The Future They Made Us Forget, chapter 19

Chapter Nineteen: the Minnesota Starvation Experiment?

?????

“Okay,” I whispered. “[They are far enough away]”

?????

But [the Kayla with me had already flung open the fridge and was stuffing her face. And the other Marvin had realized it. “She’s probably already doing it,” he mumbled.

“What?”

“Oh damn it, you’re right, she’s probably not even listening to me. Listen, uh… Marvin? Marvin, make sure she doesn’t eat more than half of what’s in that fridge, she’ll vomit. Ask me how I know. She can eat half now, and half… maybe an hour from now ?????”

But the Kayla in the fridge still had an ear open. She glared back indignantly, her food-stuffed mouth pushing out words that might’ve been “I AM listening”. I could recognize that humiliated rage. It’s never fun to have your mistakes pointed out in front of someone else – and only moreso when it’s your future self, pointing out a mistake you are making at the very moment, one you can’t possibly deny. Kayla started pointedly dividing everything in the fridge into two equal piles [– well, three piles, one of which was all the animal products – literally tearing sandwich in half, eating one half, and putting the cheese in a separate pile]

“Are you vegan?”

“????? and ?????,” she went on. "Fuller’s [grad students]. They always gave us food with meat in it. They thought it was funny to watch me [pick apart the food] “

She answered with a single word. “Yes.” [And in that word, I could feel/but she felt that word with/[enormous] pride/smoldering hatred. The will to destroy those who had wronged her, no matter what was thrown in her way. I thought back to the rifle she was carrying in the video,. She had

?????

The Kayla in the video was still talking, almost forgotten behind us. I skipped back to where we had left off.

“– she needs to be eating about 4000 calories per day. I’m not joking, we looked it up. There was research in the 1940s – the Minnesota Starvation Experiment, you can look it up –”

“– no, they shouldn’t look it up – remember, using the Internet might still be a paradox risk. We’ll, uh, I guess we’ll include the documents in the zip file –”

“– Right. Anyway, in the experiment, people volunteered to go on a starvation diet, so that humankind could learn what it takes to help someone recover from starvation. And that’s what they found out – you need about 4000 calories. Now, I don’t know how many calories things are. Diet culture kills people, I’ve never wasted my brain on it. But you – Marvin – you told me you’ve tried dieting a few times yourself, so you know this stuff, and you can help. You’ll be able to stock up on food when you go shopping [looting] later. But you can’t do that yet, first we have to tell you the time travel rules.”

At that point, there was a sudden cut in the video – switching to a part they recorded later, and edited in afterwards.

“– just realized, before we tell them the story, we should have them run the script,” said Marvin.

“The what?”

“The script I’m going to make! The program that closes the time loop.” He faced the camera. “You know how we sent you this video, and unlocked the door for you, and stuff? Well, if you’re in the past now, you’ve replaced us, so now we won’t be there to do that. So you have to do that. But not manually, of course! If you sent it manually, you might not do it at exactly the same time, and then there’d be a paradox again. So I’m going to make a script that automatically sends it at the exact same time as we did. Well, it’ll send it at some exact time, and that’ll be the same as when we sent it, because we’ll use the same script. Well, for you, we did use the same script. Ugh, time travel. I’ve been doing this for a week and I’m still not used to it. Uhh… never mind, just go ahead and run it. It’ll be called ‘run_this_once_youre_in_simons_room.py’ or something. You can run it on the computer in Simon’s room.”

Meanwhile, Kayla was [scavenging the room]. [She found a jacket that gave me déjà vu because it was the same one the Kayla in the video was wearing] [Kayla puts on Simon’s jacket/etc (does she need Marvin’s help? Video-Kayla admonish her to accept Marvin’s help?) And N95 masks (Simon has them for industrial reasons); Kayla insists they wear them (“how stupid would it be if we win and then I die of COVID because you didn’t wear a mask? Put it on already”; There’ve been a few cases, the only reason they didn’t spread further is the good ventilation); narration about how Marvin was aware that the pandemic was still dangerous (explain the pandemic a bit for the future audience), but didn’t wear one because it was too hard to explain himself to everyone else in the office, who wasn’t wearing them (“it was kind of a relief to be with someone who was expecting me to wear one; I guess if you are easily influenced by the opinions of the people around you, you need to surround yourself with people who have correct opinions”)]

[????? but at last the time came to tell us the rules. Kayla began like “okay what’s the most important stuff we need to tell them right away”

“We’re going to give them our notes, aren’t we?”

“Yeah, but we wrote those notes for us. They won’t understand them –”

“They are us!”

“I don’t understand half the comments I wrote on my own code two years ago. No. No.” [half despair/half pushing through tears] “If I’m going to disappear, then I want them to know my story.”