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by
Charles Yu
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January 7, 2024 - January 1, 2025
Love from the abandoned heart of a nonexistent dog.
was studying for my master’s in applied science fiction—I
To be more specific, I am a certified network technician for T-Class personal-use chronogrammatical vehicles, and an approved independent affiliate contractor for Time Warner Time, which owns and operates this universe as a spatio-temporal structure and entertainment complex zoned for retail, commercial, and residential use.
If 89.7 percent of the other versions of you are assholes, chances are you aren’t exactly Mr. Personality yourself. The worst part is that a lot of them are doing pretty well. A lot better than I am, although that’s not saying much. Sometimes when I’m brushing my teeth, I’ll look in the mirror and I swear my reflection seems kind of disappointed. I realized a couple of years ago that not only am I not super-skilled at anything, I’m not even particularly good at being myself.
My father built a time machine and then he spent his whole life trying to figure out how to use it to get more time. He spent all the time he had with us thinking about how he wished he had more time, if he could only have more time.
I could come up with some answer to it, but putting a number on it won’t quantify what that amount of lost years feels like.
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. It should be second nature, they tell you: Don’t be a smartass. Don’t try anything fancy. If you see yourself coming at you, don’t think, don’t talk, don’t do anything. Just run.
Chronological living is a kind of lie. That’s why I don’t do it anymore. Existence doesn’t have more meaning in one direction than it does in any other. Completing the days of your life in strict calendar order can feel forced. Arbitrary. Especially after you’ve seen what I’ve seen. Most people I know live their lives moving in a constant forward direction, the whole time looking backward.
there’s an opening for a caseworker at the social services bureau for noninteresting aliens.
My father sometimes said that his life was two-thirds disappointment. This was when he was in a good mood.
I noticed, on most nights, his jaw clenched at dinner, the way he closed his eyes slowly when my mother asked him about work, watched him stifle his own ambition, seeming to physically shrink with each professional defeat, watched him choke it down, with each year finding new and deep places to hide it all within himself, observed his absorption of tiny, daily frustrations that, over time (that one true damage-causing substance), accumulated into a reservoir of subterranean failure, like oil shale, like a volatile substance trapped in rock, a vast quantity of potential energy locked in to an
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books with bright red titles, titles dripping with superlatives, with promises of actualization, realization, books that diagrammed the self as a fixable lemon, self as a challenge in mechanics, self as an exercise in bullet points, self as a collection of traits to be altered, self as a DIY project. Self as a kind of problem to be solved.
My manager IMs me. We get along pretty well. His name is Phil. Phil is an old copy of Microsoft Middle Manager 3.0. His passive-aggressive is set to low.
Phil has two imaginary kids with his wife. She’s a spreadsheet program and she is a nice lady. Or lady program. She e-mails every year to remind me about his fake birthday. She knows they’re both software, but she’s never told him. I don’t have the heart to tell him, either.
typical customer gets into a machine that can 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.
time does heal. It will do so whether you like it or not, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. If you’re not careful, time will take away everything that ever hurt you, everything you have ever lost, and replace it with knowledge. Time is a machine: it will convert your pain into experience. Raw data will be compiled, will be translated into a more comprehensible language. The individual events of your life will be transmuted into another substance called memory and in the mechanism something will be lost and you will never be able to reverse it, you will never again have the original
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like fifty million newspapers brought to breathing, blaring life, and then obliterated into a sea of disintegrating light and noise.
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.
If I could be half the person my dog is, I would be twice the human I am.
Time Warner Time, a division of Google,
hypothetical mining, also known as weird farming.
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 space.
After a night out in the lost half city, you end up with the dust of dead robots in your hair, or someone’s dreams, or their nightmares.
in the event you find yourself trapped in a time loop (i) See if you can figure out the sequence of events that make up the loop. (ii) The thing to remember is this: the fact that you are in a time loop is most likely your fault. (iii) You are the one who interacted with yourself, for whatever reason you thought you had. (iv) Assuming you want to stay in your current universe, you will need to be able to reproduce your actions exactly in order to avoid inadvertently changing your own past and thereby diverting yourself into a different, alternate universe. (v) Once you have established the
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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.
titanium-unobtainium
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
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Just to be sure, I have run this set of propositions, the text so far, through TAMMY’s onboard 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
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Quiet in a way I have never experienced before. As if quiet were a substance, and it were thick, as if that substance were now in my head, filling it like a viscous fluid, some kind of gel.
was headed for an entire life spent alone, pitying myself for not being more, ignoring all those people who actually ask me to be more, because they see it in me.
the military-industrial-narrative-entertainment complex,
Maybe we spend most of our decades being someone else, avoiding ourselves, maybe a man is only himself, his true self, for a few days in his entire life.
Seventeen years old is not old, but it is old enough to have hurt your father.
The odds of such a finding occurring are, based on assumptions of the length of a life, the coefficient of conversational friction, the tensile strength of the father–son dynamical social-psychological fabric, and the size of the window of comprehension and dramatic coherence, approximately one time per seventy-eight point three years, subjectively experienced.
A life is about twenty-five thousand days, and a finding occurs about once every twenty-five thousand days.
just starting to feel it, some kind of answer, like a cracked egg, slowly spreading on the top of my head and dripping down all sides of my face.
How do you convince someone to change, to stop being afraid of himself? How do you convince yourself not to be so scared all the time?
The story of a man trying to figure out what he knows, teetering on the edge of yes or no, of risk or safety, whether it is worth it or not to go on, to carry on, into the breach of each successive moment. It’s a survival story, too, the story I have been telling myself. Is he friend or foe, this strange person in front of me, enemy or ally, only, in this case, both sides, all sides, they all happen to be the same person, and that person is me, and the answer, in all cases, appears to be foe. I am my own most dangerous enemy.
Enjoy the elastic present, which can accommodate as little or as much as you want to put in there. Stretch it out, live inside of it.
