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10:48PM
Matthew Irons was supposed to die at 10:48PM. Like many unfortunate people before him, Matt would’ve been at the wrong place at the wrong time. While going to intervene in a dispute between his neighbors, a stray bullet from his neighbor’s .38 should have hit him square in the forehead. An instantaneous death, or as close as it comes to one.
There should have been a lot of blood. The two men would stop their fighting. The gun would be dropped. Matt’s fiancée, Josephine Jansen, would come out their shared home and scream, fall to her knees, and weep, in that order. The blood from his body would run from the sidewalk into the storm drain.
Matthew Irons, age 28 years, 52 days, nine hours, and 35 seconds, would leave behind a small assortment of knickknacks, a few personal letters, and his social security card as the only physical evidence that he had ever existed. He never knew his parents. He had no siblings. For all practical purposes, it would be as if Matt never existed.
It was supposed to be so simple. Just another one of the unfathomable number of tragedies in the infinite history of the cosmos. Nothing special. Routine. The sky was blue, the earth orbited the sun, Matthew Irons died at 10:48PM on October 21st, 2014 from a gunshot wound to the head. Just another fact of life. But that wasn’t what happened.
“I said get the fuck back offa my goddamn lawn!” Robert, Matt’s next door neighbor yelled.
“Make me, you crotchety old sack of shit!” Jules, the man who lived across the street, retorted. “Howsa about you stop bein’ a deadbeat and give me my money?”
“Go to hell!”
Matt peered through the shutters of his window and sighed. He already regretted buying a house in this neighborhood. Each week there was a performance of machismo under the dim lighting of the street laps. For the fifth time that week, Matt reminded himself never to trust another real estate agent for the rest of his life.
“They at it again?” Jo asked. She yawned as she sashayed down the stairwell. “One of these days, those men are gonna get someone killed, I swear.”
“Nah, Jo, they’re all talk. Look, Jules is going back to his house.”
Jo gingerly slid up alongside Matt’s side, like a cat, and peered through the window. The frills of her nightdress rode up against his thigh.
“Hmm, looks like it’s over.” She leaned her body against his, making sure Matt felt her hips grinding into him.
“Hey,” she whispered seductively.
“Hey,” he whispered back. Matt placed his hands on her finely contoured hips and pulled her in close.
“Come back to bed.”
No sooner had the words left Jo’s mouth than Jules came back outside. This time, he held a small aluminum bat. It was probably his kid’s Little League bat. Jules also probably wasn’t getting the parent of the year award.
“Listen you Alzheimer’s-ridden fucker, you better give my money, or else I swear to God I’m gonna fuck up your mailbox!” he drunkenly yelled from Robert’s yard.
“Christ,” Matt said. He took a step back from Jo. “Looks like I’m gonna have to go out there this time.”
Jo put her hand over Matt’s, preventing him from going any further. “Can’t you just let them sort this out on their own? No need to be a hero today, Iron Matt.” Her tone was casual, but Matt sensed there was a keen desperation beneath it. Her grip on his hand tightened.
“Sweetie, sometimes a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do!” he said in a faux-baritone. “Besides, I can’t just stand around and let this happen every week. Somebody has got to do something!”
“Oh! My hero!” Jo pretend to swoon and faint in Matt’s arms. “Promise me you’ll be careful, okay?” She stared at him, suddenly serious.
“I promise my fair lady,” he said, still keeping on the superhero façade, “Or my name isn’t Iron Matt!”
They both giggled before exchanging a quick kiss.
“Get the fuck away from my mailbox you crazy fucker!”
The sound of metal smacking metal could be heard. Soon after, the sound of two men heavily panting.
“Ah. Duty calls. Farewell!” Matt dramatically opened the door and shut it behind him. The sight outside was not pretty.
Jules and Robert were both on the ground, Jules sitting on top of Robert, furiously beating him with his fists. Robert stuck up one hand to defend himself from the onslaught of punches, but to no avail. Robert’s other hand was caught in his waistband, grasping at something.
Matt started running towards them, shouting, “Hey break it up!”
At that moment, Robert managed to draw his gun. It was a silver .38, Smith and Wesson special. The kind of gun a hardboiled detective in a movie might use, but not a decrepit old man. The gun wedged itself between Jules’ arm and chest, aimed directly towards Matt. The barrel stared Matt down, the curvature of the barrel forming a single peephole for a deadly bullet to peer out from. Robert fired with a deafening bang.
Time slowed to a crawl for Matt as he saw the gun go off. Rational thought ceased, but for a brief moment Matt somehow knew that he was going to die right where he stood. That it was inevitable, and there was nothing he could do or could have done to prevent it. For that brief moment, Matthew Irons knew the terror of death.
And then something miraculous happened: the bullet was supposed to kill Matthew Irons missed him entirely. The bullet safely whizzed by roughly three feet away from where Matt was standing.
The watch on his wrist read 10:49PM. Matt didn’t know it, but he was twenty seconds late to his own death. Had he been three feet to the left, like he should have been, the bullet would have struck him square in the forehead. The bullet would have pierced his cranium, travelling through his front lobe and out through his occipital lobe, which would have resulted in an instant death.
That, of course, didn’t happened.
“Cut that shit out!” Matt screamed, eyes wide. “You nearly fucking shot me, goddammit!” His near-death experience was causing him to hyperventilate. He suddenly felt very weak and fell to his knees.
“Matt!” Jo shrieked, having heard the noise and walked outside. She put an arm around him, protecting him like a den mother. “Robert, put that fucking gun away!” she hissed.
“I-I’m fine…” Matt gasped. “Don’t worry, I’m all right.”
Jo hugged him as tight as she could. Matt gently stroked her hair and closed his arms around her in an angelic embrace.
The whole neighborhood poured out into the streets. Police sirens roared in the distance. Startled at the increase in attention, the two men separated from one another, both thoroughly embarrassed.
Shortly after, the police would arrive, take a statement from everyone, and haul Jules to jail. Matthew Irons, brimming with life after his brush with death, would go return to his dilapidated home in the inner city of Los Angeles and have the best sex of his life.
All was well. Until, of course, it wasn’t.
“All I’m saying is that we need a vacation,” Jo said. “Especially after what happened last night.”
“And all I’m saying is that I would love to go on vacation, Jo,” Matt replied. “But I can’t take off work.”
Jo sighed. “Fineee. But next weekend, we’re taking a roadtrip, okay? I hear there’s a storm coming next week, and I don’t want to be around for it.”
“Where’d you hear that from?” Matt said, puzzled. “Radio says clear skies next week.”
Jo shot him a winning smile. “Trust me, I have my sources. Hey, why don’t we go get something to eat to celebrate that asshole Jules finally being taken away?” She jingled his car keys in front of his nose. “Come on! Let’s go to that new sushi bar you’ve been talking about!”
“Sushi-Junai?” Matt snatched the keys from her. “You’re on.”
The couple stepped outside into the driveway. As they walked to the car, something in the grass underneath the oak tree caught Matt’s eye. From a distance, it looked like someone had tossed some stray kindling on their lawn. He stopped.
“What is it, dear?” Jo asked.
Matt took a closer look. It was a bird’s nest, full of bright, broken eggshells. The remnants of the yolk had congealed over the surface of the sticks and stems, giving it at almost translucent, oiled look to it.
“Aw, some poor mama bird lost her kids,” he said, upset.
“Poor things.” Jo averted her gaze. “That’s life though, right?”
“Yeah. Life is full of little tragedies.” Matt was already past grieving. He strode back over to the car.
The Honda was no luxury, but Matt had prided himself on it being the first car he ever owned, bought new, and kept in immaculate shape. The Honda Civic may have been made in '08, but it still looked like it had come straight off the production line. The interior still had that new car smell.
Naturally, the car was long overdue for some misfortune. Just like its owner.
Matt twiddled his thumbs at the red light. Between the tailgaters, drunks, and just plain rude people, navigating downtown Los Angeles was always pain in the ass.
Once the light turned green, he entered the intersection, only to be struck from the side by a BMW SUV, cruising well over speed limit. The driver, a teenager expecting an influx of nude photographs from his girlfriend, hadn’t noticed that the light changed and drove full force into the driver-side door of Matt’s Honda.
The force from the collision proved enough to cave in the entire door and cause the small sedan to spin into oncoming traffic, where it would collide with three other cars before finally resting on the sidewalk.
Matthew would die. But not like he was supposed to. Matthew was supposed to die at 10:48PM on October 21st, 2014. That didn’t stop him from dying at 11:16AM, October 22nd, 2014, though. The universe was petty like that.
“Matt, do you believe in true love?” Jo asked.
“What do you mean?” Matt looked at her, worried. “I love you, if that’s what you’re asking.” Internally, Matt hoped he had given the right answer and wasn’t about to reprimanded.
“No, I mean like, true love, the sort of sappy love that makes you into an idiot. Think Bon Jovi’s ‘I’d Die For You’ kind of love. Disney movie love.”
“Oh.” Matt thought a moment before responding. “Yeah, I think so. What brings this up?”
“Oh, nothing.” Jo wore her notoriously bad poker face.
“Come on, tell me.” Matt drummed his hands against the steering wheel. “I gotta know now.”
“Well, there’s this boy I like, and things are getting pretty serious between him and I…” Jo’s words dripped with candied sarcasm.
“Be serious.”
Jo fidgeted uncomfortably in her car seat. “And I just worry about him sometimes. I don’t know what I’d do without him.”
“I’m not going anywhere, Jo.”
At that very moment, the teenager in the BMV blew through the intersection.
“Jesus! Did you see that kid? He coulda hit us!” Jo rolled down the window. “Get off your fucking phone!” she yelled after him.
A chorus of car horns blared behind them. Matt had been unknowingly sitting on a green light for roughly 15 seconds.
“Move your ass!” someone called behind him. “People got places to be!”
Matt also had a place to be. But it didn’t seem like he would be getting there anytime soon.
The couple sat at the dinner table, enjoying the pulled pork Jo had cooked. Despite Jo’s magnificent cooking, a malignant unease seemed to hang about the room as they ate in silence, almost as if the room was haunted by a ghost.
Matt could tell something was bothering her, but he couldn’t pinpoint exactly what. After seven years with Josephine, he could read her face like a book. Shallow creases at the lips, brow slightly bent, her eyes never fully pointed directly at him. He decided to take a blunt approach.
“Honey, what’s wrong?”
Jo cast her eyes to the floor. “Uh, I was just thinking of something.”
“Do you want to talk about it?” Matt nudged gently.
“I-I… I can’t.”
“Is it work-related? Something you can’t tell me because it’s related to the Army?”
“No, nothing like that, it’s just…” Jo paused for a moment to think of the right words. “I don’t want to worry you.”
“I won’t worry.”
Jo sighed. “Let’s just say I’m making an impossible decision right now.”
“What do you mean?” Matt sat up, and put his arms on Jo’s shoulders.
“Like I said, I can’t talk about it, but maybe you can help me out.” She brushed his arms off him.
“I’m listening.”
“Imagine if you and ten other people were tied to a train track, and I could only save you or the ten others, not both. What should I do?”
“Are you breaking up with me?” Matt asked, suddenly alarmed.
“No, this is just a hypothetical,”
Matt took a moment to think. “I think I’d want you to save those other ten people. I know you love me, but there would always be other people. The fact that you had to sacrifice ten innocent people would taint our relationship.”
“But I don’t want other people! I want you!” Jo yelled. Her eyes puffed, welling with tears. “There’s nobody that could replace you.”
“You just think that now. Time will pass. You’d be fine.”
The tears finally fell. “God, Matt, sometimes you are just full of shit. I wish you knew what it felt like, what I was going through.”
“Baby, what do you—“
“I’m listening,” Matt said, completely unaware time had skipped backwards exactly 36 seconds.
“Imagine if I and ten other people were tied to a train track, and you could only save me or the other ten. What would you do?”
“I’d have to say sorry to those other ten people,” Matt responded jovially. “My girl comes first.”
“Matt. This isn’t a joke. This is what being in the military is like. These are the sorts of decisions I have to make sometimes.”
“I-I, I wouldn’t like myself for doing it. Honestly, I’d probably feel like shit every day for the rest of my life if I ever had to do something like that. But in that moment, when I’d have to choose between you and some people I’ve never met, I’d choose you every time.” Matt felt uncomfortable saying that. Something about it sounded fundamentally wrong, like he just admitted he’d be willing to torture someone if it came right down to it. But it was how he felt. He couldn’t deny it.
Jo pressed her head up against his chest, prompting him to cradle her. “I’m glad you understand.”
The couple enjoyed their pulled-pork dinner without incident. They talked of social minutia, how their days had been, and their plans for their future together—the typical sort of conversation young couples would have a dinner table, straight out of a Hallmark card.
And Matt was none the wiser that time shifted backwards three times that day. The people of Earth failed to notice these three brief phenomena as well. But the universe saw, the universe noticed, and the universe had not forgotten.
The couple arrived in Phoenix, Arizona as the earthquake struck. Jo insisted they visit her college friend Stephanie for the weekend, and right as they stepped out of the car and into Stephanie’s driveway, they felt the aftershock. Minor tremors shook the ground beneath them, causing Matt to momentarily lose his balance. Jo ran over and steadied him before he could fall.
“What the hell was that?” Matt placed his arms on Jo’s shoulders, looking into the distance.
“Felt like an earthquake,” Jo said. “Not a big one though.”
When Jo was certain Matt wasn’t looking, she spat a thick gob of blood into the grass next to the concrete driveway. The bright crimson blood sank past the vibrant green grass and into the topsoil without a trace.
The tell-tale chime of a text-message notification rang out from Matt’s pocket.
Jo grimaced.
“Let’s go, Stephanie’s waiting!” She grabbed his wrist and took his hand before he could withdraw the phone.
Matt’s phone continued buzzing.
Jo looked at Matt, eyes desperately begging him not to look at his phone, but knowing that he would and that there was nothing she could do to stop him.
Matt broke free of her grip, shoved his into his pocket, and took out his phone. There was a long moment of silence where he simply stared at the phone’s screen before he let the phone slide from his hand and hit the ground. The screen shattered on the concrete in a kaleidoscope of thin glass.
“Oh…oh my god…” He slumped against the car door. His eyes were wide, hand held against his forehead, on the verge of tears. “…oh my god…”
“What? What is it Matt?” Jo tried her best to sound alarmed.
“L.A…. It’s gone!”
The news called it “The LA Super Quake”, fundamentalist religious organizations nicknamed it “God’s Hand”, and some others sardonically referred it as “The Perfect 10.” To the people of Los Angeles, it didn’t matter what it was called. What mattered was the damage it caused.
The earthquake rocked Los Angeles with the explosive force of 14,950 megatons of TNT, the equivalent of a million Hiroshima bombs, or twice the world’s nuclear arsenal. Los Angeles had been designed with earthquakes in mind, but even its reinforced engineering couldn’t withstand the supernatural destructive force of “The Perfect 10.”
What was once one of the crown jewels of the United States, the seat of luxury and wealth, was reduced not much more than a pile of rubble. The skyscrapers that once dominated the skyline crumbled into the streets, burying thousands of people alive beneath the debris. Suspended highways collapsed, showering the land below it with concrete and car parts. Hospitals full of sick and elderly people that were lucky enough not to implode completely lost all power and the majority of their equipment. Tens of thousands died within the first hour of the quake; even more would die in the aftermath.
At the end of the day, more than five hundred thousand people of Los Angeles’ 3.4 million population would be dead. Nearly a million would be injured, and a hundred thousand would be still be missing.
Geologists found no satisfactory evidence to explain the sheer magnitude of the quake. For all intents and purposes, a magnitude 10 earthquake shouldn’t have been possible along the San Andreas fault line. But it happened anyways, in spite of logic, in spite of the known rules of the universe. Science, for once, lacked an answer.
Already rumors of a government conspiracy involving some sort of nuclear weapon were rampantly circulating on the internet. Grainy, out of focus phone footage purporting to show a “bomb” and reports from survivors claiming to see a mushroom cloud were posted, retweeted, and shared.
People craved a rational explanation. But there was none. The universe had been skewed, thrown off its axis. This was only the first groan, the first buckling of the cosmos under the strain caused by an interloper mussing with its gears. It was only a matter of time before more and more cogs fell out of place. Finally, the grand machine of the universe would break.
Grass is green, the moon rises after the sun sets, Matthew Irons died at 10:48PM on October 21st, 2014: immutable facts of the cosmos that were not meant to be trifled with. No one thing more important or less necessary than the other.
“How did you know?”
No matter what, this question would be asked. Jo found that she could delay it for a day, a week even, but eventually, Matt would always ask. Matt always knew, somehow. Staying cooped up in a hotel, with no work, and no home allowed him precious time to think about what happened. Matt had honed his ability to read Jo’s face to a knife’s point over the years. There would be no deceiving him.
“I just got lucky,” she’d say, or some other excuse.
Matt would never believe her. “No, there’s got to be more to it than that. How did you know, Jo?”
Matt was a man of reason. He believed in empiricism and logic—but logic didn’t apply to “The Perfect 10.” It sat there, smacking him right in the face, challenging everything he ever believed about the Earth and its rules. When rational thought failed, irrational thought replaced it: fringe theories, conspiracies, government cover-ups. Matt and the rest of the world, when faced with no other answers, ate it up.
“I swear I didn’t know anything…” Another lie, and Matt could tell. Every time, her eyes betrayed her.
“Is the government forcing you to keep silent? You have a responsibility to speak out about what happened, Jo! I know you’re keeping secrets!” There was a certain forcefulness with how he spoke. Angry, hurt, and demanding all coalescing into one melting pot of emotion.
“I can’t…I…” Jo wrought her arms together, shaking. A non-verbal way of begging Matt to drop the subject altogether.
But of course, he wouldn’t. He never did.
“Baby, I love you, but you can’t keep this a secret! Too many people are dead! Jules, Robert, the whole neighborhood is gone! They nuked us, didn’t they?! Fucking Obama nuked us! The proof’s right there!” He put a small folder of news clippings on the hotel table with circled entries over select quotes and pictures.
“Matt, you’re scaring me.” This much was true. Matt’s hysteria had a profound effect on Jo, leaving her shaking and afraid.
“I can’t help it! This is seriously fucked up! I voted for that son of a bitch!” He placed his hands over his head. “I can’t believe it… Our friends…our house…our jobs… they’re all gone. Our life is over.”
Jo put her hands over his. “Our lives aren’t over. We still have each other.”
Matt withdrew his hands. “I know you’re involved with this. What did you do, Jo?!”
“Matt, I didn’t do anything!” A lie by omission. She held her shoulder against her face, as a coughing fit overtook her. She’d been coughing more and more recently.
“What do you know that you’re not telling me?” Matt continued pressing her.
Jo sighed. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you. And even if you did, you wouldn’t like what I had to do.”
“Tell me. Please. If you love me, you have to tell me.” Matt placed his hand back over Jo’s and stared her right in the eye with a desperate vulnerability, begging her not to break his heart.
“All right, but you have to trust me, okay.”
Matt nodded.
Jo took a deep breath. “I’m a time traveler.”
“Are you bullshitting me right now, Jo, because if you are, I swear to— “ Both Jo and Matt said in perfect simultaneity. “How did you know I was going to—“
“I know.” Jo stared Matt down with a ferocious intensity. “I’ve been through this conversation at least four times now with you. Spoiler: it doesn’t go well.”
Matt’s brain struggled to process this information, leaving him sputtering incomprehensible fragments of “what”, “how”, and “when.” He felt disoriented, as if someone had just taken a sledgehammer to his skull.
For the first time in his life, he looked at his wife-to-be and didn’t recognize the woman he saw: the warm kindness of her eyes, the patient curve of her smile, the gentle softness of her face, all gone. The woman he saw in front of him was a hardened and broken war veteran with a thousand-yard stare, looking beyond him to places he could never fathom.
Jo couldn’t bear to meet his gaze. She awaited the inevitable meltdown that this revelation always prompted. “I know this is a lot to deal with…”
“Jesus, Jo, how long have you been doing this? Years? Since we met? When did you know you could time travel? How did you get time travel powers? Is this real? Am I going crazy right now? This can’t be real…” Questions rained in a rapid downpour.
“Matt, I—“
Then the question Jo always dreaded came up: “Are we real? Us, I mean. Like you and I? Did you just manipulate me to make me love you?”
“Matt, you know I would never—“
All the pieces of the puzzle came into focus for Matt with a blinding clarity. In an instant, his demeanor shifted from confused and upset to furious and accusatory.
“Did you cause what happened in L.A.?”
Jo desperately tried to hide her guilt, but Matt caught it before she could even try.
“It was you, wasn’t it? Whatever you did in the past, it created that?”
Jo dropped her gaze to the floor. “Yes, it was me. I tampered with fate, and this is what happened.”
“Jesus Christ, Jo, do you know how many people died because of you?! And for what? So you could jump back in time to remember to take the roast out of the oven?” Matt shook her with a furious intensity. The tenderness faded from his visage, leaving only an unbridled fury.
“It wasn’t like that! I had my reasons goddammit!”
“Oh? Then what was it like, huh? What could have made you… It must have been something you changed…” Matt trailed off as the grim realization of what his fiancée had done suddenly dawned on Matt. “No, Jo, you didn’t…”
“What was I supposed to do, Matt? Let you die?! I couldn’t. Never. Not when I could stop it.”
Jo went in for a hug, but Matt only limply stood in shock.
“Matt, baby, I love you.” Her words were more a plea than anything.
Matt stepped backwards, freeing himself from Jo’s embrace and causing her to slump to floor. “I-I can’t do this… You’re a monster.” He bolted for the door.
She scrambled after him on her hands and knees, arms outstretched. “Matt, no!”
Matthew Irons, age 20, was about to have the best date of his life. He whistled cheerfully outside La Primo, an upscale Italian restaurant right outside the UCLA campus as he waited for his date. After weeks of quick, awkward glances, bits of small talk, some confidence boosting, and an embarrassing rehearsal in front of a mirror, he finally managed to ask out the girl in his Introduction to Philosophy class: Josephine Jansen.
Matt had been transfixed ever since she gave her first presentation on the problem of evil. He’d never been that much into philosophy, but her personality radiated off the project from the very first sentence.
“Nothing is more laughable than the idea that a god, if he exists, is benevolent—the best we could possibly say about the guy is that he is just apathetic.” She gave her presentation with the utmost confidence, a complete conviction in what she was talking about.
For most people, this sort of theological grandstanding would be a turnoff, especially in a classroom setting, but for Matt, who’d lost his parents before he was born and had been shuffled around various foster homes in the crime-ridden slums of Los Angeles, it made perfect sense. The existence of God didn’t bring any comfort to him, and to finally hear someone call out bullshit on it was infinitely refreshing.
It also helped that she had a killer body. Taut, toned muscles of an army cadet with glossy, creamy legs that a man could run his hands over for hours. Silky smooth jet black hair, and just the cutest face on the earth.
Matt had to have her.
The date would start off awkward, much like many first dates, where both participants were a bit nervous, but quickly the nerves would fade away. Conversation would be animated, and Matt’s jokes would all find their marks that night. They’d both order the chicken alfredo and both declare their intimate love for alfredo sauce. They’d small-talk over class and studies, and discover they both had a mutual interest in obscure works of science fiction, and discuss the meanings and interpretations of various Phillip K. Dick novels.
Afterwards, Matt would walk Josephine (now known as Jo) to her dorm, and give her a long kiss. Jo would invite him inside. And that would be that.
That is, if Jo had showed up that day.
Matthew Irons was dead. No matter how the cosmic minutia shuffled, no matter what Jo changed, Matt was still fated to die a sad, pathetic, and meaningless death. Whether Matt was with her or not, whether he lived with a cat named Arnold or a dog named Francis, it didn’t matter. Some cosmic happenings like that could be flexible, bent, and manipulated. But not Matt's death at 10:48PM. That was absolute.
This particular version of Matt died alone. He never knew the sort of true, unconditional love only a parent or spouse could provide. Life for him had been an empty set of disappointments punctuated only by a cruel and sudden death.
Just how things were supposed to be. Just how fate dictated.
The interloper sat under a tree, watching Matt’s death play out yet again at a distance. Four times he had died, and it never got any easier to look at. The physicality of the scene itself, the blood, the brains, the skull fragments flittering about on the pavement, had ceased to bother Jo, but what it represented was far more crushing. She had failed. Again.
Blood mixed with tears rolled down her face. The macabre streak combined with her increasingly gaunt and pale face made her seem less a woman and more a spectral revenant. The life had been slowly choked from her body—all those spare years she had spent traveling backwards were finally catching up to her. She clenched her fist with an unbridled rage, and she smashed her hands into the rough bark of the live oak. Time, a seemingly infinite commodity for the time traveler, was running out.
But Josephine Jansen was not the type of woman to back down from a challenge. Fate had spit in her face, and she would be damned if she would just sit there and take it. The strain required to rewrite causality from the beginning once more would certainly kill her, but Jo no longer cared. All she needed was one more chance. One more time to cheat fate. One more time to come out on top.
For the fifth and final time, Jo savored the sweetness of her first date with Matt. It was a memory she tasted and perused like a fine wine, saving for only the most special and important occasions. These precious moments formed the keystone of their love. As it passed by, Jo’s heart ached. At least they would always have this moment together, this one day of pure perfection. There was nothing the universe could do to strip that from her.
“Are we real? Us, I mean. Like you and I? Did you just manipulate me to make me love you?” Matt’s anger and distrust were just as palpable as the first time.
“I never manipulated you. Have you ever wanted to hold onto a moment forever, hoping that it’d never end?” Jo spat up more blood, coating the cheap hotel table and Matt’s conspiracy notes in a thick ugly soup. All the youthful energy had drained from her face, leaving only a tired, sad visage.
“Jesus, Jo! What happened to you?”
“Listen, Matt, I don’t have much time left anymore. I held this reality at a standstill for fifty years trying to save you, and I never could.” She suffered another coughing fit, blood trickled out from her nostrils and eyes.
“Save me?”
“You were supposed to die. Robert killed you. But I couldn’t live without you. I tried and tried, but I always came back to the time we shared together.” Jo voice was getting progressively weaker and faint. “They were the best years of my life, always. No matter what reality I was in.”
“Robert killed me? How?”
Jo grabbed Matt’s face with her bloodied hands. “That’s not important! What it’s important is that you know I love you and I always did. That’s why I let ‘The Perfect 10’ happen. That’s why I broke fate!”
“Jo, I never asked you to do that! If it means millions have to suffer for me to live, I’d rather die!” Matt batted Jo’s hand away, grabbing her wrist.
“Heh, this isn’t about just you anymore, Matt.” Jo dropped backwards onto the blood-soaked tabling, chuckling blithely. “No, this is so much bigger than us now.”
“But what about fate? The universe?”
The question kick-started the last legs of Josephine’s remaining energy.
“Fuck fate, fuck God, fuck the universe! What kind of universe makes us to stand by while an innocent man is left to die a cruel and purposeless death and calls it fate? What kind of god makes a world where some little girl destined to be raped for years before finally being gruesomely tortured to death and calls that okay? Or a little boy and his mother beaten to death with a claw hammer? Or thousands of children starving to death? What kind of grand plan is that? Is that the sort of ‘fate’ you’re comfortable with?” Jo raved. “The universe is sick, Matt, and it needs to be put down. So I'm going to break it.” Seconds later, she collapsed back onto the table, exhausted.
“But…all those people…” Matt for the first time in his entire life was completely terrified of his fiancée. He wasn’t even completely sure the woman in front of him was Josephine. Her utter contempt for the world seemed to radiate into the air around her, torching it with her fury.
“They don’t matter, Matt. This is bigger than them too.” Jo’s speech became softer and softer. “Don’t you get it? This is what playing on a cosmic scale is like.”
“Jo, it’s not too late, you could go back and fix everything. Let me die like I was supposed to. What you’re doing is wrong.”
“…You’re such, a hypocrite, Matt… Not very principled… but very compassionate. I loved that… about you.”
Matt grabbed her shoulders and shook her. “Please Jo, you can’t die!” His words were wrought with complete despair.
The world was ending for Matt, both figuratively and literally, and he only had a few moments to salvage even a small portion of that world. Light blinked and faded as the world shook under its own entropy. Objects flickered in and out of existence, some returning, some being lost forever. The earth rattled and groaned beneath them, a final call begging for mercy.
Matt didn’t know what he could do, what he could say. He could only offer a final desperate plea, putting the full force of his humanity and sympathy behind just four words:
“Jo, please save us.”
Josephine Jansen faded from life with a manic smile on her face and a self-assured satisfaction knowing that she had finally won. She used her final moments to kiss Matt one final time on the check, smattering blood alongside his cheek, before quietly whispering her last word in his ear.
“No.”
There should have been a lot of blood. The two men would stop their fighting. The gun would be dropped. Matt’s fiancée, Josephine Jansen, would come out their shared home and scream, fall to her knees, and weep, in that order. The blood from his body would run from the sidewalk into the storm drain.
Matthew Irons, age 28 years, 52 days, nine hours, and 35 seconds, would leave behind a small assortment of knickknacks, a few personal letters, and his social security card as the only physical evidence that he had ever existed. He never knew his parents. He had no siblings. For all practical purposes, it would be as if Matt never existed.
It was supposed to be so simple. Just another one of the unfathomable number of tragedies in the infinite history of the cosmos. Nothing special. Routine. The sky was blue, the earth orbited the sun, Matthew Irons died at 10:48PM on October 21st, 2014 from a gunshot wound to the head. Just another fact of life. But that wasn’t what happened.
10:44 PM, October 21st, 2014
“I said get the fuck back offa my goddamn lawn!” Robert, Matt’s next door neighbor yelled.
“Make me, you crotchety old sack of shit!” Jules, the man who lived across the street, retorted. “Howsa about you stop bein’ a deadbeat and give me my money?”
“Go to hell!”
Matt peered through the shutters of his window and sighed. He already regretted buying a house in this neighborhood. Each week there was a performance of machismo under the dim lighting of the street laps. For the fifth time that week, Matt reminded himself never to trust another real estate agent for the rest of his life.
“They at it again?” Jo asked. She yawned as she sashayed down the stairwell. “One of these days, those men are gonna get someone killed, I swear.”
“Nah, Jo, they’re all talk. Look, Jules is going back to his house.”
Jo gingerly slid up alongside Matt’s side, like a cat, and peered through the window. The frills of her nightdress rode up against his thigh.
“Hmm, looks like it’s over.” She leaned her body against his, making sure Matt felt her hips grinding into him.
“Hey,” she whispered seductively.
“Hey,” he whispered back. Matt placed his hands on her finely contoured hips and pulled her in close.
“Come back to bed.”
No sooner had the words left Jo’s mouth than Jules came back outside. This time, he held a small aluminum bat. It was probably his kid’s Little League bat. Jules also probably wasn’t getting the parent of the year award.
“Listen you Alzheimer’s-ridden fucker, you better give my money, or else I swear to God I’m gonna fuck up your mailbox!” he drunkenly yelled from Robert’s yard.
“Christ,” Matt said. He took a step back from Jo. “Looks like I’m gonna have to go out there this time.”
Jo put her hand over Matt’s, preventing him from going any further. “Can’t you just let them sort this out on their own? No need to be a hero today, Iron Matt.” Her tone was casual, but Matt sensed there was a keen desperation beneath it. Her grip on his hand tightened.
“Sweetie, sometimes a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do!” he said in a faux-baritone. “Besides, I can’t just stand around and let this happen every week. Somebody has got to do something!”
“Oh! My hero!” Jo pretend to swoon and faint in Matt’s arms. “Promise me you’ll be careful, okay?” She stared at him, suddenly serious.
“I promise my fair lady,” he said, still keeping on the superhero façade, “Or my name isn’t Iron Matt!”
They both giggled before exchanging a quick kiss.
“Get the fuck away from my mailbox you crazy fucker!”
The sound of metal smacking metal could be heard. Soon after, the sound of two men heavily panting.
“Ah. Duty calls. Farewell!” Matt dramatically opened the door and shut it behind him. The sight outside was not pretty.
Jules and Robert were both on the ground, Jules sitting on top of Robert, furiously beating him with his fists. Robert stuck up one hand to defend himself from the onslaught of punches, but to no avail. Robert’s other hand was caught in his waistband, grasping at something.
Matt started running towards them, shouting, “Hey break it up!”
At that moment, Robert managed to draw his gun. It was a silver .38, Smith and Wesson special. The kind of gun a hardboiled detective in a movie might use, but not a decrepit old man. The gun wedged itself between Jules’ arm and chest, aimed directly towards Matt. The barrel stared Matt down, the curvature of the barrel forming a single peephole for a deadly bullet to peer out from. Robert fired with a deafening bang.
Time slowed to a crawl for Matt as he saw the gun go off. Rational thought ceased, but for a brief moment Matt somehow knew that he was going to die right where he stood. That it was inevitable, and there was nothing he could do or could have done to prevent it. For that brief moment, Matthew Irons knew the terror of death.
And then something miraculous happened: the bullet was supposed to kill Matthew Irons missed him entirely. The bullet safely whizzed by roughly three feet away from where Matt was standing.
The watch on his wrist read 10:49PM. Matt didn’t know it, but he was twenty seconds late to his own death. Had he been three feet to the left, like he should have been, the bullet would have struck him square in the forehead. The bullet would have pierced his cranium, travelling through his front lobe and out through his occipital lobe, which would have resulted in an instant death.
That, of course, didn’t happened.
“Cut that shit out!” Matt screamed, eyes wide. “You nearly fucking shot me, goddammit!” His near-death experience was causing him to hyperventilate. He suddenly felt very weak and fell to his knees.
“Matt!” Jo shrieked, having heard the noise and walked outside. She put an arm around him, protecting him like a den mother. “Robert, put that fucking gun away!” she hissed.
“I-I’m fine…” Matt gasped. “Don’t worry, I’m all right.”
Jo hugged him as tight as she could. Matt gently stroked her hair and closed his arms around her in an angelic embrace.
The whole neighborhood poured out into the streets. Police sirens roared in the distance. Startled at the increase in attention, the two men separated from one another, both thoroughly embarrassed.
Shortly after, the police would arrive, take a statement from everyone, and haul Jules to jail. Matthew Irons, brimming with life after his brush with death, would go return to his dilapidated home in the inner city of Los Angeles and have the best sex of his life.
All was well. Until, of course, it wasn’t.
11:00 AM, October 22nd, 2014
“All I’m saying is that we need a vacation,” Jo said. “Especially after what happened last night.”
“And all I’m saying is that I would love to go on vacation, Jo,” Matt replied. “But I can’t take off work.”
Jo sighed. “Fineee. But next weekend, we’re taking a roadtrip, okay? I hear there’s a storm coming next week, and I don’t want to be around for it.”
“Where’d you hear that from?” Matt said, puzzled. “Radio says clear skies next week.”
Jo shot him a winning smile. “Trust me, I have my sources. Hey, why don’t we go get something to eat to celebrate that asshole Jules finally being taken away?” She jingled his car keys in front of his nose. “Come on! Let’s go to that new sushi bar you’ve been talking about!”
“Sushi-Junai?” Matt snatched the keys from her. “You’re on.”
The couple stepped outside into the driveway. As they walked to the car, something in the grass underneath the oak tree caught Matt’s eye. From a distance, it looked like someone had tossed some stray kindling on their lawn. He stopped.
“What is it, dear?” Jo asked.
Matt took a closer look. It was a bird’s nest, full of bright, broken eggshells. The remnants of the yolk had congealed over the surface of the sticks and stems, giving it at almost translucent, oiled look to it.
“Aw, some poor mama bird lost her kids,” he said, upset.
“Poor things.” Jo averted her gaze. “That’s life though, right?”
“Yeah. Life is full of little tragedies.” Matt was already past grieving. He strode back over to the car.
The Honda was no luxury, but Matt had prided himself on it being the first car he ever owned, bought new, and kept in immaculate shape. The Honda Civic may have been made in '08, but it still looked like it had come straight off the production line. The interior still had that new car smell.
Naturally, the car was long overdue for some misfortune. Just like its owner.
11:16 AM, October 22nd, 2014
Matt twiddled his thumbs at the red light. Between the tailgaters, drunks, and just plain rude people, navigating downtown Los Angeles was always pain in the ass.
Once the light turned green, he entered the intersection, only to be struck from the side by a BMW SUV, cruising well over speed limit. The driver, a teenager expecting an influx of nude photographs from his girlfriend, hadn’t noticed that the light changed and drove full force into the driver-side door of Matt’s Honda.
The force from the collision proved enough to cave in the entire door and cause the small sedan to spin into oncoming traffic, where it would collide with three other cars before finally resting on the sidewalk.
Matthew would die. But not like he was supposed to. Matthew was supposed to die at 10:48PM on October 21st, 2014. That didn’t stop him from dying at 11:16AM, October 22nd, 2014, though. The universe was petty like that.
11:14AM October 22nd, 2014
“Matt, do you believe in true love?” Jo asked.
“What do you mean?” Matt looked at her, worried. “I love you, if that’s what you’re asking.” Internally, Matt hoped he had given the right answer and wasn’t about to reprimanded.
“No, I mean like, true love, the sort of sappy love that makes you into an idiot. Think Bon Jovi’s ‘I’d Die For You’ kind of love. Disney movie love.”
“Oh.” Matt thought a moment before responding. “Yeah, I think so. What brings this up?”
“Oh, nothing.” Jo wore her notoriously bad poker face.
“Come on, tell me.” Matt drummed his hands against the steering wheel. “I gotta know now.”
“Well, there’s this boy I like, and things are getting pretty serious between him and I…” Jo’s words dripped with candied sarcasm.
“Be serious.”
Jo fidgeted uncomfortably in her car seat. “And I just worry about him sometimes. I don’t know what I’d do without him.”
“I’m not going anywhere, Jo.”
At that very moment, the teenager in the BMV blew through the intersection.
“Jesus! Did you see that kid? He coulda hit us!” Jo rolled down the window. “Get off your fucking phone!” she yelled after him.
A chorus of car horns blared behind them. Matt had been unknowingly sitting on a green light for roughly 15 seconds.
“Move your ass!” someone called behind him. “People got places to be!”
Matt also had a place to be. But it didn’t seem like he would be getting there anytime soon.
7:32 PM, October 22nd, 2014
The couple sat at the dinner table, enjoying the pulled pork Jo had cooked. Despite Jo’s magnificent cooking, a malignant unease seemed to hang about the room as they ate in silence, almost as if the room was haunted by a ghost.
Matt could tell something was bothering her, but he couldn’t pinpoint exactly what. After seven years with Josephine, he could read her face like a book. Shallow creases at the lips, brow slightly bent, her eyes never fully pointed directly at him. He decided to take a blunt approach.
“Honey, what’s wrong?”
Jo cast her eyes to the floor. “Uh, I was just thinking of something.”
“Do you want to talk about it?” Matt nudged gently.
“I-I… I can’t.”
“Is it work-related? Something you can’t tell me because it’s related to the Army?”
“No, nothing like that, it’s just…” Jo paused for a moment to think of the right words. “I don’t want to worry you.”
“I won’t worry.”
Jo sighed. “Let’s just say I’m making an impossible decision right now.”
“What do you mean?” Matt sat up, and put his arms on Jo’s shoulders.
“Like I said, I can’t talk about it, but maybe you can help me out.” She brushed his arms off him.
“I’m listening.”
“Imagine if you and ten other people were tied to a train track, and I could only save you or the ten others, not both. What should I do?”
“Are you breaking up with me?” Matt asked, suddenly alarmed.
“No, this is just a hypothetical,”
Matt took a moment to think. “I think I’d want you to save those other ten people. I know you love me, but there would always be other people. The fact that you had to sacrifice ten innocent people would taint our relationship.”
“But I don’t want other people! I want you!” Jo yelled. Her eyes puffed, welling with tears. “There’s nobody that could replace you.”
“You just think that now. Time will pass. You’d be fine.”
The tears finally fell. “God, Matt, sometimes you are just full of shit. I wish you knew what it felt like, what I was going through.”
“Baby, what do you—“
7:33 PM, October 22nd, 2014
“I’m listening,” Matt said, completely unaware time had skipped backwards exactly 36 seconds.
“Imagine if I and ten other people were tied to a train track, and you could only save me or the other ten. What would you do?”
“I’d have to say sorry to those other ten people,” Matt responded jovially. “My girl comes first.”
“Matt. This isn’t a joke. This is what being in the military is like. These are the sorts of decisions I have to make sometimes.”
“I-I, I wouldn’t like myself for doing it. Honestly, I’d probably feel like shit every day for the rest of my life if I ever had to do something like that. But in that moment, when I’d have to choose between you and some people I’ve never met, I’d choose you every time.” Matt felt uncomfortable saying that. Something about it sounded fundamentally wrong, like he just admitted he’d be willing to torture someone if it came right down to it. But it was how he felt. He couldn’t deny it.
Jo pressed her head up against his chest, prompting him to cradle her. “I’m glad you understand.”
7:32PM October 22nd, 2014
The couple enjoyed their pulled-pork dinner without incident. They talked of social minutia, how their days had been, and their plans for their future together—the typical sort of conversation young couples would have a dinner table, straight out of a Hallmark card.
And Matt was none the wiser that time shifted backwards three times that day. The people of Earth failed to notice these three brief phenomena as well. But the universe saw, the universe noticed, and the universe had not forgotten.
3:34 PM, October 29th, 2014
The couple arrived in Phoenix, Arizona as the earthquake struck. Jo insisted they visit her college friend Stephanie for the weekend, and right as they stepped out of the car and into Stephanie’s driveway, they felt the aftershock. Minor tremors shook the ground beneath them, causing Matt to momentarily lose his balance. Jo ran over and steadied him before he could fall.
“What the hell was that?” Matt placed his arms on Jo’s shoulders, looking into the distance.
“Felt like an earthquake,” Jo said. “Not a big one though.”
When Jo was certain Matt wasn’t looking, she spat a thick gob of blood into the grass next to the concrete driveway. The bright crimson blood sank past the vibrant green grass and into the topsoil without a trace.
The tell-tale chime of a text-message notification rang out from Matt’s pocket.
Jo grimaced.
“Let’s go, Stephanie’s waiting!” She grabbed his wrist and took his hand before he could withdraw the phone.
Matt’s phone continued buzzing.
Jo looked at Matt, eyes desperately begging him not to look at his phone, but knowing that he would and that there was nothing she could do to stop him.
Matt broke free of her grip, shoved his into his pocket, and took out his phone. There was a long moment of silence where he simply stared at the phone’s screen before he let the phone slide from his hand and hit the ground. The screen shattered on the concrete in a kaleidoscope of thin glass.
“Oh…oh my god…” He slumped against the car door. His eyes were wide, hand held against his forehead, on the verge of tears. “…oh my god…”
“What? What is it Matt?” Jo tried her best to sound alarmed.
“L.A…. It’s gone!”
The news called it “The LA Super Quake”, fundamentalist religious organizations nicknamed it “God’s Hand”, and some others sardonically referred it as “The Perfect 10.” To the people of Los Angeles, it didn’t matter what it was called. What mattered was the damage it caused.
The earthquake rocked Los Angeles with the explosive force of 14,950 megatons of TNT, the equivalent of a million Hiroshima bombs, or twice the world’s nuclear arsenal. Los Angeles had been designed with earthquakes in mind, but even its reinforced engineering couldn’t withstand the supernatural destructive force of “The Perfect 10.”
What was once one of the crown jewels of the United States, the seat of luxury and wealth, was reduced not much more than a pile of rubble. The skyscrapers that once dominated the skyline crumbled into the streets, burying thousands of people alive beneath the debris. Suspended highways collapsed, showering the land below it with concrete and car parts. Hospitals full of sick and elderly people that were lucky enough not to implode completely lost all power and the majority of their equipment. Tens of thousands died within the first hour of the quake; even more would die in the aftermath.
At the end of the day, more than five hundred thousand people of Los Angeles’ 3.4 million population would be dead. Nearly a million would be injured, and a hundred thousand would be still be missing.
Geologists found no satisfactory evidence to explain the sheer magnitude of the quake. For all intents and purposes, a magnitude 10 earthquake shouldn’t have been possible along the San Andreas fault line. But it happened anyways, in spite of logic, in spite of the known rules of the universe. Science, for once, lacked an answer.
Already rumors of a government conspiracy involving some sort of nuclear weapon were rampantly circulating on the internet. Grainy, out of focus phone footage purporting to show a “bomb” and reports from survivors claiming to see a mushroom cloud were posted, retweeted, and shared.
People craved a rational explanation. But there was none. The universe had been skewed, thrown off its axis. This was only the first groan, the first buckling of the cosmos under the strain caused by an interloper mussing with its gears. It was only a matter of time before more and more cogs fell out of place. Finally, the grand machine of the universe would break.
Grass is green, the moon rises after the sun sets, Matthew Irons died at 10:48PM on October 21st, 2014: immutable facts of the cosmos that were not meant to be trifled with. No one thing more important or less necessary than the other.
6:34 PM October 31st, 2014
“How did you know?”
No matter what, this question would be asked. Jo found that she could delay it for a day, a week even, but eventually, Matt would always ask. Matt always knew, somehow. Staying cooped up in a hotel, with no work, and no home allowed him precious time to think about what happened. Matt had honed his ability to read Jo’s face to a knife’s point over the years. There would be no deceiving him.
“I just got lucky,” she’d say, or some other excuse.
Matt would never believe her. “No, there’s got to be more to it than that. How did you know, Jo?”
Matt was a man of reason. He believed in empiricism and logic—but logic didn’t apply to “The Perfect 10.” It sat there, smacking him right in the face, challenging everything he ever believed about the Earth and its rules. When rational thought failed, irrational thought replaced it: fringe theories, conspiracies, government cover-ups. Matt and the rest of the world, when faced with no other answers, ate it up.
“I swear I didn’t know anything…” Another lie, and Matt could tell. Every time, her eyes betrayed her.
“Is the government forcing you to keep silent? You have a responsibility to speak out about what happened, Jo! I know you’re keeping secrets!” There was a certain forcefulness with how he spoke. Angry, hurt, and demanding all coalescing into one melting pot of emotion.
“I can’t…I…” Jo wrought her arms together, shaking. A non-verbal way of begging Matt to drop the subject altogether.
But of course, he wouldn’t. He never did.
“Baby, I love you, but you can’t keep this a secret! Too many people are dead! Jules, Robert, the whole neighborhood is gone! They nuked us, didn’t they?! Fucking Obama nuked us! The proof’s right there!” He put a small folder of news clippings on the hotel table with circled entries over select quotes and pictures.
“Matt, you’re scaring me.” This much was true. Matt’s hysteria had a profound effect on Jo, leaving her shaking and afraid.
“I can’t help it! This is seriously fucked up! I voted for that son of a bitch!” He placed his hands over his head. “I can’t believe it… Our friends…our house…our jobs… they’re all gone. Our life is over.”
Jo put her hands over his. “Our lives aren’t over. We still have each other.”
Matt withdrew his hands. “I know you’re involved with this. What did you do, Jo?!”
“Matt, I didn’t do anything!” A lie by omission. She held her shoulder against her face, as a coughing fit overtook her. She’d been coughing more and more recently.
“What do you know that you’re not telling me?” Matt continued pressing her.
Jo sighed. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you. And even if you did, you wouldn’t like what I had to do.”
“Tell me. Please. If you love me, you have to tell me.” Matt placed his hand back over Jo’s and stared her right in the eye with a desperate vulnerability, begging her not to break his heart.
“All right, but you have to trust me, okay.”
Matt nodded.
Jo took a deep breath. “I’m a time traveler.”
“Are you bullshitting me right now, Jo, because if you are, I swear to— “ Both Jo and Matt said in perfect simultaneity. “How did you know I was going to—“
“I know.” Jo stared Matt down with a ferocious intensity. “I’ve been through this conversation at least four times now with you. Spoiler: it doesn’t go well.”
Matt’s brain struggled to process this information, leaving him sputtering incomprehensible fragments of “what”, “how”, and “when.” He felt disoriented, as if someone had just taken a sledgehammer to his skull.
For the first time in his life, he looked at his wife-to-be and didn’t recognize the woman he saw: the warm kindness of her eyes, the patient curve of her smile, the gentle softness of her face, all gone. The woman he saw in front of him was a hardened and broken war veteran with a thousand-yard stare, looking beyond him to places he could never fathom.
Jo couldn’t bear to meet his gaze. She awaited the inevitable meltdown that this revelation always prompted. “I know this is a lot to deal with…”
“Jesus, Jo, how long have you been doing this? Years? Since we met? When did you know you could time travel? How did you get time travel powers? Is this real? Am I going crazy right now? This can’t be real…” Questions rained in a rapid downpour.
“Matt, I—“
Then the question Jo always dreaded came up: “Are we real? Us, I mean. Like you and I? Did you just manipulate me to make me love you?”
“Matt, you know I would never—“
All the pieces of the puzzle came into focus for Matt with a blinding clarity. In an instant, his demeanor shifted from confused and upset to furious and accusatory.
“Did you cause what happened in L.A.?”
Jo desperately tried to hide her guilt, but Matt caught it before she could even try.
“It was you, wasn’t it? Whatever you did in the past, it created that?”
Jo dropped her gaze to the floor. “Yes, it was me. I tampered with fate, and this is what happened.”
“Jesus Christ, Jo, do you know how many people died because of you?! And for what? So you could jump back in time to remember to take the roast out of the oven?” Matt shook her with a furious intensity. The tenderness faded from his visage, leaving only an unbridled fury.
“It wasn’t like that! I had my reasons goddammit!”
“Oh? Then what was it like, huh? What could have made you… It must have been something you changed…” Matt trailed off as the grim realization of what his fiancée had done suddenly dawned on Matt. “No, Jo, you didn’t…”
“What was I supposed to do, Matt? Let you die?! I couldn’t. Never. Not when I could stop it.”
Jo went in for a hug, but Matt only limply stood in shock.
“Matt, baby, I love you.” Her words were more a plea than anything.
Matt stepped backwards, freeing himself from Jo’s embrace and causing her to slump to floor. “I-I can’t do this… You’re a monster.” He bolted for the door.
She scrambled after him on her hands and knees, arms outstretched. “Matt, no!”
6:30 PM, February 23rd. 2006
Matthew Irons, age 20, was about to have the best date of his life. He whistled cheerfully outside La Primo, an upscale Italian restaurant right outside the UCLA campus as he waited for his date. After weeks of quick, awkward glances, bits of small talk, some confidence boosting, and an embarrassing rehearsal in front of a mirror, he finally managed to ask out the girl in his Introduction to Philosophy class: Josephine Jansen.
Matt had been transfixed ever since she gave her first presentation on the problem of evil. He’d never been that much into philosophy, but her personality radiated off the project from the very first sentence.
“Nothing is more laughable than the idea that a god, if he exists, is benevolent—the best we could possibly say about the guy is that he is just apathetic.” She gave her presentation with the utmost confidence, a complete conviction in what she was talking about.
For most people, this sort of theological grandstanding would be a turnoff, especially in a classroom setting, but for Matt, who’d lost his parents before he was born and had been shuffled around various foster homes in the crime-ridden slums of Los Angeles, it made perfect sense. The existence of God didn’t bring any comfort to him, and to finally hear someone call out bullshit on it was infinitely refreshing.
It also helped that she had a killer body. Taut, toned muscles of an army cadet with glossy, creamy legs that a man could run his hands over for hours. Silky smooth jet black hair, and just the cutest face on the earth.
Matt had to have her.
The date would start off awkward, much like many first dates, where both participants were a bit nervous, but quickly the nerves would fade away. Conversation would be animated, and Matt’s jokes would all find their marks that night. They’d both order the chicken alfredo and both declare their intimate love for alfredo sauce. They’d small-talk over class and studies, and discover they both had a mutual interest in obscure works of science fiction, and discuss the meanings and interpretations of various Phillip K. Dick novels.
Afterwards, Matt would walk Josephine (now known as Jo) to her dorm, and give her a long kiss. Jo would invite him inside. And that would be that.
That is, if Jo had showed up that day.
10:48 PM, October 21st, 2014
Matthew Irons was dead. No matter how the cosmic minutia shuffled, no matter what Jo changed, Matt was still fated to die a sad, pathetic, and meaningless death. Whether Matt was with her or not, whether he lived with a cat named Arnold or a dog named Francis, it didn’t matter. Some cosmic happenings like that could be flexible, bent, and manipulated. But not Matt's death at 10:48PM. That was absolute.
This particular version of Matt died alone. He never knew the sort of true, unconditional love only a parent or spouse could provide. Life for him had been an empty set of disappointments punctuated only by a cruel and sudden death.
Just how things were supposed to be. Just how fate dictated.
The interloper sat under a tree, watching Matt’s death play out yet again at a distance. Four times he had died, and it never got any easier to look at. The physicality of the scene itself, the blood, the brains, the skull fragments flittering about on the pavement, had ceased to bother Jo, but what it represented was far more crushing. She had failed. Again.
Blood mixed with tears rolled down her face. The macabre streak combined with her increasingly gaunt and pale face made her seem less a woman and more a spectral revenant. The life had been slowly choked from her body—all those spare years she had spent traveling backwards were finally catching up to her. She clenched her fist with an unbridled rage, and she smashed her hands into the rough bark of the live oak. Time, a seemingly infinite commodity for the time traveler, was running out.
But Josephine Jansen was not the type of woman to back down from a challenge. Fate had spit in her face, and she would be damned if she would just sit there and take it. The strain required to rewrite causality from the beginning once more would certainly kill her, but Jo no longer cared. All she needed was one more chance. One more time to cheat fate. One more time to come out on top.
6:30 PM, February 23rd, 2006
For the fifth and final time, Jo savored the sweetness of her first date with Matt. It was a memory she tasted and perused like a fine wine, saving for only the most special and important occasions. These precious moments formed the keystone of their love. As it passed by, Jo’s heart ached. At least they would always have this moment together, this one day of pure perfection. There was nothing the universe could do to strip that from her.
6:36 PM, October 31st, 2014
“Are we real? Us, I mean. Like you and I? Did you just manipulate me to make me love you?” Matt’s anger and distrust were just as palpable as the first time.
“I never manipulated you. Have you ever wanted to hold onto a moment forever, hoping that it’d never end?” Jo spat up more blood, coating the cheap hotel table and Matt’s conspiracy notes in a thick ugly soup. All the youthful energy had drained from her face, leaving only a tired, sad visage.
“Jesus, Jo! What happened to you?”
“Listen, Matt, I don’t have much time left anymore. I held this reality at a standstill for fifty years trying to save you, and I never could.” She suffered another coughing fit, blood trickled out from her nostrils and eyes.
“Save me?”
“You were supposed to die. Robert killed you. But I couldn’t live without you. I tried and tried, but I always came back to the time we shared together.” Jo voice was getting progressively weaker and faint. “They were the best years of my life, always. No matter what reality I was in.”
“Robert killed me? How?”
Jo grabbed Matt’s face with her bloodied hands. “That’s not important! What it’s important is that you know I love you and I always did. That’s why I let ‘The Perfect 10’ happen. That’s why I broke fate!”
“Jo, I never asked you to do that! If it means millions have to suffer for me to live, I’d rather die!” Matt batted Jo’s hand away, grabbing her wrist.
“Heh, this isn’t about just you anymore, Matt.” Jo dropped backwards onto the blood-soaked tabling, chuckling blithely. “No, this is so much bigger than us now.”
“But what about fate? The universe?”
The question kick-started the last legs of Josephine’s remaining energy.
“Fuck fate, fuck God, fuck the universe! What kind of universe makes us to stand by while an innocent man is left to die a cruel and purposeless death and calls it fate? What kind of god makes a world where some little girl destined to be raped for years before finally being gruesomely tortured to death and calls that okay? Or a little boy and his mother beaten to death with a claw hammer? Or thousands of children starving to death? What kind of grand plan is that? Is that the sort of ‘fate’ you’re comfortable with?” Jo raved. “The universe is sick, Matt, and it needs to be put down. So I'm going to break it.” Seconds later, she collapsed back onto the table, exhausted.
“But…all those people…” Matt for the first time in his entire life was completely terrified of his fiancée. He wasn’t even completely sure the woman in front of him was Josephine. Her utter contempt for the world seemed to radiate into the air around her, torching it with her fury.
“They don’t matter, Matt. This is bigger than them too.” Jo’s speech became softer and softer. “Don’t you get it? This is what playing on a cosmic scale is like.”
“Jo, it’s not too late, you could go back and fix everything. Let me die like I was supposed to. What you’re doing is wrong.”
“…You’re such, a hypocrite, Matt… Not very principled… but very compassionate. I loved that… about you.”
Matt grabbed her shoulders and shook her. “Please Jo, you can’t die!” His words were wrought with complete despair.
The world was ending for Matt, both figuratively and literally, and he only had a few moments to salvage even a small portion of that world. Light blinked and faded as the world shook under its own entropy. Objects flickered in and out of existence, some returning, some being lost forever. The earth rattled and groaned beneath them, a final call begging for mercy.
Matt didn’t know what he could do, what he could say. He could only offer a final desperate plea, putting the full force of his humanity and sympathy behind just four words:
“Jo, please save us.”
Josephine Jansen faded from life with a manic smile on her face and a self-assured satisfaction knowing that she had finally won. She used her final moments to kiss Matt one final time on the check, smattering blood alongside his cheek, before quietly whispering her last word in his ear.
“No.”
"It isn't fair that my own interpretation of fate makes people suffer, so I'll kill reality itself instead, thus dooming all of humanity to a fate worse than what their own destinies could be!"
While existential nihilism isn't my cup of tea, I still managed to get some enjoyment out of the story. I can't say I sympathise with Jo, though. I mean, if the universe wants my partner dead that badly, maybe just try to enjoy all the time you've had together and then move on with your life. If you're unable to let go to the degree Jo is, then use your time travelling powers to re-live all the time you've had together. Seriously, are you so self-centered that you don't think you can't ever love anyone ever again?
But yeah, other than Jo's questionable logic, I liked the story.
While existential nihilism isn't my cup of tea, I still managed to get some enjoyment out of the story. I can't say I sympathise with Jo, though. I mean, if the universe wants my partner dead that badly, maybe just try to enjoy all the time you've had together and then move on with your life. If you're unable to let go to the degree Jo is, then use your time travelling powers to re-live all the time you've had together. Seriously, are you so self-centered that you don't think you can't ever love anyone ever again?
But yeah, other than Jo's questionable logic, I liked the story.
Well, that's a hell of a hook.
And the rest of the story is equally as engaging. This one really does a great job of grabbing a hold of the reader and not letting go. The gradual reveal is great, and it works very well with the mounting tension. Overall, this story is excellently paced.
As for complaints, the mid-story perspective shift was a little jarring for me, but I'm not sure how to tell the story without it, so I'm not gonna dock any points for that.
What's a little harder to gloss over is how the resolution plays out. I'm having trouble sympathizing with Jo at all towards the end. From her "This is not just about you anymore, Matt" line, it gets really hard to buy what she's saying. I mean, until that point I generally sympathized with what Jo was feeling and her motivations, even if I didn't agree with them. But the leap from "I'll do anything to save my boyfriend." to "This unjust universe and everyone in it deserves to die!" is pretty massive, and we only get a handful of paragraphs to bridge those two character points. I also happen to agree with Zaid that it paints her in an incredibly immature light.
As a whole, the story wins a boatload of points for keeping me invested, engaged, and interested throughout, but I do feel like the fridge logic issues at the end hurt the story quite a bit.
And the rest of the story is equally as engaging. This one really does a great job of grabbing a hold of the reader and not letting go. The gradual reveal is great, and it works very well with the mounting tension. Overall, this story is excellently paced.
As for complaints, the mid-story perspective shift was a little jarring for me, but I'm not sure how to tell the story without it, so I'm not gonna dock any points for that.
What's a little harder to gloss over is how the resolution plays out. I'm having trouble sympathizing with Jo at all towards the end. From her "This is not just about you anymore, Matt" line, it gets really hard to buy what she's saying. I mean, until that point I generally sympathized with what Jo was feeling and her motivations, even if I didn't agree with them. But the leap from "I'll do anything to save my boyfriend." to "This unjust universe and everyone in it deserves to die!" is pretty massive, and we only get a handful of paragraphs to bridge those two character points. I also happen to agree with Zaid that it paints her in an incredibly immature light.
As a whole, the story wins a boatload of points for keeping me invested, engaged, and interested throughout, but I do feel like the fridge logic issues at the end hurt the story quite a bit.
Reviewing this story is being handed a puzzle of an essay on fatalism and being prompted to assemble it, then being tasked to write a paper on the author's intentions. Which is to say that, while it is easy enough to understand that it is a puzzle, it is much more difficult to unpack.
There seems to be three main themes: how terrible fatalism/predestination is, what is the limit of true love, and moving on. Because of the way this story is told, there are at lot of scattered syllogisms and small moments across the entire story that ultimately build the backbone of its conclusion. The interconnected nature of the scenes and second read-through bonus are very strong on this story, but it might lean on these factors too heavily in order to provide a coherent thesis by the end.
That being said, I do find the ending strong and interesting, but it needed perhaps a scene more to prepare the reader for Jo's ultimate transition from the person willing to let horrific things happen in order to save her lover to someone who has let that love transform into malice and resentment. Jo's unwillingness to accept things the way there are and efforts to change them result in the conflict, and the story seems not be endorsing her for it, but not condemning her either. Even her last moment is just a refusal to fix things, rather than an active sabotage. . It is the logical extension of the dinner conversation they had, which is: "How many people would you be willing to sacrifice for one person, if you really loved them?" It's a sick hypothetical, and I don't believe there is necessarily a right answer, but how each character goes about addressing it is interesting and understandable. Jo is an absolutist, where she reasons that the act of killing ten or a million is essentially irrelevant, as these things don't have a price, where Matt is a relativist that stresses the importance of that sort of "magic number."
The weird style helps and hinders, the hardest sell being the strange take on perspective the story uses. The author is breaking a lot of rules knowingly, so I'm willing to give him/her some benefit of the doubt, but nonetheless, I find myself questioning some of the techniques utilized.
That being said, this was a strong entry. Some of the dialogue in certain scenes was a little off, particularly in the "confrontation" scene, but otherwise the character voices were strong and consistent throughout. Some great scene construction, decent prose, and very intriguing subtext makes it high on my list.
Verdict: A strange tale with some questionable moments, but very rewarding and fun the more you invest in it.
There seems to be three main themes: how terrible fatalism/predestination is, what is the limit of true love, and moving on. Because of the way this story is told, there are at lot of scattered syllogisms and small moments across the entire story that ultimately build the backbone of its conclusion. The interconnected nature of the scenes and second read-through bonus are very strong on this story, but it might lean on these factors too heavily in order to provide a coherent thesis by the end.
That being said, I do find the ending strong and interesting, but it needed perhaps a scene more to prepare the reader for Jo's ultimate transition from the person willing to let horrific things happen in order to save her lover to someone who has let that love transform into malice and resentment. Jo's unwillingness to accept things the way there are and efforts to change them result in the conflict, and the story seems not be endorsing her for it, but not condemning her either. Even her last moment is just a refusal to fix things, rather than an active sabotage. . It is the logical extension of the dinner conversation they had, which is: "How many people would you be willing to sacrifice for one person, if you really loved them?" It's a sick hypothetical, and I don't believe there is necessarily a right answer, but how each character goes about addressing it is interesting and understandable. Jo is an absolutist, where she reasons that the act of killing ten or a million is essentially irrelevant, as these things don't have a price, where Matt is a relativist that stresses the importance of that sort of "magic number."
The weird style helps and hinders, the hardest sell being the strange take on perspective the story uses. The author is breaking a lot of rules knowingly, so I'm willing to give him/her some benefit of the doubt, but nonetheless, I find myself questioning some of the techniques utilized.
That being said, this was a strong entry. Some of the dialogue in certain scenes was a little off, particularly in the "confrontation" scene, but otherwise the character voices were strong and consistent throughout. Some great scene construction, decent prose, and very intriguing subtext makes it high on my list.
Verdict: A strange tale with some questionable moments, but very rewarding and fun the more you invest in it.
"If I can't be happy, no-one can," huh? Jo comes off as megalomaniacal and more than a little selfish to me in the end. Matt comes off as pretty one-dimensional, honestly, not deviating much at all from the one or two character traits he's given pretty early on.
What was up with the birds nest? That didn't make any sense to me. Even less sense then the Perfect 10, which in itself was a pretty big 'just because', driven by whatever strange machinations of 'fate' you've got going on here. When I read the bit about the car crash, I thought that perhaps his continued presence in the world would create disruptions in what was planned that would slowly spiral out of control, but I have no idea how that would end in an earthquake. :/
Anyways, this is a pretty strong narrative. It doesn't seem to nail down a theme, and... I'm mostly okay with that, except that I think it feels like it wants to have a theme, since the simplistic characters make it feel kinda archetypal.
What was up with the birds nest? That didn't make any sense to me. Even less sense then the Perfect 10, which in itself was a pretty big 'just because', driven by whatever strange machinations of 'fate' you've got going on here. When I read the bit about the car crash, I thought that perhaps his continued presence in the world would create disruptions in what was planned that would slowly spiral out of control, but I have no idea how that would end in an earthquake. :/
Anyways, this is a pretty strong narrative. It doesn't seem to nail down a theme, and... I'm mostly okay with that, except that I think it feels like it wants to have a theme, since the simplistic characters make it feel kinda archetypal.
10:48 AM
When I got a few paragraphs into this, I was worried it was going to steal the concept of those Final Destination films. A while later, I was relieved to be proven wrong – it's not about warmed-over fatalism, it's about time-travel and utilitarian morality!
Then I got to the halfway point.
How disappointing. How cruel, even. I thought I'd managed to avoid such a fate, only for it to sneak in through he window and get me when I wasn't looking…
Yes, I do have an issue with this FD-fatalism conceit. It's just so silly. It's always struck me as a sort of wimpy anthropomorphism, where some human values are imputed to the universe, but then things stop short, terrified of going the whole way to petulant and jealous gods. Because it's more mysterious this way? Except it isn't. It's bathetic. It's as effective as some guy in a lace curtain making ghost noises.
Maybe I'm being unfair. So I don't like the conceit. What about the story itself?
Well, the thing about the story is that it doesn't make sense. The ideas it lays down for us contradict themselves over and over again.
So, for example, in one of the pasts, Jo talks about the problem of evil and how the deity must be apathetic. All well and good, but given the events of the story, it's very clearly not apathetic. It obviously cares a great deal. I don't know why, but it does.
It's not just the big stuff either. Take this quote: “Matt had honed his ability to read Jo’s face to a knife’s point over the years. There would be no deceiving him.” At which point I have to wonder how she manages to spend close to every other moment of the story deceiving him.
“Matt, I didn’t do anything!” A lie by omission. The narration, meanwhile, lies by commission.
Again:
Matt was a man of reason. He believed in empiricism and logic—but logic didn’t apply to “The Perfect 10.” It sat there, smacking him right in the face, challenging everything he ever believed about the Earth and its rules. When rational thought failed, irrational thought replaced it: fringe theories, conspiracies, government cover-ups. Matt and the rest of the world, when faced with no other answers, ate it up.
Once you get past all the contortions, what this paragraph says is that Matt is a man of reason who, the moment things get tough, abandons any pretence of rationality.
Even more condensed – what this paragraph says is that Matt is a bit of a knob.
Which, at least, is a trait he shares with the other main characters. If there's one thing that unifies Matt, Jo and the universe here, it's a sense of overblown self-importance coupled with relentless immaturity. And that's the other big thing that irritates me about this.
So, I guess this has been another one of my special S&S-is-being-a-dickhead reviews. For the sake of housekeeping, though, there are a couple more things I want to note.
On the bad side, a lot of your dialogue feels worn and clichéd, especially during the arguments.
On the good side, your actual hook is excellent, up to and including the point where Matt misses his death. It's effectively dramatic, interesting, and it serves to effectively demonstrate the first part of your conceit. Similarly, the technique of prefacing the scenes with times is a cool way of weaving the theme into the structure. So well done with that.
When I got a few paragraphs into this, I was worried it was going to steal the concept of those Final Destination films. A while later, I was relieved to be proven wrong – it's not about warmed-over fatalism, it's about time-travel and utilitarian morality!
Then I got to the halfway point.
How disappointing. How cruel, even. I thought I'd managed to avoid such a fate, only for it to sneak in through he window and get me when I wasn't looking…
Yes, I do have an issue with this FD-fatalism conceit. It's just so silly. It's always struck me as a sort of wimpy anthropomorphism, where some human values are imputed to the universe, but then things stop short, terrified of going the whole way to petulant and jealous gods. Because it's more mysterious this way? Except it isn't. It's bathetic. It's as effective as some guy in a lace curtain making ghost noises.
Maybe I'm being unfair. So I don't like the conceit. What about the story itself?
Well, the thing about the story is that it doesn't make sense. The ideas it lays down for us contradict themselves over and over again.
So, for example, in one of the pasts, Jo talks about the problem of evil and how the deity must be apathetic. All well and good, but given the events of the story, it's very clearly not apathetic. It obviously cares a great deal. I don't know why, but it does.
It's not just the big stuff either. Take this quote: “Matt had honed his ability to read Jo’s face to a knife’s point over the years. There would be no deceiving him.” At which point I have to wonder how she manages to spend close to every other moment of the story deceiving him.
“Matt, I didn’t do anything!” A lie by omission. The narration, meanwhile, lies by commission.
Again:
Matt was a man of reason. He believed in empiricism and logic—but logic didn’t apply to “The Perfect 10.” It sat there, smacking him right in the face, challenging everything he ever believed about the Earth and its rules. When rational thought failed, irrational thought replaced it: fringe theories, conspiracies, government cover-ups. Matt and the rest of the world, when faced with no other answers, ate it up.
Once you get past all the contortions, what this paragraph says is that Matt is a man of reason who, the moment things get tough, abandons any pretence of rationality.
Even more condensed – what this paragraph says is that Matt is a bit of a knob.
Which, at least, is a trait he shares with the other main characters. If there's one thing that unifies Matt, Jo and the universe here, it's a sense of overblown self-importance coupled with relentless immaturity. And that's the other big thing that irritates me about this.
So, I guess this has been another one of my special S&S-is-being-a-dickhead reviews. For the sake of housekeeping, though, there are a couple more things I want to note.
On the bad side, a lot of your dialogue feels worn and clichéd, especially during the arguments.
On the good side, your actual hook is excellent, up to and including the point where Matt misses his death. It's effectively dramatic, interesting, and it serves to effectively demonstrate the first part of your conceit. Similarly, the technique of prefacing the scenes with times is a cool way of weaving the theme into the structure. So well done with that.
AHA, IT WAS ME ALL ALONG!
And now my retrospective. I'm writing this before the results go down simply because I just want to pass the time before the results are announced.
>>ZaidValRoa
>>Bachiavellian
>>Not_A_Hat
>>Scramblers and Shadows
So most of the sticking point from everyone seems to revolve around the story's conclusion, of which I had hoped would come across as more ambiguous than it had, but I think that is simply hard to look past the utilitarianism of the situation or see it as anything other than petty selfishness, which was not my intention. Ultimately this story was intended to be a deconstruction of the idea of fatalism as a whole and the meaning of fate in as a general idea, to which the ultimate thesis is that fate is a stupid, broken system, and whatever greater good that is used to justify its continued existence is not worth the means.
In short, fate is not a comforting concept. Putting meaning on things as "destiny" is dangerous, because it implies that those were never given a chance to live and be happy were "destined" to be that way. I find the idea of fate and fatalism's existence to be repugnant, personally.
I think perhaps that the problem is that the idea of fate is too tied to the real-life and it can be easily misunderstood that when I talk about fate in this fictional sense, I am talking about the reality of our real-life world, instead of the concept, which is why the conclusion ultimately comes across as more self-serving than necessary.
Nonetheless.
>>Bachiavellian
Honestly, I felt that this was going to be the biggest sticking point for people, and I was pleasantly surprised nobody called me out on my bullshit for POV-shifting like I was writing in third person omniscient.
I regret not establishing this transition in the scene prior. I overestimated the building I had done in the last two scenes to establish that Jo was spitefully going out to basically break the universe, and her entire diatribe is too far a jump from simply being dispassionately resentful about fate. One thing I regret the most is not more directly supplementing the narrative with more bits illustrating the inherent cruelty of a universe driven by fate.
It's hard to get the reader to get behind telling the universe to go fuck itself.
>>ZaidValRoa
Okay, it is only one sentence in the dialogue, but this actually did happen in the story.
I wish I made this story about a cute little girl and her father instead of two lovers, because I think I couldn't communicate the idea of "true love" or "unconditional love" through the narration hard enough to make it understood that isn't an option. I might rewrite it under that framework later, to be honest.
But yeah, the ultimate point here I was trying to make is that some people are simply irreplaceable to others beyond any sort of utilitarianism. I think if I rewrote the character of Jo to be a father and Matt to be a cute daughter, this sort of connection would be more apparent. What do you think? I think it would be a lot harder for people to make the argument that a father's unwillingness to see his daughter die by being shot in the face as being selfish, and a lot less inclined to tell him to "get another one." I think, also, the ending would have been much well-received. Also the pre-existing scenes would largely still work.
At this point Cassius realizes that he should have wrote the story with that framework instead . Oh well.
>>Scramblers and Shadows
So essentially, I'm not sure how you did it, but you've sort of read completely opposite to my intentions, and the mechanism of the conceit that I tried to establish. I think it stems from this:
"The universe had been skewed, thrown off its axis. This was only the first groan, the first buckling of the cosmos under the strain caused by an interloper mussing with its gears. It was only a matter of time before more and more cogs fell out of place. Finally, the grand machine of the universe would break."
The idea that I went with is that fate and the universe are essentially one in the same. They're not personified beings, simply forces that exist. I think perhaps because of your experience with Final Destination, you are projecting the essence of a character onto the universe, where sans some admitted ambiguous lines, I did not create. The universe / fate are pretty much interchangeable in the story because they are simply just very complex machines. Jo and Matt aren't any more important than anyone as individuals living and dying on schedule in the story, but nobody besides Jo has the ability to casually undermine the universe's mechanics.
If there is a God in this universe, it would be a Spinoza's God, or a watchmaker God. A being that created the universe that was self-sufficient and left. As far as I'm concerned, As far as I'm concerned, God wouldn't be present in this story, which is why I find the charge of a Final Destination-esque fatalism to be all the more baffling.
WhyNotBoth.TacoGirl.
It really is about both though.
I don't really accuse this of people often, but I actually feel you are misreading the text in most of the cases you've quoted.
This is demonstrated at least twice in previous scenes and another time afterwards that Jo has difficulties lying directly, and she often answers with a technical truth rather than lie. But most of the time she isn't lying or deceiving him, and is being perfectly genial, again which is established in the following dialogue. But even moreso, ignoring all of that, the circumstance in which this scene occurs is important, which is when Matt is directly attentive and confronting to Jo, which essentially happens no where else in the entire story. I find it confusing that you'd site this particular point.
Well, this is more a matter of perspective of what Jo is talking about here contextually. Does failing to let Matt die as scheduled count as "doing something" or not? Probably not my best phrasing, but nonetheless, seems to be an odd semantic point to pick out.
Well no. When confronted with something completely supernatural, Matt finds refuge in far-fetched and unlikely rationalizations rather than simply admit the event is supernatural. I can't really speak to how people in real-life would react to a legitimately supernatural event beyond all known science, but I assume most people who couldn't believe that it had occurred would attach themselves to some sort of theory that sounds more plausible than "shit is magic."
I guess what I am saying, S&S, is that I find your read on my story to be fairly unsettling, because it is certainly not the story I thought I wrote.
I'm not sure what you really mean by this comment.
Anyways, thank you all for the feedback. If you think that the story would be better with the framing changes I described in response to Zaid, please comment and tell me so. I rewrite the entire thing, saving some of the core elements, then polish that version of the story up and submit it to a fiction anthology or something. Otherwise, I'll just try to add to what I already have.
And now my retrospective. I'm writing this before the results go down simply because I just want to pass the time before the results are announced.
>>ZaidValRoa
>>Bachiavellian
>>Not_A_Hat
>>Scramblers and Shadows
So most of the sticking point from everyone seems to revolve around the story's conclusion, of which I had hoped would come across as more ambiguous than it had, but I think that is simply hard to look past the utilitarianism of the situation or see it as anything other than petty selfishness, which was not my intention. Ultimately this story was intended to be a deconstruction of the idea of fatalism as a whole and the meaning of fate in as a general idea, to which the ultimate thesis is that fate is a stupid, broken system, and whatever greater good that is used to justify its continued existence is not worth the means.
In short, fate is not a comforting concept. Putting meaning on things as "destiny" is dangerous, because it implies that those were never given a chance to live and be happy were "destined" to be that way. I find the idea of fate and fatalism's existence to be repugnant, personally.
I think perhaps that the problem is that the idea of fate is too tied to the real-life and it can be easily misunderstood that when I talk about fate in this fictional sense, I am talking about the reality of our real-life world, instead of the concept, which is why the conclusion ultimately comes across as more self-serving than necessary.
Nonetheless.
>>Bachiavellian
As for complaints, the mid-story perspective shift was a little jarring for me, but I'm not sure how to tell the story without it, so I'm not gonna dock any points for that.
Honestly, I felt that this was going to be the biggest sticking point for people, and I was pleasantly surprised nobody called me out on my bullshit for POV-shifting like I was writing in third person omniscient.
But the leap from "I'll do anything to save my boyfriend." to "This unjust universe and everyone in it deserves to die!" is pretty massive, and we only get a handful of paragraphs to bridge those two character points.
I regret not establishing this transition in the scene prior. I overestimated the building I had done in the last two scenes to establish that Jo was spitefully going out to basically break the universe, and her entire diatribe is too far a jump from simply being dispassionately resentful about fate. One thing I regret the most is not more directly supplementing the narrative with more bits illustrating the inherent cruelty of a universe driven by fate.
It's hard to get the reader to get behind telling the universe to go fuck itself.
>>ZaidValRoa
If you're unable to let go to the degree Jo is, then use your time travelling powers to re-live all the time you've had together.
Okay, it is only one sentence in the dialogue, but this actually did happen in the story.
Seriously, are you so self-centered that you don't think you can't ever love anyone ever again?
I wish I made this story about a cute little girl and her father instead of two lovers, because I think I couldn't communicate the idea of "true love" or "unconditional love" through the narration hard enough to make it understood that isn't an option. I might rewrite it under that framework later, to be honest.
But yeah, the ultimate point here I was trying to make is that some people are simply irreplaceable to others beyond any sort of utilitarianism. I think if I rewrote the character of Jo to be a father and Matt to be a cute daughter, this sort of connection would be more apparent. What do you think? I think it would be a lot harder for people to make the argument that a father's unwillingness to see his daughter die by being shot in the face as being selfish, and a lot less inclined to tell him to "get another one." I think, also, the ending would have been much well-received. Also the pre-existing scenes would largely still work.
At this point Cassius realizes that he should have wrote the story with that framework instead . Oh well.
>>Scramblers and Shadows
So essentially, I'm not sure how you did it, but you've sort of read completely opposite to my intentions, and the mechanism of the conceit that I tried to establish. I think it stems from this:
anthropomorphism
All well and good, but given the events of the story, it's very clearly not apathetic. It obviously cares a great deal. I don't know why, but it does.
"The universe had been skewed, thrown off its axis. This was only the first groan, the first buckling of the cosmos under the strain caused by an interloper mussing with its gears. It was only a matter of time before more and more cogs fell out of place. Finally, the grand machine of the universe would break."
The idea that I went with is that fate and the universe are essentially one in the same. They're not personified beings, simply forces that exist. I think perhaps because of your experience with Final Destination, you are projecting the essence of a character onto the universe, where sans some admitted ambiguous lines, I did not create. The universe / fate are pretty much interchangeable in the story because they are simply just very complex machines. Jo and Matt aren't any more important than anyone as individuals living and dying on schedule in the story, but nobody besides Jo has the ability to casually undermine the universe's mechanics.
If there is a God in this universe, it would be a Spinoza's God, or a watchmaker God. A being that created the universe that was self-sufficient and left. As far as I'm concerned, As far as I'm concerned, God wouldn't be present in this story, which is why I find the charge of a Final Destination-esque fatalism to be all the more baffling.
I was relieved to be proven wrong – it's not about warmed-over fatalism, it's about time-travel and utilitarian morality!
WhyNotBoth.TacoGirl.
It really is about both though.
I don't really accuse this of people often, but I actually feel you are misreading the text in most of the cases you've quoted.
Matt had honed his ability to read Jo’s face to a knife’s point over the years. There would be no deceiving him.” At which point I have to wonder how she manages to spend close to every other moment of the story deceiving him.
This is demonstrated at least twice in previous scenes and another time afterwards that Jo has difficulties lying directly, and she often answers with a technical truth rather than lie. But most of the time she isn't lying or deceiving him, and is being perfectly genial, again which is established in the following dialogue. But even moreso, ignoring all of that, the circumstance in which this scene occurs is important, which is when Matt is directly attentive and confronting to Jo, which essentially happens no where else in the entire story. I find it confusing that you'd site this particular point.
“Matt, I didn’t do anything!” A lie by omission. The narration, meanwhile, lies by commission.
Well, this is more a matter of perspective of what Jo is talking about here contextually. Does failing to let Matt die as scheduled count as "doing something" or not? Probably not my best phrasing, but nonetheless, seems to be an odd semantic point to pick out.
Matt was a man of reason. He believed in empiricism and logic—but logic didn’t apply to “The Perfect 10.” It sat there, smacking him right in the face, challenging everything he ever believed about the Earth and its rules. When rational thought failed, irrational thought replaced it: fringe theories, conspiracies, government cover-ups. Matt and the rest of the world, when faced with no other answers, ate it up.
Once you get past all the contortions, what this paragraph says is that Matt is a man of reason who, the moment things get tough, abandons any pretence of rationality.
Even more condensed – what this paragraph says is that Matt is a bit of a knob.
Well no. When confronted with something completely supernatural, Matt finds refuge in far-fetched and unlikely rationalizations rather than simply admit the event is supernatural. I can't really speak to how people in real-life would react to a legitimately supernatural event beyond all known science, but I assume most people who couldn't believe that it had occurred would attach themselves to some sort of theory that sounds more plausible than "shit is magic."
I guess what I am saying, S&S, is that I find your read on my story to be fairly unsettling, because it is certainly not the story I thought I wrote.
So, I guess this has been another one of my special S&S-is-being-a-dickhead reviews.
I'm not sure what you really mean by this comment.
Anyways, thank you all for the feedback. If you think that the story would be better with the framing changes I described in response to Zaid, please comment and tell me so. I rewrite the entire thing, saving some of the core elements, then polish that version of the story up and submit it to a fiction anthology or something. Otherwise, I'll just try to add to what I already have.
>>Cassius
Fight me.
Nah, seriously though, I'm glad I got a reply like this, so I can hash out the issue a bit more.
When I raise the issue of anthropomorphism, I'm not saying I read this story as having any sort of sentient fate, or a god, or anything like that. I refer to the fact that the universe in-story reacts as if (a) ought-to-have-happened is a fundamental notion that can be corrected for, and (b) dying is a fundamental notion that is recorded. These are both thoroughly human (or organic) notions.
Or, if you like, the story seems predicated on the notion that, whether it's dumb as a sack of bricks or not, the fate machine not only has goals relating to the lives of individual people, but that it takes active steps to ensure those goals are forced through (on a scale of minutes to days -- a very human timescale) when it sees those goals aren't happening.
If you do want to push back the notion that fate in any way cares, then it might be a good idea to have events look more like a machine going wrong. Like, say, some other guy's head exploding as if shot at that very moment. Or, if this goes beyond just deaths, half of the continent vanishing completely. All the sorts of weird, buggy behaviour that pops up is fed a wrong number somewhere. (Come to think if, I quite like that idea -- it's still anthropomorphic, but taken in a different direction.)
Okay, maybe I am misreading this. The context is given by Matt in the previous line -- it's about whether she has had anything to do with the disaster. Now, as I understand it, Jo screwed about with time, which effectively caused the disaster. I genuinely can't see how to spin that as "I didn't do anything."
That's an understandable reaction, but I don't think it should be prefaced by saying he's a man of reason. I'd assume the rational response to a weird event like this would be "I don't know what happened, and I don't want to settle on any hypotheses until I know more."
Incidentally, aside from the problems above, I think you'd improve the story a great deal if it was about a time-travelling parent trying to protect their child.
Fight me.
Nah, seriously though, I'm glad I got a reply like this, so I can hash out the issue a bit more.
When I raise the issue of anthropomorphism, I'm not saying I read this story as having any sort of sentient fate, or a god, or anything like that. I refer to the fact that the universe in-story reacts as if (a) ought-to-have-happened is a fundamental notion that can be corrected for, and (b) dying is a fundamental notion that is recorded. These are both thoroughly human (or organic) notions.
Or, if you like, the story seems predicated on the notion that, whether it's dumb as a sack of bricks or not, the fate machine not only has goals relating to the lives of individual people, but that it takes active steps to ensure those goals are forced through (on a scale of minutes to days -- a very human timescale) when it sees those goals aren't happening.
If you do want to push back the notion that fate in any way cares, then it might be a good idea to have events look more like a machine going wrong. Like, say, some other guy's head exploding as if shot at that very moment. Or, if this goes beyond just deaths, half of the continent vanishing completely. All the sorts of weird, buggy behaviour that pops up is fed a wrong number somewhere. (Come to think if, I quite like that idea -- it's still anthropomorphic, but taken in a different direction.)
Well, this is more a matter of perspective of what Jo is talking about here contextually.
Okay, maybe I am misreading this. The context is given by Matt in the previous line -- it's about whether she has had anything to do with the disaster. Now, as I understand it, Jo screwed about with time, which effectively caused the disaster. I genuinely can't see how to spin that as "I didn't do anything."
Well no. When confronted with something completely supernatural, Matt finds refuge in far-fetched and unlikely rationalizations rather than simply admit the event is supernatural.
That's an understandable reaction, but I don't think it should be prefaced by saying he's a man of reason. I'd assume the rational response to a weird event like this would be "I don't know what happened, and I don't want to settle on any hypotheses until I know more."
Incidentally, aside from the problems above, I think you'd improve the story a great deal if it was about a time-travelling parent trying to protect their child.
>>Scramblers and Shadows
This is actually what I expected from the original descriptions of what was going on. At about the time the characters were sitting in the booth at Denny's or wherever, I thought that what had happened was that since one cause and effect was undone, the rest would slowly collapse. So, like, someone might get hit by a car that wasn't there, because it had stopped for the MC earlier, disassociating it from its effect by contact with someone who was unaccounted for by the system. This sort of thing would eventually feed on itself and cascade until causality was completely unrecognizable and chaos reigned.
When we got to the earthquake I was pretty sure that wasn't it, though, because I don't think there's any way a human could cause an earthquake - or fail to defuse an earthquake, perhaps.
EDIT: Also, guessing your story was a fluke. Sorry. :P
If you do want to push back the notion that fate in any way cares, then it might be a good idea to have events look more like a machine going wrong. Like, say, some other guy's head exploding as if shot at that very moment.
This is actually what I expected from the original descriptions of what was going on. At about the time the characters were sitting in the booth at Denny's or wherever, I thought that what had happened was that since one cause and effect was undone, the rest would slowly collapse. So, like, someone might get hit by a car that wasn't there, because it had stopped for the MC earlier, disassociating it from its effect by contact with someone who was unaccounted for by the system. This sort of thing would eventually feed on itself and cascade until causality was completely unrecognizable and chaos reigned.
When we got to the earthquake I was pretty sure that wasn't it, though, because I don't think there's any way a human could cause an earthquake - or fail to defuse an earthquake, perhaps.
EDIT: Also, guessing your story was a fluke. Sorry. :P