Lightspeed: Year One

something about it.

There are people walking around who look like men, but they aren’t men. But if they look like men, walk like men, talk like men, maybe they are men?

There are new categories of gender that Hwang is unable to comprehend. Men are men. He finds a daughter who is a man, so she must actually be a son, but in Hwang’s mind—his mind that he cannot change—he is his daughter and always will be.

If you could flip through Hwang’s life like a book—which I am able to do—you would see that Hwang and women have been a calamitous combination. It is not Hwang’s fault or the women’s fault but it is unfortunate nevertheless. I wish there was someone to blame.

Once, Hwang awakes to find no one. He walks around the city for hours before seeing a woman in a coverall. She is pulling vines off the side of a building and stuffing them into a trash bag. I am paid millions a year for this work, she says.

Even for the future, that is a lot of money.

It turns out that everyone has been uploaded into virtual space, but a few people still have to stick around to make sure that buildings stay up and the tanks are clean and operational.

Later, everyone comes back, because it turns out that no one really likes uploaded life.

Hwang’s wife was a research scientist. When they divorced, Hwang was granted temporary full custody and his wife went to Antarctica. Sometimes she sent their three children humorous emails about falling asleep on the toilet because it was so cold.

When their daughters were kidnapped walking home from school, Hwang’s wife and Hwang both blamed Hwang. Their son turned fifteen, became a goth, and moved in with his mother when she returned from Antarctica.

Hwang, alone, rested his head on pillowcases permanently smudged with black. And slept for days.

Hwang says, When people are able to live forever, that is when I will get my life back. I can marry again. We can have a family. When I awake, they will still be there, old as cedars. My cedar family, planted in the living room.

I will live forever, but marriage between Hwang and I is out of the question.

Sometimes one of Hwang’s daughters will buy him new clothes, but he always wakes up wearing his old clothes. He has been frumpy, archaic, obscene, unworthy of notice, and perfectly in style—all those things, in that order.

There is a future in which skanky summer is quite popular. People walk around in bathing suits, waterproof briefs, shorts, breast-baring monokinis, sarongs—all with personal climate control units attached to the base of their necks.

Hwang emerges from his room, shivering in a wrinkled button-down, sweater, and corduroy pants. That day, the rain drifts down as gently as snow, and it gets you wet so gradually that you are startled to realize it, like a boiled frog in a pot of water.

Hwang never sees his son again. Upon waking for the first time, Hwang goes out into the world and finds that his son is a computer mogul who lives in a cheesy yet terrifying house surrounded by a moat. This house has no right angles, and a viscous red substance continually flows down the sides and into the moat.

A security guard grabs the back of Hwang’s jacket as he backs up to get a running start so he can jump the moat. You’ll never make it, she says, and he realizes that the security guard is his daughter. She sighs, looking him up and down.There’s a shelter a few miles away. You can get a decent meal. I’ll drive you.

His daughter does not look how he’d expect, but her eyes, when she glances at him in the rear-view mirror, are familiar and bright. But I’m his father, says Hwang. She laughs.

The computer mogul, famously, has no father (and says so often). Of course. Hwang sits in the back seat like a lump. He realizes that he can no longer enumerate to himself the ways in which he has failed, that his failure has turned into an exponential number residing within him, sleek and unutterably dense and deadly.

There is a time during which Hwang’s visits are foreseen. His daughters tell him that his story has been passed down from their mothers. That their great-great-great . . . will come into their lives, recognizable by his blue sweater and brown corduroy pants (You dress like a fucking teddy bear, his son used to say—it felt like affection).

And then what? It is disputed. Is Hwang a force of good? Is he evil? How does he choose which daughters he appears to? Is he a matrilineal family curse? He tries to explain but it is not satisfying to his daughters.

The next time he jumps, it is a hundred years later and his story has been forgotten.

Hwang’s daughter listens to his story. When he is done, she pulls a pill case from her bag. Sounds like you need to change your point of view, she says. Try a Chip or a Barbara.

Hwang chooses a pill from the compartment labeled “Chip.” Chip and Barbara are personality construct drugs, named for the people from whom they originated.

In an hour, he feels loose. He is young, and has plenty of time to decide what he wants to be when he grows up. He doesn’t know if he wants to have kids yet. Come on, man, that’s ages away. Let’s have some fun before fun ends.

Hwang is still Chip when he goes to sleep, but it wears off in the night. He goes to find it again, to feel simultaneously free yet locked into the right time with no sense of slippage, but discovers that Chip and Barbara have been taken off the market.

In bare feet, Hwang was half an inch shorter than his wife, which seemed within the bounds of acceptability. But the world conspired to tip this delicate balance, with slanted sidewalks, with Italian heels, with poor posture. Hwang and his ex-wife each thought that the other cared more about their height discrepancy.

Your wife is white? said a sophisticated older aunt. Then your daughters will be beautiful. They were, because all daughters were beautiful; that is what Hwang believed. But Hwang was never one to be proud of their beauty. He was proud because they were brilliant, or they were about to be; they were at the age at which youthful precocity grew distinct and immutable. That is where they stayed.

Hwang always wakes up in the lab. The lab is always the same.

The time machine is a gnarled, charred mess on the floor, and the curtains are skeletons. Grishkov’s body is curled like a cat in the corner; his face is untouched like a peaceful waxwork, and for that, Hwang is grateful. Hwang sleeps on the couch, which has blackened and split like a bratwurst. As unkind and sooty as the lab is, Hwang lingers there to hold off timeshock and cultureshock.

When he needs to use the bathroom, he has to leave.

In time, Hwang begins to suspect that he is not only being pulled forward in time as he sleeps; he is also being pulled sideways in space, to parallel universes.

He thinks he has confirmation of this fact when he arrives at a time when everyone is green. (Don’t worry— there is still racism!)

Hwang sits with his daughter at a diner and tries to question her about what has happened. She explains, but language has changed, and he has trouble understanding her. Lincoln, he says. Kennedy. Were they assassinated in this timeline? She opens her mouth and taps at her translator earbud.

Doowah? she says.

Soon there are no more bananas. The iconic Cavendish banana, tall and bright and constant, has gone extinct. It is true that no one’s favorite fruit is the banana. But now that bananas as he knew them are gone, Hwang feels like he’s been trapped in a house without windows.

There is no backwards from this forwards. No more bananas for anyone ever again.

Hwang has learned a valuable life lesson: never allow someone to test a time machine on you.

No matter how certain they are it will work.

No matter how certain you are that it will enable you to fix your life and the lives of your loved ones.

But Hwang must have done some good for his later daughters; he has to have done some good; he has to.

Would it all be worth it, then?

Once, he wakes up, opens the door to the lab, and steps into water. He doesn’t know how to swim. He is a