Time-machine repair mechanic Charles Yu finds himself trapped in an infinite time loop in this high-concept coming-of-age story. Charles Yu is an apathetic, lonely young man who doesn't care about anything except escaping the pain. Then he accidentally shoots a future version of himself. Now he's ensnared in continuously repeating loop of time, destined to an agony of repeating the same choices and actions over and over again.
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Charles lives in a singe-person time/space machine with his imaginary dog and an artificial intelligence interface named TAMMY. He spends a lot of time with his spacecraft in suspended-time gear. Charles isn't living at all; he's stuck in one eternal moment -- and he likes it there. It's a moment without joy, without yearning, without desire, and without pain. Charles flirts with his artificial intelligence interface TAMMY and receives work assignments from his artificial intelligence manager Phil.
He visits his mother in a retirement home: a one-hour time loop featuring Sunday dinner with holographic images of Charles and his father. He asks his mom if she really likes living inside this fabricated hour. She says it's fine, but Charles feels guilty because he can't afford to purchase an upgraded, longer loop of time for her.
Charles returns to his space-time machine and receives a call from his manager Phil. Although he is a computer, Phil believes himself to be human. His programming includes "knowledge" of a wife, physical body sensation, and ego. Phil instructs Charles to repair a time machine broken by a 12-year old boy in Universe 31. Phil and Charles then engage in small talk with Phil asking Charles to join he and his wife for dinner one night. Charles goes along with Phil's constructed humanity and agrees to the dinner.
Charles repairs the 12-year old's time machine. It broke when the boy was attempting to kill his own father, so that he'd never have been born. The boy's name is Luke Skywalker. Charles notes that both the young Luke and he himself suffer from "my-father-is-a-hero" syndrome. Charles gets another assignment from Phil to repair the time-machine of a young woman. The woman had gone back into time to witness the death of her grandmother. Charles fixed her time-machine and explained that no matter what, you can't change the past.
Back in his own space craft, Charles continues to float in suspended-time. He spends so much time in this suspended state that he wears his engines down. Phil calls and instructs him to take his time-machine to Universe 13 for repairs. Charles doesn't want to take his space craft in for repairs. He fears that when Phil discovers just how much Charles has been using suspended-time gear, he'll fire him.
Phil calls repeatedly until Charles finally agrees to take his machine in for repairs. He drops off his spacecraft and walks around the city. When he returns to pick up his repaired time-machine, Charles encounters his future self: the self of only a few minutes into the future. He knows that encountering one's self means falling into an agonizing, inescapable time loop. Instinctively, to avoid this, Charles pulls his gun and shoots himself.
Unfortunately the loop already began. The next moment, Charles finds himself back in his spacecraft, just a few moments before Phil calls him to bring his spacecraft in for repairs. Charles repeats the entire loop, though now time seems to accelerate. It's as if he is in a dream-like state, or a trance. Walking the surface of the planet while waiting for his spacecraft to be repaired, Charles has visions of his mother in a Buddhist temple. He remembers spending time with his father before his father abandoned he and his mother.
Again, he picks up his spacecraft and shoots himself. Several loops run. Charles now experiences his inner world with a depth of clarity and vision bordering on madness. He continues through the loops, descending into darker, more chaotic visions of his mother, his father, and his childhood. Finally, Charles feels sad and begins to cry. When he shoots himself again at the beginning of the next loop, he notices (presumably for the first time) that he actually hasn't shot himself fatally. He's shot himself in the stomach. It dawns on him that gunshot wounds to the stomach are survivable. Then, loop begins anew.
Best part of story, including ending:
I liked the lyrical quality of the prose and the way Yu gives us such an intimate look inside the main character's subjective experiences and thoughts.
Best scene in story:
Charles becomes annoyed with Phil when Phil keeps pestering him about getting his time-machine repaired. In a fit of anger, Charles tells Phil: "you don't have a wife." Phil responds with trivial laughter, saying "of course I do." Charles presses the subject, with questions like: "what does she look like, Phil?", "Where did you meet?", Phil slowly becomes self-aware. He's increasingly saddened as he realizes that he is in fact a machine and not a man. It's somewhat the inverse of the scene depicting HAL's shut down in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey . It's haunting, evocative, and thought-provoking.
Opinion about the main character:
Charles is extremely unlikable in the beginning of the book. He is selfish, apathetic, and often just plain mean. He mistreats his AI interface TAMMY as well as his manager Phil He's constantly feeling guilt and angst yet never doing anything about it. He's the kind of character that you just have to see go through pain, because you know that pain is the only way he's going to grow up.