Flashforward

12

Day Five: Saturday, April 25, 2009

The administrative building at CERN had all sorts of seminar halls and meeting spaces. For the press conference, they were using a lecture hall with two hundred seats — every one of which was filled. All the PR people had needed to do was tell the media that CERN was about to make a major announcement about the cause of the time displacement, and reporters arrived from all over Europe, plus one from Japan, one from Canada, and six from the United States.

Beranger was being true to his word: he was letting Lloyd take center stage; if there were to be a scapegoat, it was going to be him. Lloyd walked up to the lectern and cleared his throat. "Hello, everyone," he said. "My name is Lloyd Simcoe." He'd been coached by one of CERN's PR people to spell it out, and so he did just that: "That's S-I-M-C-O-E, and 'Lloyd' begins with a double-L." The reporters would all receive DVDs with Lloyd's comments and bio on them, but many would be filing stories immediately, without a chance to consult the press kits. Lloyd went on. "My specialty is quark-gluon plasma studies. I'm a Canadian citizen, but I worked for many years in the United States at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. And for the last two years, I've been here at CERN, developing a major experiment for the Large Hadron Collider."

He paused; he was buying time, trying to get his stomach to calm down. It wasn't that he had a fear of public speaking; he'd spent too long as a university professor for any of that to remain. But he had no way of knowing what the reaction would be to what he was about to say.

"This is my associate, Dr. Theodosios Procopides," continued Lloyd.

Theo half-rose from his chair, next to the lectern. "Theo," he said, with a little smile at the crowd. "Call me Theo."

One big happy family, thought Lloyd. He spelled Theo's first and last names slowly for the reporters, then took a deep breath and pressed on. "We were conducting an experiment here on April 21, at precisely 1600 hours Greenwich Mean Time."

He paused again and looked from face to face. It didn't take long for it to sink in. Journalists immediately started shouting questions, and Lloyd's eyes were assaulted by camera flashes. He raised his hands, palms out, waiting for the reporters to be quiet.

"Yes," he said, "yes, I suspect you're right. We have reason to believe that the time-displacement phenomenon had to do with the work we were doing here with the Large Hadron Collider."

"How can that be?" asked Klee, a stringer for CNN.

"Are you sure?" called out Jonas, a correspondent for the BBC.

"Why didn't you come forward before this?" called the Reuters reporter.

"I'll take that last question first," said Lloyd. "Or, more precisely, I'll let Dr. Procopides take it."

"Thanks," said Theo, standing now and moving to the mike. "The, ah, reason we did not come forward earlier is that we didn't have a theoretical model to explain what happened." He paused. "Frankly, we still don't; it has, after all, only been four days since the Flashforward. But the fact is we engineered the highest-energy particle collision in the history of this planet, and it occurred precisely — to the very second — at the moment the phenomenon began. We can't ignore that a causal relationship might exist."

"How sure are you that the two things are linked?" asked a woman from the Tribune de Geneve.

Theo shrugged. "We can't think of anything in our experiment that could have caused the Flashforward. Then again, we can't think of anything else other than our experiment that could have caused it, either. It just seems that our work is the most likely candidate."

Lloyd looked over at Dr. Beranger, whose hawklike face was impassive. When they'd rehearsed this press conference, Theo had originally said "the most likely culprit," and Beranger had sworn a blue streak at the word choice. But it turned out to make no difference. "So are you admitting responsibility?" asked Klee. "Admitting all the deaths were your fault?"

Lloyd felt his stomach knot, and he could see Beranger's face crease into a frown. The Director-General looked like he was ready to step in and take over the press conference.

"We admit that our experiment seems the most likely cause," said Lloyd, moving over to stand next to Theo. "But we contend that there was no way — absolutely none — to predict anything remotely like what happened as a consequence of what we did. This was utterly unforeseen — and unforeseeable. It was, quite simply, what the insurance industry calls an act of God."

"But all the deaths — " shouted one reporter.

"All the property damage — " shouted another.

Lloyd raised his hands again. "Yes, we know. Believe me, our hearts go out to every person who was hurt or who lost someone they cared about. A little girl very dear to me died when a car spun out of control; I would give anything to have her back. But it could not have been prevented — "

"Of course it could have," shouted Jonas. "If you hadn't done the experiment, it never would have happened."

"Politely, sir, that's irrational," said Lloyd. "Scientists do experiments all the time, and we take every reasonable precaution. CERN, as you know, has an enviable safety record. But people can't simply stop doing things — science can't stop marching forward. We didn't know that this would happen; we couldn't know it. But we're coming clean; we're telling the world. I know people are afraid that it's going to happen again, that at any moment their consciousness might be transported once more into the future. But it won't; we were the cause, and we can assure you — assure everyone — that there's no danger of something similar happening again."

There were, of course, cries of outrage in the press — editorials about scientists messing with things humans were not meant to know about. But, try as they might, even the sleaziest tabloid wasn't able to come up with a credible physicist willing to claim that there was any reason to have suspected that the CERN experiment would cause the displacement of consciousness through time. Of course, that engendered some halfhearted comments about physicists protecting one another. But polls rapidly switched from blaming the team at CERN to accepting that this was something that had been utterly unpredictable, something totally new.

It was still a difficult time personally for Lloyd and Michiko. Michiko had flown back to Tokyo with Tamiko's body. Lloyd, had, of course, offered to go with her, but he spoke no Japanese. Normally, those who spoke English would have politely tried to accommodate Lloyd, but under such dire circumstances it seemed clear that he would be left out of almost every conversation. There was also the awkwardness of it all: Lloyd wasn't Tamiko's stepfather; he wasn't Michiko's husband. This was a time for Michiko and Hiroshi, regardless of whatever differences they'd had in the past, to mourn and lay to rest their daughter. As much as he, too, was crushed by what had happened to Tamiko, Lloyd had to admit that there was little he could do to aid Michiko in Japan.

And so, while she flew east to her homeland, Lloyd stayed at CERN, trying to make a baffled world understand the physics of what had occurred.

"Dr. Simcoe," said Bernard Shaw, "perhaps you can explain to us what happened?"

"Of course," said Lloyd, making himself comfortable. He was in CERN's teleconferencing room, a camera no bigger than a thimble facing him from atop an emaciated tripod. Shaw, naturally, was at CNN Center in Atlanta. Lloyd had five other similar interviews lined up for later in the day, including one in French. "Most of us have heard the term 'spacetime' or 'the space-time continuum.' It refers to the combination of the three dimensions of length, width, and height, and the fourth dimension of time."

Lloyd nodded at a female technician standing off camera, and a still image of a dark-haired white man appeared on the monitor behind him. "That's Hermann Minkowski," said Lloyd. "He's the fellow who first proposed the concept of the space-time continuum." A pause. "It's hard to illustrate the concept of four dimensions directly, but if we simplify it by removing one spatial dimension, it's easy."

He nodded again and the picture changed.

"This is a map of Europe. Of course, Europe is three dimensional, but we're all used to using two-dimensional maps. And Hermann Minkowski was born here in Kaunas, in what is now Lithuania, in 1864."

A light lit up inside Lithuania.

"There it is. Actually, though, let's pretend that the light isn't the city of Kaunas, but rather Minkowski himself, being born in 1864."

The legend "A.D. 1864" appeared at the lower-right of the map.

"If we go back a few years, we can see there's no Minkowski before that point."

The map date changed to A.D. 1863, then A.D. 1862, then A.D. 1861, and, sure enough, it was Minkowskiless throughout.

"Now, let's go back to 1864."

The map obliged, with Minkowski's light glowing brightly at the latitude and longitude of Kaunas.

"In 1878," said Lloyd, "Minkowski moved to Berlin to go to university."

The 1864 map fell away as if it were one leaf on a calendar pad; the map beneath was labeled 1865. In rapid succession, other maps dropped off, labeled 1866 through 1877, each with the Minkowski light at or near Kaunas, but when the 1878 one appeared, the light had moved 400 kilometers west to Berlin.

"Minkowski didn't stay in Berlin," said Lloyd. "In 1881, he transferred to Konigsberg, near the modern Polish border."

Three more maps fell away, and when the one labeled 1881 was exposed, the Minkowski light had relocated again.

"For the next nineteen years, our Hermann bopped about from university to university, coming back to Konigsberg in 1894, then going to Zurich here in Switzerland in 1896, and at last to the University of Gottingen, in central Germany, in 1902."

The changing maps reflected his movements.

"And he stayed in Gottingen until his death on January 12, 1909."

More maps fell away, but the light remained stationary.

"And, of course, after 1909, he was no more."

Maps labeled "1910," "1911" and "1912" fell away, but none of them had lights.

"Now," said Lloyd, "what happens if we take our maps and stack them back up in chronological order, and tip them a bit, so that we view them obliquely?"

The computer-generated graphics on the screen behind him obligingly did just that.

"As you can see, the light made by Minkowski's movements forms a trail through time. He starts down here near the bottom in Lithuania, moves about Germany and Switzerland, and finally dies up here in Gottingen."

The maps were stacked one atop another, forming a cube, and the path of Minkowski's life, weaving through the cube, was visible through it, like a glowing gopher's burrow climbing up toward the top.

"This kind of cube, which shows someone's life path through spacetime, is called a Minkowski cube: good old Hermann himself was the first to draw such a thing. Of course, you can draw one for anybody. Here's one for me."

The map changed to show the entire world.

"I was born in Nova Scotia, Canada, in 1964, moved to Toronto then Harvard for university, worked for years at Fermilab in Illinois, and then ended up here, on the Swiss/French border, at CERN."

The maps stacked up, forming a cube with a weaving light-path within.

"And, of course, you can map other people's path onto the same cube."

Five other light paths, each one a different color, wended their ways up the cube. Some started earlier than Lloyd's, and some ended before the top was reached.

"The top of the cube, here," said Lloyd, "represents today, April 25, 2009. And, of course, we all agree that today is today. That is, we all remember yesterday, but acknowledge that it has passed; and we all are ignorant of tomorrow. We're all collectively looking at this particular slice through the cube." The cube's top face lit up.

"You can imagine the collective mind's eye of humanity regarding that slice." A drawing of a human eye, complete with lashes, floated outside the cube, parallel to its top. "But what happened during the Flashforward was this: the mind's eye moved up the cube into the future, and instead of regarding the slice representing 2009, it found itself looking at 2030."

The cube extended upward into a block, and most of the color-coded life paths continued on up farther into it. The floating eye jumped up, and the highlighted plane was now very near the top of the elongated block. "For two minutes, we were looking in on another point along our life paths."

Bernard Shaw shifted in his chair. "So you're saying spacetime is like a bunch of motion-picture frames stacked up, and 'now' is the currently illuminated frame?"

"That's a good analogy," said Lloyd. "In fact, it helps me make my next point, which is this: Say you're watching Casablanca, which happens to be my favorite movie. And say this particular moment is what's on screen right now."

Behind Lloyd, Humphrey Bogart was saying, "You played it for her, you can play it for me. If she can stand it, I can stand it."

Dooley Wilson didn't meet Bogey's eyes. "I don't remember the words."

Bogart, through clenched teeth: "Play it!"

Wilson turned his gaze up at the ceiling and began to sing "As Time Goes By" while his fingers danced on the piano keys.

"Now," said Lloyd, sitting in front of the screen, "just because this frame is the one you're currently looking at" — as he said "this," the image froze on Dooley Wilson — "it doesn't mean that this other part is any less fixed or real."

Suddenly the image changed. A plane was disappearing into the fog. A dapper Claude Rains looked at Bogart. "It might be a good idea for you to disappear from Casablanca for a while," he said. "There's a Free French garrison over at Brazzaville. I could be induced to arrange a passage."

Bogey smiled a bit. "My letter of transit? I could use a trip. But it doesn't make any difference about our bet. You still owe me ten thousand francs."

Rains raised his eyebrows. "And that ten thousand francs should pay our expenses."

"Our expenses?" said Bogart, surprised.

Rains nodded. "Uh-huh."

Lloyd watched their backs as they walked off together into the night. "Louis," says Bogart — in a voiceover Lloyd knew had been recorded in post-production — "this could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship."

"You see?" said Lloyd, turning back to look at the camera, at Shaw. "You might have been watching Sam play 'As Time Goes By' for Rick, but the ending is already fixed. The first time you see Casablanca, you're on the edge of your seat wondering if Ilsa is going to go with Victor Laszlo or stay with Rick Blaine. But the answer always was, and always will be, the same: the problems of two little people really don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world."

"You're saying the future is as immutable as the past?" said Shaw, looking more dubious than he usually did.

"Precisely."

"But, Dr. Simcoe, with all due respect, that doesn't seem to make sense. I mean, what about free will?"

Lloyd folded his arms in front of his chest. "There's no such thing as free will."

"Of course there is," said Shaw.

Lloyd smiled. "I knew you were going to say that. Or, more precisely, anyone looking at our Minkowski cubes from outside knew you were going to say that — because it was already written in stone."

"But how can that be? We make a million decisions a day; each of them shapes our future."

"You made a million decisions yesterday, but they are immutable — there's no way to change them, no matter how much we might regret some of them. And you'll make a million decisions tomorrow. There's no difference. You think you have free will, but you don't."

"So, let me see if I understand you, Dr. Simcoe. You're contending that the visions aren't of just one possible future. Rather, they are of the future — the only one that exists."

"Absolutely. We really do live in a Minkowski block universe, and the concept of 'now' really is an illusion. The future, the present, and the past are each just as real and just as immutable."

13

"Dr. Simcoe?"

It was early evening; Lloyd had finally finished his last interview for the day, and although he had a stack of reports to read before going to bed, he was now walking down one of the drab streets of St. Genis. He headed over to a bakery and a cheese store to get some bread and a hunk of Appenzeller for tomorrow's breakfast.

A compact man of about thirty-five approached him. He was wearing glasses — reasonably unusual in the developed world now that laser keratotomy had been perfected — and a dark-blue sweatshirt. His hair, like Lloyd's own, was cropped fashionably short.

Lloyd felt a twinge of panic. He was probably crazy to be out alone in public after half the world had seen his face on TV. He looked left and right, sizing up his escape routes. There were none. "Yes?" he said, tentatively.

"Dr. Lloyd Simcoe?" He was speaking English, but with a French accent.

Lloyd swallowed "That's me." Tomorrow, he'd talk to Beranger about arranging a security escort.

Suddenly the man's hand found Simcoe's own and began pumping it furiously. "Dr. Simcoe, I want to thank you!" The man held up his left hand, as if to forestall an objection. "Yes, yes, I know you didn't intend what happened, and I guess some people were hurt by it. But I've got to tell you, that vision was the best thing that ever happened to me. It turned my life around."

"Ah," said Lloyd, retrieving his hand. "That's nice."

"Yes, sir, before that vision I was a different man. I never believed in God — not ever, not even as a little kid. But my vision — my vision showed me in a church, praying with a whole congregation of people."

"Praying on a Wednesday evening?"

"That's just what I said, Dr. Simcoe! I mean, not at the time I was having the vision, but later, after they announced on the news what time the visions were of. Praying on a Wednesday evening! Me! Me, of all people. Well, I couldn't deny that it was happening, that sometime between now and then I will find my way. And so I picked up a Bible — went to a bookstore and bought one. I never knew there were so many different kinds! So many different translations! Anyway, I got myself one of the ones that's got Jesus' actual words printed in red, and I began reading it. I figured, okay, sooner or later I was going to come to this, I might as well find out what it's all about. And I just kept reading — I even read all those begats, those wonderful names, like music: Obadiah, Jebediah — what great names! Oh, sure, Dr. Simcoe, if I hadn't had the vision, twenty-one years down the road I would have found all this anyway, but you got me going on it now, in 2009. I've never felt more at peace, more loved. You really did me a great favor."

Lloyd didn't know what to say. "Thank you."

"No, sir — thank you!" And he pumped Lloyd's hand again, then dashed upon his way.

Lloyd got home around 21h00. He missed Michiko a lot, and thought about calling her, but it was just 05h00 in Tokyo — too early to phone. He put his cheese and bread away, and sat down to watch some television — unwind for a few moments before he tackled the latest stack of reports.

He flipped channels until something on a Swiss news program caught his eye: a discussion of the Flashforward. A female journalist was doing a satellite hookup with the United States. Lloyd recognized the man being interviewed by his great mane of reddish-brown hair: the Astounding Alexander, master illusionist and debunker of supposed psychic powers. Lloyd had seen the guy on TV often over the years, including on The Tonight Show. His full name was Raymond Alexander, and he was a professor at Duke.

The interview had obviously had some post-production done on it: the journalist was speaking in French, but Alexander was answering in English, and an interpreter's voice was speaking over his own, giving a French version of what the American was saying. Alexander's actual words were barely audible in the background.

"You've no doubt heard," said the interviewer, "that man from CERN claiming that the visions showed the one and only real future."

Lloyd sat up.

"Oui," said the translator's voice. "But that's patently absurd. You can easily demonstrate that the future is malleable." Alexander shifted in his chair. "In my own vision, I was at my apartment. And on my desk, then as now, was this." There was a table in front of him in the studio. He reached forward and picked up a paperweight. The camera zoomed in: it was a malachite block with a small gold Triceratops on it.

"Now, it may be chintzy," said Alexander, "but I'm actually rather fond of this little item; it's a souvenir of a trip I quite enjoyed to Dinosaur National Monument. But I'm not as fond of it as I am of rationality."

He reached below the table, and pulled out a piece of burlap. He set it down, then placed the paperweight on top of it. Next, he pulled a hammer from under the table, and, as the camera watched, he proceeded to smash the souvenir to bits, the malachite fracturing and crumbling, and the small dinosaur — which couldn't have been solid metal — crushing into an unrecognizable lump.

Alexander smiled triumphantly at the camera: reason once more held sway. "That paperweight was in my vision; that paperweight no longer exists. Therefore, whatever it was that the visions showed was in no way a view of an immutable future."

"We have, of course," said the interviewer, "only your word that the paperweight was in your vision."

Alexander looked annoyed, irritated that his integrity was being questioned. But then he nodded. "You're right to be skeptical — the world would be a better place if we were all a little less credulous. The fact is that anyone can do this experiment themselves. If in your vision you saw a piece of furniture you currently own, destroy — or sell — that piece. If you could see your own hand in your vision, get a tattoo on your hand. If others saw you, and you had a beard, get facial electrolysis so that you'll never be able to grow one.

"Facial electrolysis!" said the interviewer. "That seems an extreme length to go to."

"If your vision disturbed you, and you want to be reassured that it never will come true, that would be one way to do it. Of course the most effective way to disprove the visions on a large scale would be to find some landmark that thousands of people had seen — the Statue of Liberty, say — and tear it down. But I don't suppose the National Park Service is going to let us do that."

Lloyd leaned back into his couch. Such bullshit. None of the things Alexander had suggested were real proof — and all of them were subjective; they depended on people's own recountings of their visions. And, well, what a great way to get on TV — not just for Alexander, but for anyone who wanted to be interviewed. Just claim that you've disproved the immutability of the future.

Lloyd looked at the clock sitting on one of the shelves mounted against the dark red walls of his apartment. It was 21h30 — meaning it'd only be 1:30 in the afternoon at the Colorado/Utah border, where Dinosaur National Monument was located; Lloyd had been there himself once. He thought for a few minutes more, then picked up the phone, spoke to a directory-assistance operator, and finally to a woman who worked in the gift shop at Dinosaur Monument.

"Hello," he said. "I'm looking for a particular item — a paperweight made out of malachite."

"Malachite?"

"It's a green mineral — you know, an ornamental stone."

"Oh, yes, sure. The ones we've got have little dinos on them. We've got one with a T. rex, one with a Stegosaurus, and one with a Triceratops."

"How much is the Triceratops?"

"Fourteen ninety-five."

"Do you do mail order?"

"Sure."

"I'd like to buy one of those and send it to… " He stopped to think; where the heck was Duke? "To North Carolina."

"Okay. What's the full address?"

"I'm not sure. Just put 'Professor Raymond Alexander, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina.' I'm sure it'll get there."

"UPS?"

"That would be fine."

Keyclicks. "The shipping is eight-fifty. How'd you like to pay for it?"

"On my Visa."

"Number, please?"

He pulled out his wallet, and read the string of digits to her; he also gave her the expiration date and his name. And then he hung up the phone, settled back into the couch, and folded his arms across his chest, feeling quite satisfied.

Dear Dr. Simcoe:

Forgive me for bothering you with an unsolicited email; I hope this makes it through your spam filter. I know you must be inundated with letters ever since you went on TV, but I just had to write and let you know the impact my vision had on me.

I'm eighteen years old, and I'm pregnant. I'm not very far along — only about two months. I hadn't told my boyfriend yet, or my parents. I thought getting pregnant was the worst thing that could have possibly happened: I'm still in high school, and my boyfriend will start university in the fall. We both still live with our parents, and we have no money. There was no way, I thought, that we could bring a child into the world… and so I was going to have an abortion. I'd already made the appointment.

And then I had my vision — and it was incredible! It was me, and Brad (that's my boyfriend) and our daughter, and we were all together, living in a nice house, twenty-one years down the road. My daughter was all grown up — even a little older than I am now — and she was so beautiful and she was telling us about how she was seeing this guy at school, and could she bring him over for dinner one night, and she knew we'd just love him, and of course we said yes, because she was our daughter and it was important to her, and…

Well, I'm babbling. The point is that my vision let me see that things were going to work out. I canceled the abortion, and Brad and I are looking for a small place to live together, and, to my surprise, my parents didn't freak and they're even going to help us a bit with expenses.

I know a lot of people will be telling you how their visions ruined their lives. I just wanted you to know that it improved mine enormously, and that it actually saved the life of the little girl I'm carrying inside me now.

Thank you… for everything.

Jean Alcott

Dr. Simcoe,

You hear on the news about people who had fascinating visions. Not me. My vision had myself in the exact same house I live in today. I was all alone, which isn't unusual — my kids are grown and my wife is often busy with her work. Indeed, although a few things looked different — furniture slightly rearranged, a new painting on one wall — there was nothing to give any real indication that this was the future.

And you know what? I like that. I'm a happy man; I've got a good life. That I'm going to have another couple of decades of precisely the same life is a very soothing thought. This whole vision thing has turned a lot of people's lives upside down, apparently — but not mine. I just wanted you to know that.

Best wishes,

Tony DiCiccio

Brooklyn, New York: Okay, there was this American flag in my dream, right? And it had, I think, 52 stars: a row of 7, then a row of 6, then 7, then 6, like that, for a total of 52. Now, I'm figuring that the 51st star, that must be Puerto Rico, right? But it's driving me crazy trying to guess what the 52nd might be. If you know, please e-mail…

Edmonton, Alberta: I am not smart. I have Down's Syndrome, but I am a good person. In my vision, I was talking and using big words, so I must have been smart. I want to be smart again.

Indianapolis, Indiana: Please stop sending me email saying that I will be the President of the United States in 2030; it's flooding my mailbox. I know I'll be President — and when I come to power, I will have the IRS audit anyone who tells me again…

Islamabad, Pakistan (autotranslated from the original Arabic): In my vision, I have two arms — but today, I have only one (I am a veteran of the India-Pakistan ground war). It didn't feel like a prosthesis in the vision. I'd be interested in hearing from anyone who has any information on artificial limbs or possibly even limb regeneration twenty-one years hence.

Changzhou, China (autotranslated from the original Mandarin): I am apparently dead in twenty-one years, which does not surprise me for I am mightily old now. But I would be interested in any news of the success of my children, grandchildren, or great grandchildren. Their names are…

Buenos Aires, Argentina: Almost everybody I've spoken to is celebrating a holiday or is off work during the Flashforward. Well, the third Wednesday in October isn't a holiday anywhere I know of in South America, so I'm thinking maybe we've gone to a four-day workweek, with Wednesdays off. Me, I'd prefer a three-day weekend. Anybody know for sure?

Auckland, New Zealand: I know four of the winning numbers in the New Zealand Super Eight draw of October 19, 2030 — in my vision, I was cashing a ticket that earned a $200 prize for matching those four numbers. If you know other winning numbers in the same lottery, I would like to pool my information with yours.

Geneva, Switzerland (posted in fourteen languages): Anybody with information about the murder of Theodosios ("Theo") Procopides, please contact me at…

14

Day Six: Sunday, April 26, 2009

Lloyd and Theo were eating lunch together in the large cafeteria at the LHC control center. Around them, other physicists were arguing theories and interpretations to account for the Flashforward — a promising lead related to a supposed failure of one of the quadrapole magnets had been torpedoed in the last hour. The magnet, it turned out, was operating just fine; it was the testing equipment that was faulty.

Lloyd was having a salad; Theo a kebab he'd made the night before and had reheate d in the microwave. "People seem to be dealing with things better than I would have thought," said Lloyd. The windows looked out on the nucleus courtyard, where the spring flowers were in bloom. "All that death, all the destruction. But people are dusting themselves off, getting back to work, and getting on with their lives."

Theo nodded. "I heard a guy on the radio this morning. He was saying that there had turned out to be far less call for counseling services than people had predicted. In fact, a lot of people have been apparently canceling their previously scheduled therapy sessions since the Flashforward."

Lloyd lifted his eyebrows. "Why?"

"He said it's because of the catharsis." Theo smiled. "I tell you, good old Aristotle knew exactly what he was talking about: you give people a chance to purge their emotions, and they actually end up more healthy after it. So many people lost someone they cared about during the Flashforward; the outpouring of grief has been very good psychologically. The guy on the radio said something similar happened a dozen years ago when Princess Diana died; there was a huge reduction worldwide in the use of therapists for months following that. Naturally, the biggest catharsis was in England, but just after Di was killed, even twenty-seven percent of Americans felt as though they had lost someone they knew personally." A pause.

"Of course, you don't get over the loss of a spouse or a child easily, but an uncle? A distant cousin? An actor you liked? One of your coworkers? It's a big release."

"But if everyone's going through it… "

"That was his whole point," said Theo. "See, normally, if you lose someone in an accident, you go to pieces, and it goes on for months or years… with everyone around you reinforcing your right to be sad. 'Take some time,' they say. Everyone provides emotional support for you. But if everyone else is dealing with a loss, too, there isn't that crutch effect; there's no one to say soothing words. You've got no choice but to get a grip and go back to work. It's like those who live through a war — any war is much more devastating in gross terms than any isolated personal tragedy, but after a war is over, most people just go on with their lives. Everybody suffered the same; you have to just wall it off, forget about it, and go on. That's what's happening here, apparently."

"I don't think Michiko will ever get over the loss of Tamiko." Michiko would come home from Japan that evening.

"No, no, of course not. Not in the sense that it'll ever stop hurting. But she is going on with her life; what else can she do? There really is no other choice."

At that moment, Franco della Robbia, a middle-aged, bearded physicist, appeared at their table, holding a tray. "Mind if I join you?"

Lloyd looked up. "Hi, Franco. Not at all."

Theo shuffled his chair to the right, and della Robbia sat down.

"You're wrong about Minkowski, you know," said della Robbia, looking at Lloyd. "The visions can't be of an actual future."

Lloyd took a forkful of salad. "Why not?"

"Well, look: let's take your premise. Twenty-one years from now, I will have a connection between my future self and my past self. That is, my past self will see exactly what my future self is doing. Now, my future self may not have any overt indication that the connection has begun, but that doesn't matter; I'll know to the second when the connection will start and end. I don't know what your vision showed, Lloyd, but mine had me in what I think was Sorrento, sitting on a balcony, overlooking the Bay of Naples. Very nice, very pleasant — but not at all what I'd be doing on October 23, 2030, if I knew I was in contact with myself in the past. Rather, I'd be somewhere utterly free of anything that might divert my past self's attention — an empty room, say, or simply staring at a blank wall. And at precisely 19h21 Greenwich Mean Time that day, I would start reciting out loud facts that I wanted my past self to know: 'On March eleven, 2012, be careful crossing Via Colombo, lest you trip and break your leg;' 'In your time, stock in Bertelsmann is selling for forty-two euros a share, but by 2030, it'll be six hundred and ninety euros a share, so buy lots now to pay for your retirement;' 'Here are the winners of the World Cup for every year between your time and mine.' Like that; I would have it all written out on a piece of paper, and would just recite it, cramming as much useful information as possible into that one-minute-and-forty-three-second window." The Italian physicist paused. "The fact that no one has reported a vision of doing anything like that means that what we saw couldn't be the actual future of the timeline we're currently in."

Lloyd frowned. "Maybe some people did do that. Really, the public only knows the content of a tiny percentage of the billions of visions that must have occurred. If I was going to give myself a stock tip, and I didn't know that the future was immutable, the first thing I'd say to my past self was, 'Don't share this with anyone.' Maybe those who did what you're suggesting are simply keeping quiet about it."If a few dozen people had visions," said della Robbia, "that might be possible. But with billions? Someone would have said that that was what they were doing. In fact, I firmly believe almost everyone would be trying to communicate with their past selves."

Lloyd looked at Theo, then back at della Robbia. "Not if they knew it was futile; not if they knew that nothing they said could change things that were already carved in stone."

"Or maybe everyone forgot," said Theo. "Maybe, between now and 2030, the memory of the visions will fade. The memories of dreams fade, after all. You can recall one when you first wake up, but hours later, it's gone completely. Maybe the visions will erase themselves over the next twenty-one years."

Della Robbia shook his head emphatically. "Even if that were the case — and there's no reason at all to think it might be — all the media reporting about the visions would still survive until the year 2030. All the news reports, all the TV coverage, all the things people wrote about themselves in their own diaries and in letters to friends. Psychology isn't my field; I won't debate the fallible nature of memory. But people would know what's happening on October 23, 2030, and many would be attempting to communicate with the past."

"Wait a minute," said Theo. His eyebrows were high. "Wait a minute!" Lloyd and della Robbia turned to look at him. "Don't you see? It's Niven's Law."

"What is?" said Lloyd.

"Who's Niven?" said della Robbia.

"An American science-fiction writer. He said that in any universe in which time travel is a possibility, no time machine will ever be invented. He even wrote a little story to dramatize it: a scientist is building a time machine and just as he gets it finished, he looks up and sees the sun going nova — the universe is going to snuff him out, rather than allow the paradoxes inherent in time travel."

"So?" said Lloyd.

"So communicating with yourself in the past is a form of time travel — it's sending information back in time. And for those people who tried to do it, the universe might block the attempt — not by anything as grandiose as blowing up the sun, but simply by preventing the communication from working." He shifted his gaze from Lloyd to della Robbia and back again. "Don't you see? That must have been what I was trying to do in 2030 — I'd been attempting to communicate with myself in the past, and so, instead, I simply ended up having no vision at all."

Lloyd tried to make his voice sound gentle. "There seems to be a lot of supporting evidence from other people's visions that you really are dead in 2030, Theo."

Theo opened his mouth, as if to protest, but then he closed it. A moment later, he spoke again. "You're right. You're right. Sorry."

Lloyd nodded; he hadn't really realized before just how hard all of this must be on Theo. He turned and looked at della Robbia. "Well, Franco, if the visions weren't of our future, then what did they portray?"

"An alternative timeline, of course. That's completely reasonable, given MWI." The many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics says that every time an event can go two ways, instead of one or the other way happening, both happen, each in a separate universe. "Specifically, the visions portray the universe that split from this universe at the moment of your LHC experiment; they show the future as it is in a universe in which the time-displacement effect did not occur."

But Lloyd was shaking his head. "You don't still believe in MWI, do you? TI demolishes that."

A standard argument in favor of the many-worlds interpretation is the thought experiment of Schrodinger's cat: put a cat in a sealed box with a vial of poison that has a fifty-fifty chance of being triggered during a one-hour period. At the end of the hour, open the box and see if the cat is still alive. Under the Copenhagen interpretation — the standard version of quantum mechanics — until someone looks in, the cat is supposedly neither alive nor dead, but rather a superposition of both possible states; the act of looking in — of observing — collapses the wave function, forcing the cat to resolve itself into one of two possible outcomes. Except that, since the observation could go two ways, what MWI proponents say really happens is that the universe splits at the point at which the observation is made. One universe continues on with a dead cat; the other, with a living one.

John G. Cramer, a physicist who had often done work at CERN, but was normally with the University of Washington, Seattle, disliked the Copenhagen interpretation's emphasis on the observer. In the 1980s, he proposed an alternative explanation: TI, the transactional interpretation. During the nineties and aughts, TI had become increasingly popular amongst physicists.

Consider Schrodinger's hapless cat at the moment it is sealed in the box, and the observer's eye, at the moment, an hour later, that it looks upon the cat. In TI, the cat sends out an actual, physical "offer" wave, which travels forward into the future and backward into the past. When the offer wave reaches the eye, the eye sends out a "confirmation" wave, which travels backward into the past and forward into the future. The offer wave and the confirmation wave cancel each other out everywhere in the universe except in the direct line between the cat and the eye, where they reinforce each other, producing a transaction. Since the cat and the eye have communicated across time, there is no ambiguity, and no need for collapsing wave fronts: the cat exists inside the box exactly as it will eventually be observed. There's also no splitting of the universe into two; since the transaction covers the entire relevant period, there's no need for branching: the eye sees the cat as it always was, either dead or alive.

"You would like TI," said della Robbia. "It demolishes free will. Every emitted photon knows what will eventually absorb it."

"Sure," said Lloyd, "I admit that TI reinforces the block-universe concept — but it's your many-worlds interpretation that really demolishes free will."

"How can you possibly say that?" said della Robbia, with expressive Italian exasperation.

"There's no hierarchy among the many worlds," said Lloyd. "Say I'm walking along and come to a fork in the road. I could go left, or I could go right. Which one do I choose?"

"Whichever one you want!" crowed della Robbia. "Free will!"

"Nonsense," said Lloyd. "Under MWI, I choose whichever one the other version of me didn't choose. If he goes right, I have to go left; if I go right, he has to go left. And only arrogance would lead one to think that it was always my choice in this universe that was considered, and that it was always the other choice that was simply the alternative that had to be expressed in another universe. The many-worlds interpretation gives the illusion of choice, but it's actually completely deterministic."

Della Robbia turned to Theo, spreading his arms in an appeal for common sense. "But TI depends on waves that travel backward in time!"

Theo's voice was gentle. "I think we've now abundantly demonstrated the reality of information traveling backward in time, Franco," he said. "Besides, what Cramer actually said was the transaction occurs atemporally — outside of time."

"And," said Lloyd, warming to the fight now that he had an ally, "your version of what happened is the one that demands time travel."

Della Robbia looked stunned. "What? How? The visions simply portray a parallel universe."

"Any parallel MWI universes that might exist would surely be moving in temporal lockstep with ours: if you could see into a parallel universe, you'd still see today, April 26, 2009; indeed, the whole concept of quantum computing depends on parallel universes being precisely in lockstep with ours. So, yes, if you could see into a parallel universe, you might see a world in which you'd gone over to sit down with Michael Burr, over there, instead of with me and Theo, but it'd still be now. What you're suggesting is adding contact with parallel universes on top of seeing into the future; it's hard enough to accept one of those ideas without also having to accept the other, and — "

Jake Horowitz had appeared at their table. "Sorry to interrupt," he said, "but there's a call for you, Theo. Says it's about your posting on the Mosaic web site."

Theo hurried away from the table, abandoning his half-eaten kebab. "Line three," said Jacob, trailing behind him. There was an empty office just outside the lunch room; Theo ducked in. The phone's caller ID simply said "Out of Area." He picked up the handset.

"Hello," he said. "Theo Procopides here."

"My God," said the male voice, in English, at the other end of the phone. "This is weird — talking to somebody you know is going to be dead."

Theo didn't have any response for that, so he simply said, "You have some information about my murder?"

"Yes, I think so. I was reading something about it in my vision."

"What did it say?"

The man recounted the gist of what he'd read. There were no new facts.

"Was there anything about survivors?" asked Theo.

"How do you mean? It wasn't a plane crash."

"No, no, no. I mean, did it say anything about who survived me — you know, about whether I had a wife or kids."

"Oh, yeah. Let's see if I can remember… "

See if I can remember. His future was all incidental; nobody really cared. It wasn't important, wasn't real. Just some guy they'd read about.

"Yeah," said the voice. "Yeah, you'll be survived by a son and by your wife."

"Did the paper give their names?"

The person blew air into the mouthpiece of his phone as he thought. "The son was — Constantin, I think."

Constantin. His father's name; yes, Theo had always thought he might name a son that.

"And the boy's mother? My wife?"

"I'm sorry. I don't remember."

"Please try."

"No, I'm sorry. I just don't remember."

"You could undergo hypnosis — "

"Are you crazy? I'm not going to do that. Look, I called you up to help you out; I figured I'd do you a good turn, you know? I just thought it'd be a nice thing to do. But I'm not going to be hypnotized, or pumped full of drugs, or anything like that."

"But my wife — my widow… I need to know who she is."

"Why? I don't know who I'll be married to in twenty-one years; why should you know?"

"She might have a clue as to why I was killed."

"Well, I guess. Maybe. But I've done all I can for you."

"But you saw the name! You know the name!"

"Like I said, I don't remember it. I'm sorry."

"Please — I'll pay you."

"Seriously, man, I don't remember. But, look, if it comes to me, I'll get back in touch. But that's all I can do."

Theo forced himself not to protest again. He pursed his lips, then nodded solemnly. "All right. Thank you. Thanks for your time. Can I just get your name, though, for my records?"

"Sorry, man. Like I said, if anything else occurs to me, I'll call you."

And the phone went dead.

15

Michiko returned that night from Tokyo. She seemed if not at peace at least no longer about to go to pieces.

Lloyd, who had spent the afternoon going over a new round of computer simulations, picked Michiko up at Geneva airport, and drove the dozen kilometers to his apartment in St. Genis, and then—

And then they made love, for the first time in the five days since the Flashforward. It was early evening; the lights in the room were off, but there was plenty of illumination seeping in around the blinds from outside. Lloyd had always been more adventurous than her, although she was coming up to speed nicely. Perhaps his tastes had been a little too wild, a little too Western, for her liking initially, but she had warmed to his suggestions as time went by, and he always tried to be an attentive lover. But today it had been perfunctory; the missionary position, nothing more. The sheets were usually damp with sweat when they were done, but this time they were mostly dry. They were even still tucked in along one side.

Lloyd lay on his back, looking up at the dark ceiling. Michiko lay next to him, a pale arm draped across his naked, hairy chest. They were quiet for a long time, each alone with their thoughts.

At last, Michiko said, "I saw you on CNN when I was in Tokyo. You really believe we have no free will?"

Lloyd was surprised. "Well," he said at last, "we think we have it, which amounts to the same thing. I guess. But inevitability is a constant in lots of belief systems. Look at the Last Supper. Jesus told Peter — Peter, mind you, the rock he'd said he would build his church on — Jesus told Peter that Peter would renounce him three times. Peter protested that there was no way that would ever happen, but, of course, he did it. And Judas Iscariot — a tragic figure, I always thought — was fated to turn Christ in to the authorities, whether he wanted to or not. The concept of having a role to play, a destiny to fulfill, is much older than the concept of free will." A pause. "Yes, I really believe the future is as fixed as the past. And surely the Flashforward bears that out; if the future wasn't fixed, how could everyone be having visions of a coherent tomorrow? Wouldn't everyone's vision be different — or, indeed, wouldn't it be impossible for anyone to have any visions at all?"

Michiko frowned. "I don't know. I'm not sure. I mean, what's the point of going on if it's all already fixed?"

"What's the point of reading a novel whose ending has already been written?"

She chewed her lower lip.

"The block universe concept is the only thing that makes sense in a relativistic universe," said Lloyd. "Indeed, it's really just relativity writ large: relativity says no point in space is more important than any other; there is no fixed frame of reference against which to measure other positions. Well, the block universe says no time is more important than any other — 'now' is utterly and completely an illusion, and if there's no such thing as a universal now, if the future is already written, then free will is obviously an illusion, too."

"I'm not as certain as you are," said Michiko. "It seems as if I've got free will."

"Even after this?" said Lloyd. His voice was growing a little sharp. "Even after the Flashforward?"

"There are other explanations for the coherent version of the future," said Michiko.

"Oh? Like what?"

"Like it's only one possible future, one roll of the dice. If the Flashforward were to be reproduced, we might see a completely different future."

Lloyd shook his head, his hair rustling against the pillow. "No," he said. "No, there's only one future, just as there's only one past. No other interpretation makes sense."

"But to live without free will… "

"That's the way it is, all right?" snapped Lloyd. "No free will. No choices."

"But — "

"No buts."

Michiko fell silent. Lloyd's chest was rising and falling rapidly, and doubtless she could feel his heart pounding. There was quiet between them for a long time, and then, at last, Michiko said, "Ah."

Lloyd raised his eyebrows even though Michiko couldn't see his expression. But she must have registered somehow that his facial muscles were moving.

"I get it," she said.

Lloyd was irritated, and he let his voice show it. "What?"

"I get why you're adamant about the immutable future. Why you believe there's no such thing as free will."

"And why is that?"

"Because of what happened. Because of all the people who died, and all the other people who were hurt." She paused, as if waiting for him to fill in the rest. When he didn't, she went on. "If we have free will, you'd have to blame yourself for what happened; you'd have to take responsibility. All that blood would be on your hands. But if we don't — if we don't, then it's not your fault. Que sera est. Whatever will be already is. You pushed the button that started the experiment because you always had and always will push that button; it's as frozen in time as any other moment."

Lloyd said nothing. There was nothing to say. She was right, of course. He felt his cheeks growing flush.

Was he that shallow? That desperate?

There was nothing in any physical theory that could possibly have predicted the Flashforward. He wasn't some M.D. who had failed to keep up to date on side effects; this wasn't physics malpractice. No one — not Newton, not Einstein, not Hawking — could have predicted the outcome of the LHC experiment.

He'd done nothing wrong.

Nothing.

And yet—

And yet he'd give anything to change what had happened. Anything.

And he knew that if he allowed for even one second the possibility that it could have been changed, that it could have gone down differently, that he could have avoided all those car crashes and plane crashes and botched operations and falls down stairs, that he could have prevented little Tamiko from losing her life, then he'd spend the rest of his life being crushed by guilt over what had happened. Minkowski absolved him of that.

And he needed that absolution. He needed it if he were to go on, if he were to follow his light path up through the cube without being tortured.

Those who wished to believe that the visions didn't portray the actual future had hoped that, taken collectively, they would be inconsistent: that in one person's vision, a Democrat would be president of the United States, while in another's a Republican would be in the Oval Office. In one, flying cars would be everywhere; in another, all personal vehicles would have been banned in favor of public transit. In one, perhaps aliens had come to visit Earth; in another, we'd found that we really are alone.

But Michiko's Mosaic Project was a huge success, with over a hundred thousand postings a day, and it all combined together to portray a consistent, coherent, plausible 2030, each reported vision a tile in the greater whole.

In 2017, at the age of ninety-one, Elizabeth II, Queen of England, Scotland, Northern Ireland, Canada, the Bahamas, and countless other places, died. Charles, her son, at that time sixty-nine, was mad as a loon, and, with some prodding from his advisors, chose not to ascend to the throne. William, Charles's eldest son, next in line, shocked the world by renouncing the throne, leading Parliament to declare the Monarchy dissolved.

Quebec was still part of Canada; the secessionists were now a tiny but ever-vocal minority.

In 2019, South Africa completed, at long last, its post-Apartheid crimes-against-humanity trials, with over five thousand people convicted. President Desmond Tutu, eighty-eight, pardoned them all, an act, he said, not just of Christian forgiveness but of closure.

No one had yet set foot upon Mars — the early visions that suggested the contrary turned out to be virtual-reality simulations at Disney World.

The President of the United States was African-American and male; there had apparently yet to be a female American president in the interim. But the Catholic Church did indeed now ordain women.

Cuba was no longer Communist; China was the last remaining Communist country, and its grip on its people seemed as firm twenty-one years hence as it was today. C hina's population was now almost two billion.

Ozone depletion was substantial; people wore hats and sunglasses, even on cloudy days.

Cars couldn't fly — but they could levitate up to about two meters off the ground. On the one hand, road work was being curtailed in most countries. Cars no longer required a smooth, hard surface; some places were even dismantling roads and putting in greenbelts instead. On the other hand, roads were getting so much less wear and tear that those left intact required little maintenance.

Christ had not come again.

The dream of artificial intelligence was still unfulfilled. Though computers that could talk existed in abundance, none exhibited any measure of consciousness.

Male sperm counts continued their precipitous drop worldwide; in the developed world, artificial insemination was now common, and was covered by the socialized medical programs in Canada, the European Union, and even the United States. In the Third World, birth rates were falling for the first time ever.

On August 6, 2030 — the eighty-fifth anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima — a ceremony occurred in that city announcing a worldwide ban on the development of nuclear weapons.

Despite bans on their hunting, sperm whales were extinct by 2030. Over one hundred committed suicide in 2022 by beaching themselves at locales all over the world; no one knows why.

In a victory for common sense worldwide, fourteen of North America's largest newspapers simultaneously agreed to stop running horoscopes, declaring that printing such nonsense was at odds with their fundamental purpose of disseminating the truth.

A cure for AIDS was found in 2014 or 2015. Total worldwide death count from that plague was estimated at seventy-five million, the same figure the Black Death had killed seven hundred years previously. A cure for cancer still remained elusive, but most forms of diabetes could be diagnosed and corrected in the womb prior to birth.

Nanotechnology still didn't work.

George Lucas still hadn't finished his nine-part Star Wars epic.

Smoking was now illegal in all public areas, including outdoor ones, in the United States and Canada. A coalition of Third World countries was now suing the United States at the World Court in the Hague for willfully promoting tobacco use in developing nations.

Bill Gates lost his fortune: Microsoft stock tumbled badly in 2027, in response to a new version of the Year-2000 crisis. Older Microsoft software stored dates as thirty-two-bit strings representing the number of seconds that had passed since January 1, 1970; they ran out of storage space in 2027. Attempts by key Microsoft employees to divest themselves of their stock drove the price even lower. The company finally filed for Chapter Eleven in 2029.

The average income in the United States seemed to be $157,000 per year. A loaf of bread cost four dollars.

The top-grossing film of all time was the 2026 remake of War of the Worlds.

Learning Japanese was now mandatory for all M.B.A. students at the Harvard Business School.

The fashion colors for 2030 would be pale yellow and burnt orange. Women were wearing their hair long again.

Rhinoceroses were now bred on farms specifically for their horns, still highly prized in the East. They were no longer in danger of extinction.

It was now a capital crime to kill a gorilla in Zaire.

Donald Trump was building a pyramid in the Nevada desert to house his eventual remains. When done, it will be ten meters taller than the Great Pyramid at Giza.

The 2029 World Series will be won by the Honolulu Volcanoes.

The Turks and Caicos Islands joined Canada in 2023 or 2024.

After DNA tests conclusively proved one hundred previous cases of wrongful execution, the United States abolished the death penalty.

Pepsi won the cola wars.

There will be another huge stock market crash; those who know what year it will take place are apparently keeping that information to themselves.

The United States will finally go metric.

India established the first permanent base on the Moon.

A war is under way between Guatemala and Ecuador.

The world's population in 2030 will be eleven billion; four billion of those were born after 2009, and so could never have had a vision.

Michiko and Lloyd were eating a late dinner in his apartment. Lloyd had made raclette — cheese melted and served over boiled potatoes — a traditional Swiss dish he'd grown fond of. They had a bottle of Blauburgunder with it; Lloyd was never much of a drinker, but wine flowed so freely in Europe, and he was at the age at which a glass or two a day was beneficial for his heart.

"We'll never know for sure, will we?" said Michiko, after eating a small piece of potato. "We'll never know who that woman you were with was, or who the father of my child was."

"Oh, yes, we will," said Lloyd. "You'll presumably know who the father is sometime in the next thirteen or fourteen years — before the child is born. And I'll know who that woman is whenever I do finally meet her — I'd certainly recognize her, even if she were years younger than she was in my vision."

Michiko nodded, as if this were obvious. "But I mean we won't know in time for our own wedding," she said, her voice small.

"No," said Lloyd. "We won't."

She sighed. "What do you want to do?"

Lloyd lifted his eyes from the table and looked at Michiko. Her lips were pressed tightly together; perhaps she was trying to keep them from trembling. On her hand was the engagement ring — so much less than he'd wanted to get her, so much more than he could really afford. "It's not fair," he said. "I mean, Christ, even Elizabeth Taylor probably thought it was 'till death do us part' each time she got married; nobody should have to go into a marriage knowing it's bound to fail."

He could tell Michiko was looking at him, tell that she was trying to seek out his eyes. "So that's you're decision?" she said. "You want to call off the engagement?"

"I do love you," said Lloyd, finally. "You know that."

"Then what's the problem?" asked Michiko.

What was the problem? Was it divorce that so terrified him — or just a messy divorce, like the one his parents had gone through? Who would have thought that such a simple thing as dividing up community property could have escalated into out-and-out warfare, with vicious accusations on both sides? Who would have thought that two people who had scrimped and saved and sacrificed year after year to buy each other lavish Christmas presents as tokens of their love would end up using legal claws to pry those presents back from the only person in the world to whom they meant anything? Who would have thought that a couple who had oh-so-cutely given their children names that were anagrams — Lloyd and Dolly — would turn around and use those same children as pawns, as weapons?

"I'm sorry, honey," said Lloyd. "It's tearing me apart but, I just don't know what I want to do."

"Your parents long ago booked flights to come to Geneva, and so did my mother," said Michiko. "If we're not going to go through with the wedding, we have to tell people. You've got to make a decision."

She didn't understand, thought Lloyd. She didn't understand that his decision was already made; that whatever he would do/had done was described for all time in the block universe. It wasn't that he had to make a decision; rather, the decision that had always been made simply had to be revealed.

And so—

16

It was time for Theo to go home. Not to the apartment in Geneva that he'd called home for the last two years, but home to Athens. Home to his roots.

It also, frankly, would be wise for him to not be around Michiko for a while. Crazy thoughts about her kept running through his head.

Theo didn't suspect that anyone in his family had anything to do with his death — although, as he'd begun reading up on such things, it became apparent that it was usually the case, ever since Cain slew Abel, ever since Livia poisoned Augustus, ever since O. J. killed his wife, ever since that astronaut aboard the international space station had been arrested, despite the seemingly perfect alibi, for having killed her own sister.

But, no, Theo suspected none of his family members. And yet, if any visions were likely to shed light on his own death, surely it would be those of his close relatives? Surely some of them would have been doing investigations of their own twenty-one years hence, trying to figure out who had killed their dear Theo?

Theo took an Olympic Airlines flight to Athens. The seat sales were over; people were flying again as before, assured that the consciousness-displacement would not recur. He spent the flight time poking holes in a model for the Flashforward that had been emailed to him by a team at DESY, the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron, Europe's other major particle-accelerator facility.

Theo hadn't been home for four years now, and he regretted it. Christ, he might be dead in twenty-one years — and he'd let a span of one-fifth that length slip by without hugging his mother or tasting her cooking, without seeing his brother, without enjoying the incredible beauty of his homeland. Yes, the Alps were breathtaking, but there was a sterile, barren quality about them. In Athens, you could always look up, always see the Acropolis looming above the city, the midday sun flaring off the restored, polished marble of the Parthenon. Thousands of years of human habitation; millennia of thought, of culture, of art.

Of course, as a youth, he had visited many of the famous archeological sites. He remembered being seventeen: a school bus had taken his class to Delphi, home of the ancient oracle. It had been pouring rain, and he hadn't wanted to get off the bus. But his teacher, Mrs. Megas, had insisted. They had clambered over slippery dark rocks through lush forest, until they came to where the oracle had once supposedly sat, dispensing cryptic visions of the future.

That kind of oracle had been better, thought Theo: futures that were subject to interpretation and debate, instead of the cold, harsh realities the world had recently seen.

They'd also gone to Epidaurus, a great bowl out of the landscape, with concentric rings of seats. They'd seen Oedipus Tyrannos performed there — Theo refused to join the tourists in calling it Oedipus Rex; "Rex" was a Latin word, not Greek, and represented an irritating bastardization of the play's title.

The play was performed in ancient Greek; it might as well have been in Chinese for all the sense Theo could make of the dialog. But they'd studied the story in class; he knew what was happening. Oedipus's future had been spelled out for him, too: you will marry your mother and murder your father. And Oedipus, like Theo, had thought he could circumvent destiny. Forearmed with the knowledge of what he was supposed to do, why, he'd simply avoid the issue altogether, and live a long, happy life with his queen, Iocasta.

Except…

Except that, as it turned out, Iocasta was his mother, and the man Oedipus had slain ye ars before during a quarrel on the road to Thebes had indeed been his father.

Sophocles had written his version of the Oedipus story twenty-four hundred years ago, but students still studied it as the greatest example of dramatic irony in western literature. And what could be more ironic than a modern Greek man faced with the dilemmas of the ancients — a future prophesied, a tragic end foretold, a fate inevitable? Of course, the heroes of ancient Greek tragedies each had a hamartia — a fatal flaw — that made their downfall unavoidable. For some, the hamartia was obvious: greed, or lust, or an inability to follow the law.

But what had been Oedipus's fatal flaw? What in his character had brought him to ruin?

They'd discussed it at length in class; the narrative form employed by the ancient Greek tragedians was inviolate — there was always a hamartia.

And Oedipus's was — what?

Not greed, not stupidity, not cowardice.

No, no, if it were anything, it was his arrogance, his belief that he could defeat the will of the gods.

But, Theo had protested, that's a circular argument; Theo was always the logician, never much for the humanities. Oedipus's arrogance, he said, was only evidenced in his trying to avoid his fate; had his fate been less severe, he'd never have rebelled against it, and therefore never would have been seen as arrogant.

No, his teacher had said, it was there, in a thousand little things he does in the play. Indeed, she quipped, although Oedipus meant "Swollen Foot" — an allusion to the injury sustained when his royal father had bound his feet as a child and left him to die — he could just as easily be called "Swollen Head."

But Theo couldn't see it — couldn't see the arrogance, couldn't see the condescension. To him, Oedipus, who solved the vexing riddle of the Sphinx, was a towering intellect, a great thinker — exactly what Theo felt himself to be.

The riddle of the Sphinx: what walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, and three in the evening? Why, a man, of course, who crawls at the beginning of life, walks erect in adulthood, and requires a cane in old age. What an incisive bit of reasoning on Oedipus's part!

But now Theo would never live to need that third leg, would never see the natural sunset of his span. Instead, he'd be murdered in middle-age… just as Oedipus's real father, King Laius, was left dead at the side of a well-worn road.

Unless, of course, he could change the future; unless he could outwit the gods and avoid his destiny.

Arrogance? thought Theo. Arrogance? It is to laugh.

The plane started its descent into nighttime Athens.

"Your parents long ago booked flights to come to Geneva, and so did my mother," Michiko had said. "If we're not going to go through with the wedding, we have to tell people. You've got to make a decision."

"What do you want to do?" asked Lloyd, buying time.

"What do I want to do?" repeated Michiko, sounding stunned by the question. "I want to get married; I don't believe in a fixed future. The visions will only come true if you make them do so — if you turn them into self-fulfilling prophecies."

The ball was back in his court. Lloyd lifted his shoulders. "I'm so sorry, honey. Really, I am, but — "

"Look," she said, cutting off words she didn't want to hear. "I know your parents made a mistake. But we aren't."

"The visions — "

"We aren't," said Michiko firmly. "We're right for each other. We're meant for each other."

Lloyd was silent for a time. Finally, gently, he went on. "You said before that maybe I was embracing the idea that the future was immutable too readily. But I'm not. I'm not just looking for a way to avoid guilt — and I'm certainly not looking for a way to avoid marrying you, darling. But that the visions are real is the only conclusion possible based on the physics I know. The math is abstruse, I'll grant you, but there's an excellent theoretical basis for supporting the Minkowski interpretation."

"Physics can change in twenty-one years," said Michiko. "There was a lot of stuff they believed in 1988 that we know isn't true today. A new paradigm, a new model, might displace Minkowski or Einstein."

Lloyd didn't know what to say.

"It could happen," said Michiko earnestly.

Lloyd tried to make his tone soft. "I need — I need something more than just your fervent wish. I need a rational explanation; I need a solid theory that could explain why the visions are anything but the one true fixed future." He stopped himself before he added, "A future in which we aren't meant to be together."

Michiko's voice was growing desperate. "Well, okay, all right, maybe the visions are of an actual, real future — but not of 2030."

Lloyd knew he shouldn't push it; knew that Michiko was vulnerable — hell, knew that he was vulnerable. But she had to face reality. "The evidence from newspapers seems pretty conclusive," he said softly.

"No — no, it's not." Michiko sounded increasingly adamant. "It isn't really. The visions could be of a time much farther in the future."

"What do you mean?"

"Do you know who Frank Tipler is?"

Lloyd frowned. "A candid drunk?"

"What? Oh, I get it — but it's Tipler with one P. He wrote The Physics of Immortality."

"The Physics of what?" said Lloyd, eyebrows rising.

"Immortality. Living forever. It's what you always wanted, isn't it? All the time in the world; all the time to do all the things you want to do. Well, Tipler says that at the Omega Point — the end of time — we will all be resurrected and live forever."

"What kind of gibberish is that?"

"I admit it's a whopper," said Michiko. "But he made a good case."

"Oh?" said Lloyd, the syllable pregnant with skepticism.

"He says that computer-based life will eventually supplant biological life, and that information-processing capabilities will continue to expand year after year, until at some point, in the far future, no conceivable computing problem will be impossible. There will be nothing that the future machine life won't have the power and resources to calculate."

''I suppose."

"Now, consider an exact, specific description of every atom in a human body: what type it is, where it is located, and how it relates to the other atoms in the body. If you knew that, you could resurrect a person in his entirety: an exact duplicate, right down to the unique memories stored in the brain and the exact sequence of nucleotides making up his DNA. Tipler says that a sufficiently advanced computer far enough in the future could easily recreate you, just by building up a simulacrum that reflects the same information — the same atoms, in the same places."

"But there's no record of me. You can't reconstruct me without — I don't know — some kind of scan of me… something like that."

"It doesn't matter. You could be reproduced without any specific info about you."

"What are you talking about?"

"Tipler says there are about 110,000 active genes that make up a human being. That means that all the possible permutations of those genes — all the possible biologically distinct human beings that could conceivably exist — amount to about ten to the tenth to the sixth different people. So if you were to simulate all those permutations — "

"Simulate ten to the tenth to the sixth human beings?" said Lloyd. "Come on!"

"It all follows from saying that you have essentially infinite information-processing capabilities," said Michiko. "There may be oodles of possible humans, but it is a finite number."

"Just barely finite."

"There are also a finite number of possible memory states. With enough storage capacity, not only could you reproduce every possible human being, but also every possible set of memories each of them could have."

"But you'd need one simulated human for every memory state," said Lloyd. "One in which I ate pizza last night — or at least had memories of doing that. Another in which I ate a hamburger. Et cetera, et cetera, ad nauseam."

"Exactly. But Tipler says you could reproduce all possible humans that could ever exist, and all possible memories that they could ever have, in ten to the tenth to the twenty-third bits."

"Ten to the tenth to the… "

"Ten to the tenth to the twenty-third."

"That's crazy," said Lloyd.

"It's a finite quantity. And it could all be reproduced on a sufficiently advanced computer."

"But why would anyone do that?"

"Well, Tipler says the Omega Point loves us, and — "

"Loves us?"

"You really should read the book; he makes it sound much more reasonable than I do."

"He'd pretty much have to," said Lloyd, deadpan.

"And remember that the passage of time will slow down as the universe comes to an end, if it eventually is going to collapse down into a Big Crunch — "

"Most studies indicate that's not going to happen, you know; there isn't enough mass, even taking into account dark matter, to close the universe."

Michiko pressed on. "But if it does collapse, time will be protracted so that it will seem to take forever to do so. And that means the resurrected humans will seem to live forever: they'll be immortal."

"Oh, come on. Someday, if I'm lucky, maybe I'll get a Nobel. But that's about as much immortality as anyone could ever hope for."

"Not according to Tipler," said Michiko.

"And you buy this?"

"Wellll, no, not entirely. But even if you set aside Tipler's religious overtones, couldn't you envision a far, far future in which — I don't know, in which some bored high-school student decides to simulate every possible human and every possible memory state?"

"I guess. Maybe."

"In fact, he doesn't have to simulate all the possible states — he could simulate just one random one."

"Oh, I see. And you're saying that what we saw — the visions — they're not of the actual future twenty-one years from now, but rather are from this far-future science experiment. A simulation, one possible take. Just one of the infinite — excuse me, almost infinite possible futures."

"Exactly!"

Lloyd shook his head. "That's pretty hard to swallow."

"Is it? Is it really? Is it any harder to swallow than the idea that we have seen the future, and that future is immutable, and even foreknowledge of it won't be enough to allow us to prevent that future from coming true? I mean, come on: if you have a vision that says you'll be in Mongolia in twenty-one years, all you have to do to defeat the vision is not go to Mongolia. Surely you're not predicting that you're going to be forced to go there, against your will? Surely we have volition."

Lloyd tried to keep his voice soft. He was used to arguing science with other people, but not with Michiko. Even an intellectual debate had a personal edge. "If the vision has you in Mongolia, you'll end up being there. Oh, you may have every intention of never going there, but it'll happen, and it'll seem quite natural at the time. You know as well as I do that humans are lousy at realizing their desires. You can make a promise today that you're going to go on a diet, and have every intention of still being on it a month from now, but, somehow, without it seeming like you have no free will at all, you might very well be off your diet by then."

Michiko looked concerned. "You think I need to go on a diet?" But then she smiled. "Just kidding."

"But you see my point. There's no evidence even in the short term that we can avoid things through a simple act of will; why should we think that over a span of decades we'll have self-determination?"

"Because we have to," said Michiko, earnest again. "Because if we don't, then there's no way out." She sought out his eyes. "Don't you see? Tipler has to be right. Or if he's not, there has to be some other explanation. That can't be the future." She paused. "It can't be our future."

Lloyd sighed. He did love her, but — damn it, damn it, damn it. He found his head shaking back and forth in negation. "I don't want that to be the future anymore than you do," he said softly.

"Then don't let it," said Michiko, taking his hand, intertwining her fingers with his. "Don't let it."

17

"Hello?" A pleasant female voice.

"Ah, hello, is that — is that Dr. Tompkins?"

"Speaking."

"Ah, hi. This is — this is Jake Horowitz. You know, from CERN?"

Jake didn't know what he'd expected to hear over the phone. Affection? Relief that he'd made the first contact? Surprise? But none of those emotions were conveyed by Carly's voice. "Yes?" she said, her tone even. That was all; just "yes."

Jacob felt his heart sinking. Maybe he should just hang up, get the hell off the phone. It wouldn't hurt anything; if Lloyd was right, they were bound to be together eventually. But he couldn't bring himself to do that.

"I — I'm sorry to bother you," he stammered. He'd never been good at phoning women. And, indeed, he hadn't phoned one — not like this — since high school, since that time he'd worked up enough courage to call Julie Cohan and ask her for a date. It had taken him days to prepare, and he still remembered how his finger was shaking as he stabbed out her number on the phone in his parents' basement. He could hear his older brother walking around upstairs, the wooden floor creaking with each of his ponderous footsteps, an Ahab on deck. He'd been terrified that David would try to come down while he was on the phone.

Julie's father had answered the phone, and then had called out to her to pick up on an extension — he hadn't covered the mouthpiece, and he spoke to her roughly. Nothing like the way he'd have treated Julie. And then she picked up the phone, and her father had let the handset tumble back onto the cradle, and she said, in that wonderful voice of hers, "Hello?"

"Ah, hello, Julie. This is Jake — you know, Jake Horowitz." Silence, nothing. "From your American History class."

A tone of perplexity, as if he'd just asked her to calculate the last digit of pi. "Yes?"

"I was wondering," he'd said, trying to sound nonchalant, trying to sound as if his whole life didn't depend on this, trying to sound as though his heart weren't about to burst, "I was wondering if you — if you'd like, you know, to go out with me, maybe Saturday… if you're free that is." More silence; he remembered when he was a kid the phone lines used to crackle with faint static. He missed that now.

"Maybe a movie," he'd said, filling the void.

Heartbeats more, and then: "What makes you think I'd possibly want to go out with you?"

He'd felt his vision blur, felt his stomach churn, felt the wind being kicked out of him. He couldn't remember what he'd said after that, but somehow he'd gotten off the phone, somehow he'd kept from crying, somehow he'd just sat there in the basement, listening to his older brother pacing above.

That was the last time he'd called a woman and asked for a date. Oh, he wasn't a virgin — of course not, of course not. Fifty dollars rectified that particular handicap one night in New York City. He'd felt terrible after that, cheap and unclean, but someday he would be with a woman he wanted to be with, and he owed it to her, whomever she might be, to be — well, if not skilled, certainly not flailing about without a clue.

And now, now it looked like he would be with a woman — with Carly Tompkins. He remembered her as being beautiful, remembered her as having chestnut hair and eyes that were green or gray. He'd liked looking at her, liked listening to her, when she gave her presentation at the APS conference. But the exact details of her appearance were elusive. He recalled freckles — yes, surely she'd had freckles, although not as many as he himself had, but a gentle dusting along the bridge of her small nose and her full cheeks. Surely he wasn't imagining that—

Carly's perplexed "yes?" still rang in his ears. She must know why he was calling. She must—

"We're going to be together," he said, stupidly blurting it out, wishing the moment the words were free that he could recant them. "In twenty years, we're going to be togethe r."

She was silent for a moment, then: "I guess."

Jake was relieved; he'd been afraid that she was going to deny the vision. "So I was thinking," Jake said, "I was thinking maybe we should get to know each other. You know, maybe go for coffee." His heart was pounding; his stomach was churning. He was seventeen again.

"Jacob," she said. Jacob, saying his name — no one ever started good news by saying your name. Jacob, reminding him of who he really was. Jacob, what makes you think I'd possibly—

"Jacob," she continued, "I'm seeing someone."

Of course, he thought. Of course she's seeing someone. A dark-haired beauty with those freckles. Of course.

"I'm sorry," he said. He meant for her to take that to mean he was sorry he'd disturbed her, but he felt it both ways. He was sorry she was seeing someone.

"Besides," said Carly, "I'm here in Vancouver; you're in Switzerland."

"I have to be in Seattle later this week; I'm a grad student here, but my field is computer modeling of HEP reactions, and CERN is flying me in to Microsoft for a seminar. I could — we'll, I'd thought about, you know, coming to North America a day or two early, maybe by way of Vancouver. I've got tons of frequent-flyer points; it won't cost me anything."

"When?" asked Carly.

"I — I could be there as early as the day after tomorrow." He tried to make his tone light. "My seminar starts Thursday; the world may be in crisis, but Microsoft soldiers on." At least for the time being, he thought.

"All right," said Carly.

"All right?"

"All right. Come up to TRIUMF, if you want to. I'd be glad to meet you."

"What about your boyfriend?"

"Who said it was a boy?"

"Oh." A pause. "Oh."

But then Carly laughed. "No, just kidding. Yes, it's a guy — his name's Bob. But it's not that serious, and… "

"Yes?"

"And, well, I guess we should get to know each other better."

Jacob was glad that the act of grinning from ear to ear didn't make a sound. They firmed up a time, and then they said their goodbyes.

His heart was pounding. He'd always known the right woman would come along eventually; he'd never given up hope. He wouldn't bring her flowers — he would never get them through customs. No, he'd bring her something decadent from Chocolats Micheli; Switzerland, was, after all, the land of chocolate.

With his luck, though, she'd turn out to be a diabetic.

Theo's younger brother, Dimitrios, lived with three other young men in suburban Athens, but when Theo came calling, late in the evening, Dimitrios was home alone.

Dim was studying European literature at the National Capodistrian University of Athens; ever since childhood, Dim had wanted to be a writer. He'd mastered his alpha-beta-gammas before he'd entered school, and was constantly typing up stories on the family computer. Theo had promised years ago to transfer all of Dim's stories from three-and-a-half-inch diskettes onto optical wafers; no home computers came with diskette readers anymore, but CERN's computing facility had some legacy systems that still used them. He thought about making the offer again, but didn't know whether it was better that Dim think he'd simply forgotten, or that he realize that years — years! — had gone by without his big brother having managed three minutes to request that simple favor from someone in the computing department.

Dim had answered the door wearing blue jeans — how retro! — and a yellow T-shirt imprinted with the logo of Anaheim, a popular American TV series; even a European Literature major apparently couldn't help falling under the thrall of American pop culture.

"Hello, Dim," said Theo. He had never hugged his younger brother before, but had an urge to do so now; facing the fact of one's own mortality fostered such feelings. But Dim would doubtless not know what to make of such an embrace; their father, Constantin, was not an affectionate man. Even when the ouzo was flowing more than it should have, he might pinch a waitress's behind but he'd never even tousled the hair of his boys.

"Hey, Theo," said Dimitrios, as if he had seen him just yesterday. He stepped aside to let his brother enter.

The house looked like you'd expect the home of four guys in their early twenties to look — a pig sty, with items of clothing draped over furniture, take-out food boxes piled on the dining-room table, and all sorts of gadgets, including high-end stereo and virtual-reality decks.

It felt good to be speaking Greek again; he'd gotten sick of French and English, the former with its excess verbiage and the latter with its harsh, unpleasant sounds. "How are you doing?" Theo asked. "How's school?"

"How's university, you mean," said Dim.

Theo nodded. He'd always referred to his own post-secondary studies as university, but his brother, pursuing the arts, was just in school. Perhaps the slight had been intended; there were eight years between them, a long time, but still not enough of a buffer to insure the absence of sibling rivalry. "Sorry. How's university?"

"It's okay." He met Theo's eyes. "One of my professors died during the Flashforward, and one of my best friends had to leave to look after his family after his parents were injured."

There was nothing to say. "Sorry," said Theo. "It was unforeseen."

Dim nodded and looked away. "Have you seen Mama and Poppa yet?"

"Not yet. Later."

"It's been hard on them, you know. All their neighbors know you work at CERN — 'my son the scientist,' Poppa used to say. 'My boy, the new Einstein.' " Dimitrios paused. "He doesn't say that anymore. They've had to take a lot of heat from those who lost people."

"Sorry," said Theo again. He looked around the messy room, trying to find anything on to which he could shift the conversation.

"You want a drink?" asked Dimitrios. "Beer? Mineral water?"

"No, thanks."

Dimitrios was quiet for a few moments. He walked into the living room; Theo followed. Dim sat on the couch, pushing some papers and clothes onto the floor to make room. Theo found a chair that was reasonably free of clutter and sat on it.

"You've ruined my life," said Dimitrios, his eyes meeting then avoiding his brother's. "I want you to know that."

Theo felt his heart jump. "How?"

"These — these visions. Dammit, Theo, don't you know how hard it is to face the keyboard each day? Don't you know how easy it is to become discouraged?"

"But you're a terrific writer, Dim. I've read your work. The way you handle the language is beautiful. That piece you did about the summer you spent on Crete — you captured Knossos perfectly."

"It doesn't matter; none of that matters. Don't you see? Twenty-one years hence, I won't be famous. I won't have made it. Twenty-one years hence, I'll be working in a restaurant, serving souvlaki and tzatziki to tourists."

"Maybe it was a dream — maybe you're dreaming in the year 2030."

Dim shook his head. "I found the restaurant; it's over by the Tower of the Winds. I met the manager; he's the same guy who'll be running it twenty-one years from now. He recognized me from his vision and I recognized him from mine."

Theo tried to be gentle. "Many writers don't make their living writing. You know that."

"But how many would go on, year after year, if they didn't think that someday — maybe not today, maybe not next year, but eventually — that they would break out? That they'd make it?"

"I don't know. I've never thought about it."

"It's the dream that makes artists go on. How many struggling actors are giving up today — right now — because their visions proved to them that they'll never make it? How many painters on the streets of Paris threw away their palettes this week because they know that even decades hence they'll never be recognized? How many rock bands, practicing in their parents' garages, have broken up? You've taken away the dream from millions of us. Some people were lucky — they were sleeping in the future. Because they were dreaming then, their real dreams haven't been shattered."

"I — I hadn't thought about it that way."

"Of course you hadn't. You're so obsessed with finding out who killed you that you can't see straight. But I've got news for you, Theo. You're not the only one who's dead in the year 2030. I'm dead, too — a waiter in an overpriced tourist joint! I'm dead, and so, I'm sure, are millions of others. And you killed them: you killed their hopes, their dreams, their futures."

18

Day Eight: Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Jake and Carly Tompkins could have met at TRIUMF, but they decided not to. Instead, they met at the Chapters superstore in the Vancouver suburb of Burnaby. This one still devoted about half its space to actual pre-printed books that were for sale: guaranteed bestsellers by Stephen King, John Grisham, and Coyote Rolf. But the rest of the facility was taken up by individual display copies of titles that could be printed on demand. It took only fifteen minutes to produce a single copy of any book, either in mass-market paperback or as an octavo hardcover. Large-print editions could be had, as well, and computer-translated editions in any one of twenty-four languages could be produced in only an additional few minutes. And, of course, no title was ever out of stock.

In a brilliant bit of preadaptive evolution, book superstores had been building coffee shops into their facilities for twenty years now — giving people the perfect place to spend some pleasant time while their custom books were printed, Jake got to Chapters early, entered the attached Starbucks, ordered himself a tall decaffeinated Sumatra, and found a seat.

Carly arrived about ten minutes after the appointed time. She was wearing a London Fog trench coat, the sash pulled smartly about her waist; blue slacks; and low heels. Jake rose to greet her. As he approached, he was surprised to see that she wasn't as pretty as he'd remembered.

But it was definitely her. They looked at each other for a moment, he wondering, as he expected she was, how you should greet someone whom you know for a fact you will one day have sex with. They were acquaintances, already; Jake had encountered people he'd known less well at various times and had either bestowed or received a kiss on the cheek — especially, of course, in France. But Carly decided the matter, extending her right hand. He managed a smile and shook it; her grip was firm, and her skin cool to the touch.

A Chapters employee came around to ask Carly what she wanted to drink; Jake remembered when Starbucks used to have only counter service, but of course someone had to deliver your books to you when they were printed. She ordered a grande Ethiopia Sidamo.

Carly opened her purse and reached in to fish out her wallet. Jake let his gaze fall inside her purse. The entire coffee shop was non-smoking of course; all restaurants throughout North America were these days; even in Paris, such rules were coming into effe ct. But he was relieved to see no pack of cigarettes hiding in the purse; he didn't know what he would have done if she'd been a smoker.

"Well," she said.

Jake forced a smile. It was an awkward situation. He knew what she looked like naked. Of course — of course that was twenty years hence. She was about his age now, twenty-two, twenty-three. She'd be in her early forties two decades from now; hardly run down, hardly a hag. And yet—

She had been lovely twenty years hence; surely, though, she was even lovelier now. Surely—

Yes, yes, there was still anticipation, still wonder, still tension.

Of course, she'd seen him naked, too, twenty years further down the road. He knew what she looked like — her chestnut hair color was natural, or at least dyed in both places; wine-colored nipples; those same enchanting freckles painting constellations across her chest. But him? What did he look like twenty years hence? He was no athlete even now. What if he'd put on weight? What if his chest hair had gone gray?

Maybe her present reluctance was based on what she'd seen of the future him. He couldn't promise he'd work out, couldn't promise he'd keep trim, couldn't promise anything — she knew what he'd be like in 2030, even if he himself did not.

"It's good to see you again," said Jake, trying to sound calm, trying to sound warm.

"You, too," said Carly. And then she smiled.

"What?"

"Nothing."

"No, come on. Tell me."

She smiled again, then lowered her eyes. "I was just picturing us naked," she said.

He felt his features stretching into a grin. "Me, too."

"This is strange," she said. And then: "Look, I never go to bed with anyone on the first date. I mean — "

Jake lifted his hands off the tabletop. "Me neither," he said.

She smiled at that. Maybe she was as beautiful as he remembered after all.

The Mosaic Project didn't just reveal the futures of individual human beings. It also had a lot to say about the future of governments, companies, and organizations — including CERN itself.

It seemed that in 2022, a team at CERN — Theo and Lloyd were on it — would developed a whole new kind of physics tool: the Tachyon-Tardyon Collider. Tachyons were particles that traveled faster than the speed of light; the more energy they carried, the closer to light-speed they traveled. As their energy went down, their speed went up — to almost infinite velocities.

Tardyons, on the other hand, were ordinary matter: they traveled at speeds below that of light. The more energy you pumped into a tardyon, the faster it would go. But, as old Einstein had said, the faster it goes, the more massive a tardyon gets. Particle accelerators, such as CERN's Large Hadron Collider, worked by imparting great energies to tardyons, thereby boosting them to high speeds, and hurtling them togethe r, releasing all that energy when the particles collide. Such machines were huge.

But imagine taking a stationary tardyon — a proton, say, held in place by a magnetic field — and getting a tachyon to collide with it. You wouldn't need huge accelerator rings to get the tachyon up to speed — it was naturally whipping along at superluminal velocities. All you needed to do was make sure that it hit the tardyon.

And so the TT Collider was born.

It did not require a tunnel twenty-seven kilometers in circumference, as the LHC did.

It did not cost billions of dollars to build.

It did not demand thousands of people to maintain and operate it.

A TTC was about the size of a large microwave oven. The early models — the ones available in 2030 — cost about forty million American dollars, and there were only nine in the world. But it was predicted that they'd eventually be cheap enough that every university would have its own.

The effect on CERN was devastating; more than twenty-eight hundred people were laid off. The impact on the towns of St. Genis and Thoiry was also great — suddenly over a thousand homes and apartments became available as people moved away. The LHC would apparently be left operational, but would rarely be used; it was so much easier to do, and redo, experiments using a TTC.

"You know this is crazy," said Carly Tompkins, after taking a sip of her Ethiopian coffee.

Jake Horowitz looked at her, eyebrows raised.

"What happened in that vision," said Carly, lowering her eyes, "that was passionate. It wasn't two people who had been together for twenty years."

Jake lifted his shoulders. "I never want it to get stale, to get old. People can have a good love life for decades on end."

"Not like that. Not ripping each other's clothes off in the workplace."

Jake frowned. "You never know."

Carly was quiet for a moment, then: "You want to come back to my place? You know, just for coffee… "

They were sitting in a coffee shop, of course, so the offer made little sense. Jake's heart was pounding. "Sure," he said. "That would be nice."

19

Another night at Lloyd's apartment, Lloyd and Michiko sitting on the couch, no words passing between them.

Lloyd pursed his lips, thinking. Why couldn't he just go ahead and commit to this woman? He did love her. Why couldn't he just ignore what he'd seen? Millions of people were doing just that, after all — for most of the world, the idea of a fixed future was ridiculous. They'd seen it a hundred times in TV shows and movies: Jimmy Stewart realizes that it's a wonderful life after watching the world unfold without him. Superman, incensed at the death of Lois Lane, flies around the Earth so quickly that it spins backwards, letting him return to a time before her demise, saving her. Caesar, son of the chimpanzee scientists Zira and Cornelius, sets the world on a path of interspecies brotherhood, hoping to avoid Earth's destruction by nuclear holocaust.

Even scientists spoke in terms of contingent evolution. Stephen Jay Gould, taking a metaphor from the Jimmy Stewart movie, told the world that if you could rewind the skein of time, it would doubtless play out differently, with something other than human beings emerging at the end.

But Gould wasn't a physicist; what he proposed as a thought experiment was impossible. The best you could do was a riff on what had happened during the Flashforward — move the marker for "now" to another instant. Time was fixed; in the can, each frame exposed. The future wasn't a work in progress; it was a done deal, and no matter how many times Stephen Jay Gould watches It's A Wonderful Life, Clarence will always get his wings…

Lloyd stroked Michiko's hair, wondering what was written above this slice in the spacetime block.

Jake was lying on his back, one arm bent behind his head. Carly was snuggling against him, playing with his chest hair. They were both naked.

"You know," said Carly, "we've got a chance for something really wonderful here."

Jake lifted his eyebrows. "Oh?"

"How many couples have this, in this day and age? A guarantee that they'll be togethe r twenty years from now! And not just together, but still passionately in… " She trailed off; it was one thing to discuss the future, it was quite another, apparently, to give premature voice to the L-word.

They were quiet for a time. "There isn't somebody else, is there?" asked Carly, finally, her voice small. "Back in Geneva?"

Jake shook his head, his red hair rustling against the pillow. "No." And then he swallowed, working up his courage. "But there's someone else here, isn't there? Your boyfriend — Bob."

Carly exhaled. "I'm sorry," she said. "I know a lie is a terrible way to begin a relationship. I — look, I didn't know anything about you. And male physicists are such hound dogs, really they are. I've even got an old wedding band I sometimes wear to conferences. There is no Bob; I just said there was so I'd have a convenient out, you know, if things didn't seem to be going well."

Jake didn't know whether to be offended or not. Once, when he'd been sixteen or seventeen, he was chatting to his cousin Howie's girlfriend on a July night, out front of Howie's house. There were a bunch of people around; they'd been having a barbecue around back. It was dark, and it was clear, and she had struck up a conversation with him, after noting that he was looking up at the stars. She didn't know any of their names, and was stunned that he could point out Polaris, plus the three corners of the Summer Triangle, Vega, Deneb, and Altair. He started to show her Cassiopeia, but it was hard to see, half obscured by the trees rising up behind the house. And yet he wanted her to see it — the great W in the sky, one of the easiest constellations to spot once you've been introduced to it. And so he said, here, cross the street with me, you'll be able to see it from the other side. It was a nice suburban street, devoid of traffic at that time of night, with lit-up houses behind neatly trimmed lawns.

She looked at him and said, "No."

He didn't get it — not for half a second. She thought he might try to throw her behind a bush, try to rape her. Emotions ran through him: offense at the suggestion — he was Howie's cousin, after all! And a sadness, too: a regret for what it must be to be a woman, constantly on the lookout, always afraid, always checking for escape routes.

Jake had shrugged a little, and had walked away, so stunned that he couldn't think of anything else to say. Clouds had rolled in shortly after that, obscuring the stars.

"Oh," Jake said, to Carly; he could think of no other response to her lie about Bob.

Carly moved her shoulders. "Sorry. A woman has to be careful."

He hadn't been thinking about settling down — but… but… what a gift! Here she was, a beautiful, intelligent woman, working in the same field he was in, and the certain knowledge that they'd still be together, and still be happy, two decades hence.

"What time do you have to be at work tomorrow?" asked Jake.

"I think I'll call in sick," Carly said.

He rearranged himself on the bed, facing her.

Dimitrios Procopides sat on the mess-covered couch, and stared at the wall. He'd been thinking about this ever since his brother Theo's visit two days ago. That thousands — maybe even millions — were contemplating the same thing didn't make it easier for him.

It would be such a simple thing to do: he'd bought the sleeping pills over the counter, and he'd had no trouble finding information on the World Wide Web about how big a dose of this particular brand would be required to insure fatality. For someone who weighed seventy-five kilos, as Dimitrios did, seventeen pills might be enough, and twenty-two would surely do the trick, but thirty would likely induce vomiting, defeating the purpose.

Yes, he could make it happen. And it would be painless — just falling into a deep sleep that would last forever.

But there was a Catch-22 — one of the few American novels he'd read had introduced him to that concept. By committing suicide — he wasn't afraid to think the word — he could prove that his future wasn't predestined; after all, in not just his own vision, but in that of the restaurant manager, he was alive twenty years hence. So, if he killed himself today — if he swallowed the pills right now — he'd demonstrate conclusively that the future wasn't fixed. But it would be like Pyrrhus's defeats of the Romans at Heraclea and Asculum, the kind of victory that still bears his name, a victory at a horrible cost. For if he could commit suicide, then the future that had so depressed him was not inevitable — but, of course, he'd no longer be around to pursue his dream.

There were lesser ways, perhaps, to test the reality of the future. He could pluck out an eye, cut off an arm, get a tattoo on his face — anything that would make his appearance permanently different from what others had seen of him in their visions.

But no. That wouldn't work.

It wouldn't work because none of those things were permanent. A tattoo could be removed; an arm could be replaced with a prosthetic; a glass eye could be fitted in the vacated socket.

No: he couldn't have a glass eye; in his own vision of that damnable restaurant he'd had normal stereoscopic sight. So, plucking out an eye would be a convincing test of whether the future was immutable.

Except…

Except they were making advances in prosthetics and genetics all the time. Who was to say that two decades down the road they wouldn't be able to clone him a new eye, or a new arm? And who was to say that he would refuse such a thing, a chance to overcome the damage caused by an impetuous act in his youth?

His brother Theo desperately wanted to believe that the future was not fixed. But Theo's partner — that tall guy, the Canadian — what's his name? Simcoe, that was it. Simcoe said the exact opposite — Dim had seen him on TV, making his case for the future being carved in stone.

And if the future was carved in stone — if Dim was never going to make it as a writer — then he really did not want to go on. Words were his only love, his only passion — and, if he were honest, his only talent. He was lousy at math (how hard it had been to follow Theo through the same schools, with teachers expecting him to share his older brother's talent!), he couldn't play sports, he couldn't sing, he couldn't draw, computers defeated him.

Of course, if he really was going to be miserable in the future, he could kill himself then.

But apparently he had not.

Of course not. Days and weeks slip by easily enough; one doesn't necessarily notice that one's life isn't moving forward, isn't progressing, isn't becoming what you'd always dreamed it would be.

No, it would be easy to end up living like that — the empty life he saw in his vision — if you let it sneak up on you, day after dreary day.

But he'd been given a gift, an insight. That Simcoe fellow had spoken of life as an already exposed film — but the projectionist had put the wrong reel on the projector, and it had been two minutes before he'd realized his mistake. There'd been a jump cut, a sharp transition from today to a distant tomorrow, and then back again. That perspective was different from life just unrolling one frame after another. He could see now, with clarity, that the life ahead of him wasn't one that he wanted — that, in a very real sense, as he served up moussaka and set saganaki ablaze, he was already dead.

Dim looked at the bottle of pills again. Yes, countless others, all over the world, were doubtless contemplating their futures, wondering if, now that they knew what tomorrow held, it was worth going on.

If even one of them actually did it — actually took his or her own life — surely that would prove the future was mutable. Doubtless this thought had occurred to others, as well. Doubtless many were waiting for someone else to do it first — waiting for the reports that would surely flood the nets: "Man seen by others in 2030 found dead." "Suicide proves future is fluid."

Dim picked up the amber-colored plastic bottle again, rolling it back and forth, hearing the pills clatter over one another inside it.

It would be so easy to take off the lid, pressing it into his palm — he did that now — and twisting, defeating the safety mechanism, letting the pills spill out.

What color were they? he wondered. Crazy, that: he was thinking of taking his own life, and yet had no idea what color the potential instrument of his demise was. He removed the lid. There was some cotton, but not enough to hold the pills immobile. He pulled the batting out.

Well, I'll be—

The pills were green. Who would have thought that? Green pills; a green death.

He tipped the bottle, tapped its base until a pill fell out into his hand. It had a crease down its middle, where the pressure of a thumbnail could presumably cleave it in two for a smaller dose.

But he didn't want a small dose.

There was bottled water at hand; he'd gotten it without fizz — in contrast to his usual preference — lest the carbonation interfere with the action of the pills. He popped the pill in his mouth. He'd half-expected a lime or mint flavor, but it had no flavor at all. A thin coating covered the tablet — the kind you got on premium aspirin. He lifted the water bottle and took a swig. The film did its job; the pill slid smoothly down his throat.

He tipped the pill bottle again, tapped out three more of the green tablets, popped all three into his mouth, and chased them with a large gulp of mineral water.

That was four; the maximum adult dose, marked on the bottle, was two tablets, and there was a warning about avoiding use on consecutive nights.

Three had gone down easily enough at a single gulp. He put a new trio in his palm, dropped them into his mouth, and took another swig of water.

Seven. A lucky number, that. That's what they said.

Did he really want to do this? There was still time to stop. He could call the emergency number; he could stick a finger into the back of his throat.

Or—

Or he could think about it some more. Give himself a few additional minutes to reflect.

Seven pills probably wasn't enough to do any real harm. Surely not. Surely that kind of minor overdose happened all the time. Why, the Web site had said he'd need at least another ten…

He spilled some more pills into his palm, and stared at them, a pile of little green stones.

20

Day Nine: Wednesday, April 29, 2009

"I want to show you something," said Carly.

Jake smiled and indicated with a hand gesture for her to proceed. They were at TRIUMF now, the Tri-University Meson Facility, Canada's leading particle-physics laboratory.

She began walking down a corridor; Jake followed. They passed doors with science-related cartoons taped to them. They also passed a few other people, each wearing cylindrical dosimeters that served the same purpose but looked nothing like the film badges everyone sported at CERN.

Finally, Carly came to a stop. She was standing in front of a door. On one side of it was a coiled-up fire hose behind a glass cover; on the other, a drinking fountain. Carly rapped her knuckles on the door. There was no response, so she turned the knob and opened it up. She went in and beckoned with a crooked finger and smile for Jake to follow. He did so, and once he was inside, Carly closed the door behind him.

"Well?" she said.

Jake lifted his shoulders, helpless.

"Don't you recognize it?" asked Carly.

Jake looked around. It was a good-sized lab, with beige walls, and—

— oh, my God!—

Yes, the walls were beige now, but sometime in the next twenty years they'd be repainted yellow.

It was the room in the vision. There was the chart of the periodic table, just as he'd seen it. And that workbench right there — that's the bench they'd been doing it on.

Jake felt his face grow flush.

"Pretty neat, huh?" said Carly.

"That it is," said Jake.

Of course they couldn't inaugurate the room just now; it was the middle of the work day…

But his vision… well, if the time estimates were correct, then it was of 7:21 P.M. Geneva time, which was — what? — 2:21 P.M. in New York, and — let's see — 11:21 A.M. here in Vancouver. Eleven twenty-one in the morning… on a Wednesday. Surely TRIUMF would have been busy then, too. How could they possibly have been making love here at that time on a weekday? Oh, doubtless sexual mores would continue to loosen up over the next twenty years just as they had over the last fifty, but surely even in the far-off year of A.D. 2030 you didn't run off with your sweetie for a boink-break while at work. But maybe October 23 was a holiday; maybe everyone else was off work. Jake had a vague recollection that Canadian Thanksgiving was sometime in October.

He walked around the room, comparing its present reality to what he'd seen in his vision. There was an emergency shower, common enough in labs where chemicals are used, and some equipment lockers, and a small computer workstation. There'd been a personal computer on the same spot in the vision, but it had been quite a different model, of course. And next to it…

Next to it, there'd been a device, cubic in shape, about a half-meter on a side, with two flat sheets rising up out of its top, facing each other.

"That thing that was there," said Jake. "I mean, that thing that will be there. Any idea what it is?"

"Maybe a Tachyon-Tardyon Collider?"

Jake lifted his eyebrows. "That could — "

The door to the lab swung open, and a large Native Canadian man walked in. "Oh, excuse me," he said. "Didn't mean to interrupt."

"Not at all," said Carly. She smiled at Jake. "We'll come back later."

"You want proof?" said Michiko. "You want to know for sure whether we should get married? There's one way to do that."

Lloyd had been alone in his office at CERN, examining a series of printouts of the last year's worth of 14-TeV LHC runs looking for any indication of instability prior to the first 1,150-TeV run — the one that produced the time-displacement. Michiko had just come in, and those were her first words.

Lloyd raised his eyebrows at her. "A way to get proof? How?"

"Repeat the experiment. See if you get the same results."

"We can't do that," said Lloyd, stunned. He was thinking of all the people who had died the last time. Lloyd had never believed in the 'there are some things humanity is not meant to know' philosophy, but if there ever was a test that shouldn't be done again, doubtless this was it.

"You'd have to announce the new attempt in advance, of course, said Michiko. "Warn everybody, make sure no one is flying, no one is driving, no one is swimming, no one is on a ladder. Make sure the whole human race is sitting down or lying down when it happens."

"There's no way to do that."

Sure there is," she said. "CNN. NHK. The BBC. The CBC."

"There are places in the world that still don't get TV, or even radio, for that matter. We couldn't warn everyone."

"We couldn't easily warn everyone," said Michiko, "but it could be done, certainly with a ninety-nine-percent success rate."

Lloyd frowned. "Ninety-nine percent, eh? There are seven billion people. If we missed just one percent, that's still seventy million who wouldn't be warned."

"We could do better than that. I'm positive we could. We could get it down to a few hundred thousand who didn't get word — and, let's face it, those few hundred thousand would be in nontechnological areas, anyway. There's no chance they'd be driving cars or flying planes."

"They could be eaten by animals."

Michiko stopped short. "Could they? Interesting thought. I guess animals didn't lose consciousness during the Flashforward, did they?"

Lloyd scratched his head. "We certainly didn't see the ground littered with dead birds that had fallen out of the sky. And, according to the news reports, no one found giraffes that had broken their legs by falling. The phenomenon seemed to be one of consciousness; I read in the Tribune that chimpanzees and gorillas who've been questioned by sign language reported some sort of effect — many said they were in different places — but they lacked the vocabulary and the psychological frame of reference to confirm or deny that they'd actually seen their own futures."

"It doesn't matter. Most wild animals won't eat unconscious prey anyway; they'll think it's dead, and natural selection long ago bred out carrion feeding from most life forms. No, I'm sure we could reach almost everyone, and the few that we don't reach are unlikely to be in any sort of hazardous position anyway."

"All well and good," said Lloyd, "but we can't just announce that we're going to repeat the experiment. The French or Swiss authorities would stop us, if no one else did."

"Not if we got their permission. Not if we got everyone's permission."

"Oh, come on! Scientists might be curious as to whether it's a reproducible result, but why would anyone else care? Why would the world give its permission — unless, of course, they needed to reproduce the results in order to find me, or CERN, culpable."

Michiko blinked. "You're not thinking, Lloyd. Everyone wants another glimpse of the future. We're hardly the only ones with loose ends left by the first set of visions. People want to know more about what tomorrow holds. If you tell them that you can let them see the future again, no one is going to stand in your way. On the contrary, they'll move heaven and earth to make it possible."

Lloyd was quiet, digesting this. "You think so?" he said at last. "I'd imagine there would be a lot of resistance."

"No, everyone's curious. Don't you want to know who that woman was?" A pause. "Don't you want to know for sure who was the father of the child I was with? Besides, if you're wrong about the future being immutable, then maybe we'll all see a completely different tomorrow, one in which Theo doesn't die. Or maybe we'll get a glimpse at a different time: five years down the road, or fifty. But the point is that there's not a person on the planet who wouldn't want another vision."

"I don't know," said Lloyd.

"Well, then, look at it this way: you're torturing yourself with guilt. If you try to reproduce the Flashforward and fail to do so, then the LHC had nothing to do with it, after all. And that means you can relax."

"Maybe you're right," said Lloyd. "But how do we get permission to reproduce the experiment? Who could give that permission?"

Michiko shrugged. "The nearest city is Geneva," she said. "What's it most famous for?"

Lloyd frowned, running down the litany of possibly appropriate answers. And it came to him: the League of Nations, forerunner of the UN, had been founded there in 1920. "You're suggesting we take this to the United Nations?"

"Sure. You could go to New York and present your case."

"The UN can never agree on anything," said Lloyd.

"They'll agree on this," said Michiko. "It's too seductive to turn down."

Theo had talked to his parents and his family's neighbors, but none of them seemed to have meaningful insights into his future death. And so he caught an Olympic Airlines 7117 back to the Geneva International Airport at Cointrin. Franco della Robbia had dropped him off for his outgoing flight, but Theo now took a cab — pricey at thirty Swiss francs — back to the campus. Since they hadn't fed him on the plane, he decided to go straight to the cafeteria in the LHC control center for a bite to eat. When he entered, to his surprise he spotted Michiko Komura sitting alone at a table near the back. Theo got himself a small bottle of orange juice and a serving of longeole sausage, and headed toward her, passing several knots of physicists eating and arguing about possible theories to explain the Flashforward. Now he understood why Michiko was alone; the last thing she wanted to be thinking about was the event that had caused her daughter's death.

"Hi, Michiko," said Theo.

She looked up. "Oh, hi, Theo. Welcome back."

"Thanks. Mind if I join you?"

She indicated the vacant seat opposite her with a hand gesture. "How was your trip?" she asked.

"I didn't learn much." He thought about not saying anything further, but, well, she did ask. "My brother Dimitrios — he says the visions ruined his dream. He wants to be a great writer, but it doesn't look like he's ever going to make it."

"That's sad," said Michiko.

"How are you doing?" asked Theo. "How are you holding up?"

Michiko spread her arms a bit, as if there were no easy answer. "I'm surviving. I go literally whole minutes where I don't think about what happened to Tamiko."

"I'm so sorry," said Theo, for the hundredth time. A long pause. "How's it going otherwise?"

"Okay."

"Just okay?"

Michiko was eating a tart-sized cheese quiche au bleu de Gex. She also had a half-drunk cup of tea; she took a sip, gathering her thoughts. "I don't know. Lloyd — he's not sure he wants to go through with the wedding."

"Really? My God."

She looked around, gauging how alone they were; the nearest person was four tables away, apparently absorbed in reading something on a datapad. She sighed, then shrugged a little. "I love Lloyd — and I know he loves me. But he can't get over this possibility that our marriage won't last."

Theo lifted his eyebrows. "Well, he does come from a broken home. The break-up was quite nasty, apparently."

Michiko nodded. "I know; I'm trying to understand. Really, I am." A pause. "How was your parents' marriage?"

Theo was surprised by the question. He frowned as he considered it. "Fine, I guess; they still seem to be happy. Dad was never very demonstrative, but Mom never seemed to mind."

"My father is dead," said Michiko. "But I suppose he was a typical Japanese of his generation. Kept everything inside, and his work was his whole life." She paused. "Heart attack; forty-seven years old. When I was twenty-two."

Theo searched for the right words. "I'm sure he'd be very proud of you if he'd lived to see what you've become."

Michiko seemed to consider this sincerely, instead of just dismissing it as a platitude. "Maybe. In his traditional view, women did not pursue careers in engineering."

Theo frowned. He didn't really know much about Japanese culture. There were conferences in Japan he could have arranged to attend, but although he'd been all over Europe, to America once, and to Hong Kong when he was a teenager, he'd never had an urge to travel to Japan. But Michiko was so fascinating — her every gesture, her every expression, her way of speaking, her smile and the way it crinkled her little nose, her laugh with its perfect high notes. How could he be fascinated by her and not by her culture? Shouldn't he want to know what her people were like, what her country was like, every facet of the crucible that had formed her?

Or should he just be honest? Should he face the truth that his interest was purely sexual? Michiko was certainly beautiful… but there were three thousand people working at CERN, and half of them were women; Michiko was hardly the only beautiful one.

And yet there was something about her — something exotic. And, well, she obviously liked white guys…

No, that wasn't it. That wasn't what made her fascinating. Not when he got right down to it; not when he looked at it head on, without making excuses. What was most fascinating about Michiko was that she had selected Lloyd Simcoe, Theo's partner. They'd both been single, both available. Lloyd was a decade older than Michiko; Theo eight years younger than her.

It wasn't that Theo was some sort of a workaholic, and that Lloyd had stopped to smell the roses. Theo frequently took rented sail boats out into Lac Leman; Theo played croquet and badminton in the CERN leagues; Theo made time to listen to jazz at Geneva's Au Chat Noir and to take in alternative theater at L'Usine; he even occasionally visited the Grand Casino.

But this fascinating, beautiful, intelligent woman had chosen the staid, quiet Lloyd.

And now, it seemed, Lloyd wasn't prepared to commit to her.

Surely that was no good reason to want her himself. But the heart was separate from physics; its reactions could not be predicted. He did want her, and, well, if Lloyd was going to let her slip through his fingers…

"Still," said Theo, finally replying to Michiko's comment that her father wouldn't approve of her having gone into engineering, "surely he must have admired your intelligence."

Michiko shrugged. "Inasmuch as it reflected well on him, I suppose he did." She paused. "But he wouldn't have approved of me marrying a white man."

Theo's heart skipped a beat — but whether it was for Lloyd's sake or his own, he couldn't say. "Oh."

"He distrusted the West. I don't know if you know this, but it's popular in Japan for young people to wear clothes with English phrases on them. It doesn't really matter what they say — what matters is that they're being seen to embrace American culture. Actually, the slogans are quite amusing for those of us who are fluent in English. 'This End Up.' 'Best Before Date on Bottom.' 'In order to form a more perfect onion.' "She smiled that beautiful, nose-crinkling smile of hers. " 'Onion.' I couldn't stop laughing the first time I saw that one. But one day I came home with a shirt that had English words on it — just words, not even a phrase, words in different colors on a black background: 'puppy', 'ketchup', 'hockey rink', 'very', and 'purpose.' My dad punished me for wearing such a shirt."

Theo tried to look sympathetic while at the same time wondering what form such a punishment would take. No allowance — or did Japanese parents not give their kids allowances? Being sent to her room? He decided not to ask.

"Lloyd's a good man," he said. The words came out without him thinking about them first; perhaps they sprang from some inner sense of fair play that he was glad to know he possessed.

Michiko considered this, too; she had a way of taking every comment and searching for the truth behind it.

"Oh, yes," she said. "He's a very good man. He worries because of that stupid vision that our marriage might not last forever — but there are so many things that, being with him, I know I will never have to worry about. He will never hit me, of that I'm sure. He'll never humiliate me or embarrass me. And he has a great mind for remembering details. I told him my nieces' names once, in passing, months ago. They came up again in conversation last week, and he knew their names instantly. So I can be sure he'll never forget our anniversary or my birthday. I've been involved with men before — both Japanese and foreign — but there's never been one about whom I've felt so sure, so confident, that he would always be kind and gentle."

Theo felt uncomfortable. He thought of himself as a good man, too, and certainly would never raise his hand to a woman. But, well, he did have his father's temper; in an argument, yes, if the truth be told, he might say things that were designed to wound. And, indeed, someone someday would hate him enough to want to kill him. Would Lloyd — Lloyd the good — ever arouse such feelings in another human being?

He shook his head slightly, dispelling those thoughts. "You chose well," he said.

Michiko dipped her head, accepting the compliment. And then she added, "So did Lloyd." Theo was surprised; it wasn't like Michiko to be immodest. But then her next words made plain what she'd meant. "He couldn't have picked a better person to be his best man."

I'm not so sure about that, thought Theo, but he didn't give the words voice.

He couldn't pursue Michiko, of course. She was Lloyd's fiancee.

And besides…

Besides, it wasn't her lovely, captivating Japanese eyes.

It wasn't even a jealousy or fascination born of her choice of Lloyd instead of him.

Down deep, he knew the real reason for his sudden interest in her. Of course he knew it. He figured if he embarked on some crazy new life, if he took some wild left turn, made a totally unpredictable move — such as running off and marrying his partner's fiancee — that somehow he'd be giving the finger to fate, changing his own future so radically that he'd never end up staring down the barrel of a loaded gun.

Michiko was devastatingly intelligent, and she was very beautiful. But he would not pursue her; it would be craziness to do so.

Theo was surprised when a chuckle emanated from his throat — but it was amusing, in a way. Maybe Lloyd was right — maybe the whole universe was a solid block, with time immutable. Oh, Theo had thought about doing something wild and crazy, but then, after what seemed careful consideration, weighing the options and reflecting on his own motives, he had ended up doing exactly what he would have been doing had the issue never been raised.

The movie of his life continued to unfold, frame after already exposed frame.

21

Michiko and Lloyd had planned not to move in together until after the wedding, but, except for the time she'd spent in Tokyo, Michiko had ended up staying at Lloyd's every night since Tamiko's death. Indeed, she'd only been home a couple of times, briefly, since the Flashforward, eight days ago. Everything she saw there reduced her to tears: Tamiko's tiny shoes on the mat by the door; her Barbie doll, perched on one of the living-room chairs (Tamiko always left Barbie sitting up comfortably); her finger paintings, held to the fridge door by magnets; even the spot on the wall where Tamiko had written her name in Magic Marker, and Michiko had never quite been able to get it cle an.

So, they stayed at Lloyd's place, avoiding the memories.

But, still, Michiko often drifted off, staring into space. Lloyd couldn't stand seeing her so sad, but knew that there was nothing he could do. She would grieve — well, probably forever.

And, of course, he wasn't an ignoramus: he had read plenty of articles on psychology and relationships, and he'd even seen his share of Oprah and Giselle programs. He knew he shouldn't have said it, but sometimes words just came out, tumbling forth, spoken without thought. All he'd been trying to do was fill the silence between himself and Michiko.

"You know," he said, "you're going to have another daughter. Your vision — "

But she silenced him with a look.

She didn't say a word, but he could read it in her eyes. You can't replace one child with another. Every child is special.

Lloyd knew that; even though he'd never — yet — been a parent, he knew it. Years ago, he'd seen an old Mickey Rooney film called The Human Comedy, but it wasn't funny at all, and, in the end, Lloyd thought it wasn't very human, either. Rooney played an American soldier in World War II who had gone overseas. He had no family of his own, but enjoyed vicarious contact with the people they were all fighting for back home through the letters his bunkmate received from his family. Rooney got to know them all — the man's brother, his mother, his sweetheart in the States — through the letters the man shared with Rooney. But then that man was killed in battle, and Rooney returned to the man's hometown, bringing back his personal effects. He ran into the man's younger brother outside the family homestead, and it was as if Rooney had known him all his life. The younger brother ended up going into the house, calling out, "Mom — the soldier's home!"

And then the credits rolled.

And the audience was supposed to believe that Rooney somehow would take the place of this woman's late son, shot dead in France.

It had been a cheat; even as a teenager — he'd been maybe sixteen when he saw the film on TV — he knew it was a cheat, knew that one person could never replace another.

And now, foolishly, for one brief moment, he'd implied that Michiko's future daughter might somehow take the place in her heart of poor dead Tamiko.

"I'm sorry," he said.

Michiko didn't smile, but she did nod, almost imperceptibly.

Lloyd did not know if it was the right time — his whole life, he'd been plagued by his inability to sense when the right moment was: the right moment to make his move with a girl in high school, the right moment to ask for a raise, the right moment to interrupt two other people at a party so that he could introduce himself, the right moment to excuse himself when other people obviously wanted to be alone. Some people had an innate sense of such things, but not Lloyd.

And yet—

And yet the matter did have to be resolved.

The world had dusted itself off; people were getting on with their lives. Yes, many were walking with crutches; yes, some insurance companies had already filed for bankruptcy; yes, there was a still-untold number of dead. But life had to go on, and people were going to work, going home, eating out, watching movies, and trying with varying degrees of success to push ahead.

"About the wedding… " he said, trailing off, letting the words float between them.

"Yes?"

Lloyd exhaled. "I don't know who that woman is — the woman in my vision. I have no idea who she is."

"And so you think she might be better than me, is that it?"

"No, no, no. Of course not. It's just… "

He fell silent. But Michiko knew him too well. "You're thinking that there are seven billion people on the planet, aren't you? And that it's blind luck that we met at all."

Lloyd nodded; guilty as charged.

"Perhaps," said Michiko. "But when you consider the odds against you and I meeting, I think it's more than that. It's not like you got stuck with me, or me with you. You were living in Chicago; I was living in Tokyo — and we ended up together, here, on the Swiss-French border. Is that random chance, or destiny?"

"I'm not sure you can believe in destiny while at the same time believing in free will," Lloyd said gently.

"I suppose not." She lowered her eyes. "And, well, maybe you're not really ready for marriage. So many of my friends over the years have gotten married because they thought it was their last chance. You know: they'd reached a certain age, and they figured if they didn't get married soon, they never would. If there's one thing your vision has demonstrated, it's that I'm not your last chance. I guess that takes the pressure off, doesn't it? No need to move quickly anymore."

"It's not that," said Lloyd, but his voice was shaky.

"Isn't it?" said Michiko. "Then make up your mind, right now. Make a commitment. Are we going to get married?"

Michiko was right, Lloyd knew. His belief in an immutable future did help ease his guilt over what had happened — but, still, it was the position he'd always taken as a physicist: space-time is an immutable Minkowski cube. What he was about to do he had already done; the future was as indelible as the past.

No one, as far as they knew, had reported any vision that corroborated that Michiko Komura and Lloyd Simcoe were ever married; no one had reported being in a room that had contained a wedding photo in an expensive frame, showing a tall Caucasian man with blue eyes and a beautiful, shorter, younger Asian woman.

Yes, whatever he said now had always been said — and would always be said. But he had no insight whatsoever into what answer spacetime had recorded in it. His decision, right now, at this moment, at this slice, on this page, in this frame of the film, was unrevealed, unknown. It was no easier giving voice to it — whatever it was that was about to come out of his mouth — even knowing that it was inevitable that he would say it / had said it.

"Well?" demanded Michiko. "What's it going to be?"

Theo was still at work, late in the evening, running another simulation of his and Lloyd's LHC experiment, when he got the phone call.

Dimitrios was dead.

His little brother. Dead. Suicided.

He fought back tears, fought back anger.

Memories of Dim ran through Theo's mind. The times he'd been good to him when he was a kid, and the times he'd been mean. And how everyone in the family was terrified all those years ago when they went to Hong Kong and Dim got lost. Theo had never been happier to see anyone than he was to see little Dim, hoisted up on that policeman's shoulder, coming through the crowded street toward them.

But, now, now he was dead. Theo would have to make another trip to Athens for the funeral.

He didn't know how to feel.

Part of him — a very large — was incredibly saddened by his brother's death.

And part—

Part was elated.

Not because Dim was dead, of course.

But the fact that he was dead altered everything.

For Dimitrios had experienced a vision, a vision verified with another person — and to have a vision he needed to be alive twenty-one years hence.

But if he were dead here, now, in 2009, there was no way he could be alive in 2030.

So the block universe had shattered. What people had seen might indeed make up a coherent picture of tomorrow… but it was only one possible tomorrow, and, indeed, since that tomorrow had included Dimitrios Procopides, it was no longer even that — no longer even possible.

Chaos theory said that small changes in initial conditions must have big effects over time. Surely the world of 2030 could not possibly now turn out as it had been portrayed in the billions of brief glimpses people had already had of it.

Theo paced the halls of the LHC control center: past the big mosaic, past the plaque that gave the institution's original full name, past offices, and laboratories, and washrooms.

If the future was now uncertain — indeed, was now surely not going to turn out exactly as the visions portrayed — then perhaps Theo could give up his search. Yes, in one once-possible future, someone had seen fit to kill him. But so much would change over the next two decades that surely that same outcome wouldn't happen again. Indeed, he might never meet the person who had killed him, never have any encounter with whomever that man might be. Or, in fact, that man might himself now die before 2030. Either way, Theo's murder was hardly inevitable.

And yet—

And yet it might still happen. Surely some things would turn out as the visions had indicated. Those who weren't going to die unnatural deaths would live the same spans; those who had secure jobs now might well still hold them then; those marriages that were good and solid and true had no reason not to endure.

No.

Enough doubt, enough wasted time.

Theo resolved to get on with his life, to give up this foolish quest, to face tomorrow, whatever it might bring, head on. Of course, he would be careful — he certainly didn't want one of the points of convergence between the 2030 of the visions and the 2030 yet to come to be his own death. But he would continue on, trying to make the most out of whatever time he had.

If only Dimitrios had been willing to do the same.

His walk had taken him back to his office. There was someone he should call; someone who needed to hear it from a friend first, before it blew up in his face in media all over the world.

Michiko's words hung between them: "What's it going to be?"

It was time, Lloyd knew. Time for the appropriate frame to be illuminated; the moment of truth, the instant at which the decision spacetime had already recorded in it would be revealed. He looked into Michiko's eyes, opened his mouth, and—

Brrrring! Brrrring!

Lloyd cursed, glanced at the phone. The caller ID said "CERN LHC." No one would call from the office this late if it wasn't an emergency. He picked up the handset. "Hello?"

"Lloyd, it's Theo."

He wanted to tell him this wasn't a good time, tell him to call back later, but before he could, Theo pressed on.

"Lloyd, I just got a call. My brother Dimitrios is dead."

"Oh, my God," said Lloyd. "Oh, my God."

"What is it?" said Michiko, eyes wide with concern.

Lloyd covered the mouthpiece. "Theo's brother is dead."

Michiko brought a hand to her mouth.

"He killed himself," said Theo, through the phone. "An overdose of sleeping pills."

"I am so sorry, Theo," said Lloyd. "Can I — is there anything I can do?"

"No. No. Nothing. But I thought I should let you know right away."

Lloyd didn't understand what Theo was getting at. "Ah, thank you," he said, his voice tinged with confusion.

"Lloyd, Dimitrios had a vision."

"What? Oh." And then a long pause. "Oh."

"He told me about it himself."

"He must have made it up."

"Lloyd, this is my brother; he didn't make it up."

"But there's no way — "

"You know he's not the only one; there've been other reports, too. But this one — this one is corroborated. He was working in a restaurant in Greece; the guy who runs the restaurant in 2030 also does it here in 2009. He saw Dim in his vision, and Dim saw the guy. When they put that on TV… "

"I — ah, shit," said Lloyd. His heart was pounding. "Shit."

"I'm sorry," said Theo. "The press will have a field day." A pause. "Like I said, I thought you should know."

Lloyd tried to calm himself. How could he have been so wrong? "Thanks," he said, at last. And then, "Look, look, that's not important. How are you? Are you okay?"

"I'll be all right."

"'Cause if you don't want to be alone, Michiko and I can come over."

"No, that's okay. Franco della Robbia is still here at CERN; I'll spend some time with him."

"Okay," said Lloyd. "Okay." Another pause. "Look, I've got to — "

"I know," said Theo. "Bye."

"Bye."

Lloyd replaced the handset in its cradle.

He'd never met Dimitrios Procopides; indeed, Theo didn't speak of him very often. No surprise there; Lloyd rarely mentioned his sister Dolly at work, either. When it all came down to it, it was just one more death in a week of countless deaths, but…

"Poor Theo," said Michiko. She shook her head gently back and forth. "And his brother — poor guy."

He looked at her. She'd lost her own daughter, but for now, at this instant, she found room in her heart to grieve for a man she'd never met.

Lloyd's heart was still racing. The words he'd been about to say before the phone rang still echoed in his head. What was he thinking now? That he wanted to continue to play the field? That he wasn't ready to settle down? That he had to know that white woman, find her, meet her, and make a sensible, balanced choice between her and Michiko?

No.

No, that wasn't it. That couldn't be it.

What he was thinking was: I am an idiot.

And what he was thinking was: She's been incredibly patient.

And what he was thinking was: Maybe the warning that the marriage might not automatically last was the best damned thing that could have happened. Like every couple, they'd assumed it would be till death did they part. But now he knew, from day one, in a way that no one else ever had, not even those others like him who were children of broken homes, that it wasn't necessarily forever. That it was only permanent if he fought and struggled and worked to make it permanent every waking moment of his life. Knew that if he was going to get married, it would have to be his first priority. Not his career, not the damned elusive Nobel, not peer-review, not fellowships.

Her.

Michiko.

Michiko Komura.

Or — or Michiko Simcoe.

When he'd been a teenager, in the 1970s, it looked like women would forever dispense with the silliness of taking someone else's name. Still, to this day, most did adopt their husbands' last names; they'd already discussed this, and Michiko had said that it was indeed her intention to take on his name. Of course, Simcoe wasn't nearly as musical as Komura, but that was a small sacrifice.

But no.

No, she shouldn't take his name. How many divorced women carried not their birth names but the cognomen of someone decades in their past, a daily reminder of youthful mistakes, of love gone bad, of painful times? Indeed, Komura wasn't Michiko's maiden name — that was Okawa; Komura was Hiroshi's last name.

Still, she should retain that. She should remain a Komura so that Lloyd would be reminded, day in and day out, that she wasn't his; that he had to work at their marriage; that tomorrow was in his hands.

He looked at her — her flawless complexion, her beguiling eyes, her oh-so-dark hair.

All those things would change with time, of course. But he wanted to be around for that, to savor every moment, to enjoy the seasons of life with her.

Yes, with her.

Lloyd Simcoe did something he hadn't done the first time — oh, he'd thought about it then, but had rejected it as silly, old-fashioned, unnecessary.

But it was what he wanted to do, what he needed to do.

He lowered himself onto one knee.

And he took Michiko's hand in his.

And he looked up into her patient, lovely face.

And he said, "Will you marry me?"

And the moment held, Michiko clearly startled.

And then a smile grew slowly across her face.

And she said, almost in a whisper, "Yes."

Lloyd blinked rapidly, his eyes misting over.

The future was going to be glorious.

22

Ten Days Later: Wednesday, May 6, 2009

Gaston Beranger had been surprisingly easy to convince that CERN should try to replicate the LHC experiment. But, of course, he felt they had nothing to lose and everything to gain if the attempt failed: it would be very hard to prove CERN's liability for any damage done the first time if the second attempt produced no time displacement.

And now it was the moment of truth.

Lloyd made his way to the polished wooden podium. The great globe-and-laurel-leaf seal of the United Nations spread out behind him. The air was dry; Lloyd got a shock as he touched the podium's metal trim. He took a deep breath, calming himself. And then he leaned into the mike. "I'd like to thank — "

He was surprised that his voice was cracking. But, dammit all, he was speaking to some of the most powerful politicians in the world. He swallowed, then tried again. "I'd like to thank Secretary-General Stephen Lewis for allowing me to speak to you today." At least half the delegates were listening to translations provided through wireless earpieces. "Ladies and gentiemen, my name is Dr. Lloyd Simcoe. I'm a Canadian currently living in France and working at CERN, the European center for particle physics." He paused, swallowed. "As you've no doubt heard by now, it was, apparently, an experiment at CERN that caused the consciousness-displacement phenomenon. And, ladies and gentlemen, I know at first blush this will sound crazy, but I've come here to ask you, as the representatives of your respective governments, for permission to repeat the experiment."

There was an eruption of chatter — a cacophony of languages even more varied than what one hears at CERN's various cafeterias. Of course, all the delegates had known in advance roughly what Lloyd was going to say — one didn't get to speak in front of the UN without going through a lot of preliminary discussions. The General Assembly hall was cavernous; his eyesight really wasn't good enough to make out many individual faces. Nonetheless, he could see anger on the face of one of the Russian delegates and what looked like terror on the faces of the German and Japanese delegates. Lloyd looked over at the Secretary-General, a handsome white man of seventy-two. Lewis gave him an encouraging smile, and Simcoe went on.

"Perhaps there is no reason to do this," said Lloyd. "We seem to have clear evidence now that the future portrayed in the first set of visions is not going to come true — at least not exactly. Nevertheless, there's no doubt that a great many people found real personal insight through the glimpses."

He paused.

"I'm reminded of the story A Christmas Carol, by the British writer Charles Dickens. His character Ebenezer Scrooge saw a vision of Christmas Yet to Come, in which the results of his actions had led to misery for many other people and himself being hated and despised in death. And, of course, seeing such a vision would have been a terrible thing — had the vision been of the one, true immutable future. But Scrooge was told that, no, the future he saw was only the logical extrapolation of his life, should he continue on the way he had been. He could change his life, and the lives of those around him, for the better; that glimpse of the future turned out to be a wonderful thing."

He took a sip of water, then continued.

"But Scrooge's vision was of a very specific time — Christmas day. Not all of us had visions of significant events; many of us saw things that were quite banal, frustratingly ambiguous, or, indeed, for almost a third of us, we saw either dreams or just darkness — we were asleep during that two-minute span twenty-one years from now." He paused and shrugged his shoulders, as if he himself did not know what the right thing to do was. "We believe we can replicate the experience of having visions; we can offer all of humanity another glimpse of the future." He raised a hand. "I know some governments have been leery of these insights, disliking some of the things revealed, but now that we know the future is not fixed, I'm hoping that you will allow us to simply give this gift, and the benefit of the Ebenezer Effect, to the peoples of the world once more. With the cooperation of you men and women, and your governments, we believe we can do this safely. It's up to you."

Lloyd came through the tall glass doors of the General Assembly building. The New York air stung his eyes — damn, but they were going to have to do something about that one of these days; the visions said it would be even worse by 2030. The sky overhead was gray, crisscrossed by airplane contrails. A crowd of reporters — perhaps fifty in all — rushed over to meet him, camcorders and microphones thrust out.

"Doctor Simcoe!" shouted one, a middle-aged white man. "Doctor Simcoe! What happens if consciousness doesn't drop back to the present day? What happens if we're all stuck twenty-one years in the future?"

Lloyd was tired. He hadn't been as nervous speaking in front of people since his Ph.D. oral defense. He really just wanted to go back to his hotel room, pour himself a nice Scotch, and crawl into bed.

"We have no reason to think that such a thing could happen," he said. "It seemed to be a completely temporary phenomenon that began the moment we started the particle collisions and ceased the moment we ended them."

"What about the families of any people who might die this time? Will you take personal responsibility for them?"

"How about the ones who are already dead? Don't you feel you owe them something?"

"Isn't this all just some cheap quest for glory on your part?"

Lloyd took a deep breath. He was tired, and he had a pounding headache. "Gentlemen and ladies — and I use those terms loosely — you are apparently used to interviewing politicians who can't be seen to lose their temper, and so you can get away with asking them questions in haranguing tones. Well, I am not a politician; I am, among other things, a university professor, and I am used to civilized discourse. If you can't ask polite questions, I will terminate this exchange."

"But, Dr. Simcoe — isn't it true that all the death and destruction was your fault? Didn't you in fact design the experiment that went awry?"

Lloyd kept his tone even. "I'm not kidding, people. I have had quite my fill of media exposure already; one more bullshit question like that, and I'm walking away."

There was stunned silence. Reporters looked at each other, then back at Lloyd.

"But all those deaths… " began one.

"That's it," snapped Lloyd. "I'm out of here." He began walking away.

"Wait!" cried one reporter, and "Stop!" shouted another.

Lloyd turned around. "Only if you can manage intelligent, civilized questions."

After a moment's hesitation, a melanic-American woman raised her hand, almost meekly.

"Yes?" said Lloyd, lifting his eyebrows.

"Dr. Simcoe, what decision do you think the UN will make?"

Lloyd nodded at her, acknowledging that this was an acceptable interrogative. "I'm honestly not sure. My gut feeling is that we should indeed try to replicate the results — but I'm a scientist, and replication is my stock-in-trade. I do think the people of Earth want this, but whether their leaders will be willing to do what the people desire I have no way of knowing."

Theo had come to New York, as well, and he and Lloyd that night enjoyed the extravagant seafood buffet at the Ambassador Grill in the UN Plaza-Park Hyatt.

"Michiko's birthday is coming up," said Theo, cracking a lobster's claw.

Lloyd nodded. "I know."

"Are you going to throw a surprise party for her?"

Lloyd paused. After a moment, he said, "No."

Theo gave him a "if you really loved her, you'd do it" look. Lloyd didn't feel like explaining. He'd never really thought about it before, but it came to him full blown, as if he'd always known it. Surprise parties were a cheat. You let someone you were supposed to care about think you'd forgotten their birthday. You deliberately bring them down, make them feel neglected, uncared for, unremembered, unappreciated. And then you lie — lie! — to them for weeks on end leading up to the event. All this, so that in the moment when people yell "Surprise!" the person will feel loved.

In the marriage he and Michiko were going to have, Lloyd wouldn't have to manufacture situations in order to make Michiko feel that way. She'd know of his love every day — every minute; her confidence in that would never be shaken. It would be her constant companion, his love, until the day she died.

And, of course, he'd never lie to her — not even when it was supposedly for her own good.

"You sure?" said Theo. "I'd be glad to help you organize it."

"No," said Lloyd, shaking his head a little. Theo was so young, so naive. "No, thank you."

23

The United Nations debates continued. While he was in New York, Theo got another reply to his ads looking for information about his own death. He was about to simply issue a short, polite response — he was going to give up the quest, really he was — but, damn it all, the message was just too enticing. "I did not contact you initially," it said, "because I had been led to believe that the future is fixed, and that what was going to happen, including my role in it, was inevitable. But now I read otherwise, and so I must elicit your help."

The message was from Toronto — just a one-hour flight from the Big Apple. Theo decided to head on up and meet face to face with the man who'd sent the letter. It was Theo's first time visiting Canada, and he wasn't quite prepared for how hot it was in the summer. Oh, it wasn't hot by Mediterranean standards — rarely did the temperature rise above thirty-five degrees Celsius. But it did surprise him.

To get a cheaper airfare, Theo had to stay overnight, rather than fly in and out on the same day. And so he found himself with an evening to kill in Toronto. His travel agent had suggested he might enjoy a hotel out along the Danforth — part of Toronto's major east-west axis; Toronto's large Greek community was centered there. Theo agreed, and, to his delight, he found the street signs in that part of town were in both the English and Greek alphabets.

His appointment, though, wasn't on the Danforth. Rather, it was up in North York, an area that apparently had once been a city in its own right but had been subsumed into Toronto, which now had a population of three million. Toronto's subway took him there the next day. He was amused to discover that the public transit system was referred to as the TTC (for Toronto Transit Commission); the same abbreviation would doubtless be applied to the Tachyon-Tardyon Collider he would supposedly someday helm.

The subway cars were spacious and clean, although he'd heard they were severely overcrowded during rush hour. One thing that had impressed him greatly was riding the subway — poorly named at this particular point — over the Don Valley Parkway; here the train ran what must be a hundred meters above the ground in a special set of tracks hanging below the Danforth. The view was spectacular — but what was most impressive was that the bridge over the Don Valley had been built decades before Toronto got its first subway line, and yet it had been constructed so as to eventually accommodate two sets of tracks. One didn't often see evidence of cities planning that far into the future.

He changed trains at Yonge Station, and rode up to North York Centre. He was surprised to find that he didn't have to go outside to enter the condominium tower he'd been told to come to; it had direct access from the station. The same complex also contained a book superstore (part of a chain called Indigo), a movie-theater complex, and a large food store called Loblaws, which seemed to specialize in a line of products called President's Choice. That surprised Theo; he would have expected it to be Prime Minister's Choice in this country.

He presented himself to the concierge, who directed him through the marble lobby to the elevators, and he rode up to the thirty-fifth floor. From there, he easily found the apartment he was looking for and knocked on the door.

The door opened, revealing an elderly Asian man. "Hello," he said, in perfect English.

"Hello, Mr. Cheung," said Theo. "Thank you for agreeing to see me."

"Won't you come in?"

The man, who must have been in his mid-sixties, moved aside to let Theo pass. Theo slipped off his shoes, and stepped into the splendid apartment. Cheung led Theo into the living room. The view faced south. Far away, Theo could see downtown Toronto, with its skyscrapers, the slender needle of the CN Tower and, beyond, Lake Ontario stretching to the horizon.

"I appreciated you emailing me," said Theo. "As you can imagine, this has been very difficult for me."

"I am sure it has," said Cheung. "Would you care for tea? Coffee?"

"No, nothing, thank you."

"Well, then," said the man. "Do have a seat."

Theo sat down on a couch upholstered in orange leather. On the end table sat a painted porcelain vase. "It's beautiful," said Theo.

Cheung nodded agreement. "From the Ming Dynasty, of course; almost five hundred years old. Sculpture is the greatest of the arts. A written text is meaningless once the language has fallen out of use, but a physical object that endures for centuries or millennia — that is something to cherish. Anyone today can appreciate the beauty of ancient Chinese or Egyptian or Aztec artifacts; I collect all three. The individual artisans who made them live on through their work."

Theo made a noncommittal sound, and settled back in the couch. On the opposite wall was an oil painting of Kowloon harbor. Theo nodded at it. "Hong Kong," he said.

"Yes. You know it?"

"In 1996, when I was fourteen, my parents took us there on vacation. They wanted us — me and my brother — to see it before it changed hands back to Communist China."

"Yes, those last couple of years were exceptional for tourism," said Cheung. "But they were also great times for leaving the country; I myself left Hong Kong and came to Canada then. Over two hundred thousand Hong Kong natives moved to Canada before the British handed our country back to the Chinese."

"I imagine I would have gotten out, too," said Theo sympathetically.

"Those of us who could afford it did so. And, according to the visions people have had, things get no better in China during the next twenty-one years, so I am indeed glad I left; I could not stand the idea of losing my freedom." The old man paused. "But you, my young friend, stand to lose even more, do you not? For my part, I would have fully expected to be dead twenty-one years from now; I was delighted to learn that the fact that I had a vision implies that I will still be alive then. Indeed, since I felt reasonably spry, I begin to suspect that I might in fact have much more than twenty-one years left. Still, your time may be cut short — in my vision, as I told you by email, your name was mentioned. I had never heard of you before — forgive me for saying so. But the name was sufficiently musical — Theodosios Procopides — that it stuck in my mind."

"You said that in your vision someone had spoken to you about plans to kill me."

"Ominous, to be sure. But as I also said, I know little more than that."

"I don't doubt you, Mr. Cheung. But if I could locate the person you were speaking to in your vision, obviously that person knows more."

"But, as I said, I do not know who he was."

"If you could describe him?"

"Of course. He was white. White, like a northern European, not olive-skinned like yourself. He was no older than fifty in my vision, meaning he'd be about your age today. We were speaking English, and his accent was American."

"There are many American accents," said Theo.

"Yes, yes," said Cheung. "I mean he spoke like a New Englander — someone from Boston, perhaps."

Lloyd's vision apparently placed him in New England as well; of course, it couldn't be Lloyd that Cheung had been speaking to — at that moment, Lloyd was off boinking that crone…

"What else can you tell me about the man's speech? Did he sound well-educated?"

"Yes, now that you mention it, I suppose he did. He used the word 'apprehensive' — not an overly fancy term, but not one likely to be employed by an illiterate."

"What exactly did he say? Can you recount the conversation?"

"I will try. We were indoors somewhere. It was North America. That much was apparent by the shape of the electrical outlets; I always think they look like surprised babies here. Anyway, this man said to me, 'He killed Theo.' "

"The man you were speaking with killed me?"

"No. No, I was quoting him. He said, 'he' — some other he — 'killed Theo.' "

"You're sure he said 'he'?"

"Yes."

Well, that was something, anyway; in one fell swoop, four billion potential suspects had been eliminated.

Cheung continued. "He said, 'He killed Theo,' and I said, 'Theo who?' And the man replied, 'You know, Theodosios Procopides.' And I said, 'Oh, yeah.' That is precisely how I said it — 'Oh, yeah.' I fear my spontaneous English speech has not yet attained that degree of informality, but, apparently given another twenty-one years, it will. In any event, it was clear I will know you — or at least know of you — in the year 2030."

"Go on."

"Well, then my interlocutor said to me, 'He beat us to him.' "

"I — I beg your pardon?"

"He said, 'He beat us to him.' " Cheung lowered his head. "Yes, I know how that sounds — it sounds as though my associate and I had designs on your life as well." The old man spread his arms. "Dr. Procopides, I am a wealthy man — indeed, a very wealthy man. I will not say to you that people do not reach my level without being ruthless, for we both know that that is untrue. I have dealt very harshly with rivals over the years, and I have perhaps even skirted the edges of the law. But I am not just a businessman; I am also a Christian." He lifted a hand. "Please, do not be alarmed; I will not lecture you — I know that in some Western circles to boldly declare one's faith engenders discomfort, as if one had brought up a topic best never discussed in polite company. I mention it only to establish a salient fact: I may be a hard man, but I am also a God-fearing man — and I would never countenance murder. At my current advanced age, you can well imagine that I am set in my ways; I cannot believe that in the final years of my life, I will break a moral code I have lived by since childhood. I know what you are thinking — the obvious interpretation of the words 'he beat us to him' is that somebody else killed you before my associates could have done the deed. But I say again that I am no murderer. Besides, you are, I know, a physicist, and I do little business in that realm — my principal area of investment, besides real estate, which, of course, everyone should invest in, is biological research: pharmaceuticals, genetic engineering, and so on. I am not a scientist myself, you understand — just a capitalist. But I think you would agree that a physicist would not possibly be an obstacle to the sorts of things I pursue, and, as I say, I am no killer. Still, there are those words, which I report to you verbatim: 'He beat us to him.' "

Theo looked at the man, considering. "If that's the case," he said at last, measuring his words carefully, "why are you telling me this?"

Cheung nodded, as if he'd expected the question. "Naturally, one does not normally discuss plans to commit murder with the intended victim. But, as I said, Dr. Procopides, I am a Christian; I believe, therefore, that not only is your life at stake, but so too is my soul. I have no interest in becoming involved, even peripherally, in such a sinful business as homicide. And since the future can be changed, I wish it to be so. You are on the trail of whomever it was who will kill you; if you do manage to prevent your death at the hands of that person, whomever it might be, well, then, my associates will not be beaten to it. I take you into my confidence in hopes that you will not only avoid being shot — it was death by gunshot, was it not? — by this other person, but also by anyone involved with me. I do not want your — or anyone's — blood on my hands."

Theo exhaled noisily. It was staggering enough to think that one person would someday want him dead — but to hear now that multiple parties would wish him that way was shocking.

Perhaps the old man was crazy — although he didn't seem that way. Still, twenty-one years hence he would be… would be… well, exactly how old? "Forgive my impertinence," said Theo, "but may I ask when you were born?"

"Certainly: February 29, 1932. That makes me all of nineteen years old."

Theo felt his eyes go wide. He was dealing with a loon…

But Cheung smiled. "Because I was born February 29, you see — which comes but once every four years. Seriously, I am seventy-seven years old."

Which made him a good deal older than Theo had guessed, and — my God! — would mean he'd be ninety-eight in the year 2030.

A thought occurred to Theo: he had talked to enough people who were dreaming in 2030; it was usually not hard to distinguish a dream from reality. But if Cheung was ninety-eight, could he perhaps have Alzheimer's in the future? What would the thoughts of such a brain be like?

"I'll save you from asking," said Cheung. "I do not have the gene for Alzheimer's. I'm as surprised as you are to think that I will be alive twenty-one years hence, and as shocked as you are that I, already having lived a full life, will apparently outlive a young man such as yourself."

"Were you really born February 29?" asked Theo.

"Yes. It's hardly a unique attribute; there are about five million people alive who have that birthday."

Theo considered this, then: "So this man said to you, 'He beat us to him.' What did you say after that?"

"I said, and, again, I ask you to forgive my words, 'It's just as well.' "

Theo frowned.

"And then," continued Cheung, "I added, 'Who's next?' To which my associate replied, 'Korolov.' Korolov — which I guess would be K-O-R-O-L-O-V. A Russian name, no? Does it mean anything to you?"

Theo shook his head. "No." A pause. "So you were — are — going to eliminate this Korolov, too?"

"That's an obvious interpretation, yes. But I have no idea who he or she might be."

"He."

"I thought you said you didn't know this person?"

"I don't — but Korolov is a male last name. Female Russian last names end in —ova; male ones in —ov."

"Ah," said Cheung. "In any event, after the man I was speaking to said 'Korolov,' I replied, 'Well, I can't imagine anyone else is after him.' And my associate replied, 'No need to be apprehensive, Ubu — ' Ubu being a nickname I allow only close friends to use, although, as I said, I have, as of yet, not met this man. 'No need to be apprehensive, Ubu,' he said. 'The guy who got Procopides can't have any possible interest in Korolov.' And then I said, 'Very well. See to it, Darryl' — which, I presume was the name of the man I was speaking to. He opened his mouth to speak again, but then I was suddenly back here, in 2009."

"And so that's all you know? That you and a man named Darryl will be out to get several people, including myself and someone named Korolov, but that someone else, a man, who will have no designs against this Korolov, will kill me first?"

Cheung shrugged apologetically, but whether with regret over the frustrating holes in the information or over the fact that he would one day apparently want to see Theo dead, Theo couldn't say. "That's it."

"This Darryl — did he look like a boxer? You know, a prizefighter?"

"No. I would say he was too paunchy to be any sort of athlete."

Theo leaned back in the couch, dumbfounded. "Thank you for letting me know," he said at last.

"It was the least I could do," said Cheung. He paused, as if assessing the prudence of saying more, then: "Souls are about life immortal, Dr. Procopides, and religion is about just rewards. I rather suspect that great things await you, and that you will appropriately be rewarded — but only, of course, if you manage to stay alive long enough. Do yourself a favor — do us both a favor — and do not give up your quest."

24

Theo returned to New York, telling Lloyd all about his encounter with Cheung. Lloyd was as perplexed as Theo was about what the old man had said. Theo and Lloyd stayed in New York for another eight days, while the United Nations continued to heatedly debate their proposal.

China spoke in favor of the motion to authorize replication of the experiments. Even though it was now clear that the future was not fixed, the fact that during the first set of visions China's totalitarian government still clearly reigned with an iron hand had done an enormous amount to quell dissidents in that country. For China, that was the key issue. There were only two possible versions of the future: either Communist dictatorship continued, or it did not. The first visions had shown that it had indeed continued. If the second visions showed the same thing — that, even with foreknowledge of a malleable future, Communism would not be brought down — then the dissident spirit would be crushed: a perfect example of what, in an English pun in questionable taste, The New York Times had called "taking a Dim view of the future," in honor of Dimitrios Procopides, who, having had his spirit broken by what he saw of tomorrow, gave up on ever being able to change it.

And what if the second visions showed Communism having fallen? Then China would be no worse off than it was before the first Flashforward, with its future in question. It was a worthwhile gamble, in the view of Beijing government.

The European Union ambassadors also were clearly going to vote as a block in favor of replication, for two reasons. If replication failed, then the unending stream of lawsuits being filed against CERN and its member countries would possibly be stemmed. And if replication succeeded, well, this second glimpse of the future would be free, but subsequent glimpses could be sold to humanity for billions of euros apiece. True, other nations might try to build atom smashers capable of producing the same sorts of energies unleashed by the LHC, but the first set of visions had shown a world of plentiful Tachyon-Tardyon Colliders, and still, it seemed, visions couldn't be invoked easily. If CERN was responsible, it was apparently uniquely responsible — some specific combination of parameters, unlikely to be reproduced at another accelerator, had made the Flashforward possible.

Objection to replication was most vehement in the western hemisphere — those countries in which people had mostly been awake when consciousness departed for A.D. 2030 and, therefore, in which large numbers of people had been injured or killed. The objections were based mostly on outrage over the damage done the last time, and fears that similar carnage and destruction would accompany a second set of visions.

In the eastern hemisphere, comparatively little damage had been done; in many nations, more than ninety percent of the population had been asleep — or at least safely recumbent in bed — when the Flashforward had occurred; very few casualties had occurred, and only negligible property damage had been sustained. Clearly, they argued, an organized, announced-in-advance replication wouldn't put many people at risk. They denounced the arguments against replication as more emotional than rational. Indeed, surveys worldwide showed that those who had visions were overwhelmingly pleased that they had had them, even though they had now been shown to not reveal a fixed future. Indeed, now that the world was sure the future could be changed, those who had seen what they regarded as a negative personal future were on average even more pleased to have had the insight than those who saw what they described as a positive future.

Although he had no formal voice in the UN debate, Pope Benedict XVI weighed into the fray, announcing that the visions were fully consistent with Catholic doctrine. That attendance at masses had swollen enormously since the Flashforward was doubtless a factor in the pontiff's stance.

The prime minister of Canada likewise endorsed the visions, since they showed Quebec still a part of her country. The President of the United States was less enthused: although America clearly continued to be the world's leading power two decades hence, there was substantial concern among the President's advisors that the first glimpse had already done much to damage national security, with people — children, even — who were not yet bound by oaths of secrecy having access to all sorts of back-room information. And, of course, it rankled the Democrat incumbent that the Republican Franklin Hapgood, currently a political-science professor at Purdue, was apparently destined to hold the office in 2030.

So the American delegation continued to argue against replication: "We're still burying our dead," said one ambassador. But the Japanese delegation countered by claiming that even if the visions hadn't portrayed the actual future, they clearly represented a working future. The U.S. — a country in which a very high percentage of people had had meaningful, daytime visions — was trying to hoard to itself the technological benefits to be gleaned from those visions. The first Flashforward had been to 11:21 A.M. in Los Angeles, and 2:21 P.M. in New York, it had been to 3:21 A.M. in Tokyo; most Japanese had had visions of nothing more exciting than themselves dreaming in the future. America was capitalizing on new technologies and new inventions portrayed in its citizens' visions; Japan and the rest of the Eastern hemisphere was being unfairly left behind.

That set off the Chinese delegation again; they had apparently been waiting for someone to raise this very issue. The Flashforward had been to 2:21 A.M. Beijing time; most Chinese likewise had simply had visions of themselves asleep in the future. If another Flashforward was to be invoked, surely, they argued, it should begin at a time offset twelve hours from the last attempt. That way, if consciousness jumps ahead the same fixed twenty-one years, six months, two days, and two hours, then those in the Eastern hemisphere would reap the most benefits this time, balancing things out.

The Japanese government immediately supported the Chinese on this point. India, Pakistan, and both Koreas chimed in that this was only fair.

The east was perhaps right about America trying to gain the technological upper hand: if there was going to be replication, the U.S. argued strongly that it should be at the same time of day. They couched their argument in scientific terms: replication was, in fact, replication, so as much as humanly possible, every experimental parameter must be the same.

Lloyd Simcoe was called back to address the General Assembly on this point. "I would caution strongly against changing any factor needlessly," he said, "but, since we don't yet have a full working model for the phenomenon, I cannot say categorically that doing the experiment at night instead of during the day would make any difference. The LHC tunnel is, after all, heavily shielded against radiation leakage — and that shielding has the effect of keeping solar and other external radiation out as well. Still, I would argue against changing the time of day."

A delegate from Ethiopia pointed out that Simcoe was an American, and therefore likely to be trying to protect American interests. Lloyd countered that he was, in fact, a Canadian, but that didn't impress the African; Canada, too, had benefited disproportionately from the glimpses its citizens had had of the future.

Meanwhile, the Islamic world had mostly embraced the visions as ilham (divine guidance directly exerted upon the human mind and soul), rather than wahy (divine revelation of the actual future), since, by definition, only prophets were capable of the latter. That the visions turned out to indeed be of a malleable future apparently confirmed the Islamic view, and, although Islamic leaders did not invoke the Scrooge metaphor, the concept of receiving insight that would allow one to improve oneself along religious and spiritual lines was interpreted by most as being fully congruent with the Qur'an.

Some Muslims held the dissenting view that the visions were demonic, part of the unfolding destruction of the world, rather than divine. But either way, the Islamic spiritual leaders rejected wholeheartedly the notion that a physics experiment had been the cause: that was a misguided secular, Western interpretation. The visions clearly were of spiritual origin, and hardware was irrelevant to such experiences.

Lloyd had feared that the Islamic nations would oppose replication of the LHC experiment on that basis. But first the Wilayat al-Faqih in Iran, then the Shayk al-Azhar in Egypt, and then shaykh after shaykh and iman after iman across the Muslim world came to favor attempted replication, precisely so that when the attempt failed, the infidels would have it proven to them that the original occurrence had indeed been spiritual, not secular, in nature.

Of course, governments in Islamic nations were often at odds with the faithful in their lands. For those governments that kowtowed to the west, supporting replication, so long as it was offset, as the Asians were insisting, by twelve hours from the first occurrence, was a win-win scenario: if replication failed, the Western scientists would end up with egg on their faces, and the secular worldview would take a drubbing; if it succeeded, the economies of Muslim nations would get a boost, by having their citizens attain the same sort of insights into future technologies that Americans had already received.

Lloyd had expected those who had had no vision — those who were apparently dead in the future — to be against replication, too, but, in fact, most of them turned out to favor it. Younger people who were visionless — dubbed "The Ungrateful Dead" by Newsweek — often cited a desire to prove that some other explanation besides their own deaths explained their lack of visions the first time. The older visionless, mostly already resigned to the fact that they would be dead twenty-one years hence, were simply curious to learn more, through others' accounts, about the future they would never otherwise live to see.

Some nations — Portugal and Poland among them — argued for delaying replication for at least a year. Three compelling counterarguments were presented. First, as Lloyd pointed out, the more time that elapsed, the more likely some external factor would change sufficiently to prevent replication. Second, the need for absolute safety during a replication was clear in the public's mind right now; the more the severity of the accidents that occurred last time faded into memory, the more likely that people would be cavalier in their preparations. Third, people wanted new visions that confirmed or denied the events portrayed in their first visions, letting those with disturbing insights see if they were indeed now on track to avoiding those futures. If the new visions would also be of a time twenty-one years, six months, two days, and two hours ahead of the moment at which the replicated experiment began, each passing day diminished the chances that the second vision would be sufficiently related to the first to make a comparison between the two possible.

There was also a good economic argument in favor of rapid replication, if replication were to happen at all. Many businesses were currently operating at reduced capacity, because of damage to equipment or personnel that had occurred during the first Flashforward. A work stoppage in the near future to accommodate a second Flashforward would result in less lost productivity than would one months or years down the road when all businesses and factories were back to full operation.

The debates ranged over countless topics: economics, national security (what if one nation launched a nuclear attack against another just prior to the departure of consciousness?), philosophy, religion, science, and democratic principles. Should a decision that affects everyone on the planet really be made on a one-vote-per-nation basis? Should votes be weighted according to each nation's population, in which the Chinese voice should be heard the loudest? Or should the decision be differed to a global referendum?

Finally, after much acrimony and argument, the UN made its decision: the LHC experiment would indeed be repeated, offset, as many had insisted, by twelve hours from the first occurrence.

The European Union ambassadors all insisted on one proviso, before agreeing to allow CERN to attempt to replicate the experiment: there would be no government-level lawsuits against CERN, the countries that owned it, or any of its staff members. A UN resolution was passed, preventing any such lawsuits from ever being brought at the World Court. Of course, nothing could prevent civil suits, although the Swiss and French governments had both declared that their courts would not hear such cases, and it was difficult to establish that any other courts had jurisdiction.

The Third World represented the biggest logistical problem: undeveloped or underdeveloped regions where news arrived slowly, if at all. It was decided that the experiment wouldn't be replicated for another six weeks: that should be enough time to get the word to everyone who could possibly be reached.

And so, preparations began for humanity to take another peek at tomorrow.

Michiko dubbed it Operation Klaatu. In the movie The Day the Earth Stood Still, Klaatu, an alien, neutralized all electricity worldwide for thirty minutes precisely at noon Washington time, in order to demonstrate the need for world peace, but he did it with remarkable care, so that no one was hurt. Planes stayed aloft, operating theaters still had power. This time, they were going to try to be as careful as Klaatu, even though, as Lloyd pointed out, in the movie Klaatu was shot dead for his efforts. Of course, being an alien, he managed to come back to life…

Lloyd was frustrated. The first time, for whatever reason, the experiment had failed to produce the Higgs boson; he wanted to tweak the parameters slightly, in hopes of producing that elusive particle. But he knew he had to reproduce everything exactly as before. He'd probably never get a chance to refine his technique; never get a chance to generate the Higgs. And that, of course, meant he'd likely never get his Nobel Prize.

Unless—

Unless he could come up with an explanation for the physics of what had happened. But even though it was his experiment that had apparently caused the twenty-one-year jump ahead, and even though he, and everyone at CERN, had been racking their brains trying to determine the cause, he had no special insights into why it had occurred. It was just as likely that someone else — indeed, possibly even someone other than a particle physicist — would figure out exactly what had happened.

25

D-Day.

Almost everything was the same. Of course, it was now the ungodly hour of five A.M., instead of five P.M., but since there were no windows in the LHC control room, there was no real way to tell. There were also more people present. It was hard to get a decent crowd of journalists for most particle-physics experiments, but for this one, the CERN Media Service actually had to draw lots to determine which dozen reporters could have access. Cameras were broadcasting the scene worldwide.

All over the planet, people were lying down in bed, on couches, on the floor, on the grass, on bare ground. No one was drinking hot beverages. No commercial, military, or private planes were flying. All traffic in all cities had come to a halt — indeed, had been at a halt for hours now, to make sure there would be virtually no need for emergency-room operations or air ambulances during the replication. Thruways and highways were either vacant or giant parking lots.

Two space shuttles — one American, one Japanese — were currently in orbit, but there was no reason to think they were in danger; the astronauts would simply enter their sleeping bags for the duration. The nine people aboard the International Space Station would do the same thing.

No surgery was under way; no pizzas were being tossed in the air; no machinery was being operated. At any given moment, a third of humanity is normally asleep — but right now almost all of Earth's seven billion people were wide awake. Ironically, though, less activity was going on than at any other point in history.

As with the first time, the collision was being controlled by computer. Lloyd really had nothing much to do. The reporters had their cameras on tripods, but they were lying on the floor or on tabletops. Theo was already lying down, too, and so was Michiko — a bit too close to Theo, for Lloyd's taste. There was an area of floor left in front of the main console. Lloyd lay down on it. He could see one of the clocks from there, and he counted down with it: "Forty seconds."

Would he be transported back to New England? Surely the vision wouldn't pick up where it had left off months ago. Surely he wouldn't be back in bed with — God, he didn't even know her name. She hadn't said a word; she could have been American, of course, or from Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, Scandinavia, France — it was so hard to tell.

"Thirty seconds," Lloyd said.

Where had they met? How long had they been married? Did they have kids?

"Twenty seconds."

Was it a happy marriage? It had certainly seemed to be, during that one brief glimpse. But, then, he'd even seen his own parents be tender toward each other upon occasion.

"Ten seconds."

Maybe the woman wouldn't even be in his next vision.

"Nine seconds."

Indeed, it was likely he'd be sleeping — and not necessarily even dreaming — twenty-one years from now.

"Eight seconds."

The chances were almost zero that he'd see himself again — that he'd be anywhere near a mirror, or be watching himself on closed-circuit TV.

"Seve n."

But surely he'd see something revelatory, something significant.

"Six."

Something that would answer at least a few of his burning questions.

"Five."

Something that would bring closure to what he'd seen before.

"Four."

He did love Michiko, of course.

"Three."

And he and she would be married, regardless of what the first vision, or this one, might portray.

"Two."

But, still, it would be nice to know that other woman's name…

"One."

He closed his eyes, as if that would better summon a vision.

"Zero."

Nothing. Darkness. Dammit, he was asleep in the future! It wasn't fair; it was his experiment after all. If anyone deserved a second vision, it was him, and—

He opened his eyes; he was still flat on his back. Over his head, high above, was the ceiling of the LHC control center.

Oh, Christ — oh, Christ.

Twenty-one years from now he would be sixty-six years old.

And twenty-one years from this vision, a few months later—

He'd be dead.

Just like Theo.

God damn it. God damn it.

He rolled his head to the side, and happened to see the clock.

The blue digits were silently metamorphosing: 22:00:11; 22:00:12, 22:00:13…

He hadn't blacked out—

Nothing had happened.

The attempt at replicating the Flashforward had failed, and—

Green lights.

Green lights on the ALICE console!

Lloyd rose to his feet. Theo was getting up as well.

"What happened?" asked one of the reporters.

"A big fat nothing," said another.

"Please," said Michiko. "Please, everyone stay on the floor — we don't know that it's safe yet."

Theo thumped the flat of his hand against Lloyd's back. Lloyd was grinning from ear to ear. He turned and embraced Theo.

"Guys," said Michiko, propping herself up on her elbow. "Nothing happened."

Lloyd and Theo disengaged, and Lloyd surged across the room. He reached out and took Michiko's hands and pulled her to her feet, then hugged her.

"Honey," said Michiko, "what is it?"

Lloyd gestured at the console. Michiko's eyes went wide. "Sinjirarenai!" she exclaimed. "You got it!"

Lloyd grinned even more. "We got it!"

"Got what?" asked one of the reporters. "Nothing happened, damn it!"

"Oh, yes it did," said Lloyd.

Theo was grinning, too. "Yes, indeed!"

"What?" demanded the same reporter.

"The Higgs!" said Lloyd.

"The what?"

"The Higgs boson!" said Lloyd, his arm around Michiko's waist. "We got the Higgs!"

Another reporter stifled a yawn. "Big fucking deal," he said.

Lloyd was being interviewed by one of the journalists. "What happened?" asked the man, a gruff, middle-aged correspondent for the London Times. "Or, more precisely, why didn't anything happen?"

"How can you say nothing happened? We got the Higgs boson!"

"Nobody cares about that. We want — "

"You're wrong," said Lloyd emphatically. "This is major; this is as big as it gets. Under any other circumstances, this would have been a front-page story in every newspaper in the world."

"But the visions — "

"I have no explanation for why they weren't reproduced. But today's event was hardly a failure. Scientists have been hoping to find the Higgs boson ever since Glashow, Salam, and Weinberg predicted its existence half a century ago — "

"But people were expecting another glimpse of the future, and — "

"I understand that," said Lloyd. "But finding the Higgs — not some damn-fool quest for precognition — was why the Large Hadron Collider was built in the first place. We knew we'd need to get up over ten trillion electron volts to produce the Higgs. That's why the nineteen countries that own CERN came together to build the LHC. That's why the United States, Canada, Japan, Israel, and other countries donated billions to the project as well. This was good science, important science — "

"Even so," said the reporter, "the Wall Street Journal estimated the aggregate total cost for your labor stoppage amounted to over fourteen billion dollars. That makes Project Klaatu the most expensive undertaking in human history."

"But we got the Higgs! Don't you see? Not only does this confirm the electroweak theory, it proves the existence of the Higgs field. We now know what causes objects — you, me, this table, this planet — to have mass. The Higgs boson carries a fundamental field that endows elementary particles with mass — and we've confirmed its existence!"

"No one cares about a boson," said the reporter. "People can't even say the word without snickering."

"Call it the Higgs particle, then; lots of physicists do. But whatever you call it, it's the most important physics discovery so far in the twenty-first century. Sure, we're not even a decade into the century yet, but I'll bet that at the end of this century, people will look back and say this was still the most important physics discovery of the century."

"That doesn't explain why we didn't get anything — "

"We did," said Lloyd, exasperated.

"I mean why we didn't get any visions."

Lloyd puffed his cheeks and blew out air. "Look, we tried the best we could. Maybe the original phenomenon was a onetime fluke. Maybe it had a high degree of dependence on initial conditions that have subtly changed. Maybe — "

"You took a dive," said the reporter.

Lloyd was taken aback. "Pardon?"

"You took a dive. You deliberately muffed the experiment."

"We did not take — "

"You wanted to torpedo all the lawsuits; even after that song-and-dance at the UN, you still wanted to be sure that no one could ever successfully sue you, and, well, if you showed that CERN had nothing to do with the Flashforward the first time — "

"We didn't fake this. We didn't fake the Higgs. We made a breakthrough, for God's sake."

"You cheated us," said the man from the Times. "You cheated the entire planet."

"Don't be ridiculous," said Lloyd.

"Oh, come on. If you didn't take a dive, then why weren't you able to give us all another glimpse of the future?"

"I — I don't know. We tried. Really, we tried."

"There'll be an inquest, you know."

Lloyd rolled his eyes, but the reporter was probably right. "Look," said Lloyd. "We did everything we could. The computer logs will prove that; they'll show that every single experimental parameter was exactly the same. Of course, there is the problem of chaos, and dependent sensitivity, but we really did the best we could, and the result was hardly a failure — not by a long shot." The reporter looked like he was about to object again — probably claim that the logs could have been tampered with. But Lloyd held up a hand. "Still, maybe you are right; maybe this does prove that CERN in actuality had nothing to do with what happened before. In which case…

"In which case, you're off the hook," the reporter said bitterly.

Lloyd frowned, considering. Of course, he probably already was off the hook legally for what had happened the first time. But morally? Without the absolution provided by a block universe, he had indeed been haunted — ever since Dim's suicide — by all the death and destruction he had caused.

Lloyd felt his eyebrows rising. "I guess you're right," he said. "I guess I am off the hook."

26

Like every physicist, Theo waited with interest each year to see who would be honored with the Nobel Prize — who would join the ranks of Bohr, Einstein, Feynman, Gell-Mann, and Pauli. CERN researchers had earned more than twenty Nobels over the years. Of course, when he saw the subject header in his email box, he didn't have to open the letter to know that his name wasn't on this year's list of honorees. Still, he did like to see which of his friends and colleagues were getting the nod. He clicked the OPEN button.

The laureates were Perlmutter and Schmidt for their work, mostly done a decade ago, that showed that the universe was going to expand forever, rather than eventually collapsing down in a big crunch. It was typical that the award was for work completed years previously; there had to be time for results to be replicated and for the ramifications of the research to be considered.

Well, thought Theo, they were both good choices. There'd doubtless be some bitterness here at CERN; rumor had it that McRainey was already planning his celebratory party, although that was doubtless just scurrilous gossip. Still, Theo wondered, as he did every year at this time, whether he'd someday see his own name on the list.

Theo and Lloyd spent the next few days working on their paper about the Higgs. Although the press had already (somewhat halfheartedly) announced the particle's production to the world, they still had to write up their results for publication in a peer-reviewed journal. Lloyd, as was his habit, doodled endlessly on his datapad; Theo paced back and forth.

"Why the difference?" asked Lloyd, for the dozenth time. "Why didn't we get the Higgs the first time, but did get it this time?"

"I don't know," said Theo. "We didn't change anything. Of course, we couldn't match everything exactly, either. It's been weeks since the first attempt, so the Earth has moved millions of kilometers in its orbit around the sun, and of course the sun has moved through space, as it always does, and… "

"The sun!" crowed Lloyd. Theo looked at him blankly. "Don't you see? Last time we did this, the sun was up, but this time it was down. Maybe the first time the solar wind was interfering with our equipment?"

"The LHC tunnel is a hundred meters below ground, and it's got the best radiation shielding money can buy. There's no way any appreciable quantity of ionized particles could have gotten through to it."

"Hmmm," said Lloyd. "But what about particles that we can't shield against? What about neutrinos?"

Theo frowned. "For them, it shouldn't make any difference if we're facing the sun or not." Only one out of every two hundred million neutrinos passing through the Earth actually hits anything; the rest just come on through the other side.

Lloyd pursed his lips, thinking. "Still, maybe the neutrino count was particularly high the day we did it the first time." Something tickled his mind; something Gaston Beranger had said, when he was enumerating all the other things that had been happening at 17h00 on April 21. "Beranger told me the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory picked up a burst just before we ran our experiment."

"I know someone at SNO," said Theo. "Wendy Small. We were in grad school togethe r." Opened in 1998, the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory, located beneath two kilometers of Precambrian rock, was the world's most sensitive neutrino detector.

Lloyd gestured at the phone. Theo walked over to it. "Do you know the area code?"

"For Sudbury? It's probably 705; that's the one for most of northern Ontario."

Theo dialed a number, spoke to an operator, hung up, then dialed again. "Hello," he said, in English. "Wendy Small, please." A pause. "Wendy, it's Theo Procopides. What? Oh, funny. Funny woman." Theo covered the mouthpiece and said to Lloyd, "She said, 'I thought you were dead.' " Lloyd made a show of suppressing a grin. "Wendy, I'm calling from CERN, and I've got someone else with me: Lloyd Simcoe. You mind if I put you on the speaker phone?"

"The Lloyd Simcoe?" said Wendy's voice, from the speaker. "Pleased to meet you."

"Hello," said Lloyd, weakly.

"Look," said Theo, "as you doubtless know, we tried to reproduce the time-displacement phenomenon yesterday, and it didn't work."

"So I noticed," said Wendy. "You know, in my original vision, I was watching TV — except it was three-dimensional. It was the climax of some detective show. I've been dying to find out who did it."

Me, too, thought Theo, but what he said was, "Sorry we weren't able to help."

"I understand," said Lloyd, "that the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory picked up an influx of neutrinos just before we did our original experiment on April 21. Were those neutrinos due to sunspots?"

"No, the sun was quiet that day; what we detected was an extrasolar burst."

"Extrasolar? You mean from outside the solar system?"

"That's right."

"What was the source?"

"You remember Supernova 1987A?" asked Wendy.

Theo shook his head.

Lloyd, grinning, said, "That was the sound of Theo shaking his head."

"I could hear the rattling," said Wendy. "Well, look: in 1987, the biggest supernova in three hundred and eighty-three years was detected. A type-B3 blue supergiant star called Sanduleak—69 202 blew up in the Large Magellanic Cloud."

"The Large Magellanic Cloud!" said Lloyd. "That's a hell of a long way away."

"A hundred and sixty-six thousand light-years, to be precise," said Wendy's voice. "Meaning, of course, that Sanduleak really blew up back in the Pleistocene, but we didn't see the explosion until twenty-two years ago. But neutrinos travel unimpeded almost forever. And, during the explosion in 1987, we detected a burst of neutrinos that lasted about ten seconds."

"Okay," said Lloyd.

"And," continued Wendy, "Sanduleak was a very strange star; you normally expect a red supergiant, not a blue one, to go supernova. Regardless, though, after exploding as a supernova, what normally happens is that the remnants of the star collapse either into a neutron star or a black hole. Well, if Sanduleak had collapsed into a black hole, we never should have detected the neutrinos; they shouldn't have been able to escape. But at twenty solar masses, Sanduleak was, we thought, too small to form a black hole, at least according to the then-accepted theory."

"Uh-huh," said Lloyd.

"Well," said Wendy, "back in 1993, Hans Bethe and Gerry Brown came up with a theory involving kaon condensates that would allow a smaller-massed star to collapse into a black hole; kaons don't obey Pauli's exclusion principle." The exclusion principle said that two particles of a given type could not simultaneously occupy the same energy state.

"For a star to collapse into a neutron star," continued Wendy, "all the electrons must combine with protons to form neutrons, but since electrons do adhere to the exclusion principle, as you try to push them together they instead just keep occupying higher and higher energy levels, providing resistance to the continued collapse — that's part of the reason why you need to start with a sufficiently massive star to make a black hole. But if the electrons were converted to kaons, they could all occupy the lowest energy level, putting up much less resistance, and making the collapse of a smaller star into a black hole theoretically possible. Well, Gerry and Hans said, look, suppose that's what happened at Sanduleak — suppose its electrons became kaons. Then it could have collapsed into a black hole. And how long would it take for the conversion of electrons into kaons? They mapped it out at ten seconds — meaning that neutrinos could escape for the first ten seconds of the supernova event but, after that, they'd be swallowed up by the newly formed black hole. And, of course, ten seconds is how long the neutrino burst lasted back in 1987."

"Fascinating," said Lloyd. "But what's this got to do with the burst that happened when we were running our experiment the first time?"

"Well, the object that forms out of a kaon condensate isn't really a black hole," said Wendy's voice. "Rather, it's an inherently unstable parasingularity. We call them 'brown holes' now, after Gerry Brown. It in fact should rebound at some point, with the kaons spontaneously reconverting to electrons. When that happens, the Pauli exclusion principle should kick in, causing a massive pressure against degeneracy, forcing the whole thing to almost instantaneously expand again. At that point, neutrinos should again be able to escape — at least until the process reverses, and the electrons turn back into kaons again. Sanduleak was due to rebound at some point, and, as it happens, fifty-three seconds before your original time-displacement event, our neutrino detector registered a burst coming from Sanduleak; of course, the detector — or its recording equipment — stopped working as soon as the time-displacement began, so I don't know how long the second burst lasted, but in theory it should have lasted longer than the first — maybe as long as two or three minutes." Her voice grew wistful. "In fact, I originally thought that the Sanduleak rebound burst was what caused the time displacement in the first place. I was all ready to book a ticket to Stockholm when you guys stepped forward and said it was your collider that did it."

"Well, maybe it was the burst," said Lloyd. "Maybe that's why we weren't able to replicate the effect."

"No, no," said Wendy, "it wasn't the rebound burst, at least not on its own; remember, the burst began fifty-three seconds before the time displacement, and the displacement coincided precisely with the start of the your collisions. Still, maybe the coincidence of the burst continuing to impact the Earth at the same time you were doing your experiment caused whatever bizarre conditions created the time displacement. And without such a burst when you tried to replicate your experiment, nothing happened."

"So," said Lloyd, "we basically created conditions here on Earth that hadn't existed since a fraction of a second after the Big Bang, and simultaneously we were hit by a whack of neutrinos spewing out of a rebounding brown hole."

"That's about the size of it," said Wendy's voice. "As you can imagine, the chances of that ever happening are incredibly remote — which is probably just as well."

"Will Sanduleak rebound again?" asked Lloyd. "Can we expect another neutrino burst?"

"Probably," said Wendy. "In theory, it will rebound several more times, sort of oscillating between being a brown hole and a neutron star until stability is reached and it settles down as a permanent, but non-rotating, neutron star."

"When will the next rebound occur?"

"I have no idea."

"But if we wait for the next burst," said Lloyd, "and then do our experiment again at precisely that moment, maybe we could replicate the time-displacement effect."

"It'll never happen," said Wendy's voice.

"Why not?" asked Theo.

"Think about it, boys. You needed weeks to prepare for this attempt at replicating the experiment; everyone had to be safe before it began, after all. But neutrinos are almost massless. They travel through space at virtually the speed of light. There's no way to know in advance that they're going to arrive, and since the first rebound burst lasted no more than three minutes — it was over by the time my detector started recording again — you'd never have any advance warning that a burst was going to occur, and once the burst started, you'd have only three minutes or less to crank up your accelerator."

"Damn," said Theo. "God damn."

"Sorry I don't have better news," said Wendy. "Look, I've got a meeting in five minutes — I should get going."

"Okay," said Theo. "Bye."

"Bye."

Theo clicked off the speaker phone and looked at Lloyd. "Irreproducible," he said. "The world's not going to like that." He moved over to a chair and sat down.

"Damn," said Lloyd.

"You're telling me," said Theo. "You know, now that we know the future isn't fixed, I'm not that worried, I guess, about the murder, but, still, I would have liked to have seen something, you know. Anything. I feel — Christ, I feel left out, you know? Like everyone else on the planet saw the mothership, and I was off taking a whiz."

27

The LHC was now doing daily 1150-TeV lead-nuclei collisions. Some were long-planned experiments, now back on track; others were parts of the ongoing attempts to find a proper theoretical basis for the temporal displacement. Theo took a break from going over computer logs from ALICE and CMS to check his email. "Additional Nobel winners announced," said the subject line of the first message.

Of course, Nobels aren't just given in physics. Five other prizes are awarded each year, with the announcements staggered over a period of several days: chemistry, physiology or medicine, economics, literature, and the promotion of world peace. The only one Theo really cared about was the physics prize — although he had a mild curiosity about the chemistry award, too. He clicked on the message header to see what it said.

It wasn't the chemistry Nobel — rather, it was the literature one. He was about to click the message into oblivion when the laureate's name caught his eye.

Anatoly Korolov. A Russian novelist.

Of course, after that man Cheung in Toronto had recounted his vision to Theo, mentioning someone called Korolov, Theo had researched the name. It had turned out to be frustratingly common, and remarkably undistinguished. No one by that name seemed to be particularly famous or significant.

But now someone named Korolov had won a Nobel. Theo immediately logged onto Britannica Online; CERN had an unlimited-use account with them. The entry on Anatoly Korolov was brief:

Korolov, Anatoly Sergeyevich. Russian novelist and polemicist, born 11 July 1965, in Moscow, then part of the USSR—

Theo frowned. Bloody guy was a year younger than Lloyd, for God's sakes. Of course no one had to replicate the experimental results outlined in a novel. Theo continued reading:

Korolov's first novel Pered voskhodom solntsa ("Before Sunrise"), published in 1992, told of the early days after the collapse of the Soviet Union; his protagonist, young Sergei Dolonov, a disillusioned Communist Party supporter, goes through a series of serio-comic coming-of-age rituals, fighting to make sense of the changes in his country, ultimately becoming a successful businessperson in Moscow. Korolov's other novels include Na kulichkakh ("At the World's End"), 1995; Obyknovennaya istoriya ("A Common Story"), 1999; and Moskvityanin ("The Muscovite"), 2006. Of these, only Na kulichkakh has been published in English.

He'd doubtless get a bigger write-up in the next edition, thought Theo. He wondered if Dim had read this fellow during his studies of European literature.

Could this be the Korolov Cheung's vision had referred to? If so, what possible connection did he have to Theo? Or to Cheung, for that matter, whose interests seemed commercial rather than literary?

Michiko and Lloyd were walking down the streets of St. Genis, holding hands, enjoying the warm evening breeze. After a few hundred meters passed with nothing but silence between them, Michiko stopped walking. "I think I know what went wrong."

Lloyd looked at her, his face a question.

"Think about what happened," she said. "You designed an experiment that should have produced the Higgs boson. The first time you ran it, though, it didn't. And why not?"

"The neutrino influx from Sanduleak," said Lloyd.

"Oh? That might indeed have been part of what caused the time displacement — but how could it have possibly upset the boson production?"

Lloyd shrugged. "Well, it — it… hmm, that is a good question."

Michiko shook her head. They began walking again. "It couldn't have an effect. I don't doubt that there was an influx of neutrinos at the time the experiment was originally conducted, but it shouldn't have disrupted the production of the Higgs bosons. The bosons should have been produced."

"But they weren't."

"Exactly," said Michiko. "But there was no one to observe them. For almost three whole minutes there wasn't a single conscious mind on Earth — no one, anywhere, to actually observe the creation of the Higgs boson. Not only that, there was no one available to observe anything. That's why all the videotapes seem to be blank. They look blank — like they've got nothing but electronic snow on them. But suppose that's not snow — suppose instead that the cameras accurately recorded what they saw: an unresolved world. The whole enchilada, the entire planet Earth, unresolved. Without qualified observers — with everyone's consciousness elsewhere — there was no way to resolve the quantum mechanics of what was going on. No way to choose between all the possible realities. Those tapes show uncollapsed wave fronts, a kind of staticky limbo — the superposition of all possible states."

"I doubt that wave front superposition would look like snow."

"Well, maybe it's not an actual picture; but, regardless of whether it is or isn't, it's clear that all information about that three-minute span was censored, somehow; the physics of what was happening prevented any recording of data during that period. Without any conscious beings anywhere, reality breaks down."

Lloyd frowned. Could he have been that wrong? Cramer's transactional interpretation accounted for everything in quantum mechanics without recourse to qualified observers… but maybe such observers did have a role to play. "Perhaps," he said. "But — no, no, that can't be right. If everything was unresolved, then how did the accidents occur? A plane crashing — that is a resolution, one possibility made concrete."

"Of course," said Michiko. "It's not that three minutes passed during which planes and trains and cars and assembly lines operated without human intervention. Rather, three minutes passed during which nothing was resolved — all the possibilities existed, stacked into shimmering whiteness. But at the end of those three minutes, consciousness returned, and the world collapsed again into a single state. And, unfortunately but inevitably, it took the single state that made the most sense, given that there had been three minutes of no consciousness: it resolved itself into the world in which planes and cars had crashed. But the crashes didn't occur during those three minutes; they never occurred at all. We simply went in one jump from the way things were before to the way they were after."

"That's… that's crazy," said Lloyd. "It's wishful thinking."

They were passing a pub. Loud music, with French lyrics, spilled through the heavy closed door. "No, it's not. It's quantum physics. And the result is the same: those people are just as dead, or just as maimed, as if the accidents had actually taken place. I'm not suggesting there's any way around that — as much as I wish there were.

Lloyd squeezed Michiko's hand, and they continued walking, up the road, into the future.