position, legs slumped off the couch, left arm dangling down to the floor, mouth slightly open as if she has lost control of it, eyes looking up at the ceiling, or whatever's beyond the ceiling, filled with a clear-eyed awareness of what's happening.
”She can't see you,” I say to the younger woman.
”But I can see her,” she says. She doesn't look up at me.
”Not really. This didn't really happen. You weren't there when she died.”
Now the younger woman looks at me. Angry.
”Your mom?” I say.
”Grandmother,” she says, and I realize in my time away from time, spent idling in my machine, I've become terrible at guessing someone's age.
I nod. We both watch the old woman lying there, coming to terms with whatever she was coming to terms with.
TAMMY discreetly beeps to remind me we have a job to do, rifts in the underlying fabric to repair. If we stay too long, the damage could get worse.
”I'm not saying this to hurt you,” I say. ”All I'm saying is that since you weren't there when this actually happened, you can't be here now.”
She ignores me and doesn't take her eyes off her grandmother and for a while, I'm not sure she's heard or maybe she heard me but doesn't understand, but then she looks at me.
”So what is this? An illusion? A dream?”
”More like a window,” I say, and I see that she gets it. ”By using your time machine this way, you are creating a small porthole into another universe, a neighboring universe. One almost exactly like ours, except that in this alternate world you were were there when she died. This living room, right now, is the vertex between Universe Thirty-one and Thirty-one-A, and you are bending s.p.a.ce and time and light to see into the past, a false past, a past you wish you could go to. Although you can see, through this porthole, what happened back then over there, you're not really standing next to her. You are in your own universe, our universe. You are infinitely far away.” there when she died. This living room, right now, is the vertex between Universe Thirty-one and Thirty-one-A, and you are bending s.p.a.ce and time and light to see into the past, a false past, a past you wish you could go to. Although you can see, through this porthole, what happened back then over there, you're not really standing next to her. You are in your own universe, our universe. You are infinitely far away.”
She takes a moment to digest this. I open up a side panel and immediately see the problem.
”You tampered with your tau modulator.”
She gives me a guilty look.
”Don't worry,” I say. ”I see it all the time.”
She looks back at the scene in front of us. ”I was a soph.o.m.ore in college. She was the only reason I even made it there,” she says. ”She called and I could hear something in her voice. I should have known. I should have known to come home.”
”You had your own life to start.”
”I could have come home. My dad told me it would be soon. I could have come home.”
Grandma closes her eyes. A look of something unresolved twists across her face, and then a flicker of what could be disappointment, and then, exhausted, she takes her last breath, alone, the pot of stew untouched in the next room.
I wait for what I hope is a respectful interval of silence, then quietly finish the repair and go back into the kitchen to allow her a few more minutes. I can hear crying, then low talking, then what sounds like a song, once sung to a little girl maybe, now sung one final time. The stew smells really good. I'm trying to figure out if it will cause a paradox if I have a bowl when the young woman comes into the kitchen.
”Thanks for that,” she says.
”Yeah, take all the time you want. Well, not all the time.”
”I suppose I can't stay here.”
I shake my head. ”If you bend too much and for too long, the porthole becomes an actual hole, and you might end up over there.”
”Maybe that's what I want.”
”Trust me. It's not. That's not home. I know it seems like home, everything looks the same, but it's not. You weren't there. It will never be the case that you were.”
A typical customer gets into a machine that can literally literally take her whenever she'd like to go. Do you want to know what the first stop usually is? Take a guess. Don't guess. You already know: the unhappiest day of her life. take her whenever she'd like to go. Do you want to know what the first stop usually is? Take a guess. Don't guess. You already know: the unhappiest day of her life.
Other people are just looking for weird. They want to turn their lives into something unrecognizable. I see a lot of men end up as their own uncles. Super-easy to avoid, totally dumb move. See it all the time. No need to go into details, but it obviously involves a time machine and you know what with you know who. General rule is you want to avoid having s.e.x with anyone unless you are sure they aren't family. One guy I know ended up as his own sister.
But mostly, people aren't like that. They don't want trouble, they just don't know what else to do. I see a lot of regular offenders. People who can't stop trying to hurt themselves. People who can't stop doing stupid things because of their stupid hearts.
My vocational training was in the basics of closed time-like curves, but what they should have taught me was how that relates to people's regrets and mistakes, the loves of their lives that they let get away.
I've prevented suicides. I've watched people fall apart, marriages break up in slow motion, over and over and over again.
I have seen pretty much everything that can go wrong, the various and mysterious problems in contemporary time travel. You work in this business long enough and you know what you really do for a living. This is self-consciousness. I work in the self-consciousness industry.
from How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe
nostalgia, underlying cosmological explanation for Weak but detectable interaction between two neighboring universes that are otherwise not causally connected.
Manifests itself in humans as a feeling of missing a place one has never been, a place very much like one's home universe, or as a longing for versions of one's self that one will never, and can never know.
Sometimes I think back to when my father and I were first starting to sketch it out in his study at home, just ideas on a pad, just lines and vectors and tentative inequalities, first starting to realize what might be possible, and I suspect that he knew even then that he would get lost. It was almost like he was trying to get lost, like he knew what it would all lead to, this machine. He wanted to use it for sadness, to investigate the source of his own, his father's, and on and on, to the ultimate origin, some dark radiating body, trapped in its own severe curvature, cut off from the rest of the universe.
I remember the graph paper we used, the pattern of one-centimeter squares in a light green grid. My father would open a package of five pads, each one a hundred sheets thick. He used to open the package with his company-logo letter opener, pulling the letter opener out of its holder in the heavy bra.s.s piece sitting on top of his desk (I can still picture the black box it came in, with fancy gold cursive lettering on it-EXECUTIVE DESK SET-how at first, the words seemed like a kind of promise, a looking toward the future, a rare admission of his hope and ambition, and I can also picture the dust that gathered on the box, how, with each pa.s.sing year that layer of dust thickened into a visible acc.u.mulation of embarra.s.sment, how I wished I could have snuck into his office when he was at work and thrown that box away, or hidden it from him, so that word wouldn't have to be right there on this desk, staring him in the face every day, EXECUTIVE EXECUTIVE, a thoughtless word, a thoughtless gift from the company for ten years of unappreciated service).
He would worry the cellophane in a spot just a bit, just enough to pinch between his fingers a bit of the clear wrap and tear the membrane, making that delicate, fine-structured sound of it being torn.
”Ahhh,” he would say, half smiling, enjoying the sound. He would hand me the wadded-up ball of cellophane, so I could crunch it in my hands and listen to it crackle back a bit, then crunch it harder and toss it into the gray wire wastebasket, where it would sit atop a sliding sheaf of bills and return envelopes for bills and credit card offers, an unstable mountain of debt and credit, an avalanche waiting to happen.