“Vinessa was furious at me. She said I should have told the teacher we just found the pills, that someone must have slipped them into our bag at the airport, and we were about to tell a teacher about them. She said they wouldn’t have been able to pin anything on us. But because I had confessed, she was on probation and the teachers who hated her could take her down at any time. She wasn’t going to give them that power over her. As soon as our suspensions were over, Vinessa came into school drunk. After she did that a few times, the school expelled her, and she started getting arrested.
“And I keep thinking, if only I hadn’t confessed, everything would be different. That close call would have been enough to warn Vinessa away from getting into real trouble. She only started acting out because she was angry at me. If it weren’t for that, she would have gotten into a good college, and her life would have gone in a completely different direction.”
The other videos made no mention about being caught with the pills, but they still followed a recognizable pattern. In one, Dana felt guilty about introducing Vinessa to a boy who got her addicted to drugs. In another, it was a successful shoplifting incident that emboldened Vinessa to attempt more dramatic thefts. All these Vinessas getting stuck in patterns of self-destructive behavior. All these Danas blaming themselves for it, no matter what actions they took.
If the same thing happens in branches where you acted differently, then you aren’t the cause.
She had lied about the pills being Vinessa’s, but her lie wasn’t what pushed Vinessa off the edge, what turned her into a delinquent. That was the direction Vinessa was always going to move in, no matter what anyone else did. And Dana had spent years and thousands of dollars trying to make amends for what she’d done, trying to fix Vinessa’s life. Maybe she didn’t need to do that anymore.
Dana took a look at the metadata on the video files. Each file included information about the prism it had come from; the prisms had activation dates that were fully fifteen years in the past.
Fifteen years was how long it had been since she and Vinessa had gone on that field trip. Data brokers were just getting started then, and the prisms of the time had much-smaller pads than modern ones. She was surprised that any data brokers still had prisms of that vintage, let alone ones with enough data left in their pads to transmit video. Those were the most valuable prisms that data brokers owned, and transmitting these videos had probably exhausted their pads.
Who would have paid for this? It must have cost a fortune.
STORY NOTES
Back in the mid-1990s the physicist Kip Thorne was on a book tour, and I heard him give a talk in which he described how you could—in theory—create a time machine that obeyed Einstein’s theory of relativity. I found it absolutely fascinating. Movies and television have encouraged us to think of time machines as vehicles you ride in, or else some kind of teleporter that beams you to different era. But what Thorne described was more like a pair of doors, where anything that goes in or comes out of one door will come out or go into the other door a fixed period of time later. Several questions raised by vehicular or transporter-style time machines—what about the movement of the Earth, why haven’t we seen visitors from the future yet—were answered by this type of time machine. Even more interesting was the fact that Thorne had performed some mathematical analysis indicating that you couldn’t change the past with this time machine, and that only a single, self-consistent timeline was possible.
Most time-travel stories assume that it’s possible to change the past, and the ones in which it’s not possible are often tragic. While we can all understand the desire to change things in our past, I wanted to try writing a time-travel story where the inability to do so wasn’t necessarily a cause for sadness. I thought that a Muslim setting might work, because acceptance of fate is one of the basic articles of faith in Islam. Then it occurred to me that the recursive nature of time-travel stories might mesh well with the “Arabian Nights” convention of tales within tales, and that sounded like an interesting experiment.
This story has two very different inspirations. The first was a short story by Philip K. Dick called “The Electric Ant,” which I read as a teenager. In it the protagonist goes to a doctor for a routine visit and is told, to his utter surprise, that he’s actually a robot. Later on, he opens up his own chest and sees a spool of punch tape that’s slowly unwinding to produce his subjective experience. That image of a person literally looking at his own mind has always stayed with me.
The second was the chapter in Roger Penrose’s book The Emperor’s New Mind in which he discusses entropy. He points out that there’s a sense in which it’s incorrect to say we eat food because we need the energy it contains. The conservation of energy means that it is neither created nor destroyed; we are radiating energy constantly, at pretty much the same rate that we absorb it. The difference is that the heat energy we radiate is a high-entropy form of energy, meaning it’s disordered. The chemical energy we absorb is a low-entropy form of energy, meaning it’s ordered. In effect, we are consuming order and generating disorder; we live by increasing the disorder of the universe. It’s only because the universe started in a highly ordered state that we are able to exist at all.
The idea is simple enough, but I had never seen it expressed that way until I read Penrose’s explanation. I wanted to see if I could convey that idea in fictional form.
There’s a sketch by Monty Python about a joke that’s so funny that anyone who hears or reads it dies laughing. It’s an example of an old trope that has acquired the name “the motif of harmful sensation”: the idea that you could die simply by hearing or seeing something. Or, depending on the version, by understanding something; in the Monty Python sketch, English speakers could safely recite the German version of the joke as long as they didn’t understand what they were saying.
Most versions of this trope involve some element of the supernatural; for example, horror fiction often features cursed books that drive people mad. I was wondering if a nonsupernatural version of this might be possible, and it occurred to me that a truly convincing argument that life was pointless might qualify. It’s not something that would work instantaneously; the argument would take time to fully sink in, but that just means it would spread further as people repeated it to others while they mulled it over.
The safeguard against this, of course, is that even an airtight argument won’t convince everyone who hears it. Arguments are simply too abstract to sway most people. A physical demonstration, on the other hand, would be much more effective.
Science fiction is filled with artificial beings who, like Athena out of the head of Zeus, spring forth fully formed, but I don’t believe consciousness actually works that way. Based on our experience with human minds, it takes at least twenty years of steady effort to produce a useful person, and I see no reason that teaching an artificial being would go any faster. I wanted to write a story about what might happen during those twenty years.
I was also interested in the idea of emotional relationships between humans and AIs, and I don’t mean humans becoming infatuated with sex robots. Sex isn’t what makes a relationship real; the willingness to expend effort maintaining it is. Some lovers break up with each other the first time they have a big argument; some parents do as little for their children as they can get away with; some pet owners ignore their pets whenever they become inconvenient. In all of those cases, the people are unwilling to make an effort. Having a real relationship, whether with a lover or a child or a pet, requires that you be willing to balance the other party’s wants and needs with your own.