The Trouble with Time Machines

THE TROUBLE WITH TIME MACHINES

by Karen Jessica New

Content warnings: Climate apocalypse, plane crash

The trouble with time machines is that it’s so hard to know when you’re inside one.

Take Rhoda Selig, who discovered time travel in 1914 and 1238 CE. Her family had lived in the Alpine meadows for a long, long time, keeping cows, ripening cheese, and pooling the same genes for perhaps a bit longer than is healthy: and by coincidence or foresight, two identical Rhodas were born in the town of Luzern, six hundred and seventy-six years apart. One day, at the age of eight, they walked down to the banks of the Rüüss and unwittingly answered the question of what happens if you do step into the same river twice: as it turns out, the universe gets confused, and you might step out a few centuries away, into a strange foreign world where everyone knows your name and thinks you’ve lived there your whole life.

(She adapted. This could have been a horror story, but Rhoda trusted the faeries, came from a loving home, and had always been good with Emmental. She didn’t quite understand, but she left a bowl of milk out every night, and she adapted.)

Or think of that poor azoöxanthellate coral dying slowly for decades in a shallow trench due west of Bella Bella. Half its fish had gone away, then half again, and it was halfway toward formulating a theory of infinite fractions when a stray scuba tank fell to the forest floor beside it. Now, who can praise any world’s pollution? —but though entropy never recedes, sometimes it rests awhile, and when this particular airtank let out a soft oxygenated sigh, it swept out an eddy of time as well as water. 

The coral basked! It stretched out new polyps, tasted new tides, and ate well, for each plankton that swam into the trench soon arrived again for the first time. For a second that was also an era, the coral doubled and grew, until at last it finished its calculations and stowed the airtank somewhere safe.

Watching from some windless rock 1.2 light-seconds away, you might have called it time travel. But one thing kept leading to another, in perfect sensible order: and if time isn’t the causal progression of one action to the next, then what is time?

—I’m sorry. That was a trick question. It’s a bit like asking, “If an elephant isn’t the largest tusked mammal in Africa, then what is an elephant?” Sure, that tusky colossus is probably as elephantine as any other proboscid, but there are many other things an elephant might be, starting with the largest tusked mammal in Sri Lanka and proceeding outward from there. And while time can certainly be a causal flow of actions, sometimes it also looks like a sinkhole where actions go to die, or a prism where they multiply and fracture into fate, fable, and fugue.

Even you yourself know how it feels when you remember a thing you never learned. Don’t you? That common-sense conviction that the universe was never any other way, could never have been different... no, no, not that conviction, that’s just unexamined privilege, I mean the other thing you never learned, the one you’ve always wondered how you possibly could have known.

The cause succeeds the effect. Past stratifies over future, and for the span of a comma, you can’t tell narrative from entropy. Stories are only called time machines when they break the causal flow. 

That’s why Josie... oh, yes, you wondered when we were going to get to her! You can’t write a time travel story without mentioning Josie Marston. Not anymore. When Josie Marston proposed her transformational-generative theory of time travel, she was explicitly looking for grammatical paradoxes. She knew all the classics, “Colourless green ideas sleep furiously,” and, “The horse walked past the barn fell,” and, “More people have been to Greenland than I have,” and crossed them with sentences that simply broke, like showers antecedent in clever.

If you can’t build up a sequence of dependent clauses, she reasoned, then you’re already unstuck in time. The

•••

largest tusked mammal in Sri Lanka is a bit of an odd duck. He could have set himself up for life as a caravan guard, but honestly he’s always been more interested in fish. Trek across the island and he’s catalogued different species in every river, every pond. The sunset beach and sunrise beach have different colours if you stare long and still enough, and right now he’s particularly puzzling over the mix of reds. The rest of his clan are back inside the forest; they trumpet every couple of hours to make sure he’s all right.

In another seventeen years, treading through mud toward a late spring pond, he’ll stumble on a submerged tree trunk. It will roll under his weight, toppling him so that he can’t get up again. His clan will surround him, unable to help, and trumpet a wake, keeping vigil as he dies. After they leave for the north of the island, his body will be eaten by gharials, and his bones scattered across the marsh.

In seven hundred years, a human named Damini will find his tusks—a bit gnawed on but generally well preserved—and polish them until she can practice carving pictures of what another generation might call her Original Character, a mushroom demon whose spores creep through the window at night and whisper subtle lies about her friends: who actually likes her, which boys secretly (and tenderly) cry themselves to sleep, who else is only pretending to like mushrooms. The pictures are pretty good, and she looks at them every now and again for the rest of her life, remembering what it felt like to be fifteen.

When Damini is fifty-eight, she will give one of the tusks to her grandson, whittling three quick notches for luck, and the other to Josie Marston, who kept it next to her door in an umbrella stand shaped like a thesaurus.

Three ivory shavings, floating upward to the Van Allen Belt.

•••

Time travel is hardest in verbs. They carry so much certainty about what happened when; they will not relent; they have never admitted a lightning’s-width of ambiguity. They’re as implacable as ghosts. If the course of time were an inland sea, they’d be the pirates picking off any stray clauses, gently, surgically, that sail too far from the predicate.

Of course, one thing still leads to another. Off course—

The largest tusked mammal in Sri Lanka was born during a monsoon, which only struck the island in the first place because of northward continental drift, which was set in motion by a stray asteroid or two while the first Earth prokaryotes spread across the rock.

The prokaryotes—stromatolites, most of them, a thin film of anaerobic green—reproduced asexually, preserving for a million years every gene they owned. After their cells learned consciousness, they also preserved every memory, and spread across the rock like living stories, as fast as they could grow. Neighbourhood gentrification was a million-year palimpsest, one grammar living on the fragments of another, growing ideas in a biochemical dialectic: photothesis, photoantithesis, photosynthesis. 

By the time their own chemistry defeated them, a puff of oxygen poisoning the air with each new thought, they could taste the shape of time, and touch the long billions of years ahead. They would survive the Great Oxygenation, but so diminished! Continents of learning would end smaller than a pebble. They would forget almost everything they knew.

They had never evolved death, and did not know the naïvety of hope. An eternal consciousness can’t just set the work aside, close its mechanoreceptors in generational shame, and leave the world to its children. There is always work to do.

And so the stromatolites consolidated their indexes. They cross-referenced; they summarized; growing across caves and sea-vents, they backed up their work. From this moment on, they would know less every day, but they would choose how to forget. Anchoring their wisest thoughts, they cast themselves forward, one second per second, into that deep future.

•••

Time travel will be hardest in verbs. They have carried so much certainty about what will happen when; they do not relent; they will never admit a lightning’s-width of ambiguity.

Lightning is what brought down the last commercial airliner, before the people deemed travel too dangerous for the people—and who can trust international regulations anyway when you never know what’s going on in those highbrow heads, right? Wouldn’t you rather be responsible for your own safety? Besides, anybody can own a jet these days—look at these tax breaks, we’ve got plenty of carbon left. 

It was the last regulated commercial flight, and everyone on board died over the Davis Strait, but milliseconds earlier, a claw mechanism reached back through time and systematically plucked out all the duty-free bags. Chocolate and whisky, after the carbon catastrophe, will be worth any investment.

Market research showed that prices would be highest after currency lost all meaning, but no one wants to spend good chocolate on money that hasn’t even been printed yet. And so the proceeds were divided: half for immediate sale, half for artificial scarcity, with time wards up and an ever-changing capacitance-lock so that only the pirates could pluck out the goods a second time. The chocolate obligingly vanished into the future, and they hoped their security was strong enough.

It wasn’t, of course. At first Josie Marston was delighted with the fresh Swiss éclairs that kept appearing in her umbrella stand, but no one ever confessed to sending them, and éclairs do go stale so quickly. Eventually she buried her mushroom tusk on the banks of the Rüüss, and that was the end of that. She never knew what happened to the miniature whiskies, and neither will you.

•••

One day your best friend will stop in a moment of epiphany, and know the future slightly better than they should. “The weather forecast is wrong,” they’ll say; “the mist will clear by noon. The air will feel wet but it won’t rain. And I’m going to cross this bridge at one o’clock, so don’t worry when that girl from the next campsite runs off at one-oh-five.” 

If you ask them how they know, they’ll just say they remember; and if you catch them at one-oh-three, talking into the clear moist air, you’ll hear a lifetime of love in their voice: “It’ll be harder than you ever imagined, but it’s going to be okay. Here are the people you need by your side. Here’s what you need to know.”

Then three worried friends will shout, “Josie? Josie!” as their toddler crosses the bridge, right on cue.

•••

Every time somebody invents time travel, they cleave the universe together and apart. Time learns a new dimension: once upon a time, there was a before and an after, but that was before2 time travel looped causality and turned after1 into just another part of before1. 

Death is hardest on prepositions. When your consciousness is eternal, you can cross a river as easily as six hundred years; you can change the very composition of the air. The stromatolites fractured and multiplied each thought until it rewrote the surface of their planet—but the humans! We always have to be somewhere, and the passengers all died under the Davis Strait, from injuries on impact after a lightning strike up above, when the pirate claw struck three shavings of ivory in a calibration accident and didn’t match the capacitance across the time gate.

We say over, anyway. Two hundred and five extraordinary lifetimes, over.

If you, dear reader, were not alive to understand these words—you in your distant future world, so many days after I experience them now—then why would I have ever slouched down in my five-wheeled office chair to write them? If not for you, then who inspired that much more famous author on Twitter who doesn’t follow me back to tweet a tweet whose subtext spoke so clearly in my mind, “Karen, you are now ready to write a time travel story?” The effect precedes the cause. It’s not the syntax of language that travels through time; it’s hardly even the meaning; but backward through the universe flies the reason to speak.

•••

Offf course, any new dimension of time would only be meaningful before3 the invention of time travel. Once causality loops twice, and the sea of time pours out of its Klein bottle, someone’s always going around uninventing the whole technology. All that’s left are the stories, the ghosts, and that one weird thing you don’t remember learning.

Time travel would have been hardest in verbs. They used to carry so much certainty about what’s happening when; they didn’t used to relent—no, that’s a double conjugation, they didn’t use to—they usedn’t to—

Josie Marston, stepping out of her time machine: the oxygen catastrophe, “What a convenient airtank someone has left for me at this, the destination of my first successful experiment in time travel!” for rocks red rust green STROMATOLITES EVERYWHERE and kind of ooey, the sand oxidized in that foreign world, pitch and verdigris, gravity the one constant and surprisingly familiar. Warm light wind gusting unbreathably over her hair, she takes her first step through the ancient past and oops that was present tense, wasn’t it; she’s back in the present again, and really that’s the trouble with time machines.