Chapter 9 — Restaurant Restroom, Five Minutes Earlier
Rufus examines the adage “writing is re-writing” in the context of Buddhist philosophy and time travel.
Followed by Chapter 9 —— Restaurant Restroom, Five Minutes Earlier, in which Saskia takes a second run at showing Mica time travel.
Listen to full episode :
Hello Friends,
As you likely suspect——after Mica left Saskia in the restaurant restroom at the end of last week’s chapter——today’s chapter is in some sense a first dive into the meat of time travel. To celebrate that, you might also have noticed that the image for today’s chapter is an echo of last week’s. And, as a final marker, I want to talk about one aspect of time travel within the writing process.
There’s an old adage that “writing is re-writing”. I’ve always believed this, but the more I go through life, assembling stories, the more firmly I believe it. The adage applies on multiple levels. Sentences improve with iteration, as do the broader arcs of a story and the links, calling forwards and backwards and tying the entire jumble of words into a coherent whole.
The other day, I was considering this and its interplay within the contexts of time travel and Buddhist philosophy. The former is obviously, in part, a yearning that we could make this so in our lives, while the later is a belief, in some sense, that it is so, albeit that the timeframe we’re considering is all wrong. Thought about correctly, the Buddhist’s suggest that we do have a chance to rewrite our existence again and again until we ultimately reach enlightenment.
Submitting to this understanding when writing is not just eye opening, it is freeing. No longer does one feel the need to `get it right’, as it were. One simply has to do. To try. Trying is doing, in some very real and profound way.
I am definitely an atheist, but thinking of such things does make me wonder about the possibility that there exists some strange attractor, to borrow a term from mathematics, towards which we naturally tend. An end state, if you will, that inexorably pulls on us as we muddle through our imperfect journeys, always striving for beauty along the way.
A circle is a square once all the corners have been shaved off. It’s the end state of striving to remove all corners, and yet the circle is also the constant corner. A sphere, or, more colloquially, a ball, is similarly the end state of the same process one dimension up.
But here’s the thing: that same process equally yields an ellipse or an Aussie rules football, or maybe even the smooth contours of your lovers’ body.
Like the iterations that are writing, the same process can generate myriad different, and wonderfully diverse, outcomes. For now, though, it’s time to return to time travel and see where those ideas are going to lead us today.
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 nine, in which Saskia takes a second run at showing Mica time travel.
— 9 —
Restaurant Restroom, Five Minutes Earlier
Pacing back through time, Saskia heard the main door to the restroom open and close. The lock latched and unlatched, as she reversed through time, and her now-younger self un-showed up. Saskia retreated further into the past before realigning herself with the natural flow of time. And then, she exited her stall.
Mica had just arrived at the sink and was washing her hands under the expensive water fountain facet. She glanced in the mirror and saw Saskia. Surprised, Mica turned to face her, then glanced reflexively at the door with the puckered lips on the other side. “I didn’t hear you come in.”
Saskia grinned. “Because that hasn’t happened yet. But you know what, I can feel something crazy is about to happen.”
“Crazier than time travel?”
Saskia figured it was time to swing for the fences. Her first go over had failed so banally, it was time to try a different approach. She posited that concepts seem nuts until they don’t. “If you’d told me a couple of years ago that reading your mind——literally reading what you’re thinking——was possible, using an MRI, I would have laughed. But that’s here. Now. That’s the power of AI. And really, it shouldn’t be surprising because the LLMs——the large language models——they have latent space that clearly has some idea of the concepts in our world, and their relationships with one another.”
“What are you talking about?”
Sakia explained that “It started with translation. But it wasn’t just word by word translation. And once they got that working, it seemed plausible that the computers ‘understood’ many concepts and relationships. So they added annotated images. And suddenly it wasn’t just English to German, but pictures to words, and vice versa, that the machines were inferring between. Which is just a long way of saying the programs understood objects like a cat and a dog. And once you believe——realize, what-have-you, that the programs have latent spaces that model our world, much as we do——well then it doesn’t really seem so crazy that the computers can do these translations.”
Mica was struggling to process what Saskia was saying. “You’re saying you’re reading my mind?”
“No, but an MRI could. Sure, it’s surprising there is enough fidelity in the data, but the outcomes speak for themselves. The computers are telling us that MRI’s ingest much finer granularity than we might have believed possible. The experiment doesn’t lie.”
To her left, the door back to the restaurant opened again and another Saskia walked in.
Saskia turned to see that her other self had arrived. “Oh, hey you.”
Still at the sink, Mica felt her world crumbling again. She automatically looked over at the door, and then back at the Saskia by the stalls.
“I came from the future.” Saskia winked at Mica.
The newly arrived Saskia, seeing her older self, quickly doubled back and slipped the lock on the door behind her. Then, turning back to the room, she asked her other self the obvious: “Where did you come from?”
“The future,” future-Saskia reiterated.
“But——”
“You wouldn’t know, because you haven’t lived it yet.”
“What are you doing?” Mica demanded of both of them. It was a testament to the importance of initial conditions that Mica hadn’t simply walked out again, but she was back at the precipice.
“I know what you’re thinking,” the Saskia by the stalls continued, this time directed at Mica, “But she isn’t my twin. I told you, I don’t have any siblings.”
The Saskia at the door checked the lock again.
“What are you doing?” Mica demanded of her.
“Well, we only have a table for two. So it would be a bit awkward if someone else came in and saw all three of us. Both of me.”
Unfortunately, Mica’s discombobulation had only stalled the inevitable, and she was now heading for the exit. “I’m not sure which of you I’ve been having dinner with, but this isn’t funny.”
∞
In the vacuum Mica left, the Saskia by the exit turned and gave her older self a lop-sided smile. “My turn to try?”
“That wasn’t the first time we tried this,” the older Saskia assured her with an air of defeat. “But, don’t let me stop you from trying again.” Saskia passed her older self and entered a stall. The older Saskia paused a moment, and then, considering a new idea, exited the restroom altogether. In the hallway, Saskia started rolling time backwards as she crossed to a discreet alcove by a utilities storage closet that she’d noticed earlier, on her way in. From there, she watched Mica marching backwards into the bathroom. She heard the door lock again, and, a couple of moments later, heard it unlock. She watched her younger self exit the restroom, glance at the etched nickel handlebar moustache and return, walking in reverse, to their table.
Taking stock of what had happened, Saskia mused that perhaps there was some predestined path that the universe tended towards. You could try nudging it, but that merely created ripples that washed away as you put distance between yourself and the spot your stone splashed into the water. Was the universe only sensitive to fluctuations in motivations in the neighborhood of the timeline close to transgressions of that timeline? Perhaps such perturbations got wiggled out of the system in much the same way that a gyroscope righted itself when bumped during its spin. But what if you knocked the whole gyroscope off its axle?
Saskia smoothly slowed her reversal of time and emerged back out of her hiding place as she let time run forward again, merging with the natural flow. She walked back over to the bathroom doors and waited for her younger self to, once again, approach from their table.
That’s it for chapter 9, hope you enjoyed it and I look forward to seeing you all next week. In the meantime, if you’re enjoying this story, please consider recommending it to someone you think might enjoy it too. Individual word of mouth recommendations are one of the best ways to support podcasts you like.
Until next week, cheerio.
