Down the Rabbithole: The A Train
Jan. 27th, 2009 03:19 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hwrnmnbsolLet me tell you about a ride I took today.
TIMESTAMP 01-27-2009 11:40AM
You
Must Take the A Train
To
Go To Sugar Hill Way Up in Harlem
TIMESTAMP 11-24-2035 4:50PM
The song stirs me every time. I hear it every time I take this train. It seemed like a good idea the first time I took this ride. Now it’s with me every day. It used to annoy me, but now I welcome it. It’s something constant I can rely on. It helps me keep things linear.
TIMESTAMP 01-27-2009 11:41AM
If
You Miss the A Train
You’ll
Find You’ve Missed the Quickest Way to Harlem
TIMESTAMP 11-24-2035 4:51PM
It gets non-linear sometimes. That seems to be the only downside to fuguing that I can see. I’ve fugued more than anybody else in history and I should know. When you’ve fugued as many times as I have, the linearity of memory gets all jumbled around.
One moment you’re remembering something that happened years ago
TIMESTAMP 03-31-2012 5:15AM
And then the next moment, it’s the next day, or two decades ago,
TIMESTAMP 07-04-2015 12:21PM
Or maybe it’s the exact same moment, over again,
TIMESTAMP 11-24-2035 4:51PM
And it doesn’t all happen in the same order as your timeline, but it still all strings together to make sense. Like cars on a train, they don’t necessarily always happen in the same order.
TIMESTAMP 01-27-2009 11:42AM
Hurry, Get On, Now, It’s Coming
Listen to Those Rails A-Thrumming
(All Aboard!)
TIMESTAMP 11-24-2035 4:51PM
The trumpet makes me remember Kimble and smile. Kimble fancied himself a jazz trumpeter, when he wasn’t being the third millennium’s Einstein, and he used to play A Train in our lab while we were working through trans-continuum matrices on the blackboard. Kimble, I once said,
TIMESTAMP 09-10-2002 2:14AM
“You’re definitely not making Ellington’s band,” I smirked.
“Ellington,” Kimble announced loftily, “has been dead for twenty-eight years, and I am therefore a superior musician to him.”
“But if you’re right about chronometry and energy fields, you could go back in time and try out for his band so he could reject you,” I teased.
“No, no, NO!” Kimble snatched up chalk from the eraser shelf and threw it at me.
“You can never go back!” he said. “Don’t you understand that?”
TIMESTAMP 01-27-2009 11:44AM
Get
On the A Train
Soon
You will be on Sugar Hill in Harlem
TIMESTAMP 11-24-2035 4:52PM
And of course I understand that now. When he died I had to put on his mantle, had to become the Einstein of the day, of yesterday, of never again. But the mantle never really fit me. I didn’t want to fill Kimble’s enormous shoes. I could never really shake the feeling that I didn’t really belong here. And now, I suppose, that feeling has come to fruition.
This is my last ride on the A Train.
*** --- ***
TIMESTAMP 08-21-1998 8:01AM
I’m the oldest student in the group who still hasn’t gotten a doctorate. I dropped out of school twice, and my thesis advisor shot himself once. I’m long in the tooth for a graduate student, and many programs would have simply dropped me. But this new crazy guy, this Kimble dude, has asked me to join his research team.
I knock on his door. His office looks like a cross between a landfill and a different landfill, both smelly in different ways and full of recyclables. He looks up – a boyish face under a mop of grey curls – and smiles.
“If you’re Solberg, you’re supposed to know something about Shukogani Transforms,” he says, apparently not feeling the need for introductory pleasantries.
“I am Solberg, and I tried to write a paper on uniformly distributed particle interactions using transforms,” I reply.
Kimble nods sagely. “You were beat out by the Finnish team by one month,” he comments. I shrug. I didn’t need that stupid Nobel Prize anyway.
“Well, you’re not lucky,” he sighs, “but you’ll have to do. I could use a guy who knows his way around some of the more interesting math. I’m a very busy guy and I need help.”
Kimble knows he doesn’t have to sell it. It’s the only shot I have. “Okay,” I say. “What are we working on?”
Kimble’s eyes sparkle. “We’re going to bend time.”
“Bend time?”
“Well, cut it up, anyway. Spindle, fold and mutilate time. Reshape time to our own purposes.”
I blink. “You can’t do that,” I blurt.
His shaggy eyebrows waggle. “Can’t I?”
TIMESTAMP 12-09-2015 2:01PM
And it appears that he can. And also that I get to share in a Nobel Prize anyway. He is presenting his lecture on fuguing the day before receiving the award on behalf of the team.
“Fuguing,” Kimble announces, suddenly looking very old and tired up on the podium, “is not time travel. Get that out of your heads this instant. It is, rather, a reuse of sections of time. Time cannot be traveled through – no more than we travel through it every day - but it can be looped and grafted.” I cycle the holographic projector without needing prompting; I have helped Kimble give this presentation many times.
“We know that an instantaneous translocation through space is impossible – or, rather, very very difficult to accomplish,” continues Kimble, pointing to a Solberg Diagram. “But, we can take a shortcut. Suppose you walk from point A to point B. Using a Kimble-Orrst Aggregator, we can capture this sequence of moments in time, something like filming a short movie. Then, later on, suppose you want to walk from point A to point B again. Instead of taking the time and trouble to make this journey, you decide to fugue. You step into the Aggregator terminal at A, but instead of living that experience again, we splice in the ‘film’ of your previous trip. You, again, live the experience of traveling from point A to point B. However, this all takes place in the past, back when you did it originally. The time necessary to travel happened the first time you did it, so it doesn’t take any time at all the second time. You step out of the terminal at point B as if no time has elapsed at all. You have fugued, and it is like teleportation, and you can do it again and again….”
TIMESTAMP 01-27-2009 11:09AM
“…and again!” finishes Kimble. “Over and over, for the rest of your life! Are you sure that’s what you want?”
“Of course it’s what I want. It’s what we all want!” We are walking towards the train station in Brooklyn, both excited and distressed at the same time.
“I know, I know.” Kimble pulls at his mop of hair, now almost white. “But, Andy, don’t you think we should run a few more tests before you….”
“No. Enough tests.” I stop and grab Kimble by the shoulders. I look him in the eye. “If we’re ever going to prove this thing works, we need to man up and run an actual test. Not on mice, not on chimps, on me.”
“But Orrst….”
“Forget Orrst.” But, of course, that’s impossible for the both of us. Neither of us will ever forget what happened to Orrst.
“Look,” I continue, “forget about proving anything. I’m doing this for the convenience. I live in Brooklyn. The lab is in Harlem. I ride this train every day to work. Do you know how much time I waste on this train every day of my life?”
Kimble nodded sadly. “Twenty-three minutes and….”
“Yeah, I know, I know.” I keep walking towards the train station. “But this is the last ride. It’s a nice day, and that’s rare. It’s a Sunday, so the train isn’t too crowded, and that’s nice too. I’m going to take the perfect ride up to Harlem, and it’s going to stay with me the rest of my life.”
Kimble hasn’t given up. “But the dangers!”
TIMESTAMP 12-09-2015 2:14PM
“Yes, the dangers are real,” Kimble admits to the audience of Swedes and scientists. “Playing around with the timestream isn’t something to undertake lightly. Initially, we thought that the chief issue would be the recombining of the timestreams. If the edges don’t match up perfectly – if there is a discontinuity in the reality of the two segments to be conjoined – then, we thought, there might be some kind of a catastrophe. Our fears were unfounded here; it turns out that the timestream is tremendously fluid and has great inertia, and it is capable of smoothing out any bumps and jumps that might occur along the way. “
Kimble paused to polish his glasses soberly. “No, the real hazard, as it turns out, has nothing to do with spacetime at all. Spacetime is quite tolerant to discontinuity. But the human mind, on the other hand….”
TIMESTAMP 06-06-2004 12:01PM
“He’s snapped,” Ryers declares, pacing me as I pull off my coat. We’re almost running through the lab now. Several of the younger lab assistants gather in the halls, muttering darkly to each other as we bustle past. Orrst’s thin screams can be heard echoing through the building ductwork.
“When did he fugue?” I ask, snatching a printout from one of the Russians and scanning it on the go.
“He apparently made the initial transit last month,” Ryers explains. “Didn’t tell anybody; probably wanted to get credit for being the first. Just a walk across the lab. He resegged an hour ago and immediately went catatonic. When he came to he was like this.”
“Where’s Kimble?”
“He’s already here!”
We burst into the lab. It’s a pretty tame-looking place for the site of the first fugue, successful or otherwise – some messy desks and chalkboards, workstations, a few server racks, and that’s it. Oh, and the naked scientist huddled in the corner, screaming his lungs out. Kimble is trying to talk to him.
“I’m not Orrst!” shouts Orrst. “I was Orrst! And then I wasn’t! but now I am! Or not!”
“Calm down. Calm down!” insists Kimble. “It’s going to be fine, just fine!”
“It used to be fine, Kimble!” screeches Orrst. “We had lunch last Tuesday! But we didn’t, did we, because that hasn’t happened yet! Nothing has happened yet! I’m not sure what’s happened and what’s not! Where…what’s going on?”
“It’s your memories!” Kimble presses. “Your memories from a month ago have been resegged into your memories from today! Apparently there’s some kind of incompatibility! But, Orrst, it’s only memories! It’s nothing!”
“IT’S NOT NOTHING!” bellows Orrst. “It’s everything! Everything I see, everything I hear, is just a ghost! You’re all just ghosts, torturing me! Go away!!”
Ryers comes up with a syringe. A sedative? Smart. Ryers never was the best physicist, but he has a solid dose of cunning, and a knack for being in the right place at the right time.
“Listen to me, Orrst, listen,” Kimble soothes, trying to draw Orrst’s attention. “We can fix all this. Everything will be right again, you’ll see. Everything will be….”
Orrst spots Ryers sneaking up. “NO!” he shouts, batting the syringe out of the student’s hand. “You’re not going to take me to ghostland where the nothings never were! “ He gesticulates wildly, his hands clenched into claws.
“Don’t look at me!” he shrieks. “Damn you all, you’ll never look at me again!” His claws tear into his eyes.
TIMESTAMP 12-09-2015 12:15PM
Only I can tell that Kimble is really wiping away a tear. “Orrst’s loss taught us an important lesson,” Kimble tells the audience. “The human element is the weak link in the chain. When we pull people’s lives apart and put them back together again, it’s the mind that gives way the easiest. Fortunately, we found a solution to that problem.”
I cycle the images again. “Memories, and the recording of an entire life’s memories, is not so difficult a problem to solve,” Kimble says. “It’s just a matter of electrical impulses, decoded and reencoded in the correct order. Before a person enters the Aggregator terminal, we scan their minds and upload their memories to a storage unit. Then, as the person emerges from the far terminal, we overwrite their memories with the uploaded ones, with the fugue sequence of memories added onto the chain. They ‘remember’ having traveled, but their memories are really the memories they had of the original transit. They pick up right where they left off when they began to travel, but even though no time has elapsed, they seem to have perceived the passage of time. It keeps the minds of the travelers from cracking under the discontinuity of fuguing.”
“Naturally,” continues Kimble, “there are still some discontinuous elements. If one transits during the daytime, but fugues at night, the change in one’s surroundings becomes troublesome. If one transited while one was young, but fugues many years later while old, the body can stand the strain – the timestream just absorbs the differences and keeps on going – but the mind experiences distress. To correct for this, we detune the acuity of memory at both ends of the transit, to blur the lines of transition from one state to another.”
Kimble smiles. “Nowadays we can do this digitally, when we are reassembling the fugue memory sequence prior to download,” he says. “But in the first days of experimentation, we had a cruder approach….”
TIMESTAMP 01-27-2009 11:31AM
“How many shots of tequila is enough tequila?” I ask, shooting my fourth. I’m starting to feel warm and a little hyper.
“I don’t know,” Kimble replies. We’re standing next to the Aggregator rig in front of the Lefferts station. Ryers putters around the machine and shoos away curious passers-by. A cop walks past and frowns; I hide the bottle in my coat.
“Okay, I’m pretty sure that’s plenty of tequila. Let me have the helmet.” I’ve shaved my head for this because I want to make sure I get a good scan, even though I know the tolerances on the gear are very tight. Kimble toggles the scanner nervously. I hear a cool hum and my forehead prickles.
Ryers frowns over the monitor, then gives me a thumbs up. “Clean scan,” he announces. “Everything in your brain is uploaded.”
“Sweet,” I declare, the universe swirling around me. “Let’s transit.”
“Wait,” says Kimble, putting something in my jacket pocket. “For the journey.”
“Good deal,” I mumble. Then I step through the Aggregator. It’s incredibly anticlimactic. I don’t feel anything is different, but I know that these moments in my life are being aggregated, being banked away, to be used and reused as I see fit in days to come.
I buy a ticket, go down the steps to the platform, and board the first train that comes. I find a seat – the car is almost empty – and plunk myself down. As I do so, something solid in my pocket goes THUMP, and I remember Kimble’s gift. I pull it out. It’s an iPod with earbuds. As the train lurches forward, I play the music.
You
Must Take the A Train
To
Go To Sugar Hill Way Up in Harlem
“Nice,” I declare. Buzzed on tequila and progress, I ride to Harlem on wings of jazz.
*** --- ***
TIMESTAMP 02-18-2021 4:59PM
The imagers are flashing, making it hard to see the assembled members of the press. Fortunately nobody’s asking me to speak; I’m just here to lend credibility to Ryers. Ryers loves to speak and be seen; he can have the podium all to himself and that’s just fine by me.
“We’re very pleased at the Ryers Corporation to be at the forefront of commercial fuguing technology,” Ryers says earnestly. That’s Ryers to a tee: the young, go-getting guy, not a great scientist, but a visionary when it comes to application, a wizard at business, and an expert at seeing The Big Picture. Everybody thinks Doctor Solberg is running the show behind the scenes, but this is all Ryers’ deal. I’m just the famous scientist, working on little projects.
“We’re looking beyond innovations in travel and shipping,” Ryers tells the press. “At the Ryers Corporation, we’re aiming for nothing less than a complete reshaping of the way people live their lives – all for the better.” There is a smattering of applause, mostly from plants in the audience. Ryers knows how to work the media.
“Imagine, for instance, the fuguivator,” Ryers continues. “Why make that trip up and down an office building every day? Make it once – and never waste that time again for the rest of your life. The elevator door does all the scanning, all the aggregating, all the uploading and downloading. You’re at work in an instant – effectively travelling through time!”
I shake my head.
TIMESTAMP 12-09-2015 2:01PM
“Fuguing,” Kimble announces, suddenly looking very old and tired up on the podium, “is not time travel. Get that out of your heads this instant.”
TIMESTAMP 02-18-2021 5:00PM
“Then also – we’re developing the Sleep Capsule!” exults Ryers to the press. “It looks like a bed, but don’t be fooled. When you lie down, you are scanned and aggregated. In the next instant, you ‘awake’ – but the benefits of a full night’s rest have been conferred upon you. It’s not synthetic sleep – it’s not memory manipulation – you really slept a solid eight hours! It’s just that you slept that sleep years ago – and it’s just as good today as it was then, but now it takes no time at all! And for a few extra dollars, we have some amazing dream modules that can sequence in the most pleasant dreams you can imagine! Wake up refreshed and ready to go – every time!”
I continue to smile blandly. Never mind the fact that I would never use the stupid thing myself. I prefer to sleep my sleeps as they come, thank you very much.
“I’ll take questions now,” announces Ryers, then points to a raised hand in the crowd.
“Mister Ryers, can you comment on the safety of fuguing?” the media-man asks. “How secure are peoples’ memories and pasts?”
“Our global information base is completely, unshakably foolproof,” Ryers replies surely. “We have fully redundant data facilities in Reykjavik, Reno and Melbourne that double and triple check all memories and transit sequences. Every time a person fugues, they can rest assured that they’ll arrive in once piece, just the same as they were when they started. Our company’s track record on safety is beyond reproach.”
“But what about Kimble?” a voice calls out. Ryers finds himself temporarily at a loss for words. I reach out to grab the floating mic and pull it down in front of me.
“That was nothing but an accident,” I insist. “A sad, stupid accident.”
TIMESTAMP 09-09-2019 5:14AM
“Just like the accident Orrst had,” I complain. Kimble waves me off.
“I seem to recall only ten or so years ago, you went forward rashly with something you believed strongly in,” Kimble argues mildly. He dodders around the lab now – he’s in his seventies and his back always aches.
“Yes, and you tried to stop me. Just as I’m doing now.”
“And you ignored me, just as *I’m* doing now.”
“Dammit, Kimble! Don’t you remember what you told me long ago?”
TIMESTAMP 12-09-2015 2:01PM
“Fuguing,” Kimble announces, suddenly looking very old and tired up on the podium, “is not time travel. Get that out of your heads this instant.”
TIMESTAMP 09-09-2019 5:15AM
“Yes, I remember,” sighs Kimble. He stops puttering and buttonholes me.
“Andy,” he says seriously, “I’m an old man. This is my last chance to discover something really interesting, something really new. Everything we have done to date involves resecting backwards. I’ve worked through the equations….”
“…Equations that nobody else can understand! Not even the computer!”
“I’ve worked through the equations,” continues Kimble doggedly, “and I’m quite certain that we can resect *forwards*. We can, rather, grab the tail-end of the segment and…”
“Stop stop stop!” I squeeze my temples trying to hold my brains in. “Your explanations just make my head hurt. What you’re saying is patently nonsense. It doesn’t fit into any model of timespace that we’ve ever looked at. You’re just stringing together words that mean nothing!”
Kimble frowns. “Perhaps they’d mean something to you if you were smarter,” he spits.
“Or,” I retort, “perhaps they’re the ravings of a guy who might – MIGHT – just be going a little bit senile. And who, in an attempt to prove he’s not, is going to hurt himself.”
“Get out,” he grates. “Out!”
I leave. Later, when I’m trying to sleep, Ryers calls me. He sounds shaky, and I know something terrible has happened.
“Has something happened to Kimble?” I ask. “Is it Kimble?”
“What came out of the terminal,” stammers Ryers, “isn’t Kimble anymore.”
I fugue a train up to the lab. The A Train haunts me all the way there.
*** --- ***
TIMESTAMP 11-24-2035 4:18PM
“I don’t know you any more, Ryers,” I complain.
“It’s President-for-Life Ryers,” he replies loftily. “And I don’t give a rat’s ass what you think you know. Your relevance in the universe is largely as a footnote to history.”
“There is no history!” I shout. My outrage at Ryers’ antics has been building for years, and it’s finally reached its breaking point. “You’ve made a mockery of what humanity is all about!”
“That’s ridiculous,” Ryers scoffs. “I’m evolving the human condition.”
“You’ve outlawed children!”
“No. No, I haven’t. Not exactly,” Ryers explains. “My only point is that we have plenty of adults already, all of whom spend so much of their lives in optimized fugue-time that they’re effectively immortal. Plus, you yourself discovered the unfortunate fact that fugue-stress is greatly enhanced when an adult fugues via a childhood transit; since our lives depend so heavily on fuguing, why leave the young ones behind? We might as well all live our beautiful, harm-free lives as eternal adults, where every day is a perfect day….”
“Are you aware,” I grate, “that almost twelve percent of humanity is presently locked in a perpetual resection loop, where they are all reliving the best days of their lives over and over again, with no plan to retrieve them from that loop?”
“Of course I’m aware! I know my sales figures!” Ryers looks pained. “Those people all wanted to enter into that state, and I was only too happy to grant their wish. If heaven didn’t exist before, it does now, because I invented it!”
“That’s disgusting. You’re disgusting. Oh, don’t think I don’t know about your little extracurricular games.”
Ryers shifts uneasily in his chair. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“You do. The people in the research lab tell me what’s going on. What your pet projects are. Like the one where you aggregate, making love to a man of your same approximate build, and then you aggregate again with the positions switched, and then you work on fusing the experiences and memory sets together….”
Ryers stands up, his face purpling. “Out. Out, old man,” he commands. “Get the hell out of this office. I don’t ever want to see you again.”
TIMESTAMP 06-06-2004 12:01PM
“Don’t look at me!” Orrst shrieks. “Damn you all, you’ll never look at me again!” His claws tear into his eyes.
TIMESTAMP 11-24-2035 4:42PM
I leave Ryers’ office. I know I’ve gone too far, and there’ll be hell to pay. Ultimate power has corrupted the man to the core, and he doesn’t recognize right from wrong any more. I decide to fugue back up to the lab one last time, just to look around for old time’s sake. I scan my ID card and step through the aggregator terminal. All at once the world seems to freeze.
“I’m tired of you, Solberg,” Ryers’ voice hisses in my brain. “I’ve tolerated you long enough. You don’t realize what I’ve become. I’m not a man, I’m not a president; I’m a God now. I hold ultimate power. I decide who lives and who dies.” I know it’s not really a voice; it’s a memory string implanted in my brain. He doesn’t have to do this; he’s toying with me.
“But you, you’re not even going to get to die. You’re just going to cease to be. No resection for you at the far terminal. There’s no last stop. It’s the end of the line.” Ryers’ voice cracks as he howls with laughter, and I know that his madness is complete – as complete as Orrst’s ever was.
“Enjoy your train ride, old man,” sneers Ryers. “It’s your last.”
Even if I could go back now, I wouldn’t. It is the end of the line for me. But I don’t have that choice, because I’ve already stepped through the aggregator. I’m living a transit that occurred in the past; I’m just being allowed to remember it as if it’s happening now.
TIMESTAMP 01-27-2009 11:40AM
You
Must Take the A Train
To
Go To Sugar Hill Way Up in Harlem
TIMESTAMP 11-24-2035 4:50PM
The song again. The same old song. For this one train ride I’m young again, not an old man disgusted with the sorry state of the universe, and I’m fuzzily and pleasantly drunk, and it’s good.
TIMESTAMP 01-27-2009 11:41AM
If
You Miss the A Train
You’ll
Find You’ve Missed the Quickest Way to Harlem
TIMESTAMP 11-24-2035 4:51PM
Go to hell, Ryers. You can have the universe that you have made. You can have the perversions you’ve cooked up. There’s nothing I can do about it. Somebody like Kimble could have done something, but I’ve never been Kimble and never pretended to be.
TIMESTAMP 01-27-2009 11:42AM
Hurry, Get On, Now, It’s Coming
Listen to Those Rails A-Thrumming
(All Aboard!)
TIMESTAMP 11-24-2035 4:51PM
I remember Kimble, with his trumpet, playing this song back in his lab,
TIMESTAMP 09-10-2002 2:14AM
“You’re definitely not making Ellington’s band,” I smirked.
TIMESTAMP 11-24-2035 ?:?? ??
,thinking he could play the trumpet solo for this song,
TIMESTAMP 09-10-2002 2:14AM
“Ellington,” Kimble announced loftily, “has been dead for twenty-eight years, and I am therefore a superior musician to him.”
TIME?TAMP ?1-2???03??? ??? ? ??
,and actually doing a good job of it for once.
“Hi, Doctor Solberg,” says Kimble, smiling broadly. He’s young again – his mop of hair is only grey – and he doesn’t seem to mind the lurching of the train. He sits down next to me, then plays a few licks on Ellington’s standard.
“This….this isn’t my transit,” I say.
“No, not the original. I guess it isn’t.”
“That’s impossible,”
(TIMESTAMP MISSING)
“You can never go back!” Kimble said, back in his lab long ago. “Don’t you understand that?”
(TIMESTAMP MISSING)
I blink. “You can’t do that,” I blurt.
His shaggy eyebrows waggle. “Can’t I?”
(TIMESTAMP MISSING)
He’s so good with the trumpet, it seems a shame to interrupt his playing. “So you didn’t die back in the lab.”
He shrugs modestly. “It sort of depends on your perspective.”
“Kimble,” I say, “we’ve got to get back. Ryers has gone crazy. He’s….”
“Relax,” soothes Kimble, grinning broadly again. “He’s isolated in his own little dead end. The only ones in there with him are himself, and the shadows of people who don’t really exist anymore.”
“Oh.” I puzzle that one. “Then where do we go?”
“I’ll show you,” replies Kimble affably. “We’re going to take a new type of trip.” He lays into the trumpet once more, and the train rumbles on.
Get
On the A Train
Soon
You will be on Sugar Hill in Harlem
The jazz sweeps us through. It’s a mighty fine ride.
TIMESTAMP 01-27-2009 11:40AM
You
Must Take the A Train
To
Go To Sugar Hill Way Up in Harlem
TIMESTAMP 11-24-2035 4:50PM
The song stirs me every time. I hear it every time I take this train. It seemed like a good idea the first time I took this ride. Now it’s with me every day. It used to annoy me, but now I welcome it. It’s something constant I can rely on. It helps me keep things linear.
TIMESTAMP 01-27-2009 11:41AM
If
You Miss the A Train
You’ll
Find You’ve Missed the Quickest Way to Harlem
TIMESTAMP 11-24-2035 4:51PM
It gets non-linear sometimes. That seems to be the only downside to fuguing that I can see. I’ve fugued more than anybody else in history and I should know. When you’ve fugued as many times as I have, the linearity of memory gets all jumbled around.
One moment you’re remembering something that happened years ago
TIMESTAMP 03-31-2012 5:15AM
And then the next moment, it’s the next day, or two decades ago,
TIMESTAMP 07-04-2015 12:21PM
Or maybe it’s the exact same moment, over again,
TIMESTAMP 11-24-2035 4:51PM
And it doesn’t all happen in the same order as your timeline, but it still all strings together to make sense. Like cars on a train, they don’t necessarily always happen in the same order.
TIMESTAMP 01-27-2009 11:42AM
Hurry, Get On, Now, It’s Coming
Listen to Those Rails A-Thrumming
(All Aboard!)
TIMESTAMP 11-24-2035 4:51PM
The trumpet makes me remember Kimble and smile. Kimble fancied himself a jazz trumpeter, when he wasn’t being the third millennium’s Einstein, and he used to play A Train in our lab while we were working through trans-continuum matrices on the blackboard. Kimble, I once said,
TIMESTAMP 09-10-2002 2:14AM
“You’re definitely not making Ellington’s band,” I smirked.
“Ellington,” Kimble announced loftily, “has been dead for twenty-eight years, and I am therefore a superior musician to him.”
“But if you’re right about chronometry and energy fields, you could go back in time and try out for his band so he could reject you,” I teased.
“No, no, NO!” Kimble snatched up chalk from the eraser shelf and threw it at me.
“You can never go back!” he said. “Don’t you understand that?”
TIMESTAMP 01-27-2009 11:44AM
Get
On the A Train
Soon
You will be on Sugar Hill in Harlem
TIMESTAMP 11-24-2035 4:52PM
And of course I understand that now. When he died I had to put on his mantle, had to become the Einstein of the day, of yesterday, of never again. But the mantle never really fit me. I didn’t want to fill Kimble’s enormous shoes. I could never really shake the feeling that I didn’t really belong here. And now, I suppose, that feeling has come to fruition.
This is my last ride on the A Train.
*** --- ***
TIMESTAMP 08-21-1998 8:01AM
I’m the oldest student in the group who still hasn’t gotten a doctorate. I dropped out of school twice, and my thesis advisor shot himself once. I’m long in the tooth for a graduate student, and many programs would have simply dropped me. But this new crazy guy, this Kimble dude, has asked me to join his research team.
I knock on his door. His office looks like a cross between a landfill and a different landfill, both smelly in different ways and full of recyclables. He looks up – a boyish face under a mop of grey curls – and smiles.
“If you’re Solberg, you’re supposed to know something about Shukogani Transforms,” he says, apparently not feeling the need for introductory pleasantries.
“I am Solberg, and I tried to write a paper on uniformly distributed particle interactions using transforms,” I reply.
Kimble nods sagely. “You were beat out by the Finnish team by one month,” he comments. I shrug. I didn’t need that stupid Nobel Prize anyway.
“Well, you’re not lucky,” he sighs, “but you’ll have to do. I could use a guy who knows his way around some of the more interesting math. I’m a very busy guy and I need help.”
Kimble knows he doesn’t have to sell it. It’s the only shot I have. “Okay,” I say. “What are we working on?”
Kimble’s eyes sparkle. “We’re going to bend time.”
“Bend time?”
“Well, cut it up, anyway. Spindle, fold and mutilate time. Reshape time to our own purposes.”
I blink. “You can’t do that,” I blurt.
His shaggy eyebrows waggle. “Can’t I?”
TIMESTAMP 12-09-2015 2:01PM
And it appears that he can. And also that I get to share in a Nobel Prize anyway. He is presenting his lecture on fuguing the day before receiving the award on behalf of the team.
“Fuguing,” Kimble announces, suddenly looking very old and tired up on the podium, “is not time travel. Get that out of your heads this instant. It is, rather, a reuse of sections of time. Time cannot be traveled through – no more than we travel through it every day - but it can be looped and grafted.” I cycle the holographic projector without needing prompting; I have helped Kimble give this presentation many times.
“We know that an instantaneous translocation through space is impossible – or, rather, very very difficult to accomplish,” continues Kimble, pointing to a Solberg Diagram. “But, we can take a shortcut. Suppose you walk from point A to point B. Using a Kimble-Orrst Aggregator, we can capture this sequence of moments in time, something like filming a short movie. Then, later on, suppose you want to walk from point A to point B again. Instead of taking the time and trouble to make this journey, you decide to fugue. You step into the Aggregator terminal at A, but instead of living that experience again, we splice in the ‘film’ of your previous trip. You, again, live the experience of traveling from point A to point B. However, this all takes place in the past, back when you did it originally. The time necessary to travel happened the first time you did it, so it doesn’t take any time at all the second time. You step out of the terminal at point B as if no time has elapsed at all. You have fugued, and it is like teleportation, and you can do it again and again….”
TIMESTAMP 01-27-2009 11:09AM
“…and again!” finishes Kimble. “Over and over, for the rest of your life! Are you sure that’s what you want?”
“Of course it’s what I want. It’s what we all want!” We are walking towards the train station in Brooklyn, both excited and distressed at the same time.
“I know, I know.” Kimble pulls at his mop of hair, now almost white. “But, Andy, don’t you think we should run a few more tests before you….”
“No. Enough tests.” I stop and grab Kimble by the shoulders. I look him in the eye. “If we’re ever going to prove this thing works, we need to man up and run an actual test. Not on mice, not on chimps, on me.”
“But Orrst….”
“Forget Orrst.” But, of course, that’s impossible for the both of us. Neither of us will ever forget what happened to Orrst.
“Look,” I continue, “forget about proving anything. I’m doing this for the convenience. I live in Brooklyn. The lab is in Harlem. I ride this train every day to work. Do you know how much time I waste on this train every day of my life?”
Kimble nodded sadly. “Twenty-three minutes and….”
“Yeah, I know, I know.” I keep walking towards the train station. “But this is the last ride. It’s a nice day, and that’s rare. It’s a Sunday, so the train isn’t too crowded, and that’s nice too. I’m going to take the perfect ride up to Harlem, and it’s going to stay with me the rest of my life.”
Kimble hasn’t given up. “But the dangers!”
TIMESTAMP 12-09-2015 2:14PM
“Yes, the dangers are real,” Kimble admits to the audience of Swedes and scientists. “Playing around with the timestream isn’t something to undertake lightly. Initially, we thought that the chief issue would be the recombining of the timestreams. If the edges don’t match up perfectly – if there is a discontinuity in the reality of the two segments to be conjoined – then, we thought, there might be some kind of a catastrophe. Our fears were unfounded here; it turns out that the timestream is tremendously fluid and has great inertia, and it is capable of smoothing out any bumps and jumps that might occur along the way. “
Kimble paused to polish his glasses soberly. “No, the real hazard, as it turns out, has nothing to do with spacetime at all. Spacetime is quite tolerant to discontinuity. But the human mind, on the other hand….”
TIMESTAMP 06-06-2004 12:01PM
“He’s snapped,” Ryers declares, pacing me as I pull off my coat. We’re almost running through the lab now. Several of the younger lab assistants gather in the halls, muttering darkly to each other as we bustle past. Orrst’s thin screams can be heard echoing through the building ductwork.
“When did he fugue?” I ask, snatching a printout from one of the Russians and scanning it on the go.
“He apparently made the initial transit last month,” Ryers explains. “Didn’t tell anybody; probably wanted to get credit for being the first. Just a walk across the lab. He resegged an hour ago and immediately went catatonic. When he came to he was like this.”
“Where’s Kimble?”
“He’s already here!”
We burst into the lab. It’s a pretty tame-looking place for the site of the first fugue, successful or otherwise – some messy desks and chalkboards, workstations, a few server racks, and that’s it. Oh, and the naked scientist huddled in the corner, screaming his lungs out. Kimble is trying to talk to him.
“I’m not Orrst!” shouts Orrst. “I was Orrst! And then I wasn’t! but now I am! Or not!”
“Calm down. Calm down!” insists Kimble. “It’s going to be fine, just fine!”
“It used to be fine, Kimble!” screeches Orrst. “We had lunch last Tuesday! But we didn’t, did we, because that hasn’t happened yet! Nothing has happened yet! I’m not sure what’s happened and what’s not! Where…what’s going on?”
“It’s your memories!” Kimble presses. “Your memories from a month ago have been resegged into your memories from today! Apparently there’s some kind of incompatibility! But, Orrst, it’s only memories! It’s nothing!”
“IT’S NOT NOTHING!” bellows Orrst. “It’s everything! Everything I see, everything I hear, is just a ghost! You’re all just ghosts, torturing me! Go away!!”
Ryers comes up with a syringe. A sedative? Smart. Ryers never was the best physicist, but he has a solid dose of cunning, and a knack for being in the right place at the right time.
“Listen to me, Orrst, listen,” Kimble soothes, trying to draw Orrst’s attention. “We can fix all this. Everything will be right again, you’ll see. Everything will be….”
Orrst spots Ryers sneaking up. “NO!” he shouts, batting the syringe out of the student’s hand. “You’re not going to take me to ghostland where the nothings never were! “ He gesticulates wildly, his hands clenched into claws.
“Don’t look at me!” he shrieks. “Damn you all, you’ll never look at me again!” His claws tear into his eyes.
TIMESTAMP 12-09-2015 12:15PM
Only I can tell that Kimble is really wiping away a tear. “Orrst’s loss taught us an important lesson,” Kimble tells the audience. “The human element is the weak link in the chain. When we pull people’s lives apart and put them back together again, it’s the mind that gives way the easiest. Fortunately, we found a solution to that problem.”
I cycle the images again. “Memories, and the recording of an entire life’s memories, is not so difficult a problem to solve,” Kimble says. “It’s just a matter of electrical impulses, decoded and reencoded in the correct order. Before a person enters the Aggregator terminal, we scan their minds and upload their memories to a storage unit. Then, as the person emerges from the far terminal, we overwrite their memories with the uploaded ones, with the fugue sequence of memories added onto the chain. They ‘remember’ having traveled, but their memories are really the memories they had of the original transit. They pick up right where they left off when they began to travel, but even though no time has elapsed, they seem to have perceived the passage of time. It keeps the minds of the travelers from cracking under the discontinuity of fuguing.”
“Naturally,” continues Kimble, “there are still some discontinuous elements. If one transits during the daytime, but fugues at night, the change in one’s surroundings becomes troublesome. If one transited while one was young, but fugues many years later while old, the body can stand the strain – the timestream just absorbs the differences and keeps on going – but the mind experiences distress. To correct for this, we detune the acuity of memory at both ends of the transit, to blur the lines of transition from one state to another.”
Kimble smiles. “Nowadays we can do this digitally, when we are reassembling the fugue memory sequence prior to download,” he says. “But in the first days of experimentation, we had a cruder approach….”
TIMESTAMP 01-27-2009 11:31AM
“How many shots of tequila is enough tequila?” I ask, shooting my fourth. I’m starting to feel warm and a little hyper.
“I don’t know,” Kimble replies. We’re standing next to the Aggregator rig in front of the Lefferts station. Ryers putters around the machine and shoos away curious passers-by. A cop walks past and frowns; I hide the bottle in my coat.
“Okay, I’m pretty sure that’s plenty of tequila. Let me have the helmet.” I’ve shaved my head for this because I want to make sure I get a good scan, even though I know the tolerances on the gear are very tight. Kimble toggles the scanner nervously. I hear a cool hum and my forehead prickles.
Ryers frowns over the monitor, then gives me a thumbs up. “Clean scan,” he announces. “Everything in your brain is uploaded.”
“Sweet,” I declare, the universe swirling around me. “Let’s transit.”
“Wait,” says Kimble, putting something in my jacket pocket. “For the journey.”
“Good deal,” I mumble. Then I step through the Aggregator. It’s incredibly anticlimactic. I don’t feel anything is different, but I know that these moments in my life are being aggregated, being banked away, to be used and reused as I see fit in days to come.
I buy a ticket, go down the steps to the platform, and board the first train that comes. I find a seat – the car is almost empty – and plunk myself down. As I do so, something solid in my pocket goes THUMP, and I remember Kimble’s gift. I pull it out. It’s an iPod with earbuds. As the train lurches forward, I play the music.
You
Must Take the A Train
To
Go To Sugar Hill Way Up in Harlem
“Nice,” I declare. Buzzed on tequila and progress, I ride to Harlem on wings of jazz.
*** --- ***
TIMESTAMP 02-18-2021 4:59PM
The imagers are flashing, making it hard to see the assembled members of the press. Fortunately nobody’s asking me to speak; I’m just here to lend credibility to Ryers. Ryers loves to speak and be seen; he can have the podium all to himself and that’s just fine by me.
“We’re very pleased at the Ryers Corporation to be at the forefront of commercial fuguing technology,” Ryers says earnestly. That’s Ryers to a tee: the young, go-getting guy, not a great scientist, but a visionary when it comes to application, a wizard at business, and an expert at seeing The Big Picture. Everybody thinks Doctor Solberg is running the show behind the scenes, but this is all Ryers’ deal. I’m just the famous scientist, working on little projects.
“We’re looking beyond innovations in travel and shipping,” Ryers tells the press. “At the Ryers Corporation, we’re aiming for nothing less than a complete reshaping of the way people live their lives – all for the better.” There is a smattering of applause, mostly from plants in the audience. Ryers knows how to work the media.
“Imagine, for instance, the fuguivator,” Ryers continues. “Why make that trip up and down an office building every day? Make it once – and never waste that time again for the rest of your life. The elevator door does all the scanning, all the aggregating, all the uploading and downloading. You’re at work in an instant – effectively travelling through time!”
I shake my head.
TIMESTAMP 12-09-2015 2:01PM
“Fuguing,” Kimble announces, suddenly looking very old and tired up on the podium, “is not time travel. Get that out of your heads this instant.”
TIMESTAMP 02-18-2021 5:00PM
“Then also – we’re developing the Sleep Capsule!” exults Ryers to the press. “It looks like a bed, but don’t be fooled. When you lie down, you are scanned and aggregated. In the next instant, you ‘awake’ – but the benefits of a full night’s rest have been conferred upon you. It’s not synthetic sleep – it’s not memory manipulation – you really slept a solid eight hours! It’s just that you slept that sleep years ago – and it’s just as good today as it was then, but now it takes no time at all! And for a few extra dollars, we have some amazing dream modules that can sequence in the most pleasant dreams you can imagine! Wake up refreshed and ready to go – every time!”
I continue to smile blandly. Never mind the fact that I would never use the stupid thing myself. I prefer to sleep my sleeps as they come, thank you very much.
“I’ll take questions now,” announces Ryers, then points to a raised hand in the crowd.
“Mister Ryers, can you comment on the safety of fuguing?” the media-man asks. “How secure are peoples’ memories and pasts?”
“Our global information base is completely, unshakably foolproof,” Ryers replies surely. “We have fully redundant data facilities in Reykjavik, Reno and Melbourne that double and triple check all memories and transit sequences. Every time a person fugues, they can rest assured that they’ll arrive in once piece, just the same as they were when they started. Our company’s track record on safety is beyond reproach.”
“But what about Kimble?” a voice calls out. Ryers finds himself temporarily at a loss for words. I reach out to grab the floating mic and pull it down in front of me.
“That was nothing but an accident,” I insist. “A sad, stupid accident.”
TIMESTAMP 09-09-2019 5:14AM
“Just like the accident Orrst had,” I complain. Kimble waves me off.
“I seem to recall only ten or so years ago, you went forward rashly with something you believed strongly in,” Kimble argues mildly. He dodders around the lab now – he’s in his seventies and his back always aches.
“Yes, and you tried to stop me. Just as I’m doing now.”
“And you ignored me, just as *I’m* doing now.”
“Dammit, Kimble! Don’t you remember what you told me long ago?”
TIMESTAMP 12-09-2015 2:01PM
“Fuguing,” Kimble announces, suddenly looking very old and tired up on the podium, “is not time travel. Get that out of your heads this instant.”
TIMESTAMP 09-09-2019 5:15AM
“Yes, I remember,” sighs Kimble. He stops puttering and buttonholes me.
“Andy,” he says seriously, “I’m an old man. This is my last chance to discover something really interesting, something really new. Everything we have done to date involves resecting backwards. I’ve worked through the equations….”
“…Equations that nobody else can understand! Not even the computer!”
“I’ve worked through the equations,” continues Kimble doggedly, “and I’m quite certain that we can resect *forwards*. We can, rather, grab the tail-end of the segment and…”
“Stop stop stop!” I squeeze my temples trying to hold my brains in. “Your explanations just make my head hurt. What you’re saying is patently nonsense. It doesn’t fit into any model of timespace that we’ve ever looked at. You’re just stringing together words that mean nothing!”
Kimble frowns. “Perhaps they’d mean something to you if you were smarter,” he spits.
“Or,” I retort, “perhaps they’re the ravings of a guy who might – MIGHT – just be going a little bit senile. And who, in an attempt to prove he’s not, is going to hurt himself.”
“Get out,” he grates. “Out!”
I leave. Later, when I’m trying to sleep, Ryers calls me. He sounds shaky, and I know something terrible has happened.
“Has something happened to Kimble?” I ask. “Is it Kimble?”
“What came out of the terminal,” stammers Ryers, “isn’t Kimble anymore.”
I fugue a train up to the lab. The A Train haunts me all the way there.
*** --- ***
TIMESTAMP 11-24-2035 4:18PM
“I don’t know you any more, Ryers,” I complain.
“It’s President-for-Life Ryers,” he replies loftily. “And I don’t give a rat’s ass what you think you know. Your relevance in the universe is largely as a footnote to history.”
“There is no history!” I shout. My outrage at Ryers’ antics has been building for years, and it’s finally reached its breaking point. “You’ve made a mockery of what humanity is all about!”
“That’s ridiculous,” Ryers scoffs. “I’m evolving the human condition.”
“You’ve outlawed children!”
“No. No, I haven’t. Not exactly,” Ryers explains. “My only point is that we have plenty of adults already, all of whom spend so much of their lives in optimized fugue-time that they’re effectively immortal. Plus, you yourself discovered the unfortunate fact that fugue-stress is greatly enhanced when an adult fugues via a childhood transit; since our lives depend so heavily on fuguing, why leave the young ones behind? We might as well all live our beautiful, harm-free lives as eternal adults, where every day is a perfect day….”
“Are you aware,” I grate, “that almost twelve percent of humanity is presently locked in a perpetual resection loop, where they are all reliving the best days of their lives over and over again, with no plan to retrieve them from that loop?”
“Of course I’m aware! I know my sales figures!” Ryers looks pained. “Those people all wanted to enter into that state, and I was only too happy to grant their wish. If heaven didn’t exist before, it does now, because I invented it!”
“That’s disgusting. You’re disgusting. Oh, don’t think I don’t know about your little extracurricular games.”
Ryers shifts uneasily in his chair. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“You do. The people in the research lab tell me what’s going on. What your pet projects are. Like the one where you aggregate, making love to a man of your same approximate build, and then you aggregate again with the positions switched, and then you work on fusing the experiences and memory sets together….”
Ryers stands up, his face purpling. “Out. Out, old man,” he commands. “Get the hell out of this office. I don’t ever want to see you again.”
TIMESTAMP 06-06-2004 12:01PM
“Don’t look at me!” Orrst shrieks. “Damn you all, you’ll never look at me again!” His claws tear into his eyes.
TIMESTAMP 11-24-2035 4:42PM
I leave Ryers’ office. I know I’ve gone too far, and there’ll be hell to pay. Ultimate power has corrupted the man to the core, and he doesn’t recognize right from wrong any more. I decide to fugue back up to the lab one last time, just to look around for old time’s sake. I scan my ID card and step through the aggregator terminal. All at once the world seems to freeze.
“I’m tired of you, Solberg,” Ryers’ voice hisses in my brain. “I’ve tolerated you long enough. You don’t realize what I’ve become. I’m not a man, I’m not a president; I’m a God now. I hold ultimate power. I decide who lives and who dies.” I know it’s not really a voice; it’s a memory string implanted in my brain. He doesn’t have to do this; he’s toying with me.
“But you, you’re not even going to get to die. You’re just going to cease to be. No resection for you at the far terminal. There’s no last stop. It’s the end of the line.” Ryers’ voice cracks as he howls with laughter, and I know that his madness is complete – as complete as Orrst’s ever was.
“Enjoy your train ride, old man,” sneers Ryers. “It’s your last.”
Even if I could go back now, I wouldn’t. It is the end of the line for me. But I don’t have that choice, because I’ve already stepped through the aggregator. I’m living a transit that occurred in the past; I’m just being allowed to remember it as if it’s happening now.
TIMESTAMP 01-27-2009 11:40AM
You
Must Take the A Train
To
Go To Sugar Hill Way Up in Harlem
TIMESTAMP 11-24-2035 4:50PM
The song again. The same old song. For this one train ride I’m young again, not an old man disgusted with the sorry state of the universe, and I’m fuzzily and pleasantly drunk, and it’s good.
TIMESTAMP 01-27-2009 11:41AM
If
You Miss the A Train
You’ll
Find You’ve Missed the Quickest Way to Harlem
TIMESTAMP 11-24-2035 4:51PM
Go to hell, Ryers. You can have the universe that you have made. You can have the perversions you’ve cooked up. There’s nothing I can do about it. Somebody like Kimble could have done something, but I’ve never been Kimble and never pretended to be.
TIMESTAMP 01-27-2009 11:42AM
Hurry, Get On, Now, It’s Coming
Listen to Those Rails A-Thrumming
(All Aboard!)
TIMESTAMP 11-24-2035 4:51PM
I remember Kimble, with his trumpet, playing this song back in his lab,
TIMESTAMP 09-10-2002 2:14AM
“You’re definitely not making Ellington’s band,” I smirked.
TIMESTAMP 11-24-2035 ?:?? ??
,thinking he could play the trumpet solo for this song,
TIMESTAMP 09-10-2002 2:14AM
“Ellington,” Kimble announced loftily, “has been dead for twenty-eight years, and I am therefore a superior musician to him.”
TIME?TAMP ?1-2???03??? ??? ? ??
,and actually doing a good job of it for once.
“Hi, Doctor Solberg,” says Kimble, smiling broadly. He’s young again – his mop of hair is only grey – and he doesn’t seem to mind the lurching of the train. He sits down next to me, then plays a few licks on Ellington’s standard.
“This….this isn’t my transit,” I say.
“No, not the original. I guess it isn’t.”
“That’s impossible,”
(TIMESTAMP MISSING)
“You can never go back!” Kimble said, back in his lab long ago. “Don’t you understand that?”
(TIMESTAMP MISSING)
I blink. “You can’t do that,” I blurt.
His shaggy eyebrows waggle. “Can’t I?”
(TIMESTAMP MISSING)
He’s so good with the trumpet, it seems a shame to interrupt his playing. “So you didn’t die back in the lab.”
He shrugs modestly. “It sort of depends on your perspective.”
“Kimble,” I say, “we’ve got to get back. Ryers has gone crazy. He’s….”
“Relax,” soothes Kimble, grinning broadly again. “He’s isolated in his own little dead end. The only ones in there with him are himself, and the shadows of people who don’t really exist anymore.”
“Oh.” I puzzle that one. “Then where do we go?”
“I’ll show you,” replies Kimble affably. “We’re going to take a new type of trip.” He lays into the trumpet once more, and the train rumbles on.
Get
On the A Train
Soon
You will be on Sugar Hill in Harlem
The jazz sweeps us through. It’s a mighty fine ride.
