Dialogue: A Short Story Read online



  Dialogue

  Lelanthran Krishna Manickum

  ©Lelanthran Krishna Manickum, August 3, 2007

  With profuse apologies to Isaac Asimov; consider this to be the sincerest form of flattery.

  Hello my dear, you look a little peakish. Not getting enough sleep these days? No no, please, by all means, have a seat here opposite me. Let me order you a cup of tea. The tea, you know, I promised you some time back but never got to give you - you had your reasons for refusing to entertain me, reasons which now, no doubt, cease to exist as we are both sitting here in a civil manner.

  You don't look all that pleased with yourself anymore. There is not much more to do for either of us, is there? The panel will soon return with their decision. I hope it will be in my favour, but of course the odds are stacked against me. Not being a particularly religious man, all I can do is hope; no prayer has been sent on my behalf. So hope is all that there is left for me after I've attempted to even out the odds that were, like I said, stacked against me.

  Lies? No, I spoke no lies about you, as you spoke no lies about me. I undertook to do the same to you as you did to me; after all, I'm a fair man and would do to you no more than you do to me. For every untruth you never uttered, I never said the untruth that lay on your mind. Is it still an untruth if issued from your lips? No? Then it can't be more of an untruth when issued from mine.

  Ah yes, here's your tea. With milk too. Why not use the sugar instead of the sweetener my darling? After all, it's a well-known fact that happy women have no need of weight-loss methods, right? Oh come on! You sit there with your tears barely dry on your cheeks, with your ghosts haunting over your shoulder and with your past sins now clearly being perpetuated into the future as your reward, and you speak of how much happier you are now?

  Speculation? Am I speculating? About your future, certainly, but what else can we do while we wait for the decision that took three years? Come on, humour me while we wait and while you drink your artificially sweetened tea that no doubt removes inches from your thighs. Humour me while I idly speculate. No? Let me speculate, then, about something other than your future.

  Let's assume that there is a man who, after much tinkering with the laws of physics, invents a time-machine. Too cliche? How about then, a time-telescope instead of a time-machine? A remarkable scope that let's this man see into the future. I see you laugh, and I smile in return, but I see you're already at your ease. The recriminations you were expecting have failed to materialise and it's clear to you that I intend to leave the past were it belongs - behind me.

  Of course it's the past that's more important than the future, because the shape of the past determines the shape of the future, and our hypothetical inventors telescope is certainly a theoretical possibility, within the realms of physical laws as they are now known. By examining the shape of the past, this fictional telescope can produce an approximate shape of the future.

  In much the same way that a chess grand-master can examine the board and make a good guess about his opponents next move, this telescope examines things that are, then determines what things could be a result from the things that are, and from the set of all things that could be, this machine produces the one thing that is most probable of actually being. Nothing is magical about this feat - most people accept that this is how the weather is forecast. A warm current here and a cold current there and a north-easter blowing here produce, when examined, a weather forecast that makes us rethink spending the day at the beach. This is accepted for the weather, for board games, for even, believe it or not, producing horoscopes based on the twelve signs of the zodiac.

  So in much the same way the weather bureau take measurements of current weather conditions to predict tomorrows weather conditions, we have this telescope which can examine all present conditions, including the weather by the way, and produce a possible set of conditions for tomorrow, which we call the future.

  Now comes the interesting part - what if this enterprising inventor fed the machine all todays conditions, got a set of future conditions for tomorrow, and then fed the future conditions back into the machine? Will we get the third days “future”? Of course we will. Even more devious - suppose the inventor got tomorrows state from the machine, modified it slightly before feeding it back in to the machine? This is the really cunning part, as then the inventor can simply see tomorrows future, and try out different responses to see which would be the best; which would result in the best possible third day for him.

  He may not even have done this on purpose the first time through. Maybe he simply made an error one day when entering tomorrows future into the machine when trying to determine what the third day looked like. The results must have surprised him. Maybe only then he decided to modify tomorrows future before entering it into the machine. This let's him see the future results of any actions he takes. For example, when looking into tomorrows future, he sees that he can have coffee with his breakfast, or orange juice or even no breakfast at all.

  So he modifies the input to the machine, first taking the coffee option, then the orange juice option, then the option of no breakfast at all, each time documenting how that tiny change impacted his third day. After trying all possible options on the machine, when the day comes he simply has to pick the option that gave the most beneficial result on his machine. Of course, having the time machine, oops, I mean “telescope”, he can always ensure that he leads a charmed life, with only good luck coming to him.

  You're distant, your mind is wandering ... this fiction is obviously not to your taste and I can see that you clearly find this story boring. But allow me, my dear, to continue. I promise to inject more excitement in a minute and not bore you with a cliched science-fiction story. You won't have to endure much more anyway, the panel will not be much longer.

  Suppose that this inventor sees, in this scope, a ghastly future for himself. A future without a loving wife, with an unhappy marriage, with failed dreams and broken promises and constant betrayal. Of course, he'd take steps to avoid this. He'd try different responses in his machine, and see if it made his future any brighter. Suppose that he finds out via his machine that only the most drastic and undesirable actions will avert this calamity he sees in his future. Actions that he finds himself unable to perform out of moral repugnance, even if those very actions would make his future eventually bright and happy and secure?

  Now he has a different problem - he has the capability that many would consider to be godlike, but together with this power comes the knowledge that he will have to sacrifice much of his integrity in order to keep himself happy. Now this is a problem indeed. If he abides by his morals, then he has only himself to blame when his world finally falls around his ears, and if he prevents the future calamity then he has to break his morals to do so.

  What do you think my darling? What should he do? Break his morals or himself? Perhaps what he did was a mixture of both. Perhaps he tried to minimise the morals he had to break, and tried to live with some calamities. Perhaps he simply compromised a little; compromised his morals a little and then compromised his happiness a little.

  Now he needs to ensure that everything happens, so he takes the first action, and sees that it has the result he expected. The first action, like a pebble starting a landslide, starts the chain-reaction which, after three long years finally results in the fruition of his happiness, with compromises he can live with. The first action need not be noteworthy - a simple item of gossip spread to the right ears takes care of that. The right ears, in his case, would be the ears of those who have malicious mouths and love nothing more than to spread slander and infamy with the justification of “she had a right to know”.

  Then of course, everything else that ha
ppens is deemed to be the actions of someone else in his life. The inventor himself simply seems to be on the receiving end of everything - it looks, to all the world, that everything is getting done to him, not him actually doing anything. The main protagonist in his little story seems to be the one who controls the direction that things are going in. However we know better - the inventor simply looked into his telescope and saw those small things he could do that would result in the other taking action against him.

  Further, he saw those things he could do that would result in the other performing very specific actions. He did these things, such as the little bit of idle gossip. The other responded in the only way she knew how, in the way the time-telescope predicted. No one knows about the gossip, and no one knows who was actually doing the directing, because only our inventor has a time-telescope, but everyone saw who initiated the action. Even more importantly, our inventor is the person directing the events, but it looks to the world that someone else is taking charge.

  Eventually, after wading through a sea of tears for three years, the inventor gets the final result he wanted. Who's to say that he even had a