3/19/23: One Last Time

Author’s note: This story contains mild spoilers for: Source Code, Replay, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time

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I’ve been stuck doing this job for thirty-odd years. Thirty four years and four months, to be exact. I’ve spent most of that time thinking it was hopeless. 

When the TimeLoop Crisis first began, I was full of bravado. 

“The world is ending, the Head of the Bureau said, in the first all-hands meeting about the Crisis. 

We were used to this. The Bureau existed outside time and space, and we saw world-lines nipped in the bud all the time.

“Which world?” someone asked.

“All of them.” 

Someone in the room giggled, assuming this was the beginning of a bit. But the tone in the room changed, as people realized the Head was serious.

“The metafictional universe is in danger due to the proliferation of time loops as a narrative device. Their use had historically been sporadic. When Groundhog Day came out, it consumed a disproportionate amount of temporal energy compared to the narrative value it provided. But we thought it was a fluke. We assumed it was a one-off, and of course there was still plenty of temporal energy to go around. But now, decades later, every writer is using it as a trope; there’s one Hollywood blockbuster a year featuring it, to speak nothing of the Japanese fanfiction ecosystem.”

Someone raised their hand. 

“How much time do we have left?” they asked. 

“6 months,” the Head replied. 

There was a gasp, followed by a mutter, followed by some “there, there” hand gestures by the Head, followed by a call to order.

“As of today, the Bureau is directing the full force of its resources towards the closing of time loops. We’ll be sending agents to the first cycle of each instance of a time loop used in fiction. There, they’ll truncate the loop by fulfilling the specific criteria native to that locality.”

True to his word, the Bureau mobilized its resources as it had never before. It was glorious. After years of being bogged down in an ossified shell of institutional red tape, it was finally rising to a challenge. 

As for myself, I finally felt like I had meaning in life. I had been in accounting, working on indexing the narrative uses of Existential AI risk, and let me tell you, the crowd in that department could bore you to death with a stray glance. 

But now, my work had meaning. My first assignment was to a movie called Source Code. I had seen it many years ago on a lousy first date when I probably should have been, I don’t know, calling my parents or picking up trash on the beach or being a contributing member of society.

After teleporting into the train, I walked up to the main character Stevens and handed him a sheet of paper informing him of who the terrorist was and where he’d hidden the bomb.

“This is for you,” I said, with as straight a face as I could manage, then teleported back to the Bureau. 

We knocked out the easy time loops like Source Code in quick succession. There was an entire category of loops like this; where the main character was stuck in a loop solving a mystery, and the time loop would stop once they’d collected some particular bit of information. Occasionally the main character would get spooked or view it as a trick, in which case we had to get creative. I particularly enjoyed dressing up as a plague doctor for Evelyn Hardcastle.

But other time loops were more difficult. 

For example, there was a book called Christmas Snowfall. The main character, Jessica Levitson, was doomed to repeat the day over and over again until she discovered the true meaning of Christmas. My friend Mike was assigned to that one.

“It’s impossible,” he said to me over a beer. He had just teleported back and yet another failed attempt. “You can’t just hand her a scrap of paper saying ‘Family is the most precious thing of all,’ and have her complete her character arc.”

I gave a sympathetic grunt, taking a sip of my beer. It made sense that people couldn’t complete their character arcs via fortune cookie slips.  

“I’ve tried everything. I kidnapped her family to make her feel a sense of loss. I drugged her morning coffee with empathogens so she could start Christmas with a sense of open-mindednes. I forcibly teleported her to various therapists that exist in her world. I’m telling you - it’s impossible. The kid’s a brat. It takes her thirteen thousand loops in her original story to learn to love her family. You can’t just fast forward through that.”

Meanwhile, I had the good fortune of being assigned time loops that were actually solvable. 

My fifth assignment was Replay, in which the time loop was triggered by the main character’s heart attack in the first chapter. I jumped into his office, minutes before he was due to collapse dead.

His eyes widened, and before he could react, I stabbed him in the leg with an auto-injection of slow-release Alteplase. 

“Arghhhh!” he yelled. 

“Sorry not sorry,” I said, then slammed a bottle of pills on his desk. “This is a combo-pill of aspirin, prasugrel, and a high-dose statin. You’re going to take one pill a day for the next year, or I’m going to have to come back here to stab you again, you understand?”

“Ahhhhhhhhh!” he replied. 

“Good,” I said, before jumping back to the Bureau. 

My sixteenth assignment was The Girl Who Leapt Through Time. I thought it would be difficult at first, or that it would require me to learn Japanese to convince the main character out of some bad decisions, but it turned out that the most parsimonious solution was simply to step on and crush the walnut-shaped time-travel device and stop the loop before it could even begin. 

My thirtieth assignment, Edge of Tomorrow, was trivially simple; I jumped to the big bad with a bag of grenades and jumped out before it exploded. Its counterpart, All You Need Is Kill, appeared harder at first, but was simplified when I discovered that both main characters were deathly allergic to peanut butter.

And so it continued. There was an unofficial leaderboard at the Bureau, and I shot up the ranks. For the first time in my life, I felt like I was good at something. I had a sense of purpose. People remarked upon my knack for closing loops.

Then, before we knew it, our six months was almost over, and barely half of the time loops we had catalogued were closed. Most of the remaining were bildungsromans, ones in which the main character needed some kind of emotional revelation. My friend Mike still hadn’t figured out how to truncate the loop in Christmas Snowfall, and had requested a transfer. 

A sense of hopelessness fell over the Bureau in the days leading up to the end of the metafictional universe. We worked frantically, jumping from world to world, trying to crack the tougher cases open, staying awake on coffee and amphetamines. But we all knew that we were out of time.

On the last day, the Head summoned us all to the auditorium. I knew what was about to happen. I’d been in enough stories by now to predict it.

“This is not the end,” he said. Then he held up a small walnut-shaped device that I now recognized as belonging to The Girl Who Leapt Through Time. “This device here is the most energy-efficient time loop device we have available to us. By resetting the clock back to 6 months prior, we can use our accumulated knowledge to try and try again, and perhaps eventually succeed.”

I stood up. I meant to say, “This is a terrible idea.” 

Instead, what came out was, “At what cost? All of us here are familiar with the law of conservation of narrative energy. Does creating a metafictional time loop not simply consume more temporal energy than it could theoretically negate?”

“Our scientists have found a different way to power this particular loop,” the Head said. “We can truncate a life, using the resulting surplus in potential energy as a power source for exactly one loop.”

The crowd murmured. Death magic was a common enough trope in fiction that we were all uneasy with it. 

“We would all be dead by midnight tonight regardless,” the Head said. “And we do not make this decision lightly. As a measure of good faith, I have volunteered myself as the first to go.”

He kept his word, too. Right before midnight, he sacrificed himself to power the device, and in a blink of an eye the whole Bureau (minus one person) found itself 6 months back in time.

There was a frenetic energy to the second go-through. The stakes felt higher somehow. Our Head had sacrificed himself to the cause, and there was a sense that we should not let his death be in vain.

The problem was that there were thousands of instances of time loops in fiction, and only sixty of us at the Bureau. The solutions for all the easy loops had already been found, and there just didn’t seem to be enough time. We found ourselves at the end of 6 months again, having only solved a dozen more.

“Should we draw straws?” Mike said. “Go by the leaderboard? Go alphabetically?”

Even though the odds were one in sixty, I still felt a sense of relief when I drew a long straw. 

“Fuck,” Julien said, looking down at his straw. “That’s some rotten luck, right there.”

He glanced around at the rest of us, all looking awkwardly at him. 

“What are you just standing around for? I have an hour left before I have to turn into time loop fuel. Let’s throw a party, shall we?” 

We proceeded to all get heavily inebriated, and the next morning I had very little memory of that going-away party, which was probably for the better. At the beginning of the next time loop, we all decided that the drawing straws system was a bit shit. Someone found a way to rig the device up so it would trigger automatically, drawing the life force from one of us at random. Better not to know, we thought.

It took another twenty loops before someone finally traveled far enough along the Infinite Corridor to get to Greg Egan’s Axiomatic, retrieving the neural mod technology that could alter someone’s value system.

“Finally!” Mike said, jumping back from Christmas Snowfall. “It took me a good thirty tries, but I altered Jessica’s axiomatic convictions to bump up family-values to the top of her priorities list. Broke the time loop, just like that.”

A whole class of time loops were suddenly solvable with the neural mod from Axiomatic. 

“Maybe this is it,” I said to Mike. “Maybe this is how we win this thing.”

But of course it wasn’t nearly that simple. Phil Connors from Groundhog Day turned out to somehow have a natural resistance to being neural modded. And several time loop stories had non-human protagonists, which the technology didn’t work on either. 

Our numbers dwindled, and as they did so, the same work had to be done by fewer and fewer people. At the end of every six months, I held my breath, waiting for the shoe to drop - but each time the walnut device picked someone else. 

I stopped believing, towards the end. I was one of only half a dozen left. It was one person’s job to go through and truncate the time loops that already had solutions, while the other five of us worked on the remainder.

None of our hearts were in it. The unsolved loops had been attempted thousands of times already.

Take the novel Mirror’s Mirror. The loop truncation criteria required the main character to beat Stockfish at chess. In the original ending, the character spent a literal two million years becoming superhuman at chess, solving the game, and beating Stockfish. The main difficulty in closing the loop was that any sort of cheating - be it uploading a chess engine to the main character’s mind, sabotaging the Stockfish program, or Path-to-Victory type powers - would be grounds for disqualification. 

Finally, there was just Mike and me left. 

“There’s no chance, is there?” he said sadly to me at the beginning of the loop. 

“No,” I said flatly. We were both tired. 

“I miss the days in which it still felt like winning was possible. When we had the whole Bureau with us.”

“Me too.”

There were six loops left to solve. With Mike truncating the solved loops in succession, jumping ceaselessly from world to world, that meant that the burden of closing these six last impossible loops fell to me. One per month, of the six hardest. 

We sat together in front of the portal jumper, the entire Bureau empty except for just the two of us. 

“You know, in each of these time loop stories, they all end with the main characters figuring a way out,” Mike said. “The genre itself is fundamentally an optimistic one. I’ve looked through the entire catalogue; there’s not a tragedy in the entire set.”

“Not one?”

“Not a single one,” Mike said. “The trope doesn’t work if after thousands of loops it’s all for naught. What would be the point? It would be like having Harry Potter fall down the stairs and accidentally break his neck in the last chapter of the last book.” 

“I’m sure there’s a fanfiction somewhere out there in which that happens.”

“The point is, we’re in a time loop right? We’re the main characters here. I figure, there would be no point to this if there wasn’t a chance, at least a chance, that we could win this.”

I sighed, looking down at my hands. 

“You really think that?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

We were both wasting time with this conversation. There wasn’t much wiggle room now, with only the two of us here to close the loops. But saying all this out loud, trying to believe again after dozens of loops of hopelessness, also felt important, somehow. Even when it was just the two of us left, here sitting at end of time.

“Let’s give it a go then,” I said. 

“One last time?”

“One last time.”