How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

by Charles Yu

A lot of the time, the machine isn’t even broken. I just have to explain to the customer the basics of Novikovian self-consistency, which no one wants to hear about. No one wants to hear that they went to all this trouble for nothing. For some people, that’s the only reason they rented the thing, to go back and fix their broken lives.

Other people are in the unit all sweaty and nervous and afraid to touch anything because they are so freaked out about the implications of changing history. Oh God, they say, what if I go back and a butterfly flaps its wings differently and this and that and world war and I never existed and so on and yeah. This is what I say: I’ve got good news and bad news. The good news is, you don’t have to worry, you can’t change the past. The bad news is, you don’t have to worry, no matter how hard you try, you can’t change the past.

The universe just doesn’t put up with that. We aren’t important enough. No one is. Even in our own lives. We’re not strong enough, willful enough, skilled enough in chronodiegetic manipulation to be able to just acciden...

I try to tell people all this, but no one listens. I don’t blame them and in any event, it could be worse. I mean, human nature is what keeps me employed.

People rent time machines. They think they can change the past. Then they get there and find out causality doesn’t work the way they thought it did. They get stuck, stuck in places they didn’t mean to go, in places they did mean to go, in places they shouldn’t have tried to go. They get into trouble. Logical, metaphysical, etc.

That’s where I come in. I go and get them out. I tell people: I have a job and I have job security. I have a job because I know how to fix the cooling module on the quantum decoherence engine of the TM-31. That’s the reason I have a job.

But the reason I have job security is that people have no idea how to make themselves happy. Even with a time machine. I have job security because what the customer wants, when you get right down to it, is to relive his very worst moment, over and...

You learn a lot of things in this line of work. For example: If you ever see yourself coming out of a time machine, run. Run away as fast you can. Don’t stop. Don’t try to talk. Nothing good can come of it. It’s rule number one, and it is drilled into you on the first day of training.

Most people I know live their lives moving in a constant forward direction, the whole time looking backward.

Whatever the reason, first place was always Solo, always, always, always, and second place was usually Chewbacca, because if you weren’t the one saving the galaxy, you might as well be eight feet tall and covered with hair.

Any inhabitant with a negative attachment coefficient (in which case it is referred to as a coefficient of ironic detachment) will be placed on probation pending review of the individual’s suitability for continued inclusion within the U31 diegetic space.

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Within a science fictional space, memory and regret are, when taken together, the set of necessary and sufficient elements required to produce a time machine.

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

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.

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(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.

😂

Everyone has a time machine. Everyone 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.

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.

And what had we done? We had plugged away, scrap by scrap, paper scrap and metal scrap, we had plied our trade, journeymen, not even a trade, we had our little hobby, and now we were a curiosity.

are dreamers who have stuck around long enough to have one semi-interesting dream. This is not going to work out.

We are too slow, too methodical, too square, too plodding. We are naïve. This is how it has always gone with us.

This man, though, this man knows things.

this director of research, this man on top of the profession, he can afford to take us seriously. He has a kind of practical intelligence, savvy.

My father and I lack resolve, self-confidence, the willingness to impose ourselves on others, on a situation, on a set of circumstances, to step on things, to willfully forget our deficiencies, we are too self-aware to turn off that nagging internal critic, editor, co-author, to suspend our understanding that we are trying to do what we really have no business doing.

We aren’t like the director. This man is someone for whom the world isn’t a mystery. The world is a boulder, but it has levers and he knows when and where and how to apply just the right amount of force, and it moves for him, while my father and I, pushing up against...

My father thinks success must be in direct proportion ...

He doesn’t know where or how to exert the least amount for the most gain, doesn’t know where the secret buttons are, ...

He thinks that, even if you have a great idea, there have to be trials and tribulations, errors and failures, a dark night of the soul, a slog, a time in the desert, a fallow period, a period of quiet, a period of silent and earnest and frustrated t...

My father makes to-do lists, makes plans, makes business plans. This is how he starts, always with ...

We talk to each other, create a world, create a tiny, artificial, formal space, on a blank sheet of paper, where we can imagine rules and principles and categories and ideas, all of which have absolutely nothing to do with the actual world out there.

We don’t actually do anything. He writes things down, he crosses them out, he goes back and starts again. The world has always felt just out of his reach. The world of commerce, of men taking advantage of situations, of competition, of sharp practice and words and elbows and speed, a world that was too fast for him.

And yet my father will never stop trying, my father will go on for years after this day, thinking that if he just reads another book, just figures out the key, the secret, the world, the world of science fiction with its promise and possibility, will open up to him, to us, for us.

All the foregoing is so pathetic, yet rings so true.