Breakfast with Glenn and Steve – February 15

Interior. Young’s Restaurant. The recently redecorated décor is debatably Bauhaus. Two friends sit at a booth that features a metal napkin dispenser, a miniature metal ewer of cream and a miniature metal basket of white, pink and blue packaged sweeteners. The table is covered with large plates covered to the edges with omelets, sausage links and home fries. The waitress refills their coffee cups and leaves as a third friend approaches their booth…

As I slid into the bench next to Glenn, Steve said, "Where have you been?"

"The roads are a mess," I said.

"We made it," Steve said as Glenn watched himself stirring his coffee.

"You’re a native," I said. "And Glenn is one of those majestic mountain goats with the long white hair."

"No, I’m not. I’m from New Jersey," Steve said.

"Oh, right," I said. "But Glenn is still one of those majestic mountain goats with the long white hair."

"Do you ever think about the future?" Glenn asked as he considered a drop of coffee hanging on the tip of his spoon.

"Which one?" I asked. "Aren’t there multiple possible futures?"

"Seventeen," Steve said. "There are seventeen possible futures at any one point in time."

"That seems terribly arbitrary," Glenn said.

"What can I say?" Steve replied. "It turns out God does play dice with the universe. And he uses a seventeen-sided die."

"It’s actually no crazier than any other explanation," I said. "I mean, string theory, am I right?"

"I know!" Steve said.

"But seriously," Glenn said, leaning forward. "What about the future?"

"What about it?" I asked glancing nervously around for the waitress. Glenn’s contemplative mood had left me feeling anxious. Something heavy might be going down. I needed coffee. And I needed blueberry pancakes.

"I should think we’re thinking about the future all the time. Granted, the majority of the time we’re thinking about the near future," Steve said.

"Like, how far into the near future will the waitress finish her orbit around the sun and reappear?" I asked.

"Seriously," Glenn said, sipping his coffee. Was he being contemplative? I wondered. Or was he taunting me, as he savored the rich, fair-trade, organic Peruvian that I so craved. "Do we know, yet, the true nature of space or time? You think about something like string theory and you realize how our thinking about the physical world we live in has changed—transformed—during our lifetime. Remember the first picture of an atom you ever saw in a school textbook? The tidy arrangement of protons and neutrons, the electrons in orderly orbits; it now seems as quaint as the notion of a flat earth."

"The earth isn’t flat?" Steve asked in mock horror.

"I thought you said the world was seventeen-sided," I said.

"No, I said that God plays dice with the universe, and he uses a seventeen-sided die. And he needs a nice flat surface upon which to throw that die. Hence, the Earth would need to be flat. Quod erat demonstrandum," Steve said.

"Spock could not have done better," I said.

"Did they ever time travel to the future in ‘Star Trek’?" Glenn asked.

Steve and I looked at each other, considering the question.

"I meant that to be a rhetorical question," Glenn said. "There are no points of reference…"

"Well," Steve said, interrupting, "does it qualify as traveling to the future when they return from the past? In ‘The City on the Edge of Forever’ they momentarily alter one of the seventeen possible futures relative to their position in pre-World War II Chicago."

"Right," I said. "Kirk and Spock have to follow Bones into the past in order to restore the future. Well, their present, I guess."

"Exactly," Glenn said.

"Exactly?" Steve asked.

"Yes," said Glenn. "Until Kirk and Spock undo what Bones did in the past, their there was not there."

"The undiscovered country," I offered, continuing the Star Trek trope. "Kind of like my breakfast."

"You could only time travel to the future if you knew which of the 17 sides of God’s dice came up." Glenn sipped his coffee again.

"Perhaps on several throws," I added. "Depending on how far into the future you were traveling."

"You know," Steve said, "it’s always bothered me that when Bones travels into the past and alters the future, eliminating the possible future with interstellar travel, erasing the Enterprise, that somehow, Kirk, Spock, Scotty, Uhuru and whatever other essential personnel Kirk has once again assigned to a landing party facing unknown dangers, are still there, and in Star Fleet uniform. If the Enterprise never existed, how do Kirk, Scott, and Uhuru exist? How did they ever meet Spock?"

I made eye contact with the waitress and nodded meaningfully. "I always figured that their proximity to The Guardian of Forever insulated them in some kind of temporal cocoon or whatever."

"Temporal cocoon?" Glenn asked.

I shrugged. "Or, whatever." The waitress had swung by our booth with coffee. I ordered a short stack of blueberry pancakes with a side of bacon.

"Maybe we don’t think about the future—twenty, thirty throws of the seventeen-sided die later—because we won’t be there," Steve said. "We’ll be dead. We’re insignificant for the remainder of the event."

"Well, chaos theory tells us that each and every one of us might be the butterfly in the timeline. Who can say how we impact the future?" Glenn said, stirring his freshened cup of coffee.

"I think Glenn is right," I said. "Remember the Trek episode where they have to return Captain Christopher back to his own time because his grandson does something wicked important? One might guess something important enough that, without the grandson, a temporal anomaly as significant as the one in ‘City on the Edge of Tomorrow’ might occur. Pfft! Just like that. No more Enterprise. Anyone wearing a red tunic? Dead."

"I think that one’s ‘Tomorrow is Yesterday’," Steve said. "Point taken. But I don’t buy the Butterfly Effect. Unless it was a Mothra-sized butterfly. As you said, Captain Christopher’s grandson does something wicked important. I’ve helped college students receive their grades in a timely fashion."

"Yeah, that’s probably caused more harm than good," Glenn noted.

"Perhaps. But my point," Steve said, "is that the flow of time is resilient enough to absorb my excellence in execution and follow through in a detail oriented, proactively synergistic approach that has allowed me to meet or exceed all objectives in support of undergraduate grade reporting. Even so, I’m just a drop of water in the ocean of time."

"Metaphors and monstrous moths notwithstanding," Glenn said, "and granting that our understanding of the nanoverse may change radically over the next two generations, I think we can all accept that complex, non-linear systems are easily perturbed. And these perturbations may generate unexpected results that scale far out of proportion to the perturbation."

"Um, okay," I said.

"And yet, we rarely consider the actions we take on a day-to-day basis and the impact they will have as they ripple through the system," Glenn said.

"The system?" Steve asked.

"The Space-Time Continuum," Glenn said. "We aren’t so much a drop of water in the ocean of time as we are motes in God’s eye. God’s eye being a metaphor, as well, of course."

My pancakes and bacon had arrived. I became fixated on the present. And the maple syrup.

"I still don’t get it," Steve said.

"It’s simple," the waitress said. "Don’t stiff me on the tip so I don’t beat my kids to sublimate my rage, eventually turning my oldest into an abusive parent, creating a cycle of violence that could poison generations to come. Everybody good with coffee?"

"I’m good," Steve said. I nodded in agreement. She put the bill on the table and left.

"Well, I for one don’t want that on my conscience," I said.

"Let’s hope 25% will be enough to save the world," Steve said.

"Hey," I said. "Where did Glenn go?"

"Glenn?" Steve asked. "Glenn who?"

~February 15, 2008