Chapter 34 — Biased by What Had Yet to Happen
Rufus talks about chipping away at things.
Followed by Chapter 34 —— Biased by What Had Yet to Happen, in which Saskia embraces her Dallas trip.
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Hello Friends,
We’re on a bit of a roll here. Kind of iterating over the last few weeks. So, today, I’d like to talk a bit about the nature of chipping away at something.
There is the famous adage that reminds us that every 10,000 mile journey has a first step. The interesting thing is that it’s rarely clear ahead of time, which step is likely to be the one that might break you. Which is the step that will cause your project to stall. Indeed, thinking about your mission and the risk of failure can change the breaking point. I know this from my efforts as a rock climber. The best climbers will climb until failure. That is, climb until they fall without warning. Not until they let go, but until despite what they’re telling——what they’re demanding——of their hands, their grip nonetheless fails. Me? I’m a bit of a chicken. Instead of taking an unexpected fall and trusting the rope will catch me, I usually lower my weight onto it while desperately checking that my belayer, the person below me, who I’ve already entrusted with my safety, is aware that I’m bailing.
At the other end of the journey, oftentimes you don’t even realize that you’ve been taking steps until you’re well down the road. Sometimes your project, whatever it might be, already has momentum before you realize it’s a thing at all, and then you risk the good-money-after-bad adage (but that’s a story for another day).
Writing is also to a large extent about chipping away at your task. The metaphor of a journey being comprised of steps is not so dissimilar to a book being comprised of words. And although very few authors write from the beginning to the end, there is no reason that we couldn’t count off the words in a book in the order that they were written. Now that I think about it, it would be a fascinating experiment to hear a book read that way! No doubt there would be chunks that come out in sentences, but——at least for me——those sentences would then be interspersed with a word here and there that reflect language edits I make as I write.
The funny thing is that words are just one facet of a novel, albeit the easiest to measure; in many ways, they are not the most significant dimension. Books aren’t optioned to be turned into films because of the words. It’s the story … but how does one get a hold of the story without words?
Pictures maybe?
And are words still words when they’re spoken instead of written? I for one experience them quite differently. On the page I can’t help but see the individual letters, the linear nature of the lines on a page and the staccato nature of the lengths of each word. In audio form, I more immediately absorb words’ meaning. Unless, I guess, I’m distracted by an accent or the like.
All of this makes me think of the relationship between LLMs (large language models), which are literally trained on text, and their multimodal offspring who might have audio, or other visual content, as part of their learnings. In those paradigms of machine learning, the story must sit somewhere within the latent space of the model.
Anyway, it’s probably time we turned to the next chapter in our story.
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 four, in which Saskia embraces her Dallas trip.
— 34 —
Biased by What Had Yet to Happen
Over the course of the night, Saskia gradually formed theories about what she’d witnessed with the pen. That being said, they were hard to square with the theories she contemplated about branching universes that might explain how an extra backpack had appeared on the dresser in the first case, and then disappeared without a trace.
In the end the extra backpack made little sense to her, but she did have a theory that described what had happened to the pen, after she laid it on the dresser; or at least to explain its spontaneous disappearance of its own accord. Her theory: she’d just put it down the way you might ordinarily do, and it did what it would ordinarily do.
Specifically, she reasoned by analogy: If she had been riding her bike down the road, delivering newspapers, and she’d tossed one onto a front lawn, then, assuming she’d been riding west along the street, the newspaper wouldn’t just stop moving west when it left her hand. But neither would it keep traveling west. It might bounce along a little further, but having now no means of propelling itself, it would pretty soon come to a stop. Why did time travel need to be any different? It was just another dimension, after all.
The pen, placed on the dresser, probably still had a little momentum, if you will, traveling back in time. But, once it left Saskia’s grasp——and thus Saskia’s will to take it back with her——it would skid to a halt. At that point it would disappear to an observer traveling back in time——her, for instance.
And if that was the case, what was to say that the natural “zero state” of time travel wasn’t standstill——sitting in one unique spot in time——but, rather, the conventional flow of time? Everything else seemed to flow that way. So why would the pen stop in time? Wouldn’t is simply start flowing forward with everything else?!
That’s what relativity meant, anyway. The newspaper on the front lawn was no more stationary in its resting place; it just looked stationary from the front door step, but it was still spinning around the galaxy.
Her theory didn’t explain how she and the pen briefly disappeared right before she’d placed it on the dresser, but, in fairness, she had seen herself disappear plenty of times before, whenever she turned her path through time around——that had something to do with Mica’s clutch move. Nor did it explain where the backpack that was sitting on the dresser had gone. But at least it made sense of the pen’s disappearance as she continued to roll time backwards, and then, its subsequent reappearance when she started rolling time forwards again.
The bottom line was the awkward realization that anything she wanted to take back in time with her, she’d need to keep on her person.
∞
The light outside the bedroom window disappeared and reappeared twice, and was now dimming again. Recalling that her journey was more of a marathon than a sprint, she decided it was time to go forage for food, and maybe some reading materials too. So, she slowed her charge back through time, and opened the door to the main room where——
Another copy of herself was sitting on the couch. The sight jolted her just as time stood momentarily still. Then, stumbling forward, and without thought, she rejoined the conventional flow of time.
Behind her a second double closed the door she had just exited and held up two hands, palms forward in a calming gesture.
Saskia’s concentration was a mess. She couldn’t have slipped in time right now had her life depended on it. Was this second double expecting her? Waiting for her?
Her double on the couch didn’t look up to meet Saskia’s eyes, but her second double coughed softly to regain Saskia’s attention.
Bewildered, Saskia met her second double’s eyes.
“I think it might be best we don’t interfere with ourselves,” her second double tendered, though not as a topic she was offering up for discussion, and without acknowledging the irony inherent in her declaration.
Saskia blinked, unsure of what to say.
“You’ll come to the same conclusion,” her second double assured her. “When you think about it.”
Saskia’s eyes doubled back to the her sitting on the couch.
“I’m pretty sure that that’s me,” Saskia’s second double clarified, “a few minutes down our lifeline, you much later. Just like the you that you just lived is back in there.” She indicated the door to back to the bedroom.
“But——” Saskia started, and stopped as abruptly.
Her second double gave Saskia the tersest of explanations, insisting again that when she thought about it, Saskia would realize that the safest course of action was to minimize their interactions. “No need for us to acknowledge ourselves any more than a stranger you’re passing by in the street.” She then indicated the door to the hallway outside their room. “Go get something to eat. It’ll all make sense when you mull it over.”
Saskia crossed to the main door and put her hand on the handle. Her mind still racing, she turned back to her confident second double.
“We don’t want to create another duplication the way we did in the restroom back at Cleo’s. The backpack just feels like a warning.”
Saskia nodded slowly.
“Think about it. You’ll agree with me.” The other woman repeated for the third time. “Oh, and you can leave the backpack for now. No need to carry it when time is running its ordinary flow.”
Saskia pursed her lips and bobbed her head sideways, trusting that her older id had already thought this through, maybe even lived it through. Her second double had such a confidence about her that Saskia felt obliged to follow her directive. She closed her eyes to give it a moment’s confirmatory consideration, and left the hotel room, her backpack by the door.
∞
As Saskia entered the stairwell, her mind raced in a thousand directions. If her double was right, then the double she’d just left was no a double at all. She was Saskia’s own older id. The person Saskia would be in “her future”, if not “the future”.
It was an odd sensation, experiencing first-hand what it was to trust in yourself. But if interactions with herself caused her to change course, and changing course caused replication, it would be easy to generate a hundred copies of herself before the end of the week that she was about to spend in the hotel. If each of her forked doubles incited more forking, pretty soon the hotel room would be bursting at the seams with copies of herself.
Exponential growth was scary in the context of a scarce resource like the hotel room. Even if they could all cram into their lodgings, a hundred of her would certainly draw attention to themselves in the hotel lobby.
It left Saskia reflecting that there was a predator-prey-like dynamic at play. Unfortunately, the more she thought about it, the more her older self seemed right: the only dampening effect in the feedback loop seemed to be keeping a tight reign on interactions with herself, the discrete nudges to whatever differential equations governed her future. Worse, if she did seek out another her, then she was just as likely to spot herself “earlier” and be tempted to preempt herself, potentially precipitating a spiral in the initial conditions of the model.
Her only pushback on her older id’s exhortation to avoid contact was that nothing adverse had happened during her earlier slip back in time, after her first date debacle at the restaurant, to her own backyard and her first brush with time travel. Perhaps she’d just been lucky, and was lucky now that her older id was countenancing against complacency.
She exited the hotel lobby and turned down the street.
And, as if the universe was out to prove a point, Saskia found herself reflexively dodging left to avoid a child leaping from crack to crack along the sidewalk. The mother trailing the toddler, offered an apologetic hand-in-the-air, as if to indicate that the child was yet to learn about causality, and there was nothing she could do to help.
Saskia gave an understanding smile. She couldn’t fault the munchkin, for the nature of causality was definitely still a mystery to her too.
Best to adopt an iron-clad rule: fastidiously avoid herself.
The left end of Saskia’s mouth tipped upwards at another thought: how many children had started life through an act of complacency, an egg fertilized by an errant sperm?
∞
Approaching a cafe, Saskia wondered if using her credit card was such a good idea. Could that create a flagged event, given she’d no doubt used it in LA around this time? Worse than a financial discrepancy, was there a possibility that such an inconsistency could force another fork of her self? Mica had given her a couple hundred bucks, so it wasn’t really an issue right now, but a couple hundred dollars certainly wasn’t enough to pay for her hotel room.
Still, she had the key to her room, so she’d obviously paid for it one way or another, but if she was destined to pay for it in cash, how was it that she had raised the money?
It was a fun quirk of going back in time: paying for anything upfront, meant paying for it after you’d used it. It gave Saskia confidence that she would figure out how to raise the money. And a couple hundred dollars was a nice starting stake for whatever foresight she cared to wager.
She sipped her chai and wondered just how much she had to interact with herself, or the world around her, in order to change the flow of her life. It was possible that, like a chaotic system, just the slightest nudge——the proverbial flutter of a butterfly’s wings——was enough to send the future into a blender.
On the other hand, it was equally possible that we all had destinies we were headed towards, and that in order to change things a great force needed to be applied? And even if outcomes were delicately tied to inputs, who was to say in which direction the causality ran? Did giving a billionaire’s child a popsicle make any difference? Potentially not. Probably not. But what if the child understood the meaning of such a gift when it came from the daughter of a single mom, a kid who had been dreaming of said popsicle for a week?
Saskia took another sip of her chai. Her mind wandered back to the question of her finances. There was always the Texas Lottery. She could easily check today’s numbers. Then, if she pushed on back another night when she got back to the hotel, she could come back out and buy a winning ticket. Not a full win——she didn’t want to tempt fate with a change that big——just enough to cover her needs. The sleep, that she would very much need by then, would bring her back to the here and now, where she could cash her ticket before pushing further back in time.
It was a plan.
