Recursion

by Mark P. Suszko

 

The scientists gathered in a physical conference room, shielded to outside observation by every known anti-spy technology they could imagine... and being especially creative scientists, they could imagine nearly anything. 

 

They were there to plan for saving not just their world, but existence itself. If that was even possible. Half the room was convinced it wasn’t, that the fate of the perceptible universe was sealed.

 

Before them sat the notebook.  Debate ran ‘round the circle of the finest minds of Earth.

 

“We should just burn it now. Without reading it.”

 

“That was probably thought of and tried already. But it’s here, ergo, that did not work. Um, will not work. (sigh)  We don’t have the right language to talk about this.”

 

“There is another tactic we could employ: use what’s in that book to go back, warn people, and un-do... what’s happened. Will happen, I guess.”

 

“If we keep it locked up, unread, do we achieve some kind of stasis?”

 

“I don’t see how. If that worked, we wouldn’t be having this meeting, would we?”

 

“I should also point out that not everyone outside this room is in favor of un-doing what we’re talking about.”

 

“Yes, some want to burn the whole thing down, as long as they can be ruler of the ashes. As one of the potential ashes, I say, I’m not excited about that idea, and I am in favor of...  taking steps.”

 

“We don’t know enough about it: we’re monkeys, being handed a nuke. We should defer this decision to our posterity: with the tools in that book, and more wisdom and experience than us, they could come back and tell us what to do. Or go do it themselves.”

 

“So you want to go thru hell for nothing?”

 

“We could take a wait-and-see approach.”

 

 

-----

 

 

“This is sick and twisted; how can you come back and watch this every day?”

 

“Nobody knows we’re watching; the viewer is passive-only.  And some of us find it entertaining. Quite a few, actually.”

 

“Watching the same alien person die over and over again is entertaining?”

 

“Well, they kill him a different way each time. Trying to guess is amusing. “

 

“But isn’t he feeling it?”

 

“He feels it, in the moment, but he doesn’t remember it, once everything re-sets. The creativity of the assassins is something to see. Sometimes it’s pretty subtle, sometimes hilariously over the top.  I particularly like the one where they sent back a lovely actress-agent to seduce him away from his work. I thought that plan stood a chance, until his son found dad’s old notes.  That one got a lot of repeat viewing, prurience is eternal...  Other times, it’s one or more separate future factions, fighting each other to prevent or execute the murders. The poor bastard watches them fight it out, or have a reasoned debate in front of him, before he dies. Again.”

 

“But he keeps on inventing time travel anyway.”

 

“Or someone else does. It’s the causality wall. You would think the future assassins would have figured it out at least once. For some reason, though, they don’t. 

 

“Causality wall?”

 

“It’s a variation on Zeno’s paradox. With each new attempt to go back in time and un-invent time travel, the chronauts destroy their own timeline, thus, they don’t exist to try and go back and stop time travel from being invented in the first place. The overlapping attempts create a stronger and stronger barrier of undone quantum superpositions, forcing the senders in the future to use bigger machines, more powerful energy supplies, sending more time-troopers or bigger weapons ever-deeper into the past. For the first century around the crisis node, they all tried to cut it too fine, to the moments before he finished the theorem and proof, because once he’s told anybody what’s in his head, its unstoppable.  When they built too much turbulence around that node, they started going deeper into his lifetime, even back to childhood. Then back to his parents. Then his entire genetic line. Each time, they make the time wound larger, affecting more people, more history. Until it re-sets.”

 

“They don’t understand recursion in the future?”

 

“I think it’s more like they refuse to surrender to it. We know they are exceptionally motivated. Some pretty horrible stuff must happen in our futures to inspire these missions back in time. We exist parallel to this point in his timeline. No way we can know.

 

“So they keep trying because they don’t know what happens? They don’t understand that it’s useless?”

 

“Observing always affects the quantum state. That’s why we watch from our invisible place on the sidelines, with passive instruments only - and we don’t try to stop anything. Or else we’d get pulled into their loop. It just takes someone in our plane to imagine a fix, and we could b   “

 

- By Mark Suszko