How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe - By Charles Yu Page 0,29
mean, meaner than I mean to be, just way too mean.
. . .
TAMMY hibernates in order to cool off, leaving me alone, drifting in my own time-free silence. I guess in a way, this is what I want. To push everyone and everything away. I have this way of doing this. There are so few moments when the opportunity presents itself to really make a choice. So often, it’s just the story line of the world propelling me forward, but there are these key nodes, branches in the timeline, when I can exercise some free will, and they always seem to turn out this way, always seem to end up with me hurting someone I love, someone I should be protecting. I’m nice to strangers who break their time machines, nice to random sexbots who ask for money, but when it comes to the people I care about the most, this is what I do. My mom, Phil, my dad.
I can blame this stupid defective universe where everyone is always so sad there aren’t even any bad guys anymore, but what if there never were any bad guys? Just guys like me. I’m the bad guy. No heroes, either. I’m the hero. A guy who just shot his own future in the stomach.
Maybe that’s what my future was trying to tell me. That it’s not worth it. Maybe he was trying to end it all. Either he shoots me and creates a paradox, or I shoot him, and cut off my own future. Either way, problem solved, no more having to worry about anything. I wish I could take it back, go back to just before I ruined Phil’s day, ruined his whole life, and let myself shoot me, since I’m the one who deserves it. But I guess all things in due time. At least I know I’m going to get what’s coming to me.
I notice there’s a book on my console. I pick it up, run my hand over the back cover. I’ve never seen it before, but it feels familiar already, a part of me already knows what this is. I turn the book over and read the title of this book, in my hands. It’s called How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe.
from How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe
page 101
In the book, right at this point, my future self has written these words: There exists a time in which you will have written this book.
In the next paragraph, he goes on: I know none of this seems very believable. It probably doesn’t even make sense. But for once in your life, please, I am asking you to trust me. Trust yourself.
It’s a slim, silver-colored volume with a metallic-looking sheen, relatively modest in size but with a surprising heft, as if it acquired some amount of relativistic mass in its journeys around time. It has the kind of unexpected density that academic press books (even the paperbacks) often have, due in part to a thicker paper stock and in part to the weight of a more substantial ink, the sneaky heftiness of the book being the aggregate cumulative effect of hundreds of thousands of individually insubstantial little markings, letters and numbers, commas and periods and colons and dashes, each symbol pressed upon the page by the printing machine with a slightly greater-than-expected force and darkness and permanence.
Apparently, I’m going to write this book, which appears to be, as far as I can tell, part engineering field manual and part autobiography. Or rather, I already wrote it. Now I just have to write it, which is to say, I have to get to the point in time when I will have written it, and then travel back in time to get shot and then give it to myself, so I can write it. Which all makes sense to me, except for one thing: why the hell would I want to do any of that?
Normally, when someone says trust me, I find it hard to trust him anymore, and this is doubly true for when it is my self who is saying it, but as it turns out, in my science fictional studies, I once took a course on the topological properties of possibility space and in chapter three of the coursebook we had covered this very scenario as a case study in this:
Exceedingly Improbable yet Hypothetically Still Possible