how to live safely in a science fictional universe analysis

Something from nothing: all of this saliva. He must violate some kind of conserva tion law. Ed is just this weird onto logical entity that produces unconditional slobbery loyal affection. I’m pretty sure he doesn’t even know that he doesn’t exist.

He’s a good dog, sleeps a lot, sometimes licks his paw to comfort himself. The smell of Ed is pretty powerful in here, but I’m okay with that. He didn’t say anything so I named him Ed. I asked him what he wanted his name to be. I don’t think anyone has ever been as happy to see anything as this dog was to see me. He had a face like soft clay, and haunches that were bald in spots where he’d been chewing off his own fur. I found him just as he was about to drift into a black hole. So they put the little guy in a trash pod and sent him off. It was the usual deal: hero, on his way up, has a trusty canine sidekick, then hero gets famous and important and all of that and by the time sea son two rolls around, hero doesn’t feel like sharing the spotlight anymore, not with a scruffy-looking mutt. He was retconned out of some space western. You get out and hope the world has changed. Hit this switch for the past, pull up that lever for the future. It takes you to other places, different times. The base model TM-31 runs on state-of-the-art chronodiegetical technology: a six-cylinder grammar drive built on a quad-core physics engine, which features an applied temporalinguistics architecture allowing for free-form navigation within a ren dered environment, such as, for instance, a story space and, in particular, a science ﬁctional universe. I am beginning to feel how the man looked, especially how he looked on those nights he came home so tired he couldn’t even make it through dinner without nodding off, sitting there with his bowl of soup cooling in front of him, a rich pork-and-winter-melon-saturated broth that, moment by moment, was losing - or giving up - its tiny quan tum of heat into the vast average temperature of the universe. There must be some kind of internal time distortion effect in here, because when I look at myself in the little mirror above my sink, what I see is my father’s face, my face turning into his. The Tense Operator has been set to Present-Indeﬁnite for I don’t know how long - some time now - and although I still pick up the occasional job from Dispatch, they seem to come less frequently these days and so, when I’m not working, I like to wedge the gearshift in P-I and just sort of cruise. Maybe it doesn’t actually mean anything, which would be ﬁne, which would be okay by me, because that’s what I’ve been doing: living in here, indeﬁnitely. User can survive inside the TM-31 Recreational Time Travel Device, in isola tion, for an indeﬁnite period of time.

There is just enough space inside here for one person to live indeﬁnitely, or at least that’s what the operation manual says.

How to live safely in a science fictional universe analysis