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| panda-like calm through fiction | |||||||||
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Traveled Time
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Time travel won’t be invented for another 25 years, even though we’ve had it for seven. You start to ignore the little inconsistencies- the bigger ones, too, with time. What’s actually a little more shocking is how quickly we all embraced the technology, faster than radio, television- even the internet; and all three of these suffered, because compared to the voyeurism of viewership, with time travel you could watch your own life, relive your own glory days, or even tweak the moments that formed you.
I’d like to think it was something I learned on my own, rather than the fascism of religious dogma, or just as silly, the maxims of science fiction, that told me the error in changing one’s past. Perhaps it was none of these, simply that I’d managed to fuck my life once, and I was certain I could do so again if given the chance. None of us can know for certain how long man’s been traveling backwards, or perhaps I should say how far. But the only reason we found out was someone gruesomely unstable came back, Will Carmack. Will’s entire purpose for visiting was to molest himself as a child. He was caught in the act and arrested. But when they tried to check a sample from the assault against the database, the lab techs couldn’t isolate the DNA of the victim from his attacker. They tested them both independently, and found a full match- and suddenly his insane rantings about the future he came from seemed a bit more… plausible. Little Billy used to want to grow up to be a cowboy. I watched an interview with him on 60 minutes, and there was a picture of his older self being arrested, and the interviewer asked what he wanted to be now, and he said, “Anything but him.” I remember wanting to be something else when I grew up, too; but as children, we want things we never can have, often never should have, but the cruelty of adulthood is relinquishing childish things. I had a career once, too- which is different from the job I hold now (believe me, you’ll understand the difference in a few years’ time), but it wasn’t losing that that bothers me. Owned a home, one of the homes I grew up in, point of fact, and my car, though that I hadn’t grown up in. But I’ve an idea, maybe little more than a theory, on why my life is such an unmitigated catastrophe. A lot of theories have existed about going through time. Stephen Hawking used to think there was a “cosmic editor” who would prevent paradoxes, though he’d reversed that even before he got into a threesome with his future self and a pre-cancerous Farrah Fawcett (though why he devoted an entire chapter of his latest book to that evening no one knows). I’d always been partial to the multiversal theory: all possibilities existing at once, paradoxes and time travel either creating or “visiting” parallel realities. But it turned out neither of those were true, that we were stuck with this same boring planet, in just the one universe, and whatever our meddling sewed. I’d reaped quite a bit in my youth, had at least my portion of heartbreak and comeuppance. And I hate to be a bit clichéd, or to think the sum of my years so shallow, but it was all about a girl, really. I won’t be so clichéd as to lay it all out, assuming my life is so much more interesting or different that it matters. But it didn’t come down to who was right or who was wrong (and in my experiences there’s enough of both to go around)- it really is as simple as I fucked up in permanent enough way that she never wanted to see me again. I’ve gotten used to the way that reality sometimes “shimmers” when some misguided person tries to change the world by killing Hitler or curing smallpox a hundred years early. I’ve even taken stock of friends and relations changing, sometimes as little as a radical hairstyle I don’t remember them having while we were in college, sometimes disappearing entirely out of my life (though only partially from my memory- nobody said the cosmic editor was perfect). It’s shown us the duality of the butterfly effect- that sometimes, seemingly innocuous people change the world in ways unseen, and others of us- well, we get no Wonderful Life. Travelers fall broadly into two groups: watchers and walkers. Watchers actually just peep through time (one of the first time-travel related websites had HD video of every shower Marilyn Monroe ever took), which is far safer and less energy intensive. Walkers go back, and sometimes they just smooth out a bad day they had as children, or visit now-dead relatives; a few of them try to change the basic calculus of their (or the world’s) existence. I’ve always watched- though I’ve always been tempted. I think there are little moments I could fix, tiny changes, to make her stay. And if I thought that would change things, that it would change me, maybe I would. But I ruined what we had mostly as an afterthought, and was already on the way to ruining my own goddamned life. I don’t have faith enough to believe it would be different, even if I had a thousand tries- and I do. So I watch. |
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