By A. Bierce
Sunday, June 1st 28HY
The authorities of this island — and I use the term with the same generosity one might extend to a man who declares himself king of a sandbar at low tide — have announced, to no apparent embarrassment, that suicide is essentially unknown on Haven. The provisional government considers this a triumph. Project Zero considers it a data metric indicating a healthy society. The Major Temporal Powers, who between them employ enough bureaucrats to fill a fair-sized cemetery, likely have not considered it at all, which is their customary approach to anything that does not involve the integrity of their own timeline.
This fact is, in the strictest and most useless sense, true. Three people have died by their own hand in all of Haven’s recorded history.
One of them was not a resident but a visitor who worked for TASP, and everyone, including myself, agree that there was not much we could do about being the location they picked for that rather nonsensical act that left them alive in their own timeline.
Another was an act of violence against a loved one, and the apparent resulting inability to live with that, a ‘murder-suicide’ in the modern parlance. That was just basic domestic violence, a thing all societies struggle with and I will admit that Haven does attempt to deal with. And that couple had only been here two weeks, and it is perhaps asking too much to demand Haven notice that particular situation in that short a time.
The last was a person who had chosen to end their own life out there, but was ‘rescued’ from that by a time traveler and brought here, and then proceeded to continue with their plan of drug overdose and pulled it off. This we can firmly assign blame to the time traveler who brought them here but didn’t warn anyone, although we do not really have such a system for them to have warned.
So even the extremely rare suicides are, in theory, not our fault. They were new people. Long-term residents don’t do this. The only conclusions we can draw is pay more attention to new residents. Maybe some sort of system to check in on them. A place to report possible problems.
And everyone pats themselves on the back. Suicide is very rare, but we’re going to make it even rarer. Look how much we all care, the initiative we’re showing, to work on such a rare problem.
But we are lying to ourselves. The reason suicide appears rare on Haven is the same reason that suicide appears rare at the top of a cliff overlooking the pounding ocean waves.
And the reason that we find only the corpses of new residents there is that they have not yet realized they can jump off.
SUICIDE, n. The act of self-destruction, formerly accomplished by rope, blade, poison, or the more theatrical leap from a considerable height. On Haven, accomplished by time machine — a convenience which our benefactors have somehow failed to include in their statistics, perhaps because the corpse is difficult to count when it has been averaged into nonexistence.
Consider the mechanics, which our pamphleteers have so helpfully explained in their Welcome Packets, that cheerful literature which treats the dissolution of one’s entire identity as roughly equivalent to misplacing a hat.
A person on Haven who has decided that existence on this island is no longer desirable has only to acquire a time machine — which any resident may lease, purchase, or borrow — and travel to any point in any timeline. They need not do anything dramatic when they arrive. They need not slit their wrists or swallow hemlock. They just need flip off their time machine and merely exist there long enough for the thread to do what threads do.
The universe itself becomes the executioner. And our authorities become the coroners who inspect the empty chair and declare that no one has died, because there is no body.
There was a realization from the very invention of time travel — and if not from there at least from the investigation of the disappearance of Brian Torres — that if you decide to murder someone — a problem-solving method which has been very popular with people throughout history no matter how much we pretend to disapprove of it — and then need to dispose of their body, that the entire universe was available for your use. You can get in a boat off this island, and dump their body into the temporal ocean, and you do not even need concrete shoes to make sure it will never be found.
And we ignore how obvious that choice is when the body that needs disposing by someone is their own. While cheerfully explaining it in little pamphlets by the Haven Provisional Government.
REFUGEE, n. A person who has been rescued from the wreckage of their former life and deposited on an island in both time and ocean, where they are informed, in prose of remarkable cheerfulness, that they cannot go home, cannot change history, cannot meaningfully exist in any location but this one, and should please report to the Welcome Center for housing assignment.
But that is not the worst that can happen. You could choose to ‘go back’.
The pamphlet — I have read it so that you need not — explains the situation with the gentle condescension of a nurse describing a procedure that will only hurt “a little bit.” You can go back, it says. But you will forget. You will conform. Everything you did, everything you learned, every thought that made you you will be smoothed away like a footprint in rain. Not even a footnote. Not even a memory.
It does not, I notice, devote many words to what a person should do if they find this arrangement intolerable. There is no section headed “What If You Believe Yourself To Be An Individual Person?” There is no appendix listing reasons to continue existing when existence has been redefined as a thing that only holds its shape on one small island, under the supervision of three governments that cannot agree on labor laws.
There is, however, a section on how to lease a time machine. So if you do want to conform, to be overwritten with someone else entirely, you can.
That, inexplicably, does not count as suicide. I wonder if that is because it is worse.
PROJECT ZERO, n. A joint administrative body created by three governments to oversee the welfare of temporal refugees, and which oversees it with the same attentiveness that a shepherd extends to wool — considerable interest in its continued existence, none whatsoever in its happiness.
I am told that the provisional government is aware of the problem. I am told this by people who lower their voices when they say it, as though suicide by temporal conformity, either becoming someone else or becoming nothing at all, were a state secret rather than an open wound that anyone with eyes and a passing acquaintance with grief could identify.
Mayor Dickinson, whose oratory could convince a stone to vote, has not spoken of it publicly. That’s not surprising, she doesn’t speak of a lot of things publicly. She is startlingly unwilling — for someone who once had such demanding rhetoric as a child that she changed the minds of grown men who as a matter of firm moral principle paid attention to neither children or women or how they treated their fellow men with darker skin — to use the position she has to advocate for change. We know she can still do it, she did it once in The Speech, but she does not. She is presumably satisfied with the state of affairs.
Approximately one hundred and twenty persons arrive on Haven each year. So the number say. What percentage choose to leave it by the only means available to them? No one knows. No one is counting. The time machines do not record intent. A person departs, they don’t return.
Losing any of those one hundred and twenty, at least, does cause a blip, a decrease in the population. An assumed death out there. An ‘accident’ happened, of some sort. We can pretend it wasn’t on purpose, talk about safety. Make sure everyone has emergency beacons.
But that number does not include those that go back immediately. We don’t even keep a record of that if they do not formally sign in, we don’t even know their names. Sometimes they don’t even make it here, some temporal agent just puts them back in place.
Their thread merely conforms, and they are gone — not dead, you understand, merely averaged. As though a person were a statistic that had wandered off and been gently herded back into the herd.
AVERAGED, adj. Reduced to the mean. In temporal physics, the process by which an individual thread is absorbed back into the consensus of its timeline, erasing all deviations. This includes thinking and breathing humans. Leaving behind no corpse, no note, no statistic, and no inconvenience to the authorities.
I do not write this to assign blame, which is a commodity more plentiful than bicycles on this island but much less useful. I write it because someone should say the thing that everyone knows and no one will print.
People are killing themselves here. They are doing it with the tools that the MTPs provide, through the mechanisms that the physicists have explained, in a manner that the legal system does not classify as death and the government does not classify as a problem. They are walking into the temporal ocean, and taking off their flotation devices, and choosing to stay out there, and the tide is pulling them under, and the lifeguards are filing reports that say the beach is safe. There are absolutely no corpses on the beach.
I do not know what the solution is. I am a journalist, not a savior, and I have learned that the two professions are incompatible, as the former requires telling the truth and the latter requires that people believe it.
We cannot bar time travel, the stranded people on this outcropping of existence would go mad almost immediately. Even the population that doesn’t do it rely on the news and entertainment and random goods that the time travelers bring in, just the knowledge that the rest of existence is still there brings comfort. Stopping people from walking into the temporal ocean would just result into them walking into the actual ocean.
Nor am I a therapist. The profession did not exist in my time. Perhaps a solution lies there, having that available. Or social connections, perhaps even religion, for those who can hold on to such a thing in this existence and don’t come to the conclusion that they have been abandoned by whatever God there may be. Something to tie people to this place that barely exist, to make it more real.
But I know that a problem that is not counted is a problem that does not exist, and a problem that does not exist does not require solving, and a problem that does not require solving frees the authorities to continue doing what they have always done, which is nothing, with great deliberation and at considerable expense.
HAVEN, n. A place of safety. Also, a place where the desperate are provided with the means of their own dissolution and then all are congratulated on the absence of corpses.
This column will not be reprinted in the Welcome Packets. The editors of those documents have a keen sense of what newcomers ought to know, and an even keener sense of what they ought not.