Chapter 84 — Intervention
The Curve of Time, Chapter 84 —— Intervention, in which Saskia intercepts Sienna.
Followed by musings on how little goofs can precipitate happy accidents.
Listen to full episode :
— 84 —
Intervention
A sporty black BMW swung a little too fast around the last corner before the entrance to Amara’s meditation retreat. Saskia, catching a glimpse of the driver, recognized Zeno. That made sense. About ten minutes later another car passed by, and she recognized Gary Holcomb, alive again.
An hour later, four more attendees had shown up, all in cars. But she hadn’t noticed Sienna yet, and suddenly wondered how exactly her double was traveling. Could she have missed her? Sienna had left Saskia with their car after all. Had she rented one? And, if she had, would that have created a paper trail putting Saskia in the neighborhood of Carmel-by-the-Sea when their triple had died? Were all rentals fitted with trackers? And did those trackers record histories?
Sienna’s dead double implied, via a little logical leap, that Sienna must have reversed time at some point. But why? Money? It was true, the daily lotteries were an inexhaustible ATM of sorts, but that felt icky. Surely it would have felt icky to Sienna too.
Then, Saskia saw herself round the bend at the top of the little rise she was waiting at the base of. Her double raced by her, backwards down the incline, waving at her briefly, before rounding backwards past the corner towards the entrance to the retreat. It was definitely her, and not Sienna; the exact match of her outfit too coincidental to be otherwise.
Confused, Saskia turned back to see if there was a car approaching. She was too late though: Sienna whizzed by on a bike.
Saskia leapt to her feet and made chase, but Sienna had already careened off around the next bend. Should she slow time to speed up her chase——improve her relative motion? That probably meant catching Sienna right in front of the retreat ...no, it would be better to reverse time and cut her doppelganger off back down the road; there was plenty of uphill.
She turned about and started running back, slowing time as she went, and then reversing it altogether. She waved to the her standing by the side of the road, waiting for Sienna, but didn’t stop.
∞
Saskia ran back just past the crest of the hill and situated herself at a steep run of road. She watched Sienna roll by backwards and was a little surprised not to see her future self bailing her doppelganger up. But there was no time for analysis as she returned to the normal flow of time.
The uphill section didn’t make it much easier to intercept Sienna as she powered inhumanly up through the majestic redwoods, and Saskia’s last-moment-leap in front of her, forced Sienna to swerve violently.
“Hey! What the——” Sienna shouted as Saskia clasped her handlebars. “What the hell are you doing?! I could have killed you.”
“I know you well enough to trust that’s not in your DNA.” Saskia smiled in an attempt to diffuse the situation.
“Not deliberately.” Sienna pointed behind Saskia. “The stroboscopic light through the trees . . . ” Her words drifted off, engulfed in the shock of their close call.
Saskia turned back and took in the shafts of sunlight that stabbed through the canopy above. She swallowed, realizing her inadvertent mistake.
“What are you doing here?”
“I had to stop you from attending the retreat you’re headed to.”
“How ...” but for a second time words failed Sienna. Her mind was playing catch up; this woman in front of her was obviously from the future. “Sienna——”
“No. I’m Saskia. I’m not you.” Saskia collected her backpack from the side of the road and then pointed back from where Sienna had come. “I think we should go somewhere else to talk.”
∞
They opted for a trailhead with an empty parking lot, and Sienna chained her bike to a hiking map information board.
Noticing the battery on the frame of Sienna’s bike, Saskia bobbed her head. “No wonder you were chugging up that hill.”
Sienna laughed.
“I guess Mica rubbed off on you too.”
Sienna cocked her head, “What do you mean?”
Suddenly, Saskia realized that Sienna hadn’t spent enough time with Mica to know of her favored form of transportation. Sienna’s electric bike was nothing more than a practical solution. It was an awkward faux pas and Saskia just guided them to the trail. As they hiked, Saskia explained the problem attending the meditation retreat set in motion.
Sienna insisted that she had no intention of teaching anyone else to slip in time. “Hell, you might have figured out how to do that, but I’ve got no idea.”
“Well, we’ve already changed what happens anyway.” Saskia shrugged. “I saw you ride by in that other timeline.”
“So, you want to keep backing up and editing time, every time you don’t like an outcome you see?”
Saskia explained that she’d experimented and no longer believed that was possible, but she’d also seen an instance in which she had affected change. Case in point: the woman beside her.
“I think you mean that you’re the byproduct of my fiddling with our timeline,” Sienna corrected her, and the rereading of causality hit Saskia like a palette of bricks.
∞
Sienna couldn’t understand how Saskia was so mind-boggled that what she thought was her reality, wasn’t. “If you can go backwards and forwards in time, and you believe that you have free will, then how is it you’re surprised that our lives have branched?”
“But how does it work?”
“I don’t know, but that it surprises you, is weird to me.”
The alternative was that there were multiple copies of reality running in parallel. But, how many self-similar copies existed? How fractal was the universe? In her mind, Saskia saw a higher dimensional Sierpiński triangle, only she immediately realized that her multiple worlds were ever so slightly off being identical and truly self-similar.
“We think of strands of some sort of multiverse as parametrized by splits in time, but, what if, they’re really parametrized by splits in our life curves?” Sienna asked, somewhat rhetorically.
“Unless the universe bends improbably to avoid the impossible,” Saskia quibbled.
“Even then, though, when it can’t be resolved, it would have to split——we’d split.”
“Maybe. What if we’re not splits of ourselves, but different us’s joining other us’s timelines.”
“What?”
Saskia explained that Sienna’s turning her back to her table at Cleo’s could have been Sienna somehow leaving her own timeline and infiltrating Saskia’s, and it pleased Saskia to take back ownership of the timeline they were living in.
“If that’s the case, though, you gave up that timeline when you ran in front of my bike half an hour ago.” Sienna rejoined. “Because I don’t know anything about the world where I went to the meditation retreat, even if you do.”
“You know, back home, when we talked,” Saskia pivoted abruptly to their first conversation together. “You know I was jealous of you?”
Sienna cocked her head at Saskia.
“Tomato went to you. I wondered if he somehow knew that I was the duplicate.”
“I was probably closer to the food,” Sienna conjectured magnanimously. “Cats are just fickle. It’s why we love them.”
Saskia permitted a smile at Sienna, she liked her double. Even more, it gave her a warm fuzzy feeling about herself.
“You know how time used to be measured in well-defined milestones?” It was Sienna’s turn to switch off topic. “Dinners, work weeks, weekends, project deadlines and birthdays. Anniversaries. Hummingbirds pollinating frangipanis——”
“Short days and the leaves abandoning their trees,” Saskia chimed in.
“We used to look forward to movie openings, or the Olympic games. But now, now we can just slip around and be wherever we want.”
“I know” Saskia agreed.
“It’s not good. I feel schizophrenic.”
“So, pick a time and live in it.”
“You know, that saying, that something is a blessing or a curse——”
“Is it like the difference”——Saskia interrupted her double——“between when we were kids and time moved so slowly, but now——I mean now, even without being able to slip in time——now, days can drag on, but years go by in the blink of an eye.”
Sienna bobbed her head side-to-side. “But without slipping around, we still have to wait for——”
“Even slipping in time we have to wait. It took me time to get here.”
“Funny, that there are different measurements of time,” Sienna mused, catching Saskia’s inadvertent double use of the concept. “But slipping to another time takes you out of the flow, out of the myriad distractions and trivialities that give anticipated events their meaning. Maybe experience——a lot of it——is about our communal experience. Even when others around us aren’t necessarily looking forward to the same thing we are.”
∞
In the end it wasn’t hard to convince Sienna to skip the retreat. It’s hard to refute your own best analyses and ideas, after all.
“I’m going back to my time,” Saskia told Sienna.
“And where do I go?”
Saskia gave Sienna a wry smile. “Wassily would be delighted to see you.”
That was chapter 84, Friends, I hope you enjoyed it!
There’s a funny behind the scenes on this one: I very nearly had Sienna driving up to the retreat, in spite of the fact that I’d earlier made a song-and-dance about the fact that she wasn’t going to rent a car. It’s a nice example of the dissonance that one sometimes bumps into when world-building.
It’s so easy to take your own world for granted when writing——in this instance that I naturally drive most places that I need to get to that are beyond walking (and yes, I know public transport exists, but I live in LA; it’s one of the few downsides to the city of angeles). And while, were I writing a child, I wouldn’t think of driving as a solution, Sienna can, of course, drive, it’s just that her circumstances prevent it right now.
It’s the kind of goof, though, that readers are likely to notice, maybe more easily than the author. So, I’m glad that I caught it. Curiously, it gave me a little affinity with LLMs who apologize for their hallucinations, even if I did catch my own mistake this time.
Perhaps more interestingly though, is how the ghost of the scene I had lingers in what I’ve just read. For I really liked the “near miss” of Sienna almost running Saskia down, and the “stroboscopic light through the trees” that “stabbed through the canopy”. It left me looking for a way to have Saskia almost create an accident, rather than intercede on a walking Sienna, which gave me the idea for an electric bike. And without the electric bike, I wouldn’t have had the awkward moment in which Saskia references Mica; one of the best moments in the chapter, to my mind.
Long story short, here’s to happy accidents!
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
