There’s something about time travel and paving a way for yourself that’s incredibly intriguing. There’s this idea that time travel could, maybe, allow you to go back in time and make your life better in some measurable way. Alternately, you’ve already done that, and where you are not is the outcome of a causal loop that has always been this way.

“All You Zombies” and Rant and The Simulacra and Super Time Force all hinge on this simple desire: if we could make our lives, not even the world, in our own image, would it be the best thing for us?

Cursor*10 doesn’t present these issues in any real way. At best it is an abstracted version of plotting out your own life. Maybe less plotting and more snuffing out. Sometimes you have to sacrifice your past cursors, their lives always counting down, in order for the next cursor to proceed a little further. They stand on a switch until they die, and on the shoulders of those dead pokey things you climb up the levels of a mysterious whitebox tower.