Chapter 2

Three or four days after waking up to my new existence, I was sitting in a futuristic lounge area with Dr Olivarez, eating a healthy portion of hot curry and sipping a mango lassi. My nerves were still a bit raw from all the emotions I had been experiencing, but it was no longer overwhelming. I was slowly starting to accept this strange new environment as actually real, and the fact that I had been dead and frozen for nearly one and a half centuries was beginning to sink in. That, or they were injecting me with something to take the edge off. My body had honestly never felt better than it did, and that was what I was asking her questions about.

“So, the nanites are hunting for old cells that have stopped dividing,” she was saying. “Senescent cells accumulate damage, which is part of the natural aging process. The nanites identify senescent cells, invade them and kill them off by activating a region of their DNA which makes them express a surface protein, which in turn is a signal to killer T-cells to come and eat them. Or in some cases, the cells will just kill themselves.”
“I know what apoptosis is, Dr Olivarez. I teach biology, you know. Taught, I mean.”
“Yes, I know Mr Andersson, but you must realize I don’t know everything about the history of the medical sciences, so I don’t know what words were used back in your days. You may call me Maria, by the way.”
“Thank you, Maria. What I would really like to know about is how you are manipulating my endocrine system though. Is that the nanites’ work as well? I have never felt this alive and alert. And never this hungry, come to think about it.” I scooped up another mouthful of curry with the naan bread and devoured it almost without chewing. There was a twinkle in her eye as she looked at me.
“Perhaps you just don’t remember what it was like to be a teenager, Karl. Your testosterone levels are now above 1200ng/dl, and we have tweaked your growth hormone levels as well. It is done by way of genetic modification, though, not nanites. Apart from increased energy and hunger, are there other effects that you have noticed?”
I must have blushed, because she laughed and gave me a knowing look.
“Yes, male puberty is like that. It must be interesting to experience it a second time.”
“Interesting, yes,” I said, and shifted slightly to hide the fact that I was getting an erection from merely sitting there speaking to a beautiful woman.
“Please don’t feel ashamed of your reaction, Karl. I can tell your body is aroused, but you must realize two things. First, I’m 73 years old. Having lived for as long as I have lived in the body of a young woman, I am well acquainted with the male sexual response. Second, a lot happens to common sense morality over the course of 140 years of history.”
“Tell me about that, Maria.”
“Well. From what I have read about the twentieth century, my understanding is that women were treated as second class citizens at the start of the century, and that they had to fight for the right to vote, take employment, control their own money, or for that matter to control their own sexuality? You were born in... 1979, right? By then, sexual norms had shifted tremendously and in some Scandinavian countries, so-called sexual perversions like homosexuality and pedophilia were legalized?”
“Pedophilia? No way!” I objected.
“Well, for a brief time, child pornography was legal to sell and possess. At least here in former Scandinavia.”
“Oh, I wasn’t aware. It was definitely illegal in the 2000s.”
“Yes,” she went on, “but back to the sexual revolution of the 1960s and ‘70s. Homosexuality was first made legal, then they didn’t consider it a psychiatric disease anymore, then gays were allowed to marry and adopt children. Prostitution was legalized in some countries. But then came the backlash, which was building by the time of your death. It began here in what used to be Scandinavia. There was the so-called ‘Nordic model’, where purchasing sexual services was made illegal. They started censoring the internet. Limiting access to pornography. Policing of sexual behaviour became prevalent, and people on the political left made an unholy alliance with neo-conservative nationalists, touting so-called traditional values.” She made a face and paused for a second before she went on:

“It got a lot worse in the decades immediately following your death. Widespread censorship, sexual repression, a fucking nightmare, and you should be glad you never had to live through it. But by the mid 21st century, people had had enough, and there was a second sexual revolution - but this time, it was fueled and informed by artificial intelligence. The AIs documented human sexual behaviour in greater detail than ever before, their conclusions unfiltered by preconceived ideas of propriety. Once it became clear to us that everyone - and I really mean /everyone/ - was in the proverbial closet about their sexuality, we collectively decided to come out and burn those closets down once and for all. By the time I was born, decades after that universal closet-burning coming out-party, sexual repression was a thing of the past, and it hasn’t returned yet. Let’s hope it never will.”

“But, all the wars ... all the social unrest you talked about. The collapse of whole societies?” I was fascinated by her story, but there were details in there that I felt she glossed over.
“I’m sorry, Karl, I’m not allowed to explain that in any detail. It would potentially change too much if you knew.”
“Change too much?”
“I’ll explain, but let me just say as much as I am allowed to say about our history: The three decades after your death were worse than the thirties and forties of the previous century. There were trade wars that became cold wars that became hot wars by proxy. There was nuclear and biological warfare. Weaponized artificial intelligence and drone wars. And then there were the pandemics that followed. All of this coupled to a huge migration crisis, which you experienced just the very early beginnings of. In the recessions that happened after, whole societies collapsed. Ethnic wars, culture wars. It was bad.”

I put down my naan bread and pushed away my plate. This was really affecting my appetite.
“But it got better?” I asked, hopefully.

“Well, yes and no. Much of the world is now a scorched nuclear wasteland, the north pole has melted, the sea level has risen to the point where what used to be the most valuable fertile land is now seafloor. The planet can’t sustain a human population nearly as large as when you lived, and things won’t become better in the next couple of centuries due to feedback loops.” She made a sour face.
“So how did it get better?” I asked.
“The ones of us who still exist are doing well. Medicine and science have gotten us far. We have thrown off the yokes of religion, political strife, ethnic and cultural differences, sexual repression - we are free at last. Also, we have fixed the problem of aging. We age slowly once we are out of puberty, and we can rejuvenate our bodies at will.”
“That sounds fantastic!”
“It is. However, we have thawed you out for a reason.” Her direct stare gave me shivers.
“You see, once you solve the problem of aging, you need to come to terms with the idea that you now look at spending centuries or millennia on this planet.”
“Oh...”
“Yes. You see the issue? The earth is scorched almost beyond repair. We are looking at centuries and millennia of hard work, restoring what should not have been broken in the first place.”
“And where do I fit into this picture? Have you thawed me out just so you can blame me for letting the world go to shits? I’m just a failed schoolteacher with a history of divorce, binge-drinking problems, bouts of depression and lots of performance anxiety.”
She smiled warmly and leaned over to pat my arm.
“No Karl, of course we don’t want to blame you. We need your help because we have hit a hard limit of quantum mechanics.”
“In the quiet words of the Virgin Mary; come again? A limit of quantum mechanics?”

She launched into a long and complicated explanation that I was only barely able to follow because I had studied and taught science subjects for a living:

Because of a quantum entanglement phenomenon best described under an ‘Everett-Pratchett many-worlds paradigm’, matter could only cross from one trouser-leg of time to another by going back to their bifurcation point and then down the other leg - a process that involved the folding of space-time through higher-dimensional space. Doing so could somehow trigger a quantum-resonant phenomenon where a higher-dimensional ‘brane’ could suffer wave-function collapse and cease to exist. The explanation went on for a long time and involved quantum Klein-bottles and Möbius strips, Feynman diagrams, and references to mathematics that had not yet been discovered by the time I died. Afterwards, I sat blinking and staring off into space. Dr Olivarez had worked up an appetite, though, and helped herself to what remained of my plate of curry.

“So, you want to send me ... back in time ... to...” I began, but couldn’t finish the sentence.
“To change the future, yes. Or rather, to annihilate this future from Everett-Pratchett space and replace it with one where certain key events did not occur.”
“But you would die! You would all die.”
“No, we would cease to exist, along with this whole trouser leg of reality. That is entirely different.”
“But...”
“Did you notice just then how you stood up and walked out of here because you needed to clear your head?”
“No. I nearly did, but then I decided to stay and ask some more questions.”
“True. In this world you did. But in another world, you stood up and walked out. The world bifurcated, and now both worlds exist. This one feels real to us, because we are in it - but that other world is right here beside us, infinitely close to us yet infinitely far away at the same time. We exist there too, exact replicas of ourselves, but diverging from that moment in spacetime.”
“Yes, I understand what an Everett-interpretation of quantum mechanics is, but...”
“You might understand it as an intellectual exercise, but you haven’t thought through the consequences yet, and you don’t understand the mathematics of Pratchett time-bifurcation.”
“Surely you don’t mean the fantasy writer?”
“Yes I do. He had unique intuitions on the matter, if not the theoretical framework in which to formally describe his ideas.”
“So I can go back to a time...”
“You can go back to any time where your body existed as a coherent quantum state in time-continuity with your current state-space.”
“So, in plain language, I can go back to the twentieth century, as far back as 1979, whereas you yourself could only go back to 2089?” I tried.
“Pretty much. And you happen to be one of just a handful of intact humans from the 20th century that we have found. There have been others before you, and we will probably find more, and if we succeed with our plan we will never know it, because we will cease to exist.”
“This is madness!”
“No, the way the world went wrong in the decades after you died is madness. We are just trying to fix it, and that is why we thawed you out.”
“I need to clear my head.” I stood up and made as if to leave.
“Say hello to the other you if you bump into him,” she said, and I could hear her actually giggle as I walked off to splash some cold water in my face.

Days later, we sat together with another scientist - Dr Mangubhai, a short and lithe half-asian girl who looked not a day over sixteen but claimed to be 59 - in front of a large computer screen, reconstructing a timeline of my life as it had been, drawing arrows to key historic events and discussing what Dr O and Dr M called ‘pivot points’ and ‘keystone events’. The question ‘if you could go back in time and kill Hitler as a child, should you’ came frequently to mind, but I kept my mouth shut, thinking they would probably just laugh at me. The close proximity of their very feminine bodies did nothing for my ability to concentrate in my state of testosterone-fuelled second puberty.

“So, the reason you want to send me back to 1993 is... ?” I asked, and squirmed to adjust the position of my boner, which was a major distraction. Maria sighed, as this was the third time I asked almost the same question.
“There are limits to the rejuvenation process. In cryogenic suspension, we can operate on you and use the nanites to fix some details, but we can only do so much. Shortening bones, muscles and tendons is feasible, but only by ten or fifteen percent. Skull shape corrections are also limited in scope because your brain needs the space.”
“So if you could, you would like to send me back even further?”
“Not really. Look, you are forty years old and...”
“Forty one.”
“You are forty one years old, subjective time. Your speech patterns and personality change a lot during a lifespan, and it will already be difficult enough for you to pass as fourteen. Seeing as that is also the age where your body size and head size won’t seem too mismatched, and where we run into the limits of bone- and muscle shortening, it’s the best we can do. We need to work with what we’ve got.”
“Work with what we’ve got...” I echoed, my mind drifting off topic as the awareness of their bodies intruded on me.
“Seriously, Karl, you need to focus. Why are you so preoccupied?” Maria’s tone was slightly exasperated. Dr Mangubhai chuckled - a sound completely incongruous with her physical appearance.
“He’s pondering male puberty and reliving his best years, I think” She injected, giving me an all too amused look.

“Look, this is going to be very hard. You expect me to change the course of history, and yet I will be trapped in the body of a teenager, back in the town where I grew up. I will be entering the old social circles that I have left behind and mostly forgotten. I don’t know if they were my best years.”
“This time, be sure to make them your best years. Make it count. You get a second chance at life. You weren’t living a very happy life when you died, right?”
“It was fucking hell on earth.” I admitted, thinking of my failed marriage, my withdrawal from social life as depression and anxiety claimed me, my lack of career development, my binge-drinking problems bordering on full-blown alcoholism, and the rapid deterioration of my physical health due to the sedentary lifestyle and overeating I had lapsed into after my divorce. “Fucking hell on earth!” I said again, with emphasis.