How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

by Charles Yu

And, I guess, love. Love from the abandoned heart of a nonexistent dog.

What I do remember is the way I fit between his right arm and his body, and the way his neck and the underside of his chin look in the soft yellow light of my lamp, which has a cloth lamp shade, light blue, covered by an alternating pattern of robots and spaceships. This is what I remember: (i) the little pocket of space he creates for me, (ii) how it is enough, (iii) the sound of his voice,

But the reason I have job security is that people have no idea how to make themselves happy. Even with a time machine.

We made boxes out of language, logic, rules of syntax. We made the very first crude, undiscovered, uncredited prototype of this box that I’m sitting in now.

We made equations. Equations that had sadness as a constant,

I.e., it is possible, in principle, to construct a universal time machine from no other components than (i) a piece of paper that is moved in two directions through a recording element, backward and forward, which (ii) performs only two basic operations, narration and the straightforward application of the past tense.