How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe: A Novel

she still loved my

being okay. Okay enough that we forget that we don’t have long, that it’s late, late in this universe, and at some point in the future, it’s not going to be okay.

savoring the feeling of that special universe and wondering if you’ll ever get to go there and also wondering if maybe we don’t realize it, but we’re in that one already, and we have been all along.

After Libet, we now know that I actually began moving my arm toward Jar A before I became aware of my own conscious decision to choose Jar A. In effect, I decided to reach for the cookie in Jar A before I realized that I made the decision. The question is, which I was I? Which I am I? Am I the decider-I or the realizer-I? Both? Neither?

Living like this means the year stops making sense, and the month and the week. The dates fall away from the days, like glass punched out of window frames, or ice cubes out of a tray into a sink, identical, dateless, nameless durational blobs, melting into an undifferentiated puddle. Is that a Saturday, a Friday, a Monday? Is that an April 13, or a

Sure. I could. I could put a number on something but that isn’t going to make any of it any better, a number that doesn’t correspond to what my mother felt, all the way right up to the end, before she stopped having new feelings and became content to have the old feelings over and over again. I could come up with some answer to it, but putting a nu

depression, and in doing so she has become some kind of bodhisattva, has found the peace that my mother always looked for. She is what I knew was always possible for my mom, if all that light inside her could find its way out.

More like a space elevator. It’s called the Bauman transfer system. A vast network of elevators going in all different directions in ten-dimensional space–time. Some are mainlines, some are branches, some are endpoints.

This is a box I am in. I’ve been getting into and out of boxes all my life. I say box way too much. Even the idea of a box has become a kind of box for me, a barrier against trying to find another word for it, another device.