Chapter 70 — The Temporal Frame
The Curve of Time, Chapter 70 —— The Temporal Frame, in which Wassily crashes a dinner.
Followed by some musings on tribes.
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— 70 —
The Temporal Frame
Mica was cooking a steaming broth for a Pho when the buzz of Saskia’s phone interrupted their conversation.
Saskia glanced at the screen and then up at Mica. “It’s Wassily,” she said as she answered the call. “Hey.”
Mica turned back to the wafer-thin wisps of ginger that she was slicing off. Intuitively, she knew as well as anyone that people inhabited your life for a reason. Sometimes they disappeared for a while, but when they did, their return often heralded an emerging development. It bugged Mica that it was she who had accidentally reconnected Wassily and Saskia. It felt like an own goal of sorts.
“Kitty cat,” Saskia interrupted Mica’s thoughts, her hand covering her phone. “Is it OK if Wassily comes over? He’s got another idea about time travel. Wants to share it with us.”
Mica consented with a mechanical smile, and forty-five minutes later, Wassily and Saskia sat at Mica’s kitchen counter while Mica stirred Thai basil around her bowl as she stood opposite them in the kitchen. She’d stretched the ingredients to accommodate the unexpected interloper.
Wassily smiled at Mica gratefully, “Thanks so much for this. Totally unexpected, and absolutely delicious.”
“So what’s your new theory?” Mica asked.
Wassily bobbed his head, enthusiasm spilling forth. “Saskia’s Id is a temporal frame.”
Saskia closed her right eye and cocked her head at Wassily.
Wassily beamed back at her. “But your temporal frame isn’t a universal constant. If it were, then any time you visit a certain point in time, you’d have to be there, always and forever at that point in time. And in that case, the world would be a kind of set painting, the way a movie is a fixed story.”
“You mean if time travel is possible, then free will is not?” Mica asked rhetorically. “We know. It’s called Newcomb’s paradox.”
“Huh, I didn’t know it had a name.” Wassily looked more excited to learn new nomenclature, than miffed that his thunder was being stolen. “But the implication is clear: whenever Saskia fast forwards or rewinds to the same point she’d see the same frames playing again——”
“Like, if she went back to college, Elena would always be there?” Mica knew it was irrational to be grouchy at Wassily for having known about Elena too, but she couldn’t help the light dig.
This time Wassily dipped his head before looking up at Mica, “You know Elena?”
“No, Saskia just mentioned her.”
“Oh.” Wassily looked a little unsteady in his seat. He submerged his spoon in his remaining chicken stock before recovering. “Anyway, seems to me that the other possibility is that there is free will. In which case Saskia isn’t really time traveling; because she’s actually traveling to different strands of the universe. It just feels like the timeline is fracturing and bifurcating——”
“At every decision point.” Mica nodded a smug smile. “That’s called the multiverse model.”
“But maybe it’s only Saskia, or time travelers more generally, who have the ability to fork the universe.”
“Except that I’ve seen more than one Saskia too,” Mica objected.
“Really?”
Mica turned her attention to Saskia. “During our first date. Freaked me out, but it wasn’t this Saskia.” She dropped her finger like a latch catching the woman sitting across from her and then turned back to Wassily. “So, seems like I can fork the world too, and I certainly can’t slip in time.”
“Maybe.” Wassily held up his own pointer finger. “Or, maybe that just means you’re paying enough attention to notice the result. Could still be one of the Saskia’s who forked time.”
Mica’s lips pinched into a pout and she scrunched her brow.
But Wassily barreled ahead: “A nice consequence would be that if only time travelers created forks, that would reduce the places that the universe isn’t a smooth manifold.” He turned back to Saskia. “Though, weirdly, you might not just fork the timeline at decision points.”
“What do you mean?” Saskia asked.
“It’s possible that traveling back forces you to intersect with another timeline——in which case any incompatible Saskia that you meet wouldn’t actually be you. Effectively, your decisions induced another timeline into having already existed.”
Saskia bobbed her head slowly. Time had dulled her memory of how much she enjoyed Wassily’s mathematical speculations, and this one felt spot on. Thinking back to her backyard, the first time she slipped in time, she didn’t recall her older self being there. Then again, perhaps she had been there all along; she was hiding the second time around, after all. It was the difference between splicing a loop into a timeline and stitching two separate timelines together. “I like the idea that the universe isn’t littered with singularities and self-intersections,” she said.
“Right, but we’re back to the question of free will again: did that other timeline always exist? And, is everything pre-determined? Maybe it’s still important to swing for the fences. I mean, if you don’t, you guarantee a shitty outcome. Admitting that you’re going to lose.” Wassily turned to Mica. “Thank you for bringing Saskia back into my life.”
Mica gave a tip of her head. It was hard to fault Wassily for crashing her party, especially with his heartfelt sincerity.
“You know, maybe you’re right too,” Wassily added. “Maybe we all have our own temporal frames, it’s just that for most of us our frame is forced on us. But time travelers are the only ones who can choose to switch where their frame is headed.”
At that moment, Saskia wondered if Mica’s restoring Wassily to her life had been, in fact, a consequence of her own actions; that she had somehow subconsciously summoned him back? Or was she a pawn too?
It had been a long day of travel and she rubbed her eyes. Humanity’s preoccupation with the gods was——why were we always searching for the architects of reality?
“Anyway, I’ve monopolized enough of your evening.” Wassily stood up from his stool. “Sorry about that. I’ll leave you ladies.”
After he left, Mica sat on Wassily’s stool, back by Saskia’s side. “Wassily brings out another side of you,” she noted, as she traced through the beads of sweat on her glass of beer.
Saskia shrugged, and then reached out to caress Mica’s hand. “My mind isn’t everything.” It was a throw-away line, but even as she said it, Saskia felt the weight of a personal epiphany hit her.
Well Friends, that was chapter 70. I hope you enjoyed it!
Like last week, I’m once again sidetracked by today’s chapter title. Specifically, that it reminds me that we each bring our own context and perspective to the world. Moreover——and a little disconnected from the chapter itself——these contexts are heavily influenced by how we see our place in the world. All of which returns me to a topic we’ve touched upon briefly before: groupings. Or perhaps more expressly: tribes.
While galavanting in Australia I had some stimulating conversations around this topic, the short summary of which is that from a philosophical perspective it seems to me that the optimal solution is pretty much to eliminate groupings. From a practical policy-standpoint-perspective, proposals are much less black and white.
One all-encompassing position (as my friend Michael advocated, and which I quite like) is to adopt one grouping: species. That’s sort of the “all men are created equal” perspective, which always elicits in me a bit of a chuckle, since the language itself already carves off half the population if women are viewed as distinct from men (and in the US, they obviously were for quite a while). Species also has the unfortunate risk of subjugating the environment and the world around us to second class citizens; though what exactly we’re advocating for when we advocate for species, if not protecting the world we live in, is a little confusing to me.
The fundamental problem is that coalitions create in-groups and out-groups, which is a long way of saying conflict. And while conflict is imperative for story, I’m not so convinced that it’s the optimal way to organize society.
Sure, it is good to have healthy and robust discussions around how to allocate society’s resources, and lobbying factions can help that, but——and maybe this is just the naive optimist in me——it would be better to root those discussions in equitable outcomes for all, rather than particular groups. Perhaps it’s the problem of agreeing on a north star, but not on the path there.
Anyway, time for me to return to the much simpler task of writing a book.
Until next week, be kind to someone and keep an eye out for the ripples of joy you’ve seeded.
Cheerio
Rufus
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