How To Live Safely In a Science Fictional Universe

The TM-31 includes the word “recreational” in its name. This word can be understood in the sense of “entertainment” but also in the sense of “creating again.” This resonates with the way human memory works.

Young Charles watches his father work in the garage, seemingly unnoticed. Eventually, his father asks him to help. The first UTM-1 test lasts less than one minute. The prototype travels through time, but has no control to stop in the past. Charles and his father briefly glimpse themselves from a few moments earlier. The prototype then returns to the present moment. Charles’s father is excited by the insight that the machine takes time to complete any journey. Charles shares his joy, realizing he has never seen his father so happy before.

Two scientists named Weinberg and Takayama independently arrive at the same theory: A universe must remain within the limits of a prescribed maximum size in order to sustain a coherent narrative. This radius ensures that the story world can function as a potential space for narrative truths with emotional resonance.

Charles’s mother, hoping for reconciliation, returns to the house just as the UTM-1 test ends. She hears the impact of the returning vessel and panics at the sight of the garage in flames. Present-day Charles realizes how stupid he and his father look smiling in the burning prototype. Charles’s father hardens when he sees his wife. Charles follows suit and mentally urges his mother to control her emotions. She cries harder. The present Charles realizes this is the moment he began to emotionally detach from his mother. TAMMY cries for Charles’s mother until Ed farts.

Phil calls. TAMMY warns Charles against taking the call on the grounds that he is trapped in a time loop. If he takes the call, then that call will always be part of the time loop.

Young Charles and his father work on several more prototypes. Charles’s mother becomes distanced from them, though she continues to live in the household. At age 16, Charles feels stuck and yearns to live like a normal teenager. His father begins to wonder if his theories are erroneous. One night, Charles inadvertently gives his father the insight that their time machine is continuously crashing into other time machines. Charles is unsure what that means, but he registers the joy the insight brings his father. Charles’s father argues that the time machine is not a unique object, but a special case of other time machines. Anything that has a physical form is essentially a time machine, including the human body.

The novel outlines the process of calibrating the TM-31, which involves putting on finger sensors and capture goggles. The calibrated TM-31 will observe the same physical limits that the user’s body does. The TM-31 will never travel to a place the user won’t allow themselves to visit.

When Charles is 17, he accompanies his father to meet with the research director of the Institute of Conceptual Technology, someone whom Charles’s father deeply admires. The institute detected the time machine prototype’s energy patterns and invited Charles’s father to pitch his concept to the director. Charles describes this as “the best day of [his father’s] life” (167). The days leading up to it positively affect the mood in the Yu household.

Charles and his father go to the park where the meeting is scheduled. They meet the research director, whose importance overwhelms Charles. His father answers the director’s initial questions, inadvertently making Charles feel ashamed that he ever doubted or disappointed his father.

Charles’s father explains that the conventional experience of time is an evolutionary response. His time machine is predicated on the theory that the human brain could be retrained to experience time in a different way. He cites déjà vu as a sign that humanity is capable of remembering the present rather than experiencing it. His time machine is a perception engine that uses the mind to travel to the past and future. TAMMY takes a while to recognize the expression on Charles’s father’s face. She eventually realizes that he knows his pitch will fail. Present-day Charles realizes she is right.

Charles reflects on the pain of being doomed to obscurity, which is as bad as being nonexistent. The research director invites Charles’s father to demonstrate his prototype. Charles’s father stalls for as long as he can. When it becomes clear that the prototype isn’t working as planned, Charles turns his attention to a nearby baseball diamond, where a boy and his father play baseball. Charles realizes that the day will seem ordinary to the boy and his father. The boy hits a pitch, catching the attention of everyone present, including the director. The director then excuses himself from the meeting.

On the drive back, Charles’s father puts on a façade of happiness. He enters a depressive streak over the next few days, refusing to get up from bed and failing to take care of himself. He stops acknowledging Charles. They never speak about the meeting again.

Moments have measurable qualities like thickness. In the absence of a global standard of time, chronodiegetics exists to study the past tense, regret, and limitation.

After the failed pitch, Charles’s father repeatedly drifts into the past, moving further away from his family with each passing day. To make matters worse, a more affluent inventor comes up with the same theory of time travel and develops a working prototype.

TAMMY wonders what Charles might say to his father the next time he sees him. Charles decides that he’d tell his father that he came up with an idea that worked.

Charles realizes that his father was driven by generational sadness. One morning, when Charles’s mother asks him to call his father to breakfast, Charles finds his father crying over a picture of his grandfather. TAMMY blows Charles a sympathetic kiss.

Charles’s father sets aside his prototype, contributing his research to obscure academic journals. When Charles is 20 years old, his father begins working on a mysterious but powerful project. He never involves Charles. Charles retroactively realizes this project would result in his disappearance.

TAMMY cries again out of sympathy for Charles. Charles states what the father-son axis has taught him: His father didn’t care that much for his family. He briefly imagines confronting his father when he finds him, though the odds of finding him at all are extremely low. TAMMY then reminds Charles of his future self’s message: “It’s all in the book. The book is the key” (200).