The Skipping Kind
Sometimes I want to jump ahead. Not to see what’s coming—that part has never really interested me—but to skip the difficult stretches. The grey weeks where nothing resolves and all you can do is endure. I’ve been thinking about this lately, which probably tells you something about the week I’m having.
I pulled The Time Traveler’s Wife off the shelf again. The physics of that book fascinate me more than its love story—involuntary disappearances, no control, no warning, no knowing when the other person will vanish or reappear. Either you develop a tolerance that borders on pathological, or the uncertainty grinds you apart. Probably both, simultaneously, over years.
The time-travel-via-space loophole is technically real: time passes differently at velocity, so in theory you could leave and return to a future earth. But that’s not the fantasy. The fantasy is staying yourself, keeping your memories intact, skipping forward without splitting into two timelines, without meeting yourself coming the other way. One version of you, ten years later, having missed the hard part.
Cryosleep is the closest approximation we have. I find myself wondering who actually signs up for it—the adventurous ones, curious about what the next century looks like? The depressives betting on a second chance somewhere kinder? People on transplant waiting lists who can’t afford to wait in real time? Probably all of them. Probably also some people with very specific reasons to be unfindable for a while.
I hope it stays impossible, honestly. Not because of the risks—those are real but probably manageable—but because we’ve already invented so much of what we once thought unimaginable that there’s barely anything left to dream about safely. Someone grew a human ear on a mouse’s back. IVF is routine. The gap between fantasy and product keeps narrowing. If we ever crack time travel, we lose the last subject that’s genuinely safe to speculate about. And knowing the future while you’re still inside the present—knowing how something ends while you’re in the middle of it—seems like the worst possible gift. What would you do with it, except ruin the part you’re already in.