Once upon a time, there was a science fiction author who realized he’d made a terrible mistake inserting time travel into the story you are about to read, and so he travelled back in time and fixed it, and now there’s no damn story, and it’s his fault; I’m sorry. The end.
…only it turned out not to be the end at all. Because that story was far more inspirational than the author would have expected. Every once in a while, even a mediocre mind, even a mind as mediocre as that particular author, who was, let me tell you, no great shakes when it came to the thinking process, produces a transcendent story, one which changes the hearts and/or minds of thousands of readers. This story would have changed the life of the Galactic-Dictator-To-Be. She would have changed her vicious ways and become a kinder, gentler ruler. But she didn’t and the whole Galaxy suffered; thanks a lot, scifi writer!
So this could not continue. Thus it was that the writer travelled back in time to re-change the story. Apparently, something about the writing was so earnest, so heartfelt, so charming (the writer was possibly channeling much better writers from beyond the grave; that’s not a known fact, but it seems the most plausible explanation)—something about the story was just so good that it really made a difference in the world. So the writer appeared before his former self and explained the situation.
Only his former self was unconvinced. Very unconvinced. He kept saying that there’s no way the story could be that good, and he refused to be convinced that his future self really WAS, in fact, himself. The future self thereby became unbelievably frustrated, and they argued. Okay, they tussled. Okay, the past self smashed the future self over the head with an umbrella. Which ordinarily would have been mildly annoying, but happened this time to be fatal. (Umbrellas can be effective weapons, but you have to use them just right. Or accidentally strike the temple with the one really solid bit, the metal at the end, and cave in the parietal lobe, and then you have a dead body, your own dead body, lying on the floor of your apartment. Morbid!
And very awkward. For one thing, the cops are not happy to find that there appears to be an almost-exact duplicate of you, one who matches your dental records 99.9%, one who has no Social Security Number or record or name, and besides which, is also a dead body, lying on your floor.
(Or in the trunk of your car; or out in the swampy bits of the Meadowlands; digging a proper hiding place for a corpse is quite difficult, and you’re quite likely to get caught, especially since one might have a case of the jitters, or, really, the “nearly complete and total freak-outs”, because the whole situation is quite traumatic. ) So the cops pull you over, and this is the time to be grateful that the time machine mechanism is very small, like the size of a watch, because you need to disappear right now. This is the time to start all over, so the writer travelled back to an hour before he’d showed up to visit himself…
…only to find himself of himself waiting for himself. “This is an intervention,” he said.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“Didn’t you wonder at all, didn’t you get even a little bit curious, why you didn’t disappear when you killed a version of yourself which was going to be necessary for there to be a future you?”
The writer’s hands flew up to his mouth. “Oh, no,” he said.
“Exactly. There’s only one explanation.”
“….time can’t really be modified that way, so I didn’t actually kill myself, I just stunned myself?”
“Nope; and besides, even if that were the case, how would I know that you’re coming?”
The writer paused. “Uh, no.”
“There are Temporal Police, who went back and changed things such that there couldn’t be a paradox?” “No, not that, either.”
“Then what?”
“The reason your metaphysics don’t matter—the rules of time travel, the metaphysics of how it works, the very mechanism you use—have all come about because this is a simply terrible story.”
Here, the writer lost his cool. “That’s it?”
“Be glad that’s all this is. There are dozens of other problems and paradoxes that are possible here. We could have kept going over them for a very long time.”
“But there’s no payoff! There’s no satisfaction! And for the record, if the moral here is, “Time travel can really kill the structure of a story,” there’s not nearly enough meat on those bones. This is just a bunch of arbitrary fourth-wall breaking. It’s vaguely humorous, but the self-awareness is cutesy, not helpful. This is a rotten story.”
“I know,” said the writer’s avatar, in sepulcheral tones. “This is a rotten story, and let’s be clear: this was the story that would have changed the heart and mind of the World Dictator, and started her onto paths that would ultimately have been better for her, and for the world. That’s a thing which can be done; the right tale can sometimes, though not always, be so powerful, so meaningful, that it transcends its genre, transcends even the written page and alters a life.”
“But you,” the writer’s double said, “have written a real piece of junk here. I wouldn’t be this critical, but you are me, and I just wanted you to understand:
“Because of you, the world will be crushed under the heavy boot of a vicious psychopath. This person might have gotten help. This person might have changed their ambitions. Sometimes, great art can be so moving that it makes us into new people; not always, but sometimes. You had that chance, and you blew it.”
“I haven’t, yet,” said the writer, quietly.
And so he went forth—not to change this story, but to try to write better stories.
His unexplained, unlimited time travel device had done a lot of kinds of damage, but this was the worst thing:
He’d had a great story, and he lost it. And the real truth was, he might not have cared all that much about the Galactic Overlord; all he had was his own word for it, and he was about the most unreliable narrator he’d ever met.
His greatest foolishness, his worst crime, was against himself: he’d thought to find a way to recapture the story by going to a time wherein the story still existed and hadn’t been vanished by chrononautical forces.
It’s understandable. If you’ve ever lost a manuscript, lost inspiration, lost the memory of where you were going; or if you’ve ever wanted something to write itself and still be yours, you are familiar with that urge.
Not every piece of good art, or even great art, must be the result of struggle; sometimes, inspiration, luck, timing, and/or other factors combine to produce something which just flows out of you and arrives in the Multiverse as close to perfection as one can plausibly achieve. But that’s not just rare; it’s very, very unreliable.
What he needed to do was put in the time, not the time-travel.
And that’s what he began to do. Perhaps it wouldn’t change anything; but then again, perhaps it would. Predestination is complicated at best, and is (arguably) a form of locked time-travel in and of itself, and therefore, if time-travel can be thwarted, so can Fate.
He wrote. He rewrote. He threw things out. He read. He did odd jobs to make time to write. He went through periods of failure, periods of giving up, periods of uncertainty. What worked for him might not work for you.
Sometimes, he took easier paths, or easier ways out; but sometimes, he “ate bitter”, as the old saying goes—that is, he pushed his way straight into and through difficulties or obstacles. Sometimes he did it because it was the only way he could find to try to write what he wanted, and sometimes it was because he didn’t realize just how difficult a particular path was.
Maybe he succeeded, and maybe he failed. But there’s only one way to try to write a story that’s better than your last one, and that’s to write the next story.
So he did.
Thank you for reading it.
My name is Jeff Mach (“Dark Lord” is optional) and I build communities, put on events, and make stories come into being. I also tweet a lot over @darklordjournal.
