Genre
Short Stories
Looking California
Feeling Massachusetts
Feeling Massachusetts
“Whatever you do,” they kept telling us at the MIT Temporal Arts Academy, “do not create a time loop. You’ll regret it. Forever.”
Paradoxes were not dangerous at all, tending to resolve themselves in increasingly complicated and inventive ways as time would rush to heal itself. They did result in lots of dead grandfathers and shameless grandmothers, of course, especially among the members of the freshman Practical Applications of Time Travel class, but as the scrupulously celibate Dean Thompson was fond of saying, “If it’s not experimentally verified, it’s just dogma.”
The saying was far from the Dean’s most important academic contribution, of course. His true claim to fame was a seminal paper describing time as the set of rivulet-like flows of faster-than-light tachyons. Redirect a substream this way or that, he argued, and you can visit the past, quite safely, for the most part, and for far less energy than could be generated by even the smallest house fusion reactor.
No wonder then that the lengthy treatise, breathlessly summarized in Physics Today as “You Can Now Choose Your Grandpa”, gathered the gentle Professor not one but two Nobel Prizes, the second in History, and how could it not, once he’d conclusively proven that infamous “Et tu, Brute” was in fact but a friendly verbal prompt by Julius Caesar, who’d wanted nothing more than for his family friend to join him in the sampling of an excellent red wine of recent Gallic vintage, the words spoken a full hour on the sundial before the dictatorship-weary young senator helped turn the First Citizen into a leaky sieve. (It should be noted that whether the potent grape was in fact of Bordeaux or Burgundian origin does remain the matter of some debate, with a time expedition slated to settle the argument just in time for a major revision of the Shakespearean classic to be performed by a Patrick Stewart AI in the title role, and an Olivier Brutus, after the O’Toole people backed out, citing irreconcilable differences.)
I was the Professor’s star disciple, of course. “Follow Theodore,” he used to tell my young lab assistants whenever he would visit our lab, “and in time, you would go places, heh, heh.” Our field of research, inspired as it was by his profound Groundhog Day lecture, was far beyond the state of the art: Climate Modification Through the Application of Temporal Paradoxes. Really important stuff, and I would spend many a weekend and most evenings staring at the tachyon flow simulations generated by the endlessly self-improving GPT, the rivulets churning this way and that, to shift an Antarctic current here, end a drought in Africa there.
Now, I wish in fact that I could blame the AI here. True, our IT department’s mandate to always download and install the very latest updates, supposedly for the sake of cybersecurity, did result in the loading of an as-yet-untested agentic framework onto the lab’s quantum processor. But it was completely my decision, unfortunately, to turn on the beta “casual, conversational” mode. To the extent I have any defense, I only did it because I’d grown tired of the endless “are you sure?” style confirmation requests after every command, and not because the entity’s voice was now perfectly calibrated to elicit an emotional response from its user. “Work as a true human assistant,” I told the GPT, and it appeared to comply happily, making the entire lab significantly more productive in the process.
All of which would have still been perfectly fine, had I not been in a particularly sour mood that evening, having been caught by a cold, miserable thunderstorm on my bike ride back to the dorm. Drenched, cursing, I returned to the lab, where, after crashing into my chair and pushing back from the desk, I uttered those horrible, unconsidered, fateful ten words, words that continue to haunt me as I spend countless days next to my apartment’s window, looking at perfect, moonlit evenings.
I said, “Can we do something so that this never happens again?”
You good folks know the rest. The AI complied, and though the lab lights did dim ever so slightly, an unusual occurrence given our multi-terawatt power supply, and the churning tachyon rivulets did form a few worrisome eddys, these straightened eventually, and so I did not give it much thought at the time. It was only a few weeks later when it became evident that Boston was suddenly experiencing a permanent Northern-California-style February, that I began to become concerned.
Oh, of course, just like in Groundhog Day, most of humanity remains blissfully unaware. I use “blissfully” advisedly here, as to who can really complain about permanent California weather in their backyard? And yet, and yet, they can sense that something intangible is missing, something feels wrong. I should unequivocally state here, nonetheless, that I completely discount the notion that the recent Congressional subpoenas to our lab have anything to do with the matter: the usual grant budget debates are a much likelier cause. We, of course, will continue honoring any such subpoenas, though I do appreciate the school’s offer of legal assistance.
But today, my esteemed colleagues, Dean Thomson first and foremost, I come to you with a most urgent appeal. Please let me continue my research. Please reinstate my building pass and take the padlocks off my lab doors, and Dean Thomson, you, most particularly, please remove the rather insulting restraining order that has made appearing at this hearing in person so challenging.
Let me continue my important work. Let me continue improving the world’s weather conditions through these carefully calibrated time paradoxes, just as we’ve successfully done before. I’m happy to submit to any supervisory regime, any Quality Assurance process. After all, we all share the same goal, don’t we?
We all want that day to come, and for those of us in the know, it cannot come soon enough, can it?
The day that will end, just as it used to, just as it’s been immortalized in our culture in countless compositions.
The day whose end may once again be described, quite simply, as:
‘It was a dark and stormy night.’
If you know, you know: