How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe - By Charles Yu Page 0,16

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

I don’t even get much sexbot these days.

When you are thirteen, you spend all your time imagining what it would be like to live in a world where you could pay a robot for sex. And that sex would cost a dollar. And the only obstacle to getting sex would be making sure you had four quarters.

Then you grow up and it turns out you do live in that kind of world. A world with coin-operated sexbots. And it’s not really as great as you thought it would be. Partly because it doesn’t make you any less lonely in the perpetual dark of total vacuum and partly because, well, it’s gross. Your friends, your neighbors, your own family, they know what you are doing in the kiosk. They know because they do it themselves. Partly because sexbot technology hasn’t really improved much since the first-generation consoles. No one cares enough. For a dollar, it’s pretty hard to complain.

Living like this means the year stops making sense, and the month and the week. The dates fall away from the days, like glass punched out of window frames, or ice cubes out of a tray into a sink, identical, dateless, nameless durational blobs, melting into an undifferentiated puddle. Is that a Saturday, a Friday, a Monday? Is that an April 13, or a November 2? Living like this means you don’t have a container anymore for the different days, can’t hold in a little twenty-four-hour-sized box a set of events that constitute a unit, something you can compartmentalize, something with a beginning and an end, something to fill with a to-do list. Living like this means that it all runs together, a cold and bright December morning with your father or a lazy evening in late August, one of those sunsets that seem to take longer than is possible, where the sun just refuses to go down, where the hour seems to elongate to the point that it doesn’t seem like it can stretch any farther without detaching completely from the hour before it, like a piece of taffy, like undersea molten lava forming a new island, a piece of time detaching from the seafloor and floating up to the surface.

It’s not comfortable in here. But it’s not not comfortable, either. It’s neutral, it’s the null point on the comfort–discomfort axis, the exact fulcrum, the precise coordinate located between the half infinity of positive comfort values to the right and the half infinity of negative values on the left. To live in here is to live at the origin, at zero, neither present nor absent, a denial of self- and creature-hood to an arbitrarily small epsilon–delta limit.

Can you live your whole life at zero? Can you live your entire life in the exact point between comfort and discomfort? You can in this device. My father designed it that way. Don’t ask me why. If I knew the answer to that, I would know a whole lot of other things, too. Things like why he left, where he is, what he’s doing, when he’s coming back, if he’s coming back.

Where has he been all these years? I’m guessing that’s where he is now.

I don’t miss him anymore. Most of the time, anyway. I want to. 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. Raw data will be compiled, will be translated into a more comprehensible language. 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.

Phil was right. I was overdue for maintenance. The Tense Operator is pretty much kaput.

TAMMY doesn’t think we have enough power to even get back to corporate HQ. Ed is licking his own stomach like crazy, like he’s trying to hurt himself. Which is what he does when he’s nervous. He