Do I believe in Causality?
That’s a toughy.
I can tell you I believe in it more than the universe does, which is dependent on which version of quantum mechanics you subscribe to at any given moment. In one execution, a bunch of physicists stand around and put a photon in a superposition of two states.
Let’s say.
How little sex do you have to be having to think that confusing a light particle is a satisfying Saturday night is a different question. I like to think that most of it was done naked.
And so, in my head, there it is.
Confused light particles then deliver real fun when these naked scientists subject one branch of the superposition to process A followed by process B, and subject the other branch to B followed by A. This is a process known as the quantum switch. It’s a big hit on Chaturbate.
Then, waving around their external science genitalia on some arcane helicopter formation, the randy scientists collapse the quantum state. A’s outcome influences what happens in B, and vice versa; the photon experiences both causal orders simultaneously. Or just one but, and hear me out…
Which one?
Is it the one where the big bad wolf blew down the piggies’ houses and then ate them? Or the one where he ate them first?
So there is my dilemma, the one that is going to make it hard for me to explain what happened in the previous two books before this one, books where I am just a poorly written character, not the Marysue level 26th century physicist and significant intellect I really am.
(If you weren’t expecting that refreshing honesty, it’s probably because, at about 20 dollars for a paperback copy, you only really paid for three walls. )
But, back on point.
Let’s pretend causality is real. First up, my name is Kerys. In the 26th century, which is where I was born, I work with a group of people called subtractionists. (or rats, if you get me drunk.) We mostly move bananas and cures for cancer into timelines where they are most needed, but sometimes handle bigger problems, threats to the timelines that make people fucking miserable. I have a well-managed suite of reasons why this job is better than owning a liquor store/bodega, but I don’t expect you to buy them all.
If you are keeping notes, this is what has happened:
A couple of years ago, my time, which, if you are interested, is called eigentime, the time I, myself experience, I found myself trapped in the 21st century with a few hippies and this guy Albio, whom I tackled, tased, stripped, kidnapped, tortured, and blew up his house in such a way as to capture his heart.
I’m pretty sure I also got him fired.
It felt like longer. Which, again, if you care, is called elaptic time, what a period of time FEELS like. My time travel equipment had stopped working so we, as a group, figured out how to travel in time using sex and drugs. Eventually we were able to dispense with the sex and the drugs, although, really, why we did that I’m still fuzzy on.
We got good at traveling around under our own power. And we figured out how to save the timelines. And all the stuff happening in them. Which, again, blah blah blah, is called chronometric time, the actual objective timeline. Maybe you can start to see why this is sometimes confusing.
We partied for a bit and then went back home.
Then, on my way elsewhere, I found myself trapped, again, millions of years in the past. My dual efforts to return home and avoid becoming fossilized dinosaur poop were successful but I ended up in a “deprecated timeline” where a number of subtractionists were being shunted, including a number of current and past sexual partners of mine, clearly looking for one more ride on the Kerys haunted merry go-round.
It turns out, my friend Blu Aafjes, whose name sounds like a fungus that turns dairy into expensive Parisian cheese, had tried to go on vacation. Since being a subtractionist paid out in moral superiority and storyteller cred more than actual dollar bills, she asked an artificially intelligent bookkeeping program to optimize shit so she could go on a fancy boat trip somewhere nice, maybe see a marine version of the hit musical “Mama Mia.”.
If you are a Terminator fan, and really, who isn’t, you know that this led to a whole other book, while the hyperintelligent program, DAISY, tried to make the timelines more efficient, killing massive swaths of people. Eventually, depending on how you look at it, we either stopped that problem or made it exponentially worse. That is for the history books to decide, if you believe in them. Or history at all.
Then, we partied for a bit and went back home.
Maybe you see a pattern here.
“Fuck shit up, party, go home” has sort of been how I handle the universe for a long time. And it’s worked so well that there are multiple versions of me still alive out there, many with all their limbs and a positive mental health diagnosis. I’m thinking of getting it done as a tattoo at some point, when I have a little down time.
What happens next, though, is not included in that fabled “down time.”
What can I really say about this third book. I mean, yes, on one level it's just a silly story about sex, bugs, and time travel.
But on another...
