How To Live Safely In a Science Fictional Universe

Charles visits an apartment in Oakland, California, for work. The client, a young woman, is trying to get the attention of her dying grandmother. Charles encourages the woman to leave since she wasn’t actually present for her grandmother’s death. By traveling back in time to attend her grandmother’s death, the woman has opened a porthole into an alternate universe where she was present. This means that the older woman they see isn’t really the grandmother the woman loves.

The woman regrets her failure to visit her grandmother when she was dying. Charles repairs the woman’s time machine while she bids her grandmother goodbye. The woman considers staying in the alternate universe forever, but Charles discourages her, emphasizing that this universe will never be her home.

As soon as they access a time machine, people tend to visit the worst day of their lives in order to confront their regrets. Because of this, Charles quips that he actually works in the “self-consciousness industry.”

Nostalgia is explained as an interaction between two neighboring universes. It occurs whenever someone longs for a time and place that they’ve never actually inhabited, faintly drawing the universes together.

Charles believes that his father wanted to use the time machine to investigate the origin of sadness. Charles affectionately recalls the way his father used to write equations down on graph paper, making him feel that anything could be solved on the page.

Charles has been in the TM-31 for nearly 10 years, making him around 31 years old. He cannot remember the last time he had meaningful sex. He also cannot distinguish the days from one another. He feels ambivalent about this, knowing it is a symptom of living in the TM-31. Living in the Present-Indefinite allows him to stop missing his father.

Charles admits that the Tense Operator has broken down, which will make it difficult to return to corporate headquarters. TAMMY blames herself, even after Charles takes responsibility. Charles encourages TAMMY to get them to headquarters.

The TM-31 arrives at the capital city of MU31, which is an amalgam of New York City, Los Angeles, and Tokyo. Charles muses on the differences between himself and one urban dweller who is around the same age as him.

The capital city is officially called New Angeles/Lost Tokyo-2, though it is also referred to as Loop City. Loop City was created when New York and Los Angeles suddenly merged into one city, swallowing up the rest of the United States. Tokyo split in half, then wrapped one of the halves around the New York–Los Angeles metropolis. The other half became lost somewhere in the universe.

Charles docks his TM-31 in the maintenance facility. The repair bot instructs him to return by 11:47 the following day.

Charles and Ed spend the early morning hours trying to entertain themselves. They go to the building where Charles rents a room that he hardly ever uses. He leaves Ed there to rest, thinking Ed better than him.

MU31 was acquired by Time Warner Time, who completed its development with commercial ambitions. MU31 was previously used as a storage space for the damaged inventory of science fiction operators. Corporations now leverage the universe’s conceptual inconsistency to test out new product ideas.

Young Charles is bothered that the kids at school call his father “crazy.” He asks his father if he really believes time travel is possible. Charles’s father pulls over at a video rental store to explain his secret project to prove that it is.

While Charles’s father is usually quiet as part of his defense mechanism as an immigrant, talking about his project makes him excited. Charles quietly relates what his father is saying to movies about time travel, like Back to the Future and Groundhog Day. In these movies, time travel neatly resolves the characters’ conflicts. Charles thinks about his family’s last trip to the video store, where he found a comic book advertisement for a Chrono-Adventurer Survival Kit. Charles was convinced the kit was real and frequently wondered about its contents.

His father finishes explaining his invention. Charles asks if their family is poor because he knows he can’t ask his parents to buy him the survival kit. He wants to provoke a reaction from his father, but all he does is hurt his father’s feelings. The older Charles cites this moment as a turning point in his father’s resolve to finish the project.

MU31 is subdivided into three neighborhoods: the upper-middle to upper-end region, the middle-class region, and the unincorporated areas. The upper-end inhabitants often try to mimic the unincorporated areas for authenticity’s sake. The middle-class region constitutes most of the universe. The unincorporated areas are grounded in “reality” and have no defining qualities as science fictional zones.

Unincorporated region inhabitants can emigrate to other zones, but this is a difficult process, leaving many immigrant families on the borderline between science fiction and reality. Their existence is prone to chaotic events.

Charles visits his mother. His mother does not immediately respond to him, because of her time loop. When Charles deactivates the time loop to say hello, his mother expresses her dislike of the time loop. She wishes Charles would call more. She asserts that Charles is good, though he denies it. Charles tries to apologize for something unspecified. He makes her guess his reasons for saying sorry, then decides it is time to leave when she cannot figure it out.

Charles’s mother, who is also an immigrant, taught him English grammar. He attributes his anxiety to her since she also uses anxiety to deal with the world around her.

Before Charles leaves, his mother brings him a wrapped parcel, which she claims to have found in his closet. Charles is upset when he realizes that his mother has been exiting the time loop on her own. His mother criticizes the time loop as an insufficient form of care. Charles apologizes. His mother invites him to stay even if she knows he can’t. She returns to her time loop.

On his way back to the rental, Charles encounters a sexbot on the street. The sexbot asks for money. Charles gives her a $5 bill, then feels sad about how happy it makes her. He reflects on the lack of moral conflict in the universe. He gets distracted by a song, which he chases because he feels as though it must have come from a better universe.

Charles returns home and falls asleep looking at the edge of the city.

The novel lists products and services that cater to nostalgia, loneliness, and unresolved emotional issues.

Charles wakes up late for his appointment at the maintenance facility. He rushes out with his belongings, Ed, and the box his mother had given him. At the hangar, he sees future Charles carrying future Ed and the box out of the TM-31. Charles instinctively reaches for his service weapon and prepares to shoot his future self. Future Charles lowers the barrel just in time to get hit in the stomach. Future Charles tells present Charles: “It’s all in the book. The book is the key” (89).

Present-day Charles hurries into the TM-31 to escape the corporate police. He hits his knee against the hatch of the TM-31 and screams at TAMMY to get them out of there.

A diagram explains that Charles is now caught in a time loop, forced to relive the moment of his shooting over and over again. At some point between the moment Charles enters the TM-31 and the moment he is shot, Charles learns something about himself.