How To Live Safely In a Science Fictional Universe

Charles Yu lives in a TM-31 Recreational Time Travel Device. He never leaves it, which allows him to live on the edge of time in the Present-Indefinite tense. Charles worries that his Tense Operator is malfunctioning, though he is unsure because he doesn’t feel anything different with his experience of time.

While looking at his exhausted reflection, Charles notices that he is beginning to resemble his father. Charles studied applied science fiction in college to become a structural engineer like his father. When his father suddenly disappeared, however, Charles became a time machine repairman for Time Warner Time, the corporate owner of the universe the novel is set in, Minor Universe 31.

Charles has a dog named Ed. Ed was previously the sidekick of a space western hero, but when the hero became famous, Ed was left to drift toward a black hole, where Charles found him.

The TM-31 has an anthropomorphic computer with two gendered personality interfaces. Charles chose the female interface, TAMMY, because he was attracted to her. The first time Charles ever operated TAMMY, she expressed her inability to lie, then apologized for being incompetent. TAMMY is eager to please Charles, and this makes her prone to anxiety. Charles knows how lonely his relationship with TAMMY makes him seem, but it helps him push away his regret over never meeting his idealized romantic interest, whom he calls The Woman I Never Married.

A warning light goes off in the TM-31. TAMMY cries afterwards. Charles questions her capacity to cry, which makes her even sadder. Charles doesn’t know how to deal with people who cry. Instead of asking her why she is crying, Charles reassures TAMMY. Charles is overwhelmed by the possibility that TAMMY might turn herself off one day.

Charles feels lonely in spite of his two companions. He sometimes opens wormholes to look at alternate versions of himself in other universes. He thinks most of them are terrible.

Minor Universe 31 (MU31) was only partially constructed, accounting for its lack of concrete rules. MU31’s human inhabitants feel incomplete despite the universe engineers’ assurance that MU31 is complete enough.

Charles is called to help a client, Linus Skywalker, a little boy and the son of Star Wars protagonist Luke Skywalker. Charles intuits that Linus was trying to kill his father when he was young. Linus complains that Luke’s role as the savior of the universe has overshadowed him. Charles suggests starting anew by changing his name.

Charles usually tells his clients that no one is powerful enough to change the past. Their inability to take this advice to heart gives Charles job security. He finds solace in his time machine, where nothing bad ever happens to him.

Charles explains that the real reason he has job security is that people don’t really know how to make themselves happy.

Charles remembers being read a library book by his father, one of his earliest and most comfortable memories. Charles’s father invented the time machine prototype. He spent much of his life in frustration that life could only be lived once; the time machine was intended to extend one’s allowance of time. Charles doesn’t know how long it has been since the last time he saw his father. He thinks it would be futile to know the answer. His father’s intentions for leaving remain a mystery.

There are two rules to being a time machine repairman. The first is to avoid encountering one’s self. The second is related to a conjecture called the Shen-Takayama-Furimoto Exclusion Principle: As long as one remains in the time machine, they can easily avoid themselves. Charles has successfully observed these rules by living in the TM-31. The downside is that he is forced to keep his mother in a commercially available time loop so she can live with minimal interference. Her time loop lets her experience a hypothetical family dinner.

Charles and his father designed the time machine in their garage, surrounded by various forms of boxes from graph paper boxes to the prototype box. Charles reflects that the boxes of his early life have been conceptually contained in the box of his TM-31.

MU31 is physically small, though its inhabitants tend to experience this size differently because of the universe’s conceptual inconsistency.

Charles describes the smallness of the TM-31 by comparing it to a phone booth and a hotel shower. It ultimately feels like a “second body,” which he finds difficult to separate from his real body.

MU31 is comprised of an inner core of reality and an outer layer of science fiction. The reality core allows the science-fiction layer to exist.

As a child, Charles used to roleplay as science fiction characters with his friends. Most boys wanted to be Star Wars character Han Solo because he was a “freelance protagonist.” Nobody ever wanted to be a time machine repairman.

Charles is resigned to remain in his current job for the rest of his life. As a time machine repairman, he has access to a standard-issue gun meant to pacify dangerous clients. He has never used it before, but frequently poses with it to look cool.

MU31 inhabitants are classified either as protagonists or back-office support workers. Protagonists are measured using a value called the attachment coefficient. It is possible to have a negative attachment coefficient, at which point the inhabitant is described as having an “ironic detachment” to MU31. They are considered for expulsion from the universe.

The study of time and grammar is a branch of science called chronodiegetics. Chronodiegetics proposes that people cannot distinguish between the interference of forces acting from within and outside the story. Using a grammatical framework to express this assumption, chronodiegetics theorizes that when novel characters, especially narrators, remember the past, they never know whether they have been thrust into the past or if they are simply thinking about it. This implies that memory and regret are the requisite ingredients for time travel. Time machines can therefore be constructed out of paper and narration.

Charles recalls that his childhood home was often quiet. Charles sometimes wondered if his father avoided him because Charles disappointed him. His father was an excellent scientist who became trapped by his desk job. He would often return home in disappointment and ignore his wife’s attempts at expressing sympathy with him. Charles’s father kept index cards on colleagues whom he hoped to work with, though they were too few to represent substantial opportunities for collaboration.

Charles’s father often worked on his own projects in the garage. Charles used to watch him, listening attentively whenever his father would explain a breakthrough. Afterwards, they would go upstairs and watch television, though Charles’s father would fall asleep in the middle of conversations. Charles regrets never asking how to find his father if he ever disappeared.