How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

by Charles Yu

Hit this switch for the past, pull up that lever for the future. You get out and hope the world has changed. Or at least maybe you have.

I am a terrible person. I’m a 185-pound sack of guilt. Or maybe I’m not. Maybe it’s just that I’m not the person I was going to be.

Time is a massive flow. It is a self-healing substance, which is to say, almost everything will be lost. We’re too slight, too inconsequential, despite all of our thrashing and swimming and waving our arms about. Time is an ocean of inertia, drowning out the small vibrations, absorbing the slosh and churn, the foam and wash, and we’re up here, flapping and slapping and just generally spazzing out, and sure, there’s a little bit of splashing on the surface, but that doesn’t even register in the depths, in the powerful undercurrents miles below us, taking us wherever they are taking us.

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 over and over again. Willing to pay a lot of money to do it, too.

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.

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

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.

Our house was a collection of silences, each room a mute, empty frame, each of us three oscillating bodies (Mom, Dad, me) moving around in our own curved functions, from space to space, not making any noise, just waiting, waiting to wait, trying, for some reason, not to disrupt the field of silence, not to perturb the delicate equilibrium of the system.

This is what I should have asked him: If you ever got lost, and I had to find you, where would you be? Where should I go to find you?

A 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.

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.

In the end, it wasn’t going to work. I don’t think she had the brain chemistry for love. Or maybe that was me.

Can you live your whole life at zero? Can you live your entire life in the exact point between comfort and discomfort?

I wish I could but unfortunately, it’s true: 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.

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 moment back in its uncategorized, preprocessed state. It will force you to move on and you will not have a choice in the matter.

If I could be half the person my dog is, I would be twice the human I am.

Worry was my mother’s mechanic, her mechanism for engaging with the machinery of living. Worry was an anchor for her, a hook, something to clutch on to in the world. Worry was a box to live inside of, worry a mechanism for evading the present, for re-creating the past, for dealing with the future.

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.

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.

What was I thinking? Because, if I’m being honest, I’m not sure I would even know what I do with myself. Even if you could skip to the end of it all, what would I do the next day with my life that would be so different from all the days that came before?

My mother spent a lifetime grieving and yet she still loved my father with all of her heart: all of it.

We break ourselves up into parts. To lie to ourselves, to hide things from ourselves. You are not you. You are not what you think you are. You are bigger than you think.

Imagine this uncountable number of yous. You don’t always have your own best interests at heart.

Be a man. Find your father. Tell him you love him. Then let him go.

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.

But maybe this is who he really is, maybe we go through life never actually being ourselves, mostly never being ourselves. 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.

His idea was good enough, would have been good enough for the director, for the world, good enough to be a serious contribution to the field of fictional science, good enough for me, but I don’t know where he is, and I have never been able to tell him this.

What is this called, what I am doing, to myself, to my life, this wallowing, this pondering, this rolling over and over in the same places of my memory, wearing them thin, wearing them out? Why don’t I ever learn?

At some point in your life, this statement will be true: Tomorrow you will lose everything forever.

I recall what it was like to stare at the future, so full of terror, so incomprehensible, so strange, even when it looks just like you thought it would. Maybe especially so.