Time Enough

OK, OK. I got an F in ontology and scraped my way out of epistemology by paying a shitload of money to copy somebody’s notebook. Metaphysics? Well, I lied and said I had mono and took an incomplete.

Philosophy, as a wise philosopher once said, is a walk on the slippery rocks. I try to walk soft. 

But the smarter the machines get, the easier the rocks become. Even time.

Time being the slipperiest rock of all.

What if?

What a stupid question.

Time is a one-way ticket. No time travel. No going back. 

For that matter (until fairly recently) there’s no imagining the infinite lost worlds created by every decision. A dream too big to dream, that is. (Was.) Too big for any human noggin. 

Like that infinite beach in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

No, it’s not a fucking painting! It’s a book!
James Joyce? That ring a bell with you labcoat yahoos?

Hey, I know you're button-pushing, no bullshit, just-the-facts engineering types. I get it, man. But come on! You never read that cute little bildungsroman? 
Guess not. Fine. OK.

Here’s what I copied from somebody else’s notebook.
See.

Every thousand years, a bird pecks a grain of sand from this beach. It stretches beyond imagining. Peck, peck, peck. After eons, infinity remains infinite. The level sands stretch far way.

But quantum computing spits in infinity’s eye.

Stop rushing me! You said I could talk!

I have plenty to say. I do.

As I was saying.

Quantum computing is a bird with infinite patience and infinite time to pluck infinite grains of sand. A bird that can pluck every grain of sand from the universe. From every possible universe. 

What if?

The pretty bird can show you, now.

Or me.

Yeah. Thanks to these bigthinks, time travel’s possible now! Not “real,” but might as well be. VR, pumped straight to the frontal lobe. Simulated reality and all that shit. The fucking traveler won’t know the difference. As in me.

And you, you think everything went wrong with Vietnam?

That’s your cute little thesis, right?

To prove it, you’ll make me live the whole thing, in somebody else’s body, again and again and again. You want to find the point, huh? The wrong turn. The flap of the butterfly’s wing. Well fuck you!

I’ve changed my mind, asshole! I want to serve the rest of my sentence!

Please?

Don’t push that fucking button!

Don’t.