The Future Problem

If I’d known how much of a headache “The Future Problem” would be to write, I probably wouldn’t have written it.

To steal a term from Doctor Who, it’s very timey-whimey. It follows a man who can receive information from himself three days in the future and pass it onto himself three days in the past. A continuous time loop. Ed Miller is a slave to his future self’s whims in that regard. He could disobey and do his own thing at any point… but why would you? If there’s anyone in time and space you would trust implicitly, it would be your future self. You’d be compelled to return the favour by passing on that advice to your past self.

Quite a paradox, eh? Ed Miller is in an endless loop of receiving and relaying information to himself. No decision he makes is his own. He benefits from the arrangement, sure, but his life is extremely limited as a result. I’m sure a lot of people in the real world would take that compromise. For me, I’d rather not know where I’m going. A recurring theme of this collection of five stories is that it’s the uncertainty of life that makes it interesting. By that metric, Ed Miller is the least interesting man in human history.

To counter this, I made sure to have Ed come across as the most anxious, paranoid, irrational character of any of the short stories. He doesn’t act as a normal human being would or should. There’s an argument to be made that he’s neurodivergent, or at the very least atypical. There were many times when writing and re-reading the story where I’d curse Ed for his inane decision-making and how he’d overreact to any given situation. It makes him compelling to read about in the same way you can’t look away from a burning building. Sinking ships are more engrossing than comfortable cruises.

Like with “Ennui”, the technology in this story is more mystical than tangible. Like in “The Soul Box”, we never understand exactly how our protagonist managed to create such an improbable device. The Mirror Room is something I chose not to explain in too much detail as the timey-whimeyness of the story was already starting to bog it down – all we know is that it’s two doorways in time, and that Ed Miller is wholly unprepared to deal with it.

I’m not going to pretend that doorways to the past and future will exist at some point. I don’t think we’ll ever bend time itself to our wills – at least, not in my lifetime. We know our past and the future is uncertain. For me, that’s all I’ll ever need.