Flashforward

by Robert J. Sawyer

  “Who?” said Lloyd.

  “Carly Tompkins. At least, I think it was her. She looked a lot older than the last time I’d seen her.”

  “Who is Carly Tompkins?”

  The answer came not from Jake but from Theo Procopides, sitting farther around the circle. “You should know her, Lloyd—she’s a fellow Canuck. Carly’s a meson researcher; last I heard, she was with TRIUMF.”

  Jake nodded. “That’s right. I’ve only met her a couple of times, but I’m pretty sure it was her.”

  Antonia, whose turn would have been next, raised her eyebrows. “If Jake’s vision was of Carly, I wonder whether Carly’s vision was of Jake?”

  Everyone looked at the Italian woman, intrigued. Lloyd shrugged a little. “There’s one way to find out. We could phone her.” He looked at Jake. “Do you have her number?”

  Jake shook his head. “Like I said, I hardly know her. We went to some of the same seminars at the last APS meeting, and I sat in on her paper on chromodynamics.”

  “If she’s in APS,” said Antonia, “she’ll be in the directory.” She waddled across the room and rummaged on a shelf until she found a slim volume with a plain cardboard cover. She riffled through it. “Here she is,” said Antonia. “Home and work numbers.”

  “I—ah, I don’t want to call her,” said Jake.

  Lloyd was surprised by his reluctance, but didn’t pursue the matter. “That’s all right. You shouldn’t speak to her anyway. I want to see if she spontaneously comes up with your name.”

  “You may not be able to get through,” said Sven. “The phones have been jammed with people trying to check on family and friends—not to mention all the lines knocked down by motorists.”

  “It’s worth a try,” said Theo. He got up, walked across the room, and took the directory from Antonia. But then he looked at the phone, and looked back at the numbers in the directory. “How do you dial Canada from here?”

  “It’s the same as dialing the U.S.,” said Lloyd. “The country code’s the same: zero-one.”

  Theo’s finger danced on the keypad, entering a long string of digits. Then, for the benefit of his audience, he held up fingers to indicate how many rings had occurred. One. Two. Three. Four—

  “Oh, hello. Carly Tompkins, please. Hi, Dr. Tompkins. I’m calling from Geneva, from CERN. Look, there’s a bunch of us here. Is it okay if I put you on the speakerphone?”

  A sleepy voice: “—if you like. What’s going on?”

  “We want to know what your hallucination was when you blacked out.”

  “What? Is this some kind of prank?”

  Theo looked at Lloyd. “She doesn’t know.”

  Lloyd cleared his voice, then spoke up. “Dr. Tompkins, this is Lloyd Simcoe. I’m also a Canadian, although I was with the D-Zero Group at Fermilab until 2007, and for the last two years I’ve been here at CERN.” He paused, not sure what to say next. Then: “What time is it there?”

  “Just before noon.” The sound of a stifled yawn. “Today is my day off; I was sleeping in. What’s this all about?”

  “So you haven’t been up yet today?”

  “No.”

  “Do you have a TV in the room you’re in?” asked Lloyd.

  “Yes.”

  “Turn it on. Look at the news.”

  She sounded irritated. “I can hardly get the Swiss news here in British Columbia.”

  “It doesn’t have to be the Swiss news. Put on any news channel.”

  The whole room heard Tompkins sighing into the mouthpiece of her phone. “All right. Just a second.”

  They could hear what was presumably CBC Newsworld muffled in the background. After what seemed an eternity, Tompkins returned to the handset.

  “Oh, my God,” she said into the phone. “Oh, my God.”

  “But you slept through it all?” said Theo.

  “I did, I’m afraid,” said the voice from half a world away. She paused for a second. “Why did you call me?”

  “Has the news program you’ve been watching mentioned the visions yet?”

  “Joel Gotlib is going on about that now,” she said, presumably referring to a Canadian newscaster. “It sounds crazy. Anyway, nothing like that happened to me.”

  “All right,” said Lloyd. “We’re sorry to have disturbed your sleep, Dr. Tompkins. We’ll be—”

  “Wait,” said Theo.

  Lloyd looked at the younger man.

  “Dr. Tompkins, my name is Theo Procopides. We’ve met, I think, once or twice at conferences.”

  “If you say so,” said Tompkins’s voice.

  “Dr. Tompkins,” continued Theo. “I’m like you—I didn’t see anything either. No vision, no dream, no nothing.”

  “Dream?” said Tompkins’s voice. “Well, now that you mention it, I guess I did have a dream. Funny thing was it was in color—I never dream in color. But I remember the guy in it had red hair.”

  Theo looked disappointed—he’d clearly been pleased to find he wasn’t alone. But everyone else’s eyebrows flew up, and they turned to look at Jake.

  “Not only that,” said Carly, “he had red underwear, too.”

  Young Jake now turned the aforementioned color. “Red underwear?” repeated Lloyd.

  “That’s right.”

  “Did you know this man?” asked Lloyd.

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “He didn’t look like anyone you’d ever met before?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Lloyd leaned closer to the speakerphone. “What about—what about the father of someone you’d met before? Did he look like somebody’s father?”

  “What are you getting at?” asked Tompkins.

  Lloyd sighed then looked around the room, seeing if anyone was going to object to him going on. No one did. “Does the name Jacob Horowitz mean anything to you?”

  “I don’t—oh, wait. Oh, right. Sure, sure. That’s who he reminded me of. Yeah, it was Jacob Horowitz, but, geez, he should take better care of himself. He looked like he’d aged decades since I last saw him.”

  Antonia made a small gasp. Lloyd felt his heart pounding.

  “Look,” said Carly. “I want to make sure my family members are okay. My parents are in Winnipeg—I’ve got to get going.”

  “Can we call you back in a bit?” asked Lloyd. “You see, we’ve got Jacob Horowitz here, and his vision seems to match yours—sort of, anyway. He said he was in a lab, but…”

  “Yes, that’s right. It was a lab.”

  Incredulity crept into Lloyd’s voice. “And he was in his underwear?”

  “Well, not by the end of the vision…Look, I’ve got to go.”

  “Thanks,” said Lloyd. “Bye.”

  “Bye.”

  Swiss dial tone issued from the speaker. Theo reached over and shut it off.

  Jacob Horowitz still looked decidedly embarrassed. Lloyd thought about telling him that probably half of all the physicists he knew had done it at one time or another in a lab, but the young man looked like he’d have a nervous breakdown if anyone said anything to him just now. Lloyd started to shift his gaze around the circle again. “All right,” he said. “All right. I’m going to say it, because I know you’re all thinking it. Whatever happened here caused some sort of time effect. The visions weren’t hallucinations; they were actual insights into the future. The fact that Jacob Horowitz and Carly Tompkins both apparently saw the same thing strongly suggests that.”

  “But Raoul’s vision was psychedelic, didn’t someone say that?” said Theo.

  “Yeah,” said Raoul. “Like a dream, or something.”

  “Like a dream,” repeated Michiko. Her eyes were still red, but she was reacting to the outside world.

  That was all she said, though, but, after a moment Antonia caught her meaning and elaborated. “Michiko’s right,” said the Italian physicist. “No mystery there—at whatever point in the future the visions are of, Raoul will be asleep, and having an actual dream.”

  “
But this is crazy,” said Theo. “Look, I didn’t have any vision.”

  “What did you experience?” asked Sven, who hadn’t heard Theo describe it before.

  “It was—I don’t know, like a discontinuity, I guess. Suddenly, it was two minutes later; I had no sensation of passing time, and nothing at all like a vision.” Theo folded his arms defiantly across his broad chest. “How do you explain that?”

  There was quiet around the room. The pained expressions on a lot of faces made clear to Lloyd that they’d gotten it, too, but no one wanted to voice it aloud. Finally, Lloyd shrugged a little. “Simple,” he said, looking at his brilliant, arrogant, twenty-seven-year old associate, “in twenty years—or whatever time the visions are of…” He paused, then spread his hands. “I’m sorry, Theo, but in twenty years, you’re dead.”

  5

  THE VISION LLOYD MOST WANTED TO HEAR about was Michiko’s. But she was still—as she doubtless would be for a very long time—completely out of it. When it came to her turn in the circle, Lloyd skipped over her. He wished he could just take her home, but it was doubtless best for her to not be alone right now, and there was no way that Lloyd, or anyone else, could get away to be with her.

  None of the other visions relayed by the little sampling of people in the conference room overlapped—there was no indication that they were of the same time or the same reality, although it did seem that almost everyone was enjoying a day off or a holiday. But there was the question of Jake Horowitz and Carly Tompkins—separated by almost half the planet and yet apparently seeing each other. Of course, it could be coincidence. Still, if the visions did match, not just in their broad strokes, but in precise details, that would be significant.

  Lloyd and Michiko had retired to Lloyd’s office. Michiko was curled up tightly in one of the chairs, and she had Lloyd’s windbreaker pulled over her like a blanket. Lloyd picked up the handset on his desk phone and dialed. “Bonjour,” he said. “La police de Genève? Je m’appelle Lloyd Simcoe; je suis avec CERN.”

  “Oui, Monsieur Simcoe,” said a male voice. He switched to English; Swiss often did that in response to Lloyd’s accent. “What can we do for you?”

  “I know you’re terribly busy—”

  “An understatement, monsieur. We are, as you say, bogged.”

  Swamped, thought Lloyd. “But I’m hoping one of your witness examiners is free. We have a theory about the visions, and we need the help of someone proficient at taking testimony.”

  “I’ll put you through to the right department,” said the voice.

  While he was on hold, Theo poked his head through the office door. “The BBC World Service is reporting that many people had matching visions,” he said. “For instance, many married couples, even if they weren’t in the same room at the time of the phenomenon, reported similar experiences.”

  Lloyd nodded at this bit of information. “Still, there’s always a possibility, I guess, for whatever reason, of collusion, or, Carly and Jake notwithstanding, that synchronization of visions was a localized phenomenon. But…”

  He left it unsaid—after all, it was Theo the visionless he was speaking to. But if Carly Tompkins and Jacob Horowitz—she in Vancouver, he near Geneva—really did see the exact same thing, then there would be little doubt that all the visions were of the same one future, mosaic pieces of tomorrow…a tomorrow that did not include Theo Procopides.

  “Tell me about the room you were in,” said the witness examiner, a middle aged Swiss woman. She had a datapad in front of her, and was wearing a loose polo shirt; last in fashion in the late 1980s, they were cycling back into popularity.

  Jacob Horowitz closed his eyes, shutting out distractions, trying to recall every detail. “It’s a lab of some sort. Yellow walls. Fluorescent lights. Formica counter tops. A periodic table on the wall.”

  “And is there anybody else in this lab?”

  Jake nodded. God, why did the examiner have to be female? “Yes. There’s a woman—a white woman, with dark hair. She looks to be about forty-five or so.”

  “And what is she wearing, this woman?”

  Jake swallowed. “Nothing…”

  The Swiss witness examiner had left, and Lloyd and Michiko were now comparing reports of Jacob’s and Carly’s visions; Carly had agreed to be similarly examined by the Vancouver police, and the report of that interview had been emailed to CERN.

  In the intervening hours, Michiko had rallied a bit. She was clearly trying to focus, to go on, to help with the larger crisis, but every few minutes she would fade away and her eyes would go moist. Still, she managed to read through the two transcripts without getting the paper overly wet.

  “There’s no doubt,” she said. “They match in every particular. They were in the same room.”

  Lloyd tried a small smile. “Kids,” he said. He had only known Michiko for two years; they’d never made love in a lab—but in his grad-student days, Lloyd and his then girlfriend, Pamela Ridgley, had certainly heated up a few countertops at Harvard. But then he shook his head in wonder. “A glimpse of the future. Fascinating.” He paused. “I imagine some people are going to get rich off this.”

  Michiko shrugged a bit. “Eventually, maybe. Those who happened to be looking at stock reports in the future might become wealthy—decades from now. That’s a long time to wait for it to all pay off.”

  Lloyd was quiet for a moment, then: “You haven’t told me what you saw yet—what your vision was.”

  Michiko looked away. “No,” she said, “I haven’t.”

  Lloyd touched her cheek gently, but said nothing.

  “At the time—at the time I was having the vision, it seemed wonderful,” she began. “I mean, I was disoriented and confused about what was going on. But the vision itself was joyous.” She managed a wan smile. “Except now after what’s happened…”

  Again, Lloyd didn’t push. He sat, outwardly patient.

  “It was late at night,” Michiko said at last. “I was in Japan; I’m sure it was a Japanese house. I was in a little girl’s bedroom, sitting on the side of the bed. And this girl, maybe seven or eight, was sitting up in bed, and she was talking with me. She was a beautiful girl, but she wasn’t—she wasn’t—”

  If the visions were of a time decades in the future, of course she wasn’t Tamiko. Lloyd nodded gently, absolving her of having to finish the thought. Michiko sniffled. “But—but she was my daughter; she must have been. A daughter I haven’t had yet. She was holding my hand, and she called me okaasan; that’s Japanese for ‘mommy.’ It was like I was putting her to bed, wishing her good night.”

  “Your daughter…” said Lloyd.

  “Well, our daughter, I’m sure,” said Michiko. “Yours and mine.”

  “What were you doing in Japan?” asked Lloyd.

  “I don’t know; visiting family, I guess. My uncle Masayuki lives in Kyoto. Except for the fact that we had a daughter, I didn’t really get any sense that it was in the future.”

  “This child, did she—”

  Lloyd cut himself off. What he’d wanted to ask was boorish, crude. “Did she have slanted eyes?” Or maybe he would have caught himself in time and phrased it more elegantly: “Did she have epicanthic folds?” But Michiko wouldn’t have understood. She’d have thought some prejudice underlay Lloyd’s question, some silly misgivings about miscegenation. But that wasn’t it. Lloyd didn’t care if their eventual children were occidental or oriental in appearance. They could as easily be one as the other, or, of course, a mixture of the two, and he’d love them just the same, assuming—

  Assuming, of course, that they were his children.

  The visions seemed to be of a time perhaps two decades in the future. And in his vision, which he hadn’t yet shared with Michiko, he was somewhere, maybe New England, with another woman. A white woman. And Michiko was in Kyoto, Japan, with a daughter who might be Asian or might be Caucasian or might be something in between, all depending on who her father was.

  This child, did she— />
  “Did she what?” asked Michiko.

  “Nothing,” said Lloyd, looking away.

  “What about your vision?” asked Michiko. “What did you see?”

  Lloyd took a deep breath. He’d have to tell her sometime, he supposed, and—

  “Lloyd, Michiko—you guys should come on down to the lounge.” It was Theo’s voice; he had just stuck his head in the door again. “We just recorded something off CNN that you’ll want to see.”

  Lloyd, Michiko, and Theo entered the lounge. Four other people were already there. White-haired Lou Waters was jerking up and down on screen; the lounge VCR was an old unit—some staff member’s hand-me-down—and didn’t have a great pause function.

  “Ah, good,” said Raoul, as they entered. “Look at this.” He touched the pause key on the remote, and Waters sprang into action.

  “—David Houseman has more on this story. David?”

  The picture changed to show CNN’s David Houseman, standing in front of a wall of antique clocks—even with a breaking story, CNN still strove for interesting visuals.

  “Thanks, Lou,” said Houseman. “Most people’s visions of course had no time reference in them, but enough people were in rooms with clocks or calendars on the wall, or reading electronic newspapers—there didn’t seem to be any paper ones left—that we’ve been able to conjecture a date. It seems that the visions were of a time twenty-one years, six months, two days, and two hours ahead of the moment at which the visions occurred: the visions portray the period from 2:21 to 2:23 P.M. Eastern Time on Wednesday, October 23, 2030. That assumes the occasional aberrations are explicable: some people seemed to be reading newspapers dated October 22, 2030, or even earlier—presumably they were reading old editions. And the time references, of course, depend a great deal on what time zone the person happens to be in. We’re assuming that the majority of people will still live in the same time zone two decades from now that they happen to live in today, and those that report times off by a whole number of hours from what we’d expect were in some other time zone—”

  Raoul hit the pause key again.

  “There it is,” said Raoul. “A concrete number. Whatever we did here somehow caused the consciousness of the human race to jump ahead twenty-one years for a period of two minutes.”