Chapter 97 — Before the Beginning
The Curve of Time, Chapter 97 —— Before the Beginning, in which Saskia goes back further than ever before.
Followed by some musings on what it means to give away your kittens, metaphorically speaking.
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— 97 —
Before the Beginning
Saskia watched her younger self imbuing her even younger self with the ability to slip in time, the very ability that turned her into the fly-on-the-wall at this inciting event. It was weird being present for the third time at this dramatic inflection point in human history, and only now realizing what had happened; seeing her younger selves the principal actors: one unaware, the other only half aware.
A flutter of warblers startled from a grevillea to the left of her spying double; obscured from her double by the garden shed. The bird’s flits and swoops made a miniature echo of a murmuration of starlings, and they triggered a long-forgotten memory of research Saskia had conducted years ago: each bird in a murmuration was in contact with but half a dozen of its neighbors, meaning the collective’s aerial ballet was an unintentional emergent behavior.
It was the illusion of intelligence in the LLMs that had motivated her research back then, but really the interconnections of our own neurons felt similarly remarkable, and just as strange: that our consciousness, rather than being an entity of its own, might also be a spontaneous byproduct of the aggregate. And doubly strange to think of that, in the context of her own actions; a rebellious bird’s effort to dictate the flow of the universe. To bump it to something better.
Then, behind the feathery foliage of the grevillea, she noticed a fourth Saskia. Had it been she, and not Tomato, who had awoken her youngest self? She scanned the garden. Were there more of her here?
Returning to her fourth double, she locked eyes with the new Saskia, and, together, they somehow silently agreed to wait for their more innocent selves to leave.
Why had her future self returned? Were her efforts to short circuit time travel fated to fail? Surely, if she succeeded, this scene would never happen: there would be no one to return here.
The world felt suddenly near-death, only near-life made more sense. It felt curiously as she imagined finding religion must.
But, no. She was still a nihilist.
As Wassily once told her: if you play a thousand hands of blackjack, at some point you’ll win ten hands in a row, and at another you’ll lose ten in a row. The ten you lose will convince you the dealer is cheating. The ten you win . . . those you might credit to luck.
The human mind was fickle and frail; but there was always an answer, even if she couldn’t see it.
After the selves from her first two passes through this garden gathering had disappeared, Saskia approached her mysterious future self.
“Why are you back?”
Her temporal successor cocked her head and raised one eyebrow. “Isn’t that my question for you?”
That neither recalled themselves as the other was disconcerting. They were distinct doppelganger’s, come back separately. Duplicated before returning to the here and now.
“So, where did you come from?” Saskia asked.
The Saskia in front of her had returned from shortly after the restroom at Cleo’s.
“Sienna?”
“No.”
It mattered when you went back, and how far. It was one thing to go back and change your actions, that duplicated yourself. But, if you returned back before a duplication, it was evidently possible to un-duplicate——or at least remove a duplicate.
What had happened here, though, was more subtle. It showed that events you didn’t know about might not have happened as you expected. This was Sienna, as Saskia knew her, but before she committed to her new identity. It was as if she discovered a friend had died, only in this case, an extra double had spawned. She could never know which timeline she was living in, no more than she did before learning to slip in time.
There was, of course, no reason why duplicate hers couldn’t slip back through the timeline she was living in.
“Who’s Mica with now?” not-Sienna-Sienna asked.
Saskia slowly shook her head, eyes scanning, as if in hope of spotting a greater understanding. Then, centering herself, she nodded. “Another me.” She explained to her other self that she’d left Mica in order to eliminate time travel from the world.
“And then you’re going back to her?”
“It doesn’t work like that.” The tears filling her eyes were explanation enough.
“That’s noble of you.”
“Did you come to the same conclusion?”
“I think I’m still earlier in my journey.”
“Best to slip back where you came from.”
“What about you?”
“If I’m successful, that won’t be an option for me.”
She explained to herself what she and Mica had come to understand about the universe. “Whether we have free will or not——seems pretty moot; I don’t know if I’m traveling to an already existent version of the universe, or if I’m creating a new version by dint of my own will.”
Her double considered Saskia’s reasoning.
“Either way, it feels like I have choice, so absent evidence to the contrary, I’m going to behave as if I do.”
“Like I said, noble of you.”
“You should talk. You just let me have my shot with Mica. Sure it was my timeline, but you . . . ” Saskia really wasn’t sure what else to say. So, she left her double and kept moving on her mission: slipping back further in time. The splintering of time really was a pandora’s box.
∞
Saskia slipped back before her youngest self had even returned home. She went around to the front of her house and down the street. There, she waited.
When the youngest her arrived, that her looked at Saskia, incredulous.
Saskia asked her younger self to walk with her, and gently steered them away from home. She played the most obvious ruse, letting the younger self believe that she’d had a long lost twin.
As they walked Saskia kept an eye on the time. Until she was sure that their fateful garden gathering had passed unattended. Then, she explained to herself that, actually, she was a version of herself from the future. It amused her that her younger self took more convincing than Mica had.
“You’re saying I learn to time travel?”
“To slip in time, yes.”
“How?”
“Well, you would have. Would have taught yourself.” Saskia explained the nature of life curves and closed loops in time. How they could mess with your understanding of causality. That the grandfather paradox was solved by blowups. “The fact that I’m here; that I learnt to do this from myself, from another version of us. That’s enough to convince me it’s possible.”
Her younger self objected that Saskia’s decision to intercede hadn’t been Saskia’s to make.
Saskia shrugged apologetically. “What’s done is done.”
“Not if you really can slip in time.”
“Mostly it is, once things have happened. And, for all I know, everything has already happened and we’re just living the movie frame by frame. It’s just that it’s a weirdly multidimensional movie.”
“How are you still here, then? Shouldn’t you disappear like in Back To The Future?”
Saskia reminded her younger self that closed loops were hard to wrap your head around, but that that didn’t stop them from being real. “We now exist outside a closed loop in time. One that I’ve pincered off. One you don’t need to experience.”
Younger Saskia squinted at her older self.
“We’re in another subspace altogether.”
“Can you at least win the lottery? Once. Prove to me what you’re saying is true.”
“It’s not that simple.” Saskia closed her eyes, recalling all the lottery winners she’d recently met. “You have no idea what the ripple effects might be.”
Younger Saskia frowned.
The way her younger self fought what was their new shared reality broke something in Saskia, and she changed her own plans yet again. “I would like to introduce you to someone.”
That was chapter 97, Friends, I hope you enjoyed it!
I sometimes muse about how much elements that were included in earlier drafts inform the final product, even those elements that have been left on the cutting room floor.
The last few weeks have been an exercise in giving my proverbial kittens away——I like that metaphor better than killing your babies, which is the traditional name for what I’ve been doing. Either way, the act is an unfortunate necessity, an integral step in the art of writing. Indeed, when building anything it is prudent to start with an excess of foundational material; construction projects typically add 10% to their materials, give or take, to account for waste from diagonal cuts etc. Striking that balance between bloat and efficiency, it’s a fine art. But the fundamental truth is that without enough material, you’ll be left with a hole in the roof or the floor.
As someone who loves kitties, welcoming a feline into our pride … well, I’m always a sucker. Those following on instagram will know that my wife is of a similar sentiment. Her current mission is to woo a neighborhood cat, who we’re both convinced (to varying degrees) is without a home, into ours.
We’ve had an instance in the past when we brought another cat home from a shelter after having lost one. Our intentions were good: we wanted to give our remaining cat a buddy. But it didn’t work well, and we were forced to take that one back.
The new kitty, though, our cat Egg’s look-alike, seems pretty friendly with our cats, so maybe this is a good idea.
Anyway, story-wise, as I think I’ve mentioned I culled the final seven chapters down to four (today’s being the penultimate), and that’s meant sending away some of the ideas that I really liked but couldn’t find a viable home for. I console myself by not deleting the ideas, instead, storing them in a new file … maybe, I kid myself, I will write a sequel, and they’ll become important for that. Sort of like giving a cat to a friend: I can always visit them later. That they were here for a while though——I’m not exactly a believer in the supernatural, but I do think you can feel their ghosts.
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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