Part 7 (2/2)

I was sixteen when my father had his next breakthrough.

TAMMY takes note of my postp.u.b.escent form, notes the disparity from my present-day physique.

”Hey, you used to have muscles,” she says, surprised.

”Shut up. Just shut up.”

By this time in our prototype numbering scheme, we were up to the UTM-21. We had crashed the UTM-3, the UTM-5, the UTM-7, 9, 11, and so on, each odd-numbered model failing in some new, unexpected way. We'd spent hours, years in here, trying to improve our idea, but what was happening was simple: we kept cras.h.i.+ng. It was easy to figure out what. What we couldn't figure out was why.

My father was at the chalkboard.

”Pay attention,” he said. ”We can figure this out. We have to figure this out.”

As much as anything else, he was trying to convince himself. I was ready to quit, to go upstairs, to leave the house, to be a man of my own. Or to just be a teenager. Anything else but watch my father any longer. I'd grown up. Didn't he see that? I was already taller than him, had been for a couple of years, was too tall for my family. We'd been doing this for so long, since I was ten, and we'd had some good times, but where was this all going? What was his plan for this, us, our family?

”More research,” he would say. ”We need more data points.”

His trajectory at work had already become apparent, had started to move sideways, and my mother, after a good year, was in a holding pattern herself. In some ways she'd started to regress, even picking up new habits, new ways of tearing my father down, tearing herself down, found a way to cry harder, more jagged, more raw. She would disappear into her room some Friday nights and not come out the whole weekend, and then emerge, Monday morning, and everything would be okay again. Things were livable, were bearable, but at sixteen, I felt old, I felt tired of this, of prototypes and going sideways, of back and forth, I felt mediocre, I could see where this was headed and I wanted to escape my own future.

At some point in that year together, the last year we were recognizable as a family, my father had started to sound different. He still spoke in the same manner, gruff, as if I were always on the verge of annoying him, but there was a subtle change in what he said, in the questions he asked. I could hear, within each one, another question curled up, folded up inside, hidden from me, perhaps not fully intentionally placed in there by him. They had gone from tests, games, teaching, to something else. Something like wondering. Something harder, more genuine. Asking.

”Do you think there's something wrong?” he asked me once while I had my head buried in a control panel.

”Niven ring is cracked. We'll need to fuse it shut.”

”No, not that. I mean with the theory.”

”I don't understand.”

”The theory. My theory. Is it, did I take a wrong turn somewhere in the equations? Did I get it wrong?”

My father had begun asking my opinion about the world. He was admitting, in his way, what he didn't know, what confused him, what frustrated him in this country, at work, in this town, both close and far from the center of everything. He was asking me if I was ready to be part of our family, ready to help him, ready to be a numerator.

I remember feeling small, unprepared, like I had to help him, feeling like how in the world could I possibly help him. I was angry at him for asking, sorry for him for having to, angry at myself for not being more prepared, for not being the gifted kid he once thought I was, for not being who he had hoped I would be.

The house became charged, a field of static potential energy, a kind of vectorless disappointment, a field of invisible isovoltaics, lines with arrowheads pointing in minute directional indicators, a bogglingly complex arrangement of single-point losses, the fine-toothed, fine-pixeled array, the heat map of a thermodynamic system whose ending was already foretold in the current steady state.

It wasn't until well after midnight that it happened, by that point, we'd been staring at the chalkboard for nine and a half hours. It was cold, but to concede that to my dad would have brought I'm not sure what kind of reaction, so I just kept my mouth shut and my eyes focused on our neighbor, across the street, who was my age, kissing her boyfriend good-bye for what seemed like the entire night.

My father was undeterred. He stood there, staring at the math, working it over and over again. Theta and nu, sigma and tau. The tau doesn't modulate, he said. ”Does that make any sense to you?” he said, pointing to a board full of differential equations.

”I don't even know what I'm looking at.”

”Oh yeah,” he said. ”Sorry. It says that we are colliding with other objects.”

”Maybe we are,” I said.

”That's impossible,” he said. ”Unless”

He paused, staring off into s.p.a.ce, when something hit him, something real but invisible. I could see it, the impact, and his face opened up, his eyes widened, his jaw dropped. So this was what he worked for, all this toiling in the garage: a moment like this. It might come once a year, or once a decade. He yelped in pain or joy. And he hugged me. He threw chalk up in the air and clapped his hands and made a huge cloud of white chalk dust and he jumped up and down and whooped and just generally looked silly. So this was what he loved: science. So this was what it looked like: my father, happy.

Then he erased the whole board and picked up a new piece of chalk and started scribbling, chalk flying, breaking the chalk, yelping in exclamation every minute or so, pounding on his own head in excitement, and when he stopped after what felt like hours, covered in white, his fingers raw, hair matted against his face, sweat dripping from his ears, in his eyes, he said, You did it, you figured it out, son, we are cras.h.i.+ng. We are cras.h.i.+ng into time machines everywhere. He pointed to the board, an illegible tangle of equalities and inequalities and infinities and asymptotes, and he started to explain, shouting, his voice hoa.r.s.e.

I don't remember everything he said, exactly, but I remember the feeling, the idea, where he was going with it, the idea that our equations had been too simple, too naive, that we had been a.s.suming a time machine was some kind of specialized object, that we only had to solve for an isolated variable, when in fact a time machine was just a special case. He said: A house can be a time machine. A room. Our kitchen, this garage, this conversation, anything can be a time machine. Just sitting there, you are. So am I.

Everyone has a time machine. Everyone is is a time machine. It's just that most people's machines are broken. The strangest and hardest kind of time travel is the unaided kind. People get stuck, people get looped. People get trapped. But we are all time machines. We are all perfectly engineered time machines, technologically equipped to allow the inside user, the traveler riding inside each of us, to experience time travel, and loss, and understanding. We are universal time machines manufactured to the most exacting specifications possible. Every single one of us. a time machine. It's just that most people's machines are broken. The strangest and hardest kind of time travel is the unaided kind. People get stuck, people get looped. People get trapped. But we are all time machines. We are all perfectly engineered time machines, technologically equipped to allow the inside user, the traveler riding inside each of us, to experience time travel, and loss, and understanding. We are universal time machines manufactured to the most exacting specifications possible. Every single one of us.

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

TM-31 calibration protocol To calibrate the unit to your specifications, follow these steps:

1. Attach the sensors to your fingertips.

2. Put on the percepto-visual mind-output capture goggles.

3. Lie back.

4. Look at the world.

The process takes forty-three to forty-four seconds, depending on factors such as body ma.s.s, natural hair color, and degree of self-knowledge.

When the calibration is complete, your vehicle will have the same limits that you do.

You can't build a car that violates the laws of physics. Same goes for a time machine. You can't go just anywhere, only to places it will let you go. You can only go to places that you will let yourself go.

I am seventeen years old. My father will turn forty-nine next week. This is the best day of his life.

If a life is an arc, and an arc has a high point, then that high point is today.

We are in the car driving to the good side of town.

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