Alicornutopia

Story Of. < 2,300 words. Fanfic of the movie "Arrival". Will make best sense if you have seen the movie and also read the story it's based on, Ted Chiang's "Story Of Your Life".

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Am not crying! You're crying!!!

al;kdjal;skdjfalkc
:DDDDDDD :(((( :DDD
that was SO MUCH SADDER and SO MUCH MORE SATISFYING than the original
(oh my gosh, eve, I want to hear all about eve, how does she grow up, does she learn heptapod does she learn about her ~sister)
(also I am having a sudden craving for a setting where humanity simultaneously meets the heptapods and the Muse-aliens and the Cordyceps-aliens and both sets of Three-Worlds-Collide-aliens)

I loved it. It was very sad.

Ahhhh Moriwen is right about that being much more satisfying than the original... but I'm not actually sure it's sadder? I mean, it's sad that she doesn't get to keep all the memories (just a... memory of a memory?) but she also gets to have her family.

What the heck is the point of precognition if you never even try to change anything? Agh. I think that part actually annoyed me *more* than the thing where the Chinese bigwig meets her in the future and randomly tells her what to tell his past self, just so she can "remember" that future conversation (acausal time loops are... aaaagh) and wow did that part annoy me.

I’ve just seen the movie; I haven’t read the story it was based on yet. I had no trouble following this but it probably has references I missed.

I agree with cbhacking above. About not using precognition: trying to change things is one of the first thing you should do once you’re not in a high-stakes situation. Others include information generation from nothing, but we already know that works.

With the acausal time loop, it would be fine if she’d said sometime in the intervening eghteen months, “This is weird but you need to tell me at the party what I said to you,” but he says at the party that what he’s doing was just a hunch.