Oh, where to begin?
That’s a little joke. The idea of a beginning is ridiculous enough within a singular, linear frame of reference. For me it’s like drawing a dot on a piece of paper, pointing at it, and saying “There, that’s the center of the universe.”
Ah, time. It’s more complicated than anyone realizes. Everything is, really. You think of the very air you breathe as “oxygen,” but it’s a cocktail of multiple molecular elements, maintained at just the right temperature and pressure within the relative homeostasis produced by this planet’s molten core and incredibly fast rotational speed, allowing it to be aspirated and serve as a constant cellular fuel source for your body as every organ has developed over millions of years of evolution.
Time is like that, and saying “now” is essentially the same thing as saying “air.” It means far more than you think.
My name is Gustav Polchin, at least as far as I can remember, and my friends call me Gus, at least when I first meet them. Causality is a guideline I tend to ignore. It’s a necessity for my work. And thank you for mentioning that embarrassing nickname Grandpa Paradox only once in the story. I’m not sure how that started. Was that another joke? No, the question, not the name.
Ah, yes. Please call me Gus, since you have when I met you. And I trust you realize that this recording did come out as complete nonsense. Your editor was a saint.
You’re going to edit this interview yourself? That was very funny. You should focus on just keeping notes, and get a good pair of scissors. Most people like you get the best results from decoupe. Look up William S. Boroughs. He’ll have been one of the greats.
Ah, my tenses. Please try to ignore them. I’ll try to keep them simple, but time is a fluid, after all. It’s easy to get drunk on it.
Hm. That was very clever! I wonder how many times I’ve thought of it. You should write it down. Actually, I think you told it to me when we first met. Could I borrow that pen when you’re done?
I’m sorry, I believe your question was why they call me Grandpa Paradox. Have I answered it, or am I going to?
***
Instead of jumping straight to how it started, let’s put a thumbtack over where I am right now, and work outward from there. I always find it best to do that, find your footing then look around at your surroundings. It’s so natural in three dimensions, but no one considers doing it for time.
I’m Grandpa Paradox, a member of the New York Bulwark, and-
What’s the Bulwark? I apologize, I’m a member of Liberty’s Torch. No, they changed the name. Please give me a moment. As I said, it’s about finding your footing, here and now. Slow breath, envision the date, know the place, and… good.
I’m Grandpa Paradox, a reserve member of Defense Society of America. I’ll happily jump to save the city, country, and world when it’s in danger. I have been for, um, decades?
Wait, I apologize. I’m getting mixed up with myself, and we really don’t want to discuss more than one of me. I’m none of those things I just said. None of that is in there heres, nows, or thens. Elsewhere. Definitely elsewhere. Let me start in the middle again.
I’m Grandpa Paradox. You could consider me a sort of temporal ecologist. Have I explained how time is a lot like air? The complexity analogy? Well, all those complex parts of “now” that you never have to think of when you’re in it, I help make sure that “now” you’re living is as safe as the “air” you’re breathing. It’s more complicated than it sounds.
Speaking of complicated, I’ve already sounded very confusing to you, right? Good, I always find it easy to start with what’s seen as confusing. It’s always the simplest for me, but sometimes I’m going to have forgotten to do it.
You’re tapping your pen and sighing a lot. I’ve definitely already started at not the beginning. I’ll get more reductive from here, then. You understand what I’ll say about your editor, right? I can give you their name. They really did a great job on making this coherent. Well, as coherent as it can be without completely losing the plot.
So, anyway, here we are. Right here and right now. Me talking, you listening, at this splotch in time. Yes, splotch is the best word. Trust me, there may be a purpose, but there’s no such thing as a point.
***
You’re running out of ink? Well, it happens to the best of us. You should really bring more than one pen with you for these things. Though I suppose in most cases it’s easier for you to type your notes. Try tapping the tip sharply on the table a few times. It helps get the ink loose.
Did you bring a notebook with you like I asked? Oh, it’s right there. Good, nevermind that.
You keep tapping that pen. Am I really being that frustrating to follow?
***
If it isn’t already obvious, I don’t experience time linearly. Most people think I live backwards, like Merlin, who didn’t. That’s as accurate as saying I live time forwards. Now, sideways or diagonally? It’s incredibly reductive, but it’s a start, because it lets you picture time beyond a bidirectional framework.
Hah! Yes, I’ve found a start of something! That happens so rarely. It’s a start to say that I experience time in a direction neither forward nor backward. Really, even saying I experience it in any singular vector is inaccurate, but again, it’s a start, and that is exceedingly rare for me in the first place. Actually, so are first places, now that I’m thinking about it.
Nearly everyone here experiences time as a straight line, from one point to a point that follows, to a point that follows that, and so on. There is cause, then there is effect, and everything functions based on that pattern. And don’t worry, that’s largely true. Time as you perceive it is real, and not an illusion or a misunderstanding.
There’s a paper notebook in your bag. Would you mind taking it out and giving me a clean piece of paper? Get a pen, too. Those notes you’re talking will become very hard to follow as we talk. I’ve found it’s best to use free-floating blocks of thoughts in these interviews, and drawing squiggly arrows between them. It’s as reductive as what I’ll have explained to you, but it’s a start. Well, no, I don’t suppose that is the start, is it?
Thank you. Good, the paper’s lined. Here’s your- wait, I apologize, could I borrow that pen for a moment? Thanks again.
Like I said, time as you experience it is a line. See, I’ll draw two points on one of these rules, and an arrow that goes from one point, through another, and onward. That’s the majority case for everyone here. Each rule is a line of points traveling in one direction. Nice and neat and parallel.
Now tell me, looking at this piece of paper, do you see thin black lines and a thick black line, or thick white stripes? You see the black lines because the page is ruled and then I drew on it, so they stand out, but there’s still a lot of blank paper. Those rules on the page are for writing words between them, after all.
Stop writing right there for a- er, seven seconds? Words written between those lines aren’t important. They’ll just muddle what I’m trying to describe. My point is the blank space between them.
All of these lines, nice and even, going in the same direction. That’s time for almost everyone, and that’s how it should be. That’s the “now” you’re in being the “air” you can breathe.
I already explained that, just wait.
So what happens when points are drawn between those lines? What happens when new lines are drawn in different directions. What happens when this stops being a nicely ruled piece of paper and becomes a mess of jagged zig-zags, swirls, dots, and- what happened to that coffee ring? That was such a beautiful part of the metaphor.
Oh, well. I’ll make it now. Here, messy sip, put the mug down, pick it up again. There’s the coffee ring!
By the way, could I- Sorry again. I mean, here’s your pen back. I’m going to keep it for a bit, though. Try to remember that.
***
The best way to describe what I do is that I look for all the things that shouldn’t have been going to be, and nudge them in the right direction. All of those dots between the lines, and the lines going in the wrong directions, and the coffee ring? I clean them up.
I already showed it to you, just wait.
Take this flat image of a two-dimensional plane with many correct and some incorrect points and vectors, and picture it expanded to three dimensions, like a big cube.
I’ll say have patience. This is why I told you to take out that paper notebook. Typing notes was nonsense.
Cut-up technique. William S. Boroughs. Weirdly enough, dadaist writing is one of the most effective ways to keep track of what I explained. Remind me to tell you later.
Just picture a cube with a bunch of arrows going in the same direction, and a bunch of other lines and points working around and through those arrows. The arrows are causality as you should perceive it, and all those other bits are possible problems that need to have been solved.
I am keeping my tenses simple, didn’t I already say I would?
The mechanisms aren’t important, and neither are all of the extra points and lines on the paper, but some of them can make the nice little arrows that are supposed to be there, all merrily going in that one direction, get kinks in them. And that coffee ring? Hoo boy, you don’t want to know.
What coffee ring and paper? Right, picture a cube, and a… coffee sphere in it. Just a sphere of spilled coffee. This is all wildly reductive anyway. Sometimes I don’t know why I even try drawing it.
***
I’m trying to keep track of this all in my head, and once again, I am really impressed at how your editor managed to make it all comprehensible. You shouldn’t try editing this yourself, especially if you’re just typing notes. Remind me to give you their name. They do a great job.
There are a lot of simplified visions on how time travel works. Mostly they look at time as a single line, and moving backward and forward on it can affect that line. At most, moving backward and changing an event will make the line split off into two from there, generating a parallel timeline. That isn’t true, and it’s also geometrically hilarious, because you can’t have a vector extend from a single point on a line and have it run parallel to that line. Changing an event that already happened won’t erase what comes after the event either, because it will happen.
That sounds like destiny? Predestination is its own complicated and false concept. I’ll get there, just have patience.
Before I forget, can I borrow that pen? Thanks. No, I already wrote it down, this is for something different.
Like I said, things happen, and they will happen, and usually that goes in a specific order. No, there are parallel dimensions, but that’s not what I’m talking about and there isn’t enough ink for me to reduce paratemporal transaxial alterity to a drawing on a piece of paper. Way more arrows than I can draw. We’re focusing on our universe and its overarching timeline, which in the context of this dimensionality is moving in a single direction like almost everything else in it.
Anyway, when some of those arrows get nudged in other directions, I nudge them back to run parallel, as they should. Because their effects are going to remain, and keeping the causes in line with them prevents even more confusion further up the line. Now, when I say “confusion,” I mean a mass of disruptions causing peoples’ perceptions and their very existence altering to follow much more complicated vectors than causality. Believe me, the results aren’t pretty. Very few people can handle it mentally or physically.
Is that how I became like this? Not really. Well, it will, and that’s why I came here, but you get the joke of describing such a thing as a “cause” for my current state, right?
So, I move all around the- no, I’ll stop at cube. I move all around the piece of paper to correct those lines moving in the directions and the points that don’t have their own lines. What coffee ring? Oh, if there’s a coffee ring on the cube it could be disastrous. Could even become a sphere, and that would be a whole new problem I’ve dealt with, if we’re keeping the metaphors properly reduced. When is the coffee getting here, anyway? I’ve had a long day.
Wait, was that a joke?
If it is, it’s not as big a joke as you asking me to start at the beginning. You should really stop doing that.
***
The origin of my powers and role is complicated. It’s complicated even to me, because while I know what happened, I’m not sure when or how.
Ugh, fine. If we must pin down a “start,” I’ll do my best. I much prefer to pin down a “now,” even if that isn’t any less complicated, because at least you can work your way outward from there.
I’m a theoretical physicist, because of course I am. I’m an applied quantum engineer, because that’s the natural extension of what happened to me. Happened? Yes, past tense, right. Anyway, I was a theoretical physicist. I just defended my doctorate in temporal physics. They laughed me out of the building when I showed my proof that entropy is a function separate from the passage of time.
So I’m this newly minted doctor of physics and already angling for department head, and I’m building on the mathematical proofs of pseudolinearity based on observations of fictitious forces. No, these forces are real, it’s just a term. I didn’t come up with it. No one wants to hear it. I get kicked out of the doctoral track.
It sounds like a mad scientist origin story? Why? I actually taught my theories to some very promising grad students once I got the big chair.
Anyway, it happened, and I found myself with a much broader frame of reference and the ability to explore outside of the frame freely. It surprised me too, the first time. What do you mean, what do I mean by “it?”
I’ll show the paper as soon as I’m done. I have a good feeling about it getting approved. Though let’s all be honest, they should give me an honorary degree in physics just for the work I’ve been doing.
I’m not talking around what happened. You can’t just pin down a single point and work out from there. It’s like orbiting the sun, sometimes you just swing around. You don’t want to fall in, after all.
***
I think that should cover your list of questions. Oh, yes, I’ll have a coffee. It was very good. Yes, recording this is fine. You can try typing your notes, but they won’t make much sense. You should really bring a paper notebook next time.
The recording won’t be much better. Your editor is a wonder for getting all of this into a somewhat understandable state.
You’re going to edit the interview yourself? Remind me to give you their name. Trust me.
Let’s have a seat. I can’t say that this will take a while, but it’ll almost certainly take some time. That’s a little joke, right up there with starting at the beginning.
Oh, that’s actually where you want to start. I’m so sorry.
And before I forget, here are your pens back.