"Train of Events" was the third story I sold to F&SF. I wrote it in 2001, and it appeared in the January 2003 issue. It's a time-travel story -- or rather, it's a story set in a world where time travel is as common as air travel is in our world.
A quick summary: Jeremy Calder goes to work on the day everyone knows he will cause the release of a deadly virus, ultimately resulting in six hundred deaths. (Jeremy won't get it, because the authorities have distributed a vaccine in advance.) He has to get past protesters, including some people who know they're going to die from the virus. He's wearing a new suit he bought for the occasion, even though all the pictures from the future of him on the big day show him wearing khaki slacks and a novelty T-shirt.
Jeremy works for a biohazard disposal firm, and they're currently cleaning out a pharmaceutical research lab in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. The lab went out of business fourteen years earlier when time travel was invented and people from the future sent back a database containing everything that will ever be known about medicine.
His boss causes a minor accident but nothing gets released, so he assigns another worker to help Jeremy clean up. The other man, Simon, wants to take Jeremy's place because he's part of an organization called the Schrodinger Front, who work to falsify the records that will be handed down to the future, so that the knowledge people have about what's going to happen will be wrong, thereby preserving free will.
Jeremy gets a call from Vera, a girl he met eight months earlier at a Halloween party. He leaves Simon to do his work and goes downstairs to meet her. She's very eager to hook up with him, and then Jeremy notices that not only is she wearing the same outfit and perfume he remembers from the party, she's also still got her hand stamp. She time-jumped right after the party, and she's here because she wants to sleep with someone who's about to be famous. He turns her down angrily and goes back upstairs to work.
His return startles Simon, who gives himself a nasty burn on the autoclave and has to go to the emergency room. The arrival of an ambulance panics the protesters outside, and the cops ask Jeremy to go outside and reassure them. He does, but slips and falls into a puddle of orange North Carolina mud, ruining his suit. The only spare clothes his boss can find are the khaki slacks and novelty T-shirt he wears in all the pictures.
Dispirited that he can't even pick his own clothes, Jeremy goes through the afternoon like a robot. He destroys all the remaining test tubes of hazardous material and for a moment thinks he has beaten fate. But then he notices one stray tube on the bottom of the refrigerator, and he knows that he'll fall, or drop it, or break it somehow before he gets to the autoclave. So he hurls it away angrily, breaking the vial and releasing the virus. Then he reports it and sits down to wait.
This is a story about free will. How can we have free will if we know the future? It isn't just a science-fictional problem: as I've mentioned before, as we learn more about the brain the circle bounded by our free will gets smaller and smaller. Someday we all will confront the problem of having the illusion of free will, even as our actions -- even our thoughts -- become predictable.
There's a political angle to all of this. If humans aren't actually free agents, then our entire Western Enlightenment system of liberal democracy is a sham. Why guarantee freedoms when nobody is really free? Already we can see the first tendrils of this attitude creeping into public discourse -- government acting to prevent people from eating what they want because they overindulge and get fat, or preventing people from playing video games because they might cause violence in real life, or similar instances of "nanny-state" bossiness.
Right now it's hardly more than a joke -- those silly bureaucrats trying to take our Big Macs. But if we are malleable, there's always the temptation to mold us, make us "better."
Even if our personalities and preferences are innate, the product of our genes, that doesn't really change matters. Do-gooders and busybodies have been proposing ways to eliminate "undesirable" traits from the population since Francis Galton. Now we're actually getting the tools to manipulate the genome directly. That little whisper in the ear "It's for their own good" will never go away.
Anyway. Back to the story: I had a ball writing about a world with access to all future knowledge. I expect I'll come back to it at some point. My original idea was to write a mystery set in that world, but at the time I couldn't make it work. Now that I've improved my craft, I may tackle that again sometime.
This is the first story I've changed because of real-world events. Initially, the virus Jeremy releases is more deadly, with a bigger body count. After September 11, 2001, I decided to scale it down, and added some lines to make it clear that the victims could get vaccinated but failed to do so.
The structure of the story is taken from the Stations of the Cross -- it seemed like a good model for a story of someone who is going knowingly to his fate. I couldn't work in all fourteen, but I did have Jeremy get a call from his mother, then Simon volunteers to take his place, then he meets Vera, then he falls, and is stripped of his clothes. Obviously Jeremy doesn't die at the end, or come back from the dead. (If anyone is offended by this . . . it's just a short science fiction story. Christianity has survived greater threats.)
Imposing this kind of arbitrary constraint is a great spur to creativity. At least, it is for me. If I sit down in front of my laptop to write a story, I have no idea what to do. But tell me it has to be an alternate history story about auto racing based on the Tarot deck and that starts the juices going. (Hmm . . . ) In this story, for instance, I never would have come up with the plot thread about Jeremy's clothing, or Simon and the Schrodinger Front, had I not been working from the Stations of the Cross.
I'm not the only one who does this. Italo Calvino used Tarot cards to come up with stories for The Castle of Crossed Destinies. In the science fiction field, Catherine Asaro has written stories based on quantum physics, with character interactions mirroring the behavior of particles.
Done too obviously, it degenerates into stunt writing. But when it's used to encourage creativity, it's a very powerful technique. Note that once the story is developing nicely, it's entirely possible to ditch the initial constraints. Try it and see. Or not -- you are still a free agent. Aren't you?
"It's a time-travel story -- or rather, it's a story set in a world where time travel is as common as air travel is in our world."
Interesting. The featured story in the very first MF&SF I ever read (Jan '79, which I picked out of a trash heap in Ocean Grove, NJ), had the same theme.
" (If anyone is offended by this . . . it's just a short science fiction story. Christianity has survived greater threats.)"
I think it's pretty cool myself. It seems that if anyone was going to notice and complain, it would be a PZ Myers type calling you a crypto-faithhead.
Posted by: Dwtwiddy | 12/12/2010 at 08:47 PM