How to Live Safely in a Science Fictiona (2010) (4 page)

Universe 31 can feel claustrophobic some nights, like it’s an overgrown city of insomniacs, crowded and noisy and suffused with a background illumination that glows purple in the sky, in the east sky and the west sky and in the north and the south, in the early sky and the late, high and low and in every corner of every sky, and on nights like these, no one ever sleeps in this city-sized universe, everyone just stares up at their vast yet tiny piece of the connected sky, listening to the still-humming hum of the primordial radiation.

Other nights, it’s the opposite. It’s so dark that every single person in the universe feels lonely, at the same time, even if they are holding someone or being held, and no one sleeps, because it’s too quiet, too dissipated, everyone just lies awake feeling puny, feeling the enormity of what there is and what there isn’t, everyone just stares upward at the heavens, watching their little corner, their swath of the frigid black cloth that swallows all warmth and light.

The usable interior volume of the main compartment of the TM-31 is a bit bigger than that of a phone booth. There isn’t much extra room in here; in fact it’s hardly a room at all, closer to a snug envelope of space–time that fits me like a second body. When I am looking through the viewfinder and I have the Frame of Reference filter set just right, I can, if I choose to, relax my mind in such a way as to imagine that I have actually become one with the device, have merged with it, and after a while the distinction between my vehicle and me gets a bit confused.

I guess I could describe this space as closest in size to, though not quite as large as, a hotel shower, not the kind with a curtain, but the cross-sectionally-square-shaped kind that is see-through from floor to ceiling, except that the main hatch to the TM-31, while it can be made transparent like a shower door (if that’s what you’re into), also happens to be a super-cooled magnetic compression system, designed to insulate against temperatures ranging from, at the low end, about half a degree above absolute zero to, at the high end, about a million degrees Kelvin. Hot, cold, people’s opinions. All of it just bounces off. In addition, you can install an aftermarket cloaking device, so that the unit can be made invisible with the flick of a switch. You can just sit in here, impervious and invisible. So invisible you might even forget yourself.

Standing one way, with my arms outstretched, I can touch the sides of the unit with my palms flattened, but turning the other way, along the vehicle’s lengthwise axis, I can’t touch both sides with my full wingspan, and in fact, lying down in the unit along that axis, with my hair lightly brushing one wall, if I point my toes, I can just barely touch both ends with the entire height of my body. So that’s how I sleep in here, i.e., quite comfortably. It’s a bed, an office, a living room, and a tool shop. I take it to go to work, I use it for work, I go home from work in it, I live in it until the next day. If, in connection with a repair job, I have to do some back-of-the-envelope physics, nothing fancy, just some rough-and-ready number crunching, there’s a space–time simulation engine with a touchscreen interface that offers dropdown menus with easy-to-use partial differential equations; all I need to do is click on what kind of geometry the universe has in the local region (Euclid/Riemann/Lobachevsky) and I’m off to the races. I have everything I need to move through time in here, and nothing I don’t.

I will say, though, that it’s hard to stay in shape in a recreational time travel device. I eat a lot of Ramen. There isn’t enough room to do push-ups. Sometimes I pick up Ed and curl him a few times. He grumbles a bit but puts up with it.

Because I have been living nonchronologically for so long, this device, this space in here is, in a way, for me, the world, the whole entire world. No other material entity has undergone the particular set and sequence of relativistic accelerations, of stresses and strains, of Lorentz contractions and time dilations, that this machine has. There is nothing in existence as similar to me as this TM-31. As a physical object, it encodes the history of my worldline. My personal time, as opposed to the external time of the world, exists inside here, and here only. The air in here, the molecules in here. My calculator, the shirt I’m wearing, my pillow, my quantum screwdriver, my Planck-length measuring tape. These are the objects that come with me as I move, as I tell the machine to move. The unit, this phone booth, this four-dimensional person-sized laboratory, I live in it, but, over time, through diffusion and breathing and particle exchange, the air in here, the air that travels with me, it is me, and I’m it.
*
The exhaled carbon dioxide that gets recycled and processed by the pump, the oxygen-rich air that is piped back in, these molecules
*
move around me, and in me, and then back out, all
*
of it
*
the same matter.
*
I breathe it
*
in, it
*
is in my bloodstream. Sometimes, they
*
are part of me, sometimes, I am part of them.
*
Sometimes, they
*
are in my sandwich,
*
sometimes in my hair,
*
sometimes in my blood
*
–brain
*
barrier,
*
sometimes in my foot,
*
sometimes even in my lungs
*
and stomach
*
and kidneys
*
and gallbladder,
*
sometimes in the on-board quantum
*
computer,
*
sometimes in my graph paper,
*
sometimes in the blood
*
coursing through my beating heart.
*
The photon,
*
the light
*
in here,
*
has been bouncing around for a while. It’s
*
old light,
*
it’s
*
new light,
*
it’s
*
all
*
the same age, it’s
*
all
*
the same light.
*

*
In Feynman’s path integral formulation, a particle, any particle, a photon, say, is not so much a particular object at a particular location in space and time as it is an aggregate, a total, a sum over histories.

Put another way: a photon takes every possible path through space–time to get from point A to point B. In a sense, every photon in the universe is everywhere in the universe at every time in the universe.

Or, put yet another way: there is only one photon in the entire universe, and that photon, spread across all of creation in a vast probabilistic smear, that one photon is responsible for all the light we see.

from
How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

reality, in relation to

Reality represents 13 percent of the total surface area and 17 percent of the total volume of Minor Universe 31. The remainder consists of a standard composite base SF substrate.

In terms of topology, the reality portions of 31 are concentrated in an inner core, with science fiction wrapped around it.

While it was long thought that reality was simply a special case of SF (i.e., QoE factor = 1, i.e., the strangeness of experience is no greater or less than intuitive notions of how things should be), it is now believed that, in some geological sense, the SF layer is structurally supported by the non-SF core of “reality,” and researchers have recently begun to conduct experiments to study what they suspect may be an invisible, microscopic, but highly dynamic exchange of materials at the thin permeable boundary layer between the two regions.

When you are a kid, playing with the other kids on your street, and everyone is fighting over who they are going to be, you have to call dibs early, as soon as you see one another, pretty much
as soon as you step outside your house
, even if you’re halfway down the block. First dibs gets Han Solo. Everyone knows that. You almost don’t even have to say it. If you are first, you are Han Solo, period, end of story.

There was one time Donny, the kid from two blocks over (the other side of the freeway), got first pick and said he was going to be Buck Rogers, and everyone laughed at Donny so hard and for so long that he looked like he was going to cry. He begged to change his answer, but by then it was too late. Justin, who had second dibs, got to be Solo that day, which was like winning the lottery with a ticket he didn’t even buy, and he milked it for all it was worth. Donny was in agony, was in hell really, and everyone called him Suck Rogers until he peed his pants and then got on his blue Huffy bike and rode away, never to return.

I was never totally sure why everyone wanted to be Han Solo. Maybe it was because he wasn’t born into it, like Luke, with the birthright and the natural talent for the Force and the premade story. Solo had to make his own story. He was a freelance protagonist, a relatively ordinary guy who got to the major leagues by being quick with a gun and a joke. He was, basically, a hero because he was funny.

Whatever the reason, first place was always Solo, always, always, always, and second place was usually Chewbacca, because if you weren’t the one saving the galaxy, you might as well be eight feet tall and covered with hair.

But no one grows up wanting to be the time machine repair guy.

No one says, Hey, I want to be the guy who fixes stuff.

My cousin is in accounts receivable on the Death Star, and whenever we talk he always says how nice it’d be
if I joined him
. He says they have a good cafeteria. So that’s an option. And there’s an opening for a caseworker at the social services bureau for noninteresting aliens. Government pension.

But really, it’s probably just easiest to keep doing what I’m doing. You know how it goes. At first it’s just for the time being, until you can get your own story together, be the hero in something of your own. You tell people it’s your day job, you tell yourself it’s your day job, and then, at some point, without you noticing, it stops being your day job and just becomes your job.

At least I get a gun. It’s standard-issue to us service techs, for the rare occasion when a client refuses to cooperate and endangers himself or the structural integrity of the fabric of space–time. It’s actually a pretty cool, semi-scary-looking gun, not at all wimpy. I’ve never used it, of course, but once in a while I’ll take it out of the holster and pose with it in front of the mirror, just to see what I would look like arresting someone.

from
How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

attachment coefficient

Inhabitants of Universe 31 are separated into two categories, protagonists and back office.

Protagonists may choose from any available genre. Currently, there are openings in steampunk.

Back office support workers must choose between retcon, accounting, human resources, time machine repair, or janitorial.

In order to qualify as a protagonist, a human must be able to demonstrate an attachment coefficient of at least 0.75. A coefficient of 1.00 or above is required in order to be a hero.

Factors used in calculating the coefficient include

• ability to believe
  
• fervency of that belief
  
• humility
  
• willingness to look stupid
  
• willingness to have heart broken
  
• willingness to see U31 as nonboring or, better yet, to see it as interesting, and maybe even important, and despite its deeply defective nature possibly even worth saving
  

Any inhabitant with a negative attachment coefficient (in which case it is referred to as a
coefficient of ironic detachment
) will be placed on probation pending review of the individual’s suitability for continued inclusion within the U31 diegetic space.