Chapter 4 — A Second Beginning
Hello Friends,
Welcome once again, my merry band. Today, I want to give a little call out to one facet of The Curve of Time that I think is a little unusual within the pantheon of the time travel genre. Specifically, that the version of time travel in my story is continuous in nature.
Surprisingly, to me at least, it seems that almost all time travel stories involve effectively jumping from one spot in time, to another altogether, separated by some discrete span of time (and often space too). That is, they involve an abrupt jump from one point in time to another, often managed with the aid of a time-machine, a wardrobe or the act of going to sleep and waking up elsewhere. Saskia, by contrast, as you’ve already read, is able to move through time by speeding or slowing her own path through the space-time continuum.
This manifestation of time travel is curiously unusual. Indeed, I’d love to hear of any other literary examples of this sort of time travel that you might recall. The closest analogue that comes to my mind is Flatland, which isn’t actually a time travel book, though it does share a commonality in that it deals with the interplay between two and three dimensional space (of course, time travel is typically situated between three and four dimensions, but I trust you can see the similarity). Moreover, in the same way that the plot and context of Flatland was used as an excuse to give a mainstream presentation of two and three dimensions, and how one sits within the other, I intend to use The Curve of Time as an excuse to give an approachable and more general presentation of higher dimensional spaces, and some of the geometry inherent within.
Naturally, I’ve given some consideration as to why my expression of time travel is so unusual. I suspect the avoidance of continuous time travel is, in part, to circumvent the first conundrum of time travel, namely the problem of literally running into oneself.
What do I mean? Well, imagine you’re sitting in your chair and you decide to reverse time. How could you possibly do this without bumping into your earlier self?
At risk of giving away a spoiler, I want to assure you that I have a means of resolving this conundrum. Truthfully, the spoilage risk exists primarily to the mathematicians among you. Specifically, the algebraic geometers who have a standard means of dealing with a very similar geometric challenge. So, apologies if you happen to be an algebraic geometer, unhappily for you I decided that on balance the teaser value of this hint to the masses reading this missive was worth the catastrophic spoiler risks to you and a select few.
Happily, my own past life as a mathematician gave me insight into the obvious out. But we’ll get to that later. I don’t want to pre-empt the story any more than I already have. For now, all I want to note is that The Curve of Time is going to be my excuse to relate this construction to you. And indeed, The Curve of Time will more generally be an excuse to share some of the beauty of mathematics with those who have sadly missed this joy in their lives thus far.
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
And now, without further ado, here’s chapter four.
— 4 —
A Second Beginning
Having abandoned her bike Saskia walked back to her house, going back through time as she did, and back around the block so as not to accidentally run into Mica.
She walked forwards, as you or I might walk, but doing so as time passed backwards. To an ordinary observer, this would have appeared as someone walking backwards. To Saskia, that was most certainly not how it felt. Her mind went in the direction that her body passed; which would have been different had she been deliberately walking backwards, in that case her mind would have been going in the opposite direction that her body was traveling——though that too is a little unfair to say, because as anyone who has watched someone walking backwards knows, walking backwards is quite different to playing a movie of walking forwards in reverse.
At one point Saskia noticed a jogger. To her, he was jogging backwards from a side street, with his eyes glued on her. Saskia felt suddenly very self conscious, and she stopped abruptly. In an effort to fake normal, she reached for the phone in her pocket, as if to check a text that just came in. At that moment the jogger completed a weird double take, and, like an excellent actor, returned his concentration to the path he was receding back along. Still standing still, and still watching her phone, Saskia kept flowing smoothly backwards in time until the jogger disappeared back behind the corner from which he’d evidently come.
It’s hard to judge how fast you are slipping back in time without external indicators. To judge how long everything is taking. It’s a bit like a yacht tacking in the wind. Maybe you feel that you’re skating across the water very fast, and yet you’re making slow actual progress towards your destination because it’s directly into the wind.
In any event, her timing was good. Saskia eased back from slipping backwards in time as she rounded the corner at the end of her block, and, in perfect synchrony, saw Mica pull her car to a stop outside her house. Mica paused at the wheel, killing the engine and tossing her keys into the bag she retrieved from the passenger seat. She pulled out a little notepad and checked the number of the street address that she’d scrawled inside it with that on Saskia’s letterbox.
Saskia watched her for a moment, taking in her fair complexion. There was a warmth to Mica that unnerved her. It was strange how a temporal shift could muddle expectations. Seeing Mica for the first time half an hour ago——or a couple of minutes in the future, depending on your perspective——it was different now. Now, Saskia was hoping for something.
She steeled herself, gave herself a quick pep talk, and approached Mica’s car. She knocked on Mica’s window. “Can I help you?”
Jumping at first, Mica collected herself and wound down the window; opening the door was too awkward with Saskia standing beside it. “Oh, hi. I’m Mica Pollock. I’m a journalist looking for Saskia Topp.”
Saskia gave Mica a goofy grin.
“I was hoping to catch her and have a word with her. Do you know which house she lives in?”
“I’m Saskia,” Saskia responded, feigning surprise. “But why——”
“It’s ok. There’s nothing to worry about. You won the lottery, right?”
“Yes.” Saskia pointed to her front door. “And I live right there.”
Saskia was making a better first impression, presenting bright and happy about her win. Again, she admitted her new gift, but this time she expressed excitement about it. Grateful for her new superpower, and excited to test its possibilities. She quipped to Mica that it wouldn’t have been much of a superpower if didn’t let her go back and right wrongs.
Mica was naturally, and reasonably, skeptical of Saskia’s claim that she could time travel, and once again challenged her to prove she could by telling her how this would play out.
“I can tell you that you came from that direction.” Saskia pointed in the direction the car was facing. “And that’s not how it looks here,” she observed with a note of triumph.
“Or you saw me circle the block, looking for a parking spot,” Mica countered.
“But I didn’t. I saw you later and you told me that happened. And now I’ve returned——”
“To make a better first impression?” Mica smirked.
Saskia flushed red with embarrassment and Mica laughed. She told Saskia that she ought to read tarot cards.
“I could tell you tomorrow’s lottery numbers,” Saskia offered, right as she realized the risk this proposition ran of sounding desperate.
“You have a way of knowing the lottery numbers in advance?” Mica’s journalistic antenna were suddenly buzzing. “Is it someone you work with? I thought lottery workers were barred from playing the lottery.”
“It’s not that,” Saskia protested. “I work in AI. Machine learning.”
“Sounds very sexy.”
Saskia laughed. “I work in trash. Recycling, really. I teach machines to sort through garbage.”
“That really does sound sexy!”
And though Saskia was fully aware that “sexy” wasn’t meant how she’d liked it to have been, she did register that she had piqued Mica’s interest. “Actually, I’ve got a better idea than the lottery. You know the race track nearby?”
Mica nodded.
“Meet me there. I promise: I’ll blow your mind and it’ll all make sense.” With that, Saskia gave Mica a cheeky wink. “My bike is parked just around the corner. I’ll race you there.”
