How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe - By Charles Yu Page 0,3
I’ve come to terms with that, with what it probably means. 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.
from How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe
unfinished nature of
Minor Universe 31 was slightly damaged during its construction and, as a result, the builder-developer who owns the rights abandoned the original plans for the space.
At the moment work was halted, physics was only 93 percent installed, and thus you may find that it can be a bit unpredictable in places. For the most part, however, while here travelers should be fine relying on any off-the-shelf causal processor based on quantum general relativity.
The technology left behind by the MU31 engineering team, despite being only partially developed, is first-rate, although the same can’t be said of its human inhabitants, who seem to have been left with a lingering sense of incompleteness.
Client call. Screen says
SKYWALKER, L
and my first thought is Oh, man, wow, but when I get there it’s not you know who, with the man-blouse and the soft boots and the proficiency at wielding light-based weapons. It’s his son. Linus.
We’re on a pretty standard-looking ice planet, nineteen, twenty years in the past. A few huts are off in the distance. It’s so cold everything is blue. It hurts to breathe. Even the air is blue.
The crash site is maybe two hundred yards up the hill to the north. I park the unit, pop the hatch, listen to it go psssshhhh, that hydraulic hatch-popping sound. I love that sound.
I hike up to the site with my service pack, to an outcropping of frozen rock, and as I’m catching my breath I notice a small amount of smoke seeping out of a side panel on Linus’s rental unit. I pop it open and see a small fire burning in his wave function collapser.
I get my clipboard out, tap my knuckles on the hatch. I’ve never met Linus Skywalker before, but I’ve heard stories from other techs, so I feel like I have a good idea what to expect.
What I don’t expect is a kid. A boy opens the hatch and climbs out, pushes the hair out of his eyes. Can’t be a day older than nine. I ask him what he was doing when the machine failed, and he mumbles something about how I would never understand. I say, Try me. He looks down at his anti-gravity boots, which appear to be a couple of sizes too big, then gives me a look like, I’m a fourth-grader, what do you want from me?
“Dude,” I say. “You know you can’t change the past.”
He says then what the hell is a time machine for.
“Not for trying to kill your father when he was your age,” I say.
He closes his eyes, tilts his head back, pushes air out through his nostrils in a super-dramatic way.
“You have no idea what it’s like, man. To grow up with the freaking savior of the universe as your dad.”
I tell him that doesn’t have to be his whole story. That he can have a new beginning.
“For starters,” I say, “change your name.”
He opens his eyes, looks at me as seriously as a nine-year-old can, says yeah maybe, but I know he doesn’t mean it. He’s trapped in his whole dark-father-lost-son-galactic-monomyth thing and he doesn’t know any other way.
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.