Chapter 32 — To Texas
Rufus makes the case that iteration is crucially important to … everything.
Followed by Chapter 32 —— To Texas, in which Saskia heads to Texas to change the past.
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Hello Friends,
Today we follow Saskia to Texas. She is at the beginning of her journey to revise reality. To improve on what currently is. And with this in mind, I thought it might be fun to talk a little about my beliefs around iteration.
Put simply: I believe that everything in life that gets better, does so through iteration. No exceptions. Even “breakthroughs” are from iteration, no matter how it might seem otherwise.
I believe one of the best encapsulations that I’ve seen of this idea came from my friend, Kalid, who has an awesome website called Better Explained, which, as its name suggests, gives really nice explanations of some fundamental mathematical concepts. But the pertinent page I want to highlight is actually one that talks about how to learn. Specifically, Kalid subscribes to a Blurry to Sharp approach to learning in which he insists that it’s far better to start with a really rough idea of the whole picture and gradually refine the details than what is often done, namely line by line rigorously defining and deducing content. Like Kalid, I prefer the iterative approach.
We’ve already encountered this approach on this project, when back in the commentary for chapter 7 I confessed to merging the Episodes and Newsletter tabs on the website. That was iteration. Though, that was not, by a long shot, the only iteration that’s we’ve seen here. Even before that, in chapter 5, I described my writing process, which, for those of you paying attention, more or less amounted to iteration.
More generally, science and knowledge are built on iteration. In fact, this is a good place for me to note that Mica’s view, of a couple of chapters ago——that Saskia could simply have gone back to the turn of the twentieth century and brought with her some battery tech to give electric cars the edge——was completely disingenuous. But don’t hold that perspective against me, authors are often misrepresented by their characters. It’s worth thinking about the specific problems in that case, though, as I think they are more generally instructive.
Here are some of the quick highlights: modern battery technology relies on significant advances in material sciences, manufacturing techniques, supply chains for rare materials, electric charging infrastructure, and economic and political considerations, to name just a few factors (an LLM actually helped me with this). In turn, each of these bullet points hides a multitude of incremental advances. Advances in material sciences alone elides over iterative conceptual progress in chemistry, electrochemisty (including the management of cathodes and anodes), synthesis of pure materials, and nanotechnology (both for conceptual understanding and engineering, including microscopy and cleanroom environments that were not conceivable until late in the 20th century). In short, there aren’t a few little things that Saskia could possibly have hoped to take back with her to bias the automobile race towards battery electric vehicles.
Finally, for a more visually striking example of iteration at work, I encourage you to check out the genius of my aunt Ev Hales, one of Australia’s preeminent watercolorists. It’s always thrilling to me to see her paintings come to life, as in this a watercolor demonstration Drama at Sunrise.
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 two, in which Saskia heads to Texas to change the past.
— 32 —
To Texas
Saskia watched the ground below slip in and out of view between the clouds. She considered slipping forward in time to speed the flight up, but decided that the more prudent course was to use this time to rest. If she had to get a week into the past, it seemed wasteful to spend any time the outside world was flowing forwards on anything that didn’t require that motion of her.
She wuzzled up her sweater, nestled it between her seat and the wall of the plane, and leaned her head against it. She let her eyelids droop and her mind wander.
An almost involuntary smile stole across her lips as she let her mind drift back to her backyard earlier that day. Time really was slipping by in a blur. This whole adventure had been a whirlwind. This morning she’d had no plan to fly to Texas.
But she was learning. After recounting her trip back to her second visit to her first slip in time——the one she’d spent largely in her home office——she and Mica had strategized about how to get back to her planned rendezvous with Zeno Williams. The problem was more difficult in a foreign city, and booking a hotel didn’t really make sense; as Mica had observed: “Renting a hotel room for the night gives you tonight, not yesterday night.”
They’d landed on the clever plan of having Saskia rent a room once she’d wound the clock back, and hiding the key for her younger self to find in the future. Presumably she could find a location somewhere near the hotel when she got into Dallas proper and by looking and finding the key there, she’d know that spot later, when she, earlier in time, needed to stash the key. It all seemed not so dissimilar to Saskia’s buying of her lottery ticket.
As Saskia dozed on the plane she reflected that the relative future on her own life curve was about to run counter to the rest of the world. It was the sort of thing that could really mess with your mind. Then she realized there were physical analogues. It was the same principle that said: if Mica had been driving from Santa Monica to Pasadena, and Saskia had, at the same time, been heading towards the beach then Mica would have known about traffic on the 405 well before Saskia, who would have similarly known that the 101 was backed up before Mica. Unless either of them had checked the traffic on their phones, of course.
You didn’t need to be a time traveller to understand this.
Indeed, many manifestations were interchangeable: knowing there was a hill at a certain point on a road didn’t seem so different from knowing that it rained there on Tuesday. One trait was merely physical, the other had a temporal component to it as well. Just different dimensions.
But something niggled in the back of Saskia’s mind. She was headed back in time, precisely to change the course of the universe. How long did changes take to filter through? Would it be enough for Saskia to book the room before she doctored the timeline? It left her wondering about the possibility of multiple timelines. How and where, exactly, did splits occur?
Perhaps her predominant paradigm for thinking about the universe was all wrong: maybe the universe wasn’t some fixed thing we could wind our way through ...but where did that leave Saskia’s life curve, the path her id was flowing along? Could it be that the universe folded around her id? What if the future and past only existed, not for the universe, just for our experience.
These heady thoughts of relative framing lulled Saskia, for there was no point getting stressed about them. To her, at least in this moment, they were abstractions. But it was a wistful thought to think that our lives might be the special things with futures and pasts, and not the universe as a whole.
∞
After landing, Saskia called Mica from the Fort Worth airport to let her know she’d made it. She’d wanted to hear Mica’s voice one last time before she started winding the clock backwards, and she was curious what Mica might make of her philosophical musings on the flight.
“If the universe folds around my life path, and you’ve got your own life path . . . can I be sure I’ll actually be coming back to the you I know now?” Saskia asked.
“You’ve already done it more than once.”
“But have I returned to the same you each time?” Saskia didn’t admit it, but her anxiety was being amplified by thoughts of the other her she’d encountered.
“I’m still me!”
“Maybe? But with that logic, do I need to go at all?”
“How else are you going to change the past? And, sure, it seems like you ought to know you went before you leave, but until you make a change you can’t know what will happen.”
Saskia sighed, Mica seemed far more at ease with the topsy-turvy logic of time travel.
“It’s like when you won the lottery, you only experienced it once.”
“I’m going to miss you.”
“Just make sure you miss you too,” Mica advised. “We still don’t know that things don’t somehow go pear-shaped when you bump into yourself at another time.”
“It’s ok, once I get back where I’m going, I’ll book the room and leave the hotel for good. And once I’ve warned Zeno, I’ll slip back to the present in a different hotel.”
“I’m going to miss you too.”
“Sixteen sleeps for me,” Saskia observed.
On the other end of the phone, Mica went quiet.
“You still there?”
“Yes...”
“It’s just one sleep for you,” Saskia assured her. “Maybe not even that.”
“I know.” Suddenly, Mica was more definitive, “It’s going to work out. With the hotel, at least.”
“And you know that because——”
“You emailed me. A week ago.”
“Wait? What?!”
“Well I just deleted it back then. I didn’t know I was about to meet a time traveller! But just now, you reminded me——your ‘sixteen sleeps’.”
“I’m so confused!”
“I get all sorts of kookie emails as a reporter. But I remember it now.”
Saskia waited while Mica searched through her trash folder, but the email had been permanently deleted. Or had the timeline altered? There was one sure way to find out. She switched their call to a face-time and blew Mica a kiss. “Guess I should get going.”
∞
Saskia got out of her Uber near Uptown in Dallas proper. Scanning the map on her phone, she figured that the Katy Trail might offer a convenient place to find her hidden hotel key. The street view images turned out to have undersold the opportunity, if anything; there was an entire tangle of undisturbed undergrowth. She walked along the path looking for a location obscured from passers by.
She found a spot that seemed like a particularly promising hiding place, and glanced about. Nobody was paying her any attention, so she stepped off the path and pushed a shrub aside. The leaf litter looked untouched, not just in the last week, but, to Saskia’s eyes, the last year. She could see the fallen foliage decomposing, and for a moment she feared that her plan had never been acted upon.
For no reason other than that it was obvious, she lifted a rock that lay atop the decaying matter. And there, lo and behold, beneath the rock, she found a hotel stationary envelope. She flipped the flap at the back and inside it, found a room key and a hand written note, written in a cursive script she immediately recognized.
It was disconcerting to find a gift to herself that she hadn’t yet hidden, and she wondered if the feeling bore a similarity to that Alzheimers patients must regularly experience. At least she felt confident about where to hide the key when she eventually returned a week earlier.
A second layer of unease crawled over her skin as she reflected that the world hadn’t changed since she placed it here. Then again, it sort of made sense. Her plan was to leave this key for herself before she tracked Zeno down and changed the world. No wonder the key was still here.
∞
At the hotel, Saskia exited the elevator on the third floor and turned right. Reading the numbers on the doors, she glanced back at the key in her hand to remind herself. In doing so, she almost bumped into a room service cart that a maid pushed out of 314. The woman had kind eyes, which Saskia met. She smiled at Saskia and gave a little chuckle that indicated she knew Saskia had made a mistake.
“Sorry,” Saskia apologized, “I’m a goofball.”
The woman clearly didn’t speak English well, but she pointed kindly in the other direction down the hallway.
Doubly embarrassed that this stranger knew better than she did, where she was staying, Saskia double-checked her key and the numbers on the doors again. She forced a laugh and about turned.
