How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe - By Charles Yu Page 0,5

of it. He was one of the first people to work out the basic math and the parameters and the limitations of life in the various canonical time travel scenarios; he was gifted or cursed, depending on how you look at it, with a deep intuition for time, an ability to feel it, inside, viscerally, and he still spent his whole life trying to figure out how to minimize loss and entropy and logical impossibility, how to tease out the calculus underlying cause and effect; he still spent the better part of four decades trying to come to terms with just how screwed up and unfair it is that we only get to do this all once, with the intractability and general awfulness of trying to parse the idea of once, trying to get any kind of handle on it, trying to put it into the equations, isolate into a variable the slippery concept of onceness.

Years of his life, my life, his life with my mom, years and years and years, down in that garage, near us, but not with us, near us in space and time, crunching through the calculations, working it out on that chalkboard we mounted on the far wall near the tool rack. My father built a time machine and then he spent his whole life trying to figure out how to use it to get more time. He spent all the time he had with us thinking about how he wished he had more time, if he could only have more time.

He’s still doing it, for all I know. I haven’t seen him for some number of years. I would be more precise, but I can’t. Or really, I won’t. I don’t feel like being more precise about it. Some number of years. Some number. I’ve spent long enough in P-I, in this gear, inside this TM-31, that figuring out how “long” it has been is more an exercise in science fictional math than anything else.

Sure, there’s a partial differential equation I could use to calculate the Aggregate Loss of Possibility, or Quantity of Wasted Father–Son Time, but what’s that going to do? Put a number on it? Sure. I could. I could put a number on something but that isn’t going to make any of it any better, a number that doesn’t correspond to what my mother felt, all the way right up to the end, before she stopped having new feelings and became content to have the old feelings over and over again. I could come up with some answer to it, but putting a number on it won’t quantify what that amount of lost years feels like. So, yeah, I think I’m happy here in the Present-Indefinite, not being precise about it. I know what I know. I know I’ve been looking for him for a while, spent a good portion of my life trying to untangle his timeline. Trying to bring him back home. What I don’t know is why he would want to untangle his worldline from ours. What I don’t know is what that will mean for us all, when we get to the ends of those worldlines, when we’re supposed to be knotted up together. Is he alone? Is he happier where he is? Does he think about us before he goes to sleep at night?

. . .

You learn a lot of things in this line of work.

For example: If you ever see yourself coming out of a time machine, run. Run away as fast you can. Don’t stop. Don’t try to talk. Nothing good can come of it. It’s rule number one, and it is drilled into you on the first day of training. It should be second nature, they tell you: Don’t be a smartass. Don’t try anything fancy. If you see yourself coming at you, don’t think, don’t talk, don’t do anything. Just run.

And the best way to comply with rule number one is rule number two, which is actually more of a conjecture, long believed by science fictional theorists to be true, but still as yet to be rigorously proved: the Shen-Takayama-Furimoto Exclusion Principle. Roughly stated, it goes something like this: A self auto-dislocated by at least one-half phase shift from his own subjective present will not, under ordinary conditions, encounter any other version of his self in a controlled story space environment, which is to say, if you hide inside this box and don’t look out the porthole, you can, if that’s what