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gets into a machine that can literally take her whenever she’d like to go. Do you want to know what the first stop usually is? Take a guess. Don’t guess. You already know: the unhappiest day of her life.
    Other people are just looking for weird. They want to turn their lives into something unrecognizable. I see a lot of men end up as their own uncles. Super-easy to avoid, totally dumb move. See it all the time. No need to go into details, but it obviously involves a time machine and you know what with you know who. General rule is you want to avoid having sex with anyone unless you are sure they aren’t family. One guy I know ended up as his own sister.
    But mostly, people aren’t like that. They don’t want trouble, they just don’t know what else to do. I see a lot of regular offenders. People who can’t stop trying to hurt themselves. People who can’t stop doing stupid things because of their stupid hearts.
    My vocational training was in the basics of closed time-like curves, but what they should have taught me was how that relates to people’s regrets and mistakes, the loves of their lives that they let get away.
    I’ve prevented suicides. I’ve watched people fall apart, marriages break up in slow motion, over and over and over again.
    I have seen pretty much everything that can go wrong, the various and mysterious problems in contemporary time travel. You work in this business long enough and you know what you really do for a living. This is self-consciousness. I work in the self-consciousness industry.

from How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

nostalgia, underlying cosmological explanation for
    Weak but detectable interaction between two neighboring universes that are otherwise not causally connected.
    Manifests itself in humans as a feeling of missing a place one has never been, a place very much like one’s home universe, or as a longing for versions of one’s self that one will never, and can never know.

Sometimes I think back to when my father and I were first starting to sketch it out in his study at home, just ideas on a pad, just lines and vectors and tentative inequalities, first starting to realize what might be possible, and I suspect that he knew even then that he would get lost. It was almost like he was trying to get lost, like he knew what it would all lead to, this machine. He wanted to use it for sadness, to investigate the source of his own, his father’s, and on and on, to the ultimate origin, some dark radiating body, trapped in its own severe curvature, cut off from the rest of the universe.
    I remember the graph paper we used, the pattern of one-centimeter squares in a light green grid. My father would open a package of five pads, each one a hundred sheets thick. He used to open the package with his company-logo letter opener, pulling the letter opener out of its holder in the heavy brass piece sitting on top of his desk (I can still picture the black box it came in, with fancy gold cursive lettering on it— EXECUTIVE DESK SET —how at first, the words seemed like a kind of promise, a looking toward the future, a rare admission of his hope and ambition, and I can also picture the dust that gathered on the box, how, with each passing year that layer of dust thickened into a visible accumulation of embarrassment, how I wished I could have snuck into his office when he was at work and thrown that box away, or hidden it from him, so that word wouldn’t have to be right there on this desk, staring him in the face every day, EXECUTIVE , a thoughtless word, a thoughtless gift from the company for ten years of unappreciated service).
    He would worry the cellophane in a spot just a bit, just enough to pinch between his fingers a bit of the clear wrap and tear the membrane, making that delicate, fine-structured sound of it being torn.
    “Ahhh,” he would say, half smiling, enjoying the sound. He would hand me the wadded-up ball of cellophane, so I could crunch it in my