One Word Kill (Impossible Times, #1)

by Mark Lawrence

‘The equations that govern the universe don’t care about “now”. You can ask them questions about this time or that time, but nowhere in the elegance of their mathematics is there any such thing as “now”. The idea of one specific moment, one universal “now” racing along at sixty minutes an hour, slicing through the seconds, spitting the past out behind it and throwing itself into the future . . . that’s just an artefact of consciousness, something entirely of our own making that the cosmos has no use for.’

It’s always a shock, when you’ve been hit by some calamity, to see the world go about its business with perfect indifference. When Elvis dies, when Charles marries Diana, you feel you’re part of things, that everyone is moved by the same current, even if they really don’t want to be. But turn that around and you discover that your father dying or your blood turning against you doesn’t make the slightest impact.

In hospital they ask you to rate your discomfort on a scale of ten. I guess it’s the best they can come up with, but it fails to capture the nature of the beast. Pain can stay the same while you change around it. And, like a thumb of constant size, what it blocks out depends on how close it gets to you. At arm’s length a thumb obscures a small fragment of the day. Held close enough to your eye it can blind you to everything that matters, relegating the world to a periphery. Playing the game kept my mind on something else. For most of the session, the pains in the long bones of my legs and the sickness in my stomach subsided to annoyance. At other times, they were a spike pinning me to the fact of my disease.

‘If every moment, an infinity of different worlds are branching from this one to accommodate all possibilities . . . then that’s an infinite number of worlds from where time travellers could come back to this one. And since there aren’t an infinity of time travellers arriving every moment, then either the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is wrong . . . or time travel is impossible.’

the arrival of the time traveller is an event like any other and branches a new timeline off from the reality he went back to. So, it’s never crowded. And because his arrival creates a new branch he can do all those paradoxical things you hear about. He can kill his father as a little boy to prevent his own birth. He can meet himself. It won’t matter, because he isn’t affecting the timeline that leads to him, he is changing events on a new timeline.’

She made me feel like I was part of something, part of the world, not just skating around the edges, too tied up in myself to join in.

All of us have a shell, a skin between us and the world that we have to break each time we speak to it. Sometimes I wished mine were thinner.

We might live in a multiverse of infinite wonder, but we are what we are, and can only care about what falls into our own orbit.