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The real time-travel paradox was the friends we made along the way

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She was taller than me. Prettier and with better muscle tone. Shinier hair and perfect skin and teeth. Which was odd because she claimed she was me — from the future.

“Mmmmf!” I said.

“Sorry about the gag. Let me loosen it.”

“What the hell!? You’re here to kill me — won’t that kill you, too?”

She rolled her eyes. “No, it didn’t. I’m here, aren’t I?”

I scoffed. “I might not be a time-travelling assassin supermodel —”

“Yet,” she interjected with a smile.

“— but even I know that’s impossible. It’s a time whatchamacallit … a paradox!”

She leant forward with a gleam in her eyes like I was 101 puppies, and she was in the market for a winter coat. “Yes, exactly! I need a paradox, a large one. Killing myself is the biggest event I can put into motion at such short notice.”

I struggled against the plastic straps that bound my hands behind my kitchen-table chair. “That doesn’t make any sense!”

“Sorry, I don’t have the time to explain the general theory of paradoxity or walk you through my calculations.”

“Calculations about what?” I asked — as long as I kept her talking, she wasn’t murdering me.

“About how much energy the death will release. Don’t worry — it will have been enough.”

“Energy for what?”

She let out an exasperated sigh. “Let me make it simple: what’s the biggest paradox you’ve heard of?”

“I don’t know — everything I say is a lie?”

“No, that just means you don’t understand set theory. The greatest one is existence itself: why is there something instead of nothing? It gave rise to everything, and — together with other, smaller paradoxes — keeps everything going.

“Uh huh,” I said, humouring my future self.

“But those bastards from the CCCCCC — the Chronological Continuum Consistency Coordinated Consortium Confederacy — are obsessed with timescape integrity. They’ve pushed my team back everywhen, undoing our efforts to make the timeline a better place to live in. They will even make sure World War Three — which we’d managed to avoid, you’re welcome — will begin right on time next Tuesday. I need to finish them once and for all. They’re out of control. They’ll go too far back; undo the Paradox of Life itself —”

“Life’s a paradox?”

“Duh!” — I hadn’t realized how obnoxious it is when I do that — “Why else would dumb, entropic matter organize itself into something that can laugh, love and fart?”

I looked around and saw an old family picture. “Why kill me? Wouldn’t killing somebody like … not mum or dad, um … would grandma Georgina work? We never liked her.”

“No, we didn’t. Remember the haircut incident in third grade?” She chuckled softly. “But no, sorry, it must be me, or it won’t have enough juice. A tight timeloop like this should release ten-to-the-twelfth-power chronojoules. The CCCCCC bastards will never see it coming!”

I grasped for something, anything to distract her. “Aren’t you supposed to be older? Why do you look better than me?”

She looked down at her body. “It’s a back-echo of the energy release. It rearranges nearby systems into their optimal state. And this,” she waved at herself, “is more optimal than, well, that.” She pointed at me.

“Thanks so much for taking the time to insult me before killing me.”

“No problem.” She looked at some glowing numbers on her wrist. “This will have been fun but time has run out of time — we have to do this now.”

She pulled out a knife and slipped behind me.

“Stop!” I said, but she didn’t. I felt something shift and fell forward. There was a flash of something much brighter than ordinary light could ever be.

My hands weren’t tied behind me any more. I leapt up, trying to remember the three weeks of taekwondo I’d taken back in high school — and hoping she didn’t. I turned and saw a hotter version of myself lying on the floor with a gash on the side of her throat. Blood was spreading out on the white carpet my ex-boyfriend had picked out. Good, I never liked it, or him — wait, why was I still breathing?

I looked down — my body had changed. I looked like her now. I felt the energy and knowledge move through me. I knew what I had to do — fight those bastards from the CCCCCC and win.

There was just one thing I didn’t understand. I knelt beside her. “This doesn’t make any sense. I thought you had to kill me?”

She looked up with a small, weak smile. I leant in to hear her say, “If it made sense, it wouldn’t be a paradox, would it?”

The story behind the story

Rodrigo Culagovski reveals the inspiration behind The real time-travel paradox was the friends we made along the way.

My offspring and I love to watch superhero team TV series. They usually feature some — or a lot — of time travel, and are full of plot holes and paradoxes, to the point where we joke that time-travel paradoxes are their real super power.

I’m also a member of Codex, an SFF writers community. We hold flash-fiction contests twice a year. Last year, one of the prompts was “Road trip! Where are you going and who are you bringing with?” I didn’t use it as is, but it got me thinking of my favourite snowclone, “The Real X Was the Friends We Made Along the Way”.

This story is the love child of these two ideas.

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How Hawking’s paradox still puzzles physicists

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An electron microprobe image of a grey sphere on a black background. The sphere has a partially irregular surface and is about 200 micrometres across according to the scale bar.

Avi Loeb and his team say that metallic balls found near Papua New Guinea could be of extraterrestrial origin.Credit: Avi Loeb’s photo collection

Scientists have clashed over whether a research team has indeed found fragments of an interstellar space rock that hit Earth in 2014. A team led by controversial astrophysicist Avi Loeb used magnetic sledges to recover more than 800 metallic spherules from the seafloor near Papua New Guinea last year. They claim that a handful of the tiny blobs are unusually rich in beryllium, lanthanum and uranium, proving that they came from outside the Solar System. But the planetary science community is unconvinced, suggesting alternate origins for the spherules, and disputing whether the 2014 asteroid impact was even interstellar.

Nature | 6 min read

Reference: arXiv preprint (not peer reviewed) and arXiv preprint (not peer reviewed)

A preprint study has found that some artificial intelligence (AI) systems, including those that power chatbots such as ChatGPT, are more likely to suggest that a fictional defendant is sentenced to death when they write in African American English (AAE) — a dialect spoken by millions of people in the United States that is associated with the descendants of enslaved African Americans — compared with one written in Standardized American English (SAE). The models also associated AAE speakers with extreme negative stereotypes and were more likely to match them with less-prestigious jobs. Overt racism in AI models (linking a particular group with violence, for example) can be reduced by using human feedback. But such fine-tuning did nothing to remove covert racism based purely on dialect.

Nature | 5 min read

Reference: arXiv preprint (not peer reviewed)

Mobile clinics in rural villages in Sierra Leone sharply boosted the uptake of COVID-19 vaccines compared to villages that did not get the service. When COVID-19 vaccines were first made available, people who live in rural areas had to make, on average, a seven-hour round trip to receive one, at a total cost that could exceed a week’s wages, says economist and study co-author Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak. “When you’re starting with a baseline vaccination rate of essentially zero, our research shows that the most cost-effective thing to do is just to show up,” Mobarak says. The mobile clinics cost about US$33 per person vaccinated.

Nature | 3 min read

Read an expert analysis by public-health researchers Alison Buttenheim and Harsha Thirumurthy in the Nature News & Views article (Nature | 8 min read)

Reference: Nature paper

The heart is the first organ to develop, but scientists know surprisingly little about how different types of heart cells organize to form a working heart. Researchers combined RNA sequencing and high-resolution fluorescence imaging to map communities of heart cells in enough detail to build a high resolution, 3D ‘heart atlas’. As well as mapping cardiac structures, the study reveals signalling pathways that orchestrate the arrangement of heart cells. The authors hope that this ‘atlas’ will offer new insights into congenital heart disease, a leading cause of death in infants.

Nature | 3 min video

Reference: Nature paper

Features & opinion

Early-onset cancer is on the rise. Colorectal cancer, for example, has become the leading cause of cancer death among men under 50 in the United States and the second leading cause of cancer death in young women. Researchers are looking at tumour genetics, dietary changes and microbiome composition for clues, but so far there is no clear explanation for the shift. “If it had been a single smoking gun, our studies would have at least pointed to one factor,” says gastroenterologist Sonia Kupfer. “It seems to be a combination of many different factors.”

Nature | 11 min read

Nanomedicine researcher Morteza Mahmoudi co-founded the Academic Parity Movement after he was forced to quit his job because of bullying. The non-profit organization targets academic harassment with tailored and context-specific training, monitoring and intervention strategies. “Survey data revealed that academic bullying and harassment do not affect all scientific fields equally,” explains Mahmoudi.

Nature | 5 min read

Physicist Stephen Hawking died six years ago, on 14 March 2018. Fifty years ago, he published a Nature paper with the enigmatic title: Black hole explosions? The paper introduced the concept of ‘Hawking radiation’: the idea that black holes are not truly black because they constantly emit a tiny amount of heat. As Hawking soon realized, this creates a paradox. Hawking radiation doesn’t maintain the details of the original material that went into the hole; therefore, it inexorably erases information from the Universe, contradicting the laws of quantum mechanics. Efforts to solve the conundrum have led to legendary wagers, a theory that wormholes connect the inside of black holes with the outside and the idea that the Universe is a hologram. “Here it is, 50 years after that great paper, and we’re still puzzled,” says theoretical physicist John Preskill.

Nature | 7 min read

Reference: Nature paper (from 1974)

Quote of the day

After his son broke a beaker in his school chemistry lab, Keith Hornberger asked chemists on Twitter to help him feel better by sharing their biggest glassware blunders. Chemist Josh McBee wins by a mile. (Chemistry World | 5 min read)

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