Chapter 30 — A Bridge to Far
Rufus muses about concurrently holding contradictory ideas in your head.
Followed by Chapter 30 —— A Bridge to Far, in which Mica encourages Saskia to consider how else she can wield her superpower for good.
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Hello Friends,
We’ve all had the experience of holding and believing two contradictory ideas. Simultaneously, for instance, entering two events onto our calendars without noticing until the day of the conflicting commitments, and then … well, then we’re pickled!
It can get significantly worse, though. It’s perfectly possible to hold competing concepts in our heads without even realizing that they can’t be reconciled. In fact, when I asked my undergraduate advisor why he kept me about——what on earth was in it for him, given the strictly one way nature of our knowledge transfer——he simply smiled at me and said: it’s useful to have someone about who isn’t afraid to ask why 1 + 1 = 3. Looking back on it, I guess he too was evidently well aware that he was susceptible to conflating two wholy unequal entities.
Not withstanding the hallucinations of LLMs, computers are generally recognized as being better on this front. Humans have for a long time been well documented as unreliable sorters of tomatoes, for example (their color and size perception shifting over time). This particular example is not such a big deal when you’re growing tomatoes in your own backyard; either you eat everything you’ve grown, or in the case of our current abundant crop, you’re so spoilt for choice that sorting doesn’t really matter (for those curious why this is on my mind: we built a Hugelkultur atop of a pile of logs, and the results have led me to understand how someone might come up with the notion underpinning the story premise in Attack of the Killer Tomatoes).
Anyway, all of this is a preamble to talking about reading. Specifically, a few weeks ago, I got a little nervous about my narration. At times I was concerned that I was belaboring the words, and then moments later I felt that I was rushing through the text. Weird that I could concurrently be concerned about being too fast and too slow.
It wasn’t just the individual words, either: were my pauses too long, or not long enough? And what of the gaps between paragraphs?
Perhaps the truth is that in some cases there is no correct answer. It’s personal preference, and even that preference is colored by context.
I’ve encountered a similar phenomenon during my writing process. Though it’s not unusual for me to feel, when reading over an early draft of a chapter, that the pace is lagging and in need of tightening, the funny thing is that, once in a while I’ll then come back to the same chapter the next day and in re-reading it anew it’ll feel too fast, as if rather than trimming, what it really needs is some expansion and room to breath. Same chapter, same me, but completely different reactions. I usually chalk this up to expectation, in which case moving to another part of the story is the best bet, with the plan of returning afresh at a later date (once again, relying on my goldfish memory being my editing superpower that allows me to experience the chapter in some approximation to that of a first time reader).
Returning to my narration, I am, as always, interested in your thoughts. In the meantime, I’ll console myself that at least any narrating imperfections should reassure you that I’m human and this is human generated. Or are the machines getting that good?!
Until next week, be kind to someone and keep an eye out for the ripples of joy you’ve seeded.
Cheerio
Rufus
PS. If you think of someone who might enjoy joining us on this experiment, please forward them this email. And if you are one of those someone’s and you’d like to read more
And now, without further ado, here’s chapter thirty, in which Mica encourages Saskia to consider how else she can wield her superpower for good.
— 30 —
A Bridge to Far
Saskia opened her front door to find Mica standing on her stoop. Before she knew what was happening, Mica had leaned forward, placed her hands either side of Saskia’s head and pulled her close enough to plant a kiss on Saskia’s nose. “Thank you!”
Saskia burst into a giggle. “You’re welcome.”
Mica released Saskia, and let herself in. “But there’s so much more you could do. Money is just one dimension.”
Saskia closed the front door and trotted after Mica.
“You could go back to the Pharoahs. You could really change things!” In most accounts of time travel wherein a character stumbles across the ability to slip back through history, or forward into the future, the temporal temptation is to go way back, or way forward. To witness pivotal moments in history, or to see where we’re headed in the long run. Saskia, though, had already realized that not only was life as a spectator only so interesting, she was also faced with the very real challenge that her time travel wasn’t simply a matter of stepping through a portal. Slipping a long way into the past or future was manifestly impractical. Like her hike to San Francisco, only a million times more so. It just wasn’t going to happen.
Already, slipping time backwards at three or four times the standard speed that the world flowed felt as if she was driving a formula one racing car. Objects appeared unexpectedly out of nowhere; for beyond the speed with which Saskia thrust through the world, she had inbuilt expectations around the directionality of motion——it was unusual to see a squirrel fall out of a tree, but a lot more disconcerting to see one spontaneously fall back up into the tree. To compound those problems, she lost more time every time she fell asleep. Never mind accounting for any mundane details like using the restroom, or procuring food——and she’d never tested whether one could eat while moving through time at anything but the standard flow.
But without the physical experience of slogging back a week, Mica still lived in the land of anything as possibility.
“How about you go back a hundred years?” Mica suggested. “Back to the turn of the twentieth century.”
Saskia could see Mica had a specific agenda. “Why then?”
“To undo the debacle of the automobile. You take some basic battery tech back with you, and tip the scales. Change the course of history. Give electric cars the little leg up they needed to obviate the internal combustion engine. Did you know a third of cars in America were electric in 1900?”
Saskia shook her head. “There’s no way I could go back that far.”
“How far could you go?”
“No idea.”
“Ten years?”
Saskia laughed. “No idea, but not ten years.”
“So you do have some idea,” Mica prodded.
“I’m pretty sure I can’t jump up and touch the moon. That’s what 100 years would be.”
“But humanity touched the moon.”
“Fine. But you know what I mean, the stars then.”
“Maybe we’ll get there one day too.”
“The closest star is over four light years away. That means traveling at the speed of light for four years! That’s so far from reality——besides, neither has any bearing on how high I can jump.” She sighed. “Going back isn’t just: ‘skip to some destination’, I have to get there. Physically.”
To Saskia’s surprise, Mica bobbed her head appreciatively. “That makes sense. I guess.” She wrinkled her nose. “That kind of always bugged me about time travel stories. They never seemed to take into account that the earth is always spinning about, so it’s not just a matter of going back to a time, it’s hitting the place too. But if you’re going back continuously that just makes sense.”
Saskia was frustrated. Mica seemed to appreciate what she was saying, but she still felt as if she were responsible for a road block. She hadn’t meant it that way, and she certainly hadn’t wanted to be a party pooper. “Find me a problem that happened a week ago and I’ll give it a try.”
“Maybe this is when you go back to the restroom at Cleo’s.”
“Maybe.” Saskia felt awkward about not having corrected Mica’s earlier misconception.
Mica opened the New York Times on her phone and scrolled through the headlines. Political parties squabbling didn’t look like fertile territory, and preventing an earthquake was obviously not possible, for one thing no one would listen to a Cassandra unless she was comfortable going public, and that just brought more headaches. Then she found it, a something significant enough to notice, but susceptible to shifting. Moreover, those helped would be un-inclined to publicly draw attention to themselves, and thus Saskia.
“How about this oil spill?” She turned her phone for Saskia to see. “The Deepwater Black Gold rig. You could go back and stop the spill before it happens.”
“Plug an underwater geyser before it springs?” Saskia laughed, but even so she reached out for Mica’s phone.
“Sure, you’re scuba certified.”
Saskia skimmed the article. “This ‘subsea blowout’ is 400m below the surface!”
“What’s the deepest you’ve dived?”
Saskia admitted that, in fact, she had dived almost that deep before, in search of deepsea creatures, but just once and it required highly specialized diving equipment, which she certainly didn’t own.
Mica closed her eyes, blissfully fantasizing the affair. She was warming to the idea of learning to dive. More specifically, to the notion of Saskia teaching her to glide through the darkness——she knew it was dark down deep——maybe her hand in Saskia’s. Perhaps diving could become their thing together. When she opened her eyes, she smiled at Saskia. “We don’t need you to dive yourself. You just need to convince someone else to look into the problem before the cap ruptures.”
Saskia bobbed her head from side to side, considering.
“I’m sure you could be persuasive.” Mica winked at her.
