Chapter 45 — The Paradox of Agency
Rufus talks about the way disparate elements slid into stories.
Followed by Chapter 45 —— The Paradox of Agency, in which Saskia and Mica wrestle with some paradoxes of time travel.
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Hello Friends,
One of the most fun elements in writing a story——to me, at least——is the weaving of different threads together. I feel like this is one of those components for which my mathematical training is, perhaps surprisingly, most helpful.
Books on how to write will talk about A and B storylines and the importance of juggling between the two or more, and that’s all fine and good and super important. But, to me, the magic comes when those lines blur and what you thought of as one aspect of the narrative is suddenly something new. It’s that moment when you look away and the thread that you thought you were pulling on, the one you thought was blue turns out to be purple now. Maybe you drop a stitch in surprise and when you check again you realize the thread in your hand is now actually red.
Today’s chapter has shades of this aspect of writing, with apparently throw-away moments from earlier in The Curve of Time returning to the fore with new significance.
A sort of related ingredient is the belief, when you’re reading a story, that the author knew all along the way in which the various elements would interact. Sometimes——very occasionally if I’m going to be honest——that’s the case. But truthfully, stories do not come out fully formed. More often, the interconnections find themselves, or, if I’m to be charitable with myself, I notice them when flicking backwards and forwards through the draft that I’m attending to. In this respect, the way in which I’m trundling along with the podcast recordings, about twenty chapters behind of the ones I’m writing, is kind of perfect; twenty short chapters is a great distance within the text to call back something that was referenced earlier.
Taking a step back, this all begs the question about provenance referenced in the title of today’s chapter: the paradox of agency. That is, in life ideas or solutions to problems are sometimes said to just “come to us”. And while it’s true, perhaps we’ve primed the pump nicely——in the case of writing, through our life experiences or simply reviewing what we’ve written so far. Thus, the fundamental question remains: how much agency do we really have in it all? Some write to put food on their tables, some to hit a personal goal, some to keep ahead of their associated podcast, and in each case it is some unrelated task or goal that pushes us to set up the conditions to stumble upon the connections … are we, authors, really just draught-horses being led down the road, pulling the wagon of text along with us, blithely unaware of where we’re headed? These are the sort of existential spirals I sometimes swirl into.
I hope they resonate, because Saskia is going to face similar curiosity wanderings in today’s chapter.
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 forty five, in which Saskia and Mica wrestle with some paradoxes of time travel.
— 45 —
The Paradox of Agency
It had been twelve days and Miranda had needed to head home. So, despite her anxiety, she had entrusted Saskia to Mica’s care. Mica had assured her she’d keep a very careful eye on the patient. A couple of hours later, the two younger women sat together, alone finally. Encased inside the cotton cocoon.
They each had a dozen discoveries and ideas to relay to the other, and just as many more questions to ask. Their conversation went in a hundred directions at once. Anything to do with time-travel, they’d strictly reserved for time away from others.
Mica kicked off their discussion with some of the early fruits of her research: Newcomb’s paradox. “Never mind time travel, if any perfect predictor of the future existed——that would contradict free will,” Mica explained. “You can’t have agency if the future can be known.”
“A branching multiverse would resolve that problem for time travel,” Saskia objected. “A new branch of spacetime every time a choice happens.”
“That would contradict predictability.”
“Not if you could somehow know which branch you were heading into.”
Mica ran her hand up through the back of her hair. “You feel like you’ve got that choice?”
Saskia’s mind immediately reverted to her double and the question of which world she was actually living in. Was Mica even the same Mica that she’d first met? She looked at Mica and raised both eyebrows, hopelessly.
“Were you thinking what I was thinking?” Mica switched tracks. “Back when the doctor described your heart arrhythmia.”
“Some sort of smearing from the cusp point that I bumped into in your bed?” Saskia nodded. “Though, smearing feels more like a classic trope of teleporting.”
“Only you’ve got the scar tissue to prove it’s a time travel problem too.”
Saskia, squinted one eye, as if trying to divine something. She was still wrestling with the notion of choice. “You know, I’m starting to wonder: can I really change the course of time? The arc of the universe?”
“You tell me.”
“I mean, it feels like I have agency. In every moment I’m living. Past. Present. Future. Notwithstanding that I’m not sure you can ever live in the future.”
“Doesn’t seem much different from the past when you can travel in time.”
“Except we can both remember some of the past.”
“The present has its own problems.” Mica shook her head. “Now that you’ve gone back and gotten knocked out and come to again, are you really even in the present?”
Saskia furrowed her brow.
“You’ve lived longer than me,” Mica explained. “Seems to me, that makes our ‘presents’ are incompatible.”
Mica’s concern triggered a new question in Saskia: “Do you remember getting a call from a Robin? Back before I hit my head.”
“When?”
“Right before I hit my head. Asking about your charities article.”
Mica nodded slowly. “That was you?”
“Well, you hadn’t met me yet and I didn’t want to confuse things.” The two women sat quietly. Eventually, Saskia wondered aloud if Mica had experienced it the first time through that time, or if it was only after Saskia had gone back.
“I’ve only lived everything through once,” Mica responded. That left both women wondering what would have happened if Saskia hadn’t gone back in time. Could that even have happened? “There is no beginning . . . ” Mica left a pregnant meaningful pause, “That’s what the Bootstrap paradox says.”
“The Bootstrap paradox?”
“You go back and show yourself time travel. And by doing so everything else falls in place. You couldn’t be where you are without your future self.”
“Oh good, circular logic. Reassuring that that could be the basis of our world!”
“Makes you question what the future is, right? And the present, and the past. I mean, if you’re going to go back to change the past, is the past now in your future?”
“Unless there’s more than one future and past,” Saskia countered.
“And we’re back to free will. Where does it all begin again?! Time is a circle and we’ll never know where it starts?” Mica reached out and touched Saskia’s cheek.
Saskia held Mica’s hand there. “How is it we came this far before having a come-to-Jesus, this is time travel–moment?”
Mica, however, was still percolating on the call from Robin. “Were you calling because of all the cash you had?——by the way, where did all that cash come from?”
Saskia laughed. “No, and I didn’t have that much money. Just enough to pay for a hotel back to . . . back to your present.”
“Your mom was pretty freaked out by it——the cash.”
“Mom gets nervous when I have a hundred dollar bill on me.”
“Your mom is sweet.” Mica smiled at Saskia. “I see her in you. She’s a nurturing spirit.”
“You don’t know the half of it.” Saskia nodded. Her mind cast back to a time, marked indelibly in her mind, when she was a kid and her mother brought a young man home.
“What are you thinking?”
Saskia described her memory, correcting Mica’s misconception that her mother had openly brought a lover home: “No, not like that. She picked him up on the street. He was drunk to debilitation. Mom had no interest in him. He was so out of it, though, she couldn’t in good conscience let him go home. Actually, I’m not even sure he knew where home was at that point.”
Saskia couldn’t remember where her father had been that night. It had all felt very dangerous having an unknown, and unpredictable, man in their house. Suddenly, though, Saskia realized that she was now older than the man had been. That was a weird thought. Moreover, she was no longer much younger than her mother had been back then. Both the man and her mother had seemed so complex back then. So full of knowledge of the world. They had both seemed to know how the world worked. They had been such adults in that moment, and she’d felt like such a child. Now, now Saskia was an adult and the world, if anything, was much less certain.
“He was pretty embarrassed when he woke up the next morning. And probably still drunk. He was very grateful, but also very ready to leave.”
Mica pursed her lips in a mute whistle. “I remember thinking that about Mr. Henderson, my sixth grade teacher, when I bumped into him in a mall a couple of years ago. My memory of him wasn’t as charged, but he was there in front of me, and he was just an old man now. You know what I mean?”
But before Saskia could answer, her phone rang. It was Boss-man. He wanted to know where Saskia was. She told him that she was out with an injury. “I’ve been in the hospital. In Dallas.”
“Dallas?” Boss-man was taken aback. “When did you fly to Dallas?”
“Well my mother was here.” It was awkward talking about the timing of everything. Saskia jogged Boss-man’s memory about her mother’s call to her work when she’d missed a day.
“The old Saskia wouldn’t have just left without warning,” he chided her. He was clearly still struggling with the change in their power dynamic. Or rather with the new fully legible rendering of it. He missed his old Saskia.
For her part, Saskia wondered if she was indeed the same person. At what point did you become someone different? College was a traditional transition, but that required moving away and it took years.
“I should be back before next week,” she promised Boss-man detachedly, even as it occurred to her that Boss-man’s upset probably had more to do with his apparent loss of control than her absence. Again, Saskia envied her double’s freedom to escape anonymously. To be more like a ghost.
To Mica, Saskia recalled her individual life curves model of the universe, the conception of space-time she’d identified on the plane to Texas. The one that formed the universe by braiding the filaments of our own paths through it; the one that gave past and future to our ids and not much else. “You and Boss-man are both in your presents, but I’m also in my present, even if your past of two weeks ago is my past of three or four weeks ago. I just spent some time looping backwards in between.”
“But you still don’t get to pick which future you want to live in, right?”
“No. And I definitely still feel like we all have agency. Even if we can’t control how our choices might inadvertently slip us adrift of those we care about.”
