Short story: Irrevers-able

I discovered time travel back on the 29th of December, 2013. You might wonder at my using such an archaic date nomenclature if I had access to all of eternity, but the nature of the thing is not as you might think. I am not a traveller in time; I am a scientist, and I should not be using language so imprecisely. However, I do travel, and it is not going back in time to kill your grandfather and all that nonsense. This is impossible, and I can prove it. It is a very different kind of travel, for very different reasons.

What I discovered was a kind of particle. Not a particle of matter, but a particle of time. Billions upon billions of these particles surround us at any moment, swarming through us – not really affecting us, but at the same time changing us completely. We age because the particles lap at our bodily matter like waves on a rock. But the particles care not that they are propelling us all forward. They are simply fleeing from the singularity, and hence we have only ever known time as marching inexorably onward.

Going back in time is possible in as far as you can unwind all of history, playing 7 billion movies in reverse. You must calculate and undo each and every reaction between matter and these particles, in the correct order, for each and every quark on the planet (and possibly those beyond), in order to turn back the clock. Of course, it is far from necessary to perform this feat on such a grand scale; one might only have need of it on a smaller scale. It can be done, and I will achieve it.

The first part is easy: the reaction with the particles is reversible; one merely needs to direct them in the right way. The other part not so much: performing the calculations to achieve a complete and correct reversal requires an immense amount of computing power, which itself requires the energy of many suns. But this is no more than an inconvenience. I have a ship, and all I have done is set it on autopilot towards the nearest star, and locked myself inside a chamber that prevents the particles from decaying my body, effectively putting me into a complete stasis only to wake once I have achieved my destination, ready to feed.

I travel from star to star, devouring each one to progress my calculations one atom at a time. And the atoms number as many as the stars.

So I will destroy this universe.

Just to get you back.

—-

I originally posted this on Quora, but it just disappeared into the great nebula of excellent creative writing already on the site.

Meet Elan Wong

Elan on the left, and an old Polaroid of me (Caesar) when I was a baby on the right.

Jenny and I are absolutely pleased as punch to announce that not only are we with child, we had the baby on Sunday morning, 29th December 2013. Sorry for keeping him a secret from you, internet; we’ve been disappointed in the past and so wanted to keep something so very precious to us private.

I’ve put together a brief FAQ for what I imagine are the most pressing questions right now:

What are the gory details?
Elan was born on the morning of 29th December 2013, weighing 3.86 kg (8.52 lbs). He’s a big baby – his head circumference was 37cm which supposedly puts him in the ~95th percentile. Winning!

How do you pronounce Elan?
EE-lun (IPA: /’i:.lən/) – essentially “Ian” but with an “L” shoved in, not the regular English word.

Where did you get the name from?

You named your son after a stick figure?
Yep. It’s from a brilliant, if slightly nerdy, web comic. Check it out: http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots.html. No particular reason; I like it because it’s relatively unique without being too “out there”.

Does he have a Chinese name?
My parents have helped us to choose 黃栢延 – we haven’t settled on the romanisation yet, but it’ll probably be “Wong Pak Yin”. I’ll have to figure out what it is in Korean too… will update this post when I figure that out.

Magic words

The hardest part about an ability is the using. Many of you guys say that I write well – maybe I really do, or maybe you’re just being charitable – and that I should write more and more often. Whatever your real intentions are, I do wish I could write more; I simply lack inspiration.

Some would say that we’re surrounded by inspiration – and indeed many artists can write a song, paint a picture, or pen a poem at the drop of a hat. I recently came across Andrew Huang on Youtube – this guy is a veritable master of sounds, making reasonably good songs out of seemingly any idea that pops into his head, such as sounds of water, turning Beethoven into Dubstep, his obvious love of rap and a whole lot more besides. Heck, he even wrote a whole song based on a single asinine comment about fuzzy unicorns posted to one of his videos!

That’s not to say I have a shortage of ideas. In fact, I have A Lot Of Ideas. Thinking back on my previous output though, it occurs to me that what I’m waiting for is almost always an interesting sounding word (e.g. macabre) or turn of phrase (“Meet Me In My Reverie“) that I can latch onto, around which I can craft something. To use a horrible cliché, it’s like a pearl forming around a grain of sand, or a raindrop around a speck of dust.

I also find that having limitations helps. When I wrote “Danse Macabre” I forced myself to write solely on pen and paper, without using the computer to look up words or rhymes (truth be told, despite what I previously wrote, the real reason why I started writing that way was to try and use up as many pens and as many sheets of paper as possible because I had so many lying around). My poetry is also mostly in rhyme because it gives me a way to constrain all the possibilities inherent in language – otherwise wrangling words would be like trying to herd cats.

Back to the point, I’m just a guy who strings words together. The more I read, the more I write. So if you want me to write more just give me more things to read, including things that you write such as your posts and comments on Facebook – just please no unicorns.

Perfectly crazy

I have this habit, which annoys the crap out of Jenny: it’s my tendency to keep things in pristine condition. And I don’t mean just my mint-in-sealed-box collection of Transformers, but practically everything we own. For instance, I get monumentally upset when either of us scrape our car’s alloy wheels against the kerb, and last night, I got a little upset because she accidentally put a hot frying pan a little too close to one of our table mats, causing it to melt a bit.

I don’t like bending the spines of books or magazines when reading; I keep the boxes, manuals and accessories for almost everything for when I finally sell it or give it away after I’m done with it (chuck it out? I don’t know you); I even don’t like using the windscreen wipers on the car until absolutely necessary, to avoid excessive wear on the glass. Yes I am that batshit crazy.

So whenever either of us damages or breaks something I get really upset (or if I see it being done to something that’s doesn’t belong to me, I cringe on the inside).

To me, an item in its brand new state is a kind of perfection. The way it was intended to be. Its divine form. And I see it as my duty to preserve it to the best of my ability. After all, what are we if not the products and stewards of nature’s (or your preferred divine being’s) efforts against disorder and decay?

Those who are religious spend their entire lives in the pursuit of intimacy with a being – or beings – belonging to a higher state of perfection than themselves, and those of us who don’t believe still strive to fulfil our innate purpose of maintaining that unbroken chain of progress (be it biological/evolutionary or intellectual/scientific/technological). Perfection is both our destiny and our fate.

Therefore, in the language of religion, I feel that a sin has been committed when a thing is sullied or marred. The entropy in the world has increased by a perceivable amount, and I mourn it as a loss. Sometimes that means I display a disproportionate amount of grief over an inanimate object, but it’s probably the closest thing I’ll ever have to a spiritual experience.

Grind

Whizzing by while standing still
Time to waste and time to kill
Lazy as a busy bee
Idle productivity

Kicking goals and scoring nil
Climbing up and down the hill
Round and round along the straight
Opening the closing gate

Meaningless profundity
A heathen blessing unto me
Oh miserable happiness
The void that fills my emptiness