Chapter 75 — The Living Dead
The Curve of Time, Chapter 75 —— The Living Dead, in which Mica bounces through a phone tree of revelations.
Followed by reflections on mankind’s invention of a time travel device.
Listen to full episode :
— 75 —
The Living Dead
“His name was Gary Holcomb,” Dalton said. “H-O-L-C-O-M-B.”
Mica scribbled the name on her wrist.
“He was hit by a car. East of Seattle. Near Issaquah.”
“Well don’t leave me hanging.”
Dalton explained that his source in the Seattle PD was all worked up about it. “Your guy——Gary Holcomb——was no ordinary hit and run. Was super weird. The front of the car wasn’t damaged. Almost like he jumped right before it hit him. But when he landed on the roof, he did so with force——and on his back. It’s like he was violently flipped upside down, but without damaging the car on the first hit. At least that’s what my source heard. No one saw him before he was hit.”
“When was this?”
“Maybe ten minutes ago. It’s all pretty sketchy.”
“Anything else?”
“I’ll call, if I hear.”
“Your credits keep racking up.” Mica hung up. She searched “Gary Holcomb, Seattle”. Found her man and dialed.
The other end picked up on the second ring, but said nothing.
“Gary Holcomb?” Mica asked.
“Yes. Who is this?”
“You should be dead.”
“I beg your pardon.”
“You should be dead.”
“You’ve got the wrong number.”
“You’re Gary Holcomb. How did you come back?”
But Gary’s only answer was dial tone.
Mica cursed him and redialed. It went straight to voicemail. She tried again, but Gary Holcomb wasn’t answering. Mica cursed herself. How could she be so stupid? She’d freaked him out. She tried texting, but it was clear he was ignoring her now.
Suddenly, Mica understood what would happen next. But, could she stop him going back in time? Perhaps he had already left. That would account for why he wasn’t responding to her messages. Was it really possible to prevent a death from happening? Curiously, it wasn’t something Saskia had tried yet. At least not that she’d hadn’t admitted to her.
Whether Saskia was being completely straight with her or not, Saskia was Mica’s only option right now.
With nothing else for it, Mica called her unreliable partner.
Well, that was chapter 75, Friends, short, but I hope you enjoyed it!
Obviously, I’ve been thinking about time travel a lot for the last couple of years, and it occurred to me a while back that we, humans, have already invented a time travel device of sorts, and that that device is arguably mankind’s most singular and significant unlock of the world around us.
Specifically, I’m talking about the written word.
And it’s actually more than just a time travel device, because it permits ideas to travel not just through time, but space too. Indeed, in some sense, it blurs the line between travel through time and the other three dimensions.
Clearly it’s not a perfect time traveling machine——I mean, it only permits travel from the past to the present, and the present to the future, or, being technical, from the past to the future too——but we should celebrate it all the same. It puts us in a conversation, albeit a one-directional conversation, with great minds throughout the ages.
Thought about this way, other modes of transport are like time travel turbo chargers (if you’ll permit me the anachronistic internal combustion energy analogy). Planes, trains and automobiles all expand the future territories our words can reach, flattening a sort of four-dimensional space-time cone, if you will. In this context, the big unlock of the internet is that it improves that flattening to more or less a link to any physical point in the future.
Double-clicking on that lens makes me realize that all communication is a sort of time travel. Video is just a souped up version of words; a way of capturing a moment now——visually——and rendering it back at another time. Even video-conferencing is just that, but done really fast; for those on earth the worst lag is usually no more than those awkward bumps on Zoom where we start talking over one another; astronauts, I understand, will experience significantly more awkward forms as we explore further from our home planet.
In any event, even normal conversation is time travel, in that the words we say are not actually received as we say them, but only after the air particles have bumped their way from my larynx to your ears. Of course, this is stretching the observation as, unlike the written word, without a recording device we have no choice of when to engage with the words our interlocutor speaks.
Stepping back again, there is an argument that text is pretty close to the platonic ideal of time travel for thought, since, as with all time travel, anything better would immediately break the world as we know it: if you could send ideas back in time then human knowledge would have to be kind of flat; I-phones in antiquity, if you will, though I suspect I-phones will one day look as primitive as a VHS cassette does now.
The point being, that a perfect time travel device kind of can’t exist, since, as we’re only to well aware, it would introduce all manner of paradoxes. Indeed, it’s not clear what one would mean by a “perfect time travel device for ideas”. If that meant we could go back and re-write history to our liking then that more or less necessitates a multiverse model for the universe as the only way to avoid unraveling contraditions.
The funny thing is: a multiverse model of reality kind of looks like what we already have, albeit one in which we have no means of slipping between strands at this point in time!
Alright, enough navel gazing for one day.
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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