Chapter 95 — Leaving
The Curve of Time, Chapter 95 —— Leaving, in which Saskia begins to roll time backwards.
Followed by musings on how Rube Goldberg machines are a good model for many things in life.
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— 95 —
Leaving
A week in the future present, Mica and her doppelganger were no doubt sitting on a rock, looking out over the same expanse of water that lay in front of Saskia. They were, perhaps, watching the same pelicans skimming atop the ocean.
Here, though, Saskia was six days in, rolling back through time, and she felt like she was living in a fugue state. A very solitary one.
She and her double had spent the afternoon before she left trying, again, to coax Mica out of the ordinary flow of time. Unfortunately, they had had no more luck breaking Mica’s bond with the present than when they’d tried together alone, back at the Santa Anita racetrack.
The open-ended-ness of marching into the unknown was terrifying. But, why was Saskia so afraid? Ordinary life was no different. Was it the naked risk of forever foregoing future hugs from her lovers?
And now, now she was committed to life as an outsider. To being an immigrant in her own country. An immigrant with no home to call for comfort. She’d departed; on a ship to the antipodes of a couple of centuries ago; on an intergalactic sojourn, a journey from which there would be no return. At this point, change was accruing gradually, like the friendship that melted away as coffee dates passed rescheduled until the final reschedule slipped by, unattended. The rubicon still lay ahead; that moment when your legs crunched out beneath you, a texting driver having barreled into the crosswalk.
Life turned on a knife’s edge. She and her double, virtually identical, now careening in opposite directions. Perhaps her relationship with Mica had always been doomed. Would there always be a reason——some reason——why she needed to sacrifice her desires and leave? Was that her nature?
Whatever the case, she was headed towards the precipice of no return: towards permanently foreclosing access to the timeline in which her heart resided.
∞
Before she’d left, the three of them stopped to check in on the world that was spiraling around them.
“This is good,” Mica had said as she held up her phone. “A bucket of paint just sold for one point six million dollars.”
“What?” Doppelganger Saskia frowned.
Mica scanned the article. “Unbounded possibilities,” she quoted with chuckle.
“Could that be us?” Saskia had asked. “If we all stayed?”
Her double shook her head. “We owe it to the world. It was we who ruptured the fabric of time.”
Then Mica’s face dropped, and she turned her phone for the Saskias to see. On it, was a photo of Sienna’s dead body, and above the image, the headline: “Time Traveler Stopped in Time.”
“I don’t think you can wait for me,” Mica had said. “If you die, who will go back and un-plant the seed?”
Saskia’s double had nodded. “Time matters, even to time travelers.”
Saskia sat on the sand at the bottom of El Matador beach, watching the waves unfurl from their churning white froth, the water clarifying again to a glassy surface as the cascading foam sucked up and back into the tip of the curl in the swell.
Beyond the breakers a dolphin leapt backwards out of the ocean. It was one among many. There were a pod of them. The last became the first, and Saskia watched, waiting for the first to be last.
One might reasonably have expected time travel to make everything more certain——remove the surprises——but she still had to live her life. And living remained as unpredictable as it always had been.
She closed her eyes, imagining Mica and her double were here with her. Their last touch ...
Mica had reached out to hold the hand of Saskia’s twin. “Is our world about to go zooop? Coalescing to a point like an old TV set shutting down.”
Saskia curled her fingers around Mica’s. “I don’t think your life curves are about to compact back to the zero dimensional possibility that was the universe before the big bang.”
Her twin gave her a crooked smile.
They weren’t the first ménage à trois to break up, but even the curious necessity that had propelled them forward hadn’t stopped it hurting.
∞
Saskia had become the Sienna after their dinner at Cleo’s. She would forever be the interloper.
And, like Sienna, she had left, to start anew——there was the prospect of being a secret superhero and saving the world, but it was deeper than that. It was in her nature; Sienna had done it before her. In exercising her free will, she was still tied to her essential core.
There was a certain circularity to life. To her life. And Saskia could see epicycles within the flow of it all: the births and deaths of other people and pets. To her, it would all be measured within the beginning and end of her existence. The cycle of her own life.
She slipped her phone from her pocket. Her lock-screen was a picture of Tomato. Her favorite kitty had been born years into her own life, and unless things went pear-shaped, he’d pass before she did. But there were ghost Tomatos, in parallel universes. Surely some of those would outlive her——the one in this world had already outlived Sienna. Their cycles would form links in a chain of living Id’s——actually it was more like chain mail, or . . . a discrete manifold link lattice?
She closed her eyelids and recalled herself streaming by with tears in her eyes. At first, she’d been running backwards from the beach, backwards towards Mica’s car. Running backwards. Then walking backwards. And as she closed in on the three of them ...
Mica and native Saskia had pulled Saskia tight. They hugged. There had been no letting go. Saskia’s future self faded, and Saskia pulled back from her lovers’ embrace to look at the beautiful couple that made them a threesome.
But Mica held tight to Saskia’s hand as Saskia slowed time down. Mica could feel the power in Saskia’s hand growing. Saskia’s twin could feel her own doppelganger parting.
Saskia had known she must go. Gently, but resolutely, she pulled away. Mica felt Saskia’s hand yanking free, and native Saskia reached out to Mica’s hand clasping Saskia’s. Mica wanted to let her go. And she wanted to hold on, like the world depended on their touch. She had to let Saskia go, in her mind she knew it, but her heart was breaking. She had fallen in love with, not one, but both Saskias. She couldn’t let go.
Tears welled up in Saskia’s eyes. She felt Mica struggling. Saskia didn’t want to leave, but she’d made such a mess of this world. Humanity needed her.
They all knew she must go.
They were all sacrificing. Saskia, for abandoning Mica and her other self on some altruistic quest to save the world? And her double, for staying in a world at risk of descending into chaos? For staying with Mica despite the unknowable.
Saskia pulled away gently as she slowed time. And as she slowed time her pull became inexorable. Mica simply couldn’t hold on. As Saskia pulled physically free her first tear splashed down her cheek.
That was chapter 95, Friends. I confess, I’ve got a bit of a tear in my own eyes.
It’s strange how sometimes your actions in life can have far unforeseen consequences——life really is a bit like a giant Rube Goldberg machine.
The thing is, even if the multiverse does exist, if we have no way of choosing which strand we live in, then effectively it's not so dissimilar to living in the timeline we're used to living in, where we don't have control of outcomes or how everyone else around us interacts to create our world.
Few people have any real understanding of how a cell phone works, but we all get to use them every day.
Life is full of pecadillos, and just because I don't have control over yours doesn't mean they won't impact my world.
And, machine learning is kind of similar: you have an idea that you think might work, an architecture for a computer program that mirrors the way neurons fire in our brains. And you set it up, and run the program. And maybe you’re happily surprised that it does something useful. But of course, just because you can write it, doesn't mean you understand how it works. The outcomes can still surprise you.
If life is like a Rube Goldberg machine, then neural nets really are like life.
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
