How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe - By Charles Yu Page 0,7
out of language, logic, rules of syntax. We made the very first crude, undiscovered, uncredited prototype of this box that I’m sitting in now. We made equations. Equations that had sadness as a constant, whose escape velocities seemed impossibly out of reach. A lot of strange variables went into those equations, got imprinted onto the boxes, onto us, onto him. He was trying to make the perfect box. A vehicle to move through possibility space, a vehicle to happiness or whatever it was he was looking for. We trapped ourselves in boxes, inside of boxes in boxes, inside of more.
All that got encoded in my box, too. You live like this long enough, a life without chances, you lose your bearings. A life without danger. A life without the risk of Now. In any event, what do I need with Now? Now, I think, is overrated. Now hasn’t been working out so great for me. Now never has.
Chronological living is a kind of lie. That’s why I don’t do it anymore. Existence doesn’t have more meaning in one direction than it does in any other. Completing the days of your life in strict calendar order can feel forced. Arbitrary. Especially after you’ve seen what I’ve seen.
Most people I know live their lives moving in a constant forward direction, the whole time looking backward.
from How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe
size of
Thirty-one is a smallish universe, slightly below average in size. On the cosmic scale, somewhere between shoe box and standard aquarium. Not big enough for space opera and anyway not zoned for it. Despite its relatively modest physical dimensions, inhabitants of 31 report a considerable variance in terms of psychological scale, probably owing to the significant inconsistency in conceptual density of the underlying fabric of this region of existence.
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