Flashforward

by Robert J. Sawyer

  Theo looked away, unable to meet her eyes, unsure how she’d react to the words he felt bubbling up within him. “He’d be a fool to let you go,” he said.

  His hand had been lying on the tabletop. Suddenly he felt Michiko’s hand touching his, patting its back affectionately. “Why, thank you,” she said. He did look at her and she was smiling. “That’s the nicest thing anyone ever said to me.”

  She took back her hand…but not for a few more delicious seconds.

  Lloyd Simcoe walked from the LHC control center to the main administration building. It normally took fifteen minutes to make the journey, but it ended up lasting half an hour because he was stopped three times by physicists going the other way who wanted to ask Lloyd questions about the LHC experiment that might have caused the time displacement, or to suggest theoretical models to explain the Flashforward. It was a beautiful spring day—cool, but with great mountains of cumulonimbus in the bright blue sky rivaling the peaks to the east of the campus.

  At last he entered the admin building and made his way down to Béranger’s office. Of course, he’d made an appointment (for which he was now fifteen minutes late); CERN was a huge operation, and there was no way in which you could just drop in on its Director-General.

  Béranger’s secretary told Lloyd to head right in, and Lloyd did just that. The office’s third-floor window looked out over the CERN campus. Béranger rose from behind his desk and took a seat at the long conference table, much of which was covered with experimental logs related to the Flashforward. Lloyd sat down on the opposite side.

  “Oui?” said Béranger. Yes? What is it?

  “I want to go public,” said Lloyd. “I want to tell the world about our role in what happened.”

  “Absolument pas,” said Béranger. No way.

  “Dammit, Gaston, we have to come clean at some point.”

  “You don’t know that we’re at fault, Lloyd. You can’t prove it—and nobody else can, either. The phones have been ringing off the hook, of course: I imagine every scientist in the world is getting calls from the media asking for opinions about what happened. But nobody has connected it to us yet—and hopefully nobody will.”

  “Oh, come on! Theo says you came storming over to the LHC control center right after the Flashforward—you knew it was us from the very first moment.”

  “That’s when I thought it was a localized phenomenon. But once I learned it was worldwide, I reconsidered. You think we were the only facility doing something interesting at that time? I’ve checked. KEK was running an experiment that had started just five minutes before the Flashforward; SLAC was doing a set of particle collisions, too. The Sudbury Neutrino Observatory picked up a burst at just before 17h00; there was also, just before 17h00, an earthquake in Italy measuring three-point-four on the Richter scale. A new fusion reactor came online in Indonesia at precisely 17h00 our time. And there was a series of rocket-motor tests going on at Boeing.”

  “Neither KEK nor SLAC can produce energy levels close to what we were doing with the LHC,” said Lloyd. “And the rest are hardly unusual events. You’re grasping at straws.”

  “No,” said Béranger. “I’m conducting a proper investigation. You’re not sure—not to a moral certainty—that it was us, and until you are, you’re not saying a word.”

  Lloyd shook his head. “I know you spend your days pushing paper around, but I thought in your heart you were still a scientist.”

  “I am a scientist,” said Béranger. “This is about science—good science, the way it’s supposed to be done. You’re ready to make an announcement before all the facts are in. I’m not.” He paused, took a breath. “Look,” he said, “people’s faith in science has already been shaken enough over the years. Way too many science stories have turned out to be frauds or hype.”

  Lloyd looked at him.

  “Percival Lowell—who just needed better lenses and a less-active imagination—claimed to see canals on Mars. But there were no canals there.

  “We’re still dealing with the aftermath of one idiot in Roswell who decided to declare that what he was looking at was the remains of an alien spaceship, instead of just a weather balloon.

  “Do you remember the Tasaday? The stone-age tribe discovered in New Guinea in the 1970s that had no word for war? Anthropologists were falling all over themselves to study them. Only one problem—they were a hoax. But scientists were too quick to want to get on talk shows and didn’t bother to look at the evidence.”

  “I’m not trying to get on a talk show,” said Lloyd.

  “Then we announced cold fusion to the world,” said Gaston, ignoring him. “Remember that? The end of the energy crisis, the end of poverty! More power than humanity would ever need. Except it wasn’t real—it was just Fleischmann and Pons jumping the gun.

  “Then we started talking about life on Mars—the antarctic meteorite with supposed microfossils, proof that evolution had begun on another planet besides Earth. Except that it turned out the scientists had spoken too soon again, and the fossils weren’t fossils at all, but just natural rock formations.”

  Gaston took a breath. “We’ve got to be careful here, Lloyd. You ever listened to anybody from the Institute for Creation Research? They spout absolute gibberish about the origin of life, but you can see people in the audience nodding their heads and agreeing with them—the creationists say the scientists don’t know what they’re talking about, and they’re right, half the time we don’t. We open our mouths too early, all in some desperate bid for primacy, for credit. But every time we’re wrong—every time we say we’ve made a breakthrough in the fight for a cure for cancer or we’ve solved a fundamental mystery of the universe and then have to turn around a week or a year or a decade later and say, oops!, we were wrong, we didn’t check our facts, we didn’t know what we were talking about—every time that happens we give a boost to the astrologers and creationists and New Agers and all the other ripoff artists and charlatans and just plain nut cases. We are scientists, Lloyd—we’re supposed to be the last bastion of rational thought, of verifiable, reproducible, irrefutable proof, and yet we’re our own worst enemies. You want to go public—you want to say CERN did it, we displaced human consciousness through time, we can see the future, we can give you the gift of tomorrow. But I’m not convinced, Lloyd. You think I’m just an administrator who is trying to cover his ass, indeed, the collective ass of all of us, and of our insurers. But that’s not it—or, to be honest, that’s not entirely it. Dammit, Lloyd—I’m sorry, more sorry than you can possibly imagine, about what happened to Michiko’s daughter. Marie-Claire gave birth yesterday; I shouldn’t even be here—thank God her sister is staying with us—but there’s so much to be done. I’ve got a son now, and even though I’ve only had him for a matter of hours, I could never stand losing him. What Michiko has faced—what you’re facing—is beyond imagining to me. But I want a better world for my son. I want a world in which science is respected, in which scientists speak from hard data not wild speculations, in which when someone reports a science story the people in the audience will sit up and take notice because something new and fundamental about the way the universe works is being revealed—rather than having them roll their eyes and say, geez, I wonder what they’re claiming this week. You don’t know for a fact—for an honest-to-God fact—that CERN had anything to do with what happened…and until you—until I know that, no one is giving a press conference. Is that clear?”

  Lloyd opened his mouth to protest, closed it, then opened it again. “And if I can prove that CERN had something to do with it?”

  “You’re not to reactivate the LHC—not at 1150-TeV levels. I’m reshuffling the experimental queue. Anyone who wants to use the LHC for proton-proton collisions may do so, once we finish all the diagnostics, but no one is firing up that accelerator for nuclear collisions until I say so.”

  “But—”

  “No buts, Lloyd,” said Béranger. “Now, look, I’ve got a ton of work to do. If there’s noth
ing else…?”

  Lloyd shook his head, and left the office, left the administration building, and headed back.

  More people stopped Lloyd on his way back; it seemed there was a new theory being put forth every few minutes and old ones being shot down just as frequently. At last Lloyd returned to his office. Waiting on his desk was the initial report of the engineering team that had been scouring the entire twenty-seven kilometers of the LHC tunnel, looking for any abnormality in the equipment that might have accounted for the time displacement; so far, nothing unusual had cropped up. And the ALICE and CMS detectors had also received clean bills of health, passing every diagnostic test run on them to date.

  There was also a copy of the front page of the Tribune de Genève waiting; someone had placed it there and had circled a particular story:

  Man Who Had Vision Dies

  Future Not Fixed, Professor Says

  MOBILE, ALABAMA (AP): James Punter, 47, was killed in an automobile accident today on the I-65. Punter had previously recounted a precognition vision to his brother Dennis Punter, 44.

  “Jim had told me all about his vision,” said Dennis. “He was at home—the same house he lived in today—in the future. He was shaving, and had the fright of his life when he saw himself in the mirror, all old and wrinkled.”

  Punter’s death has wide-ranging implications, says Jasmine Rose, a philosophy professor at the State University of New York at Brockport.

  “Ever since the visions occurred, we’ve been arguing about whether they portrayed the real future or only one possible future, or, indeed, whether they might simply be hallucinations,” she said.

  “Punter’s death clearly indicates that the future is not fixed; he had a vision and yet is no longer around to see that vision come true.”

  Lloyd was still steamed from his encounter with Béranger, and he found himself crumpling up the newspaper page and throwing it across his office.

  A philosophy professor!

  Punter’s death didn’t prove a thing, of course. His account was entirely anecdotal. There was no supporting evidence for it—no newspaper or TV show glimpsed that could be compared with others’ accounts of the same things, and no one else had apparently seen him in their visions. A forty-seven-year-old could easily be dead in twenty-one years. He could have made up the vision—and a very unimaginative one it was, too—rather than revealing that he hadn’t had one. As Michiko had said, Theo had probably ruined his chances of ever getting life insurance by revealing his own lack of a vision; Punter might have decided it was better to pretend to have a vision than admit that he was going to be dead.

  Lloyd sighed. Couldn’t they have gotten a scientist to address this issue? Someone who understands what really constitutes evidence?

  A philosophy professor. Give me a fucking break.

  Michiko was doing most of the work related to setting up the Web site; Theo was running computer simulations of the LHC collision on a separate PC in the same room, making himself available as needed to help Michiko. Of course, CERN had all the latest authoring tools, but there still was much to be done by hand, including writing up descriptions of various lengths to submit to the hundreds of different search engines available worldwide. She figured they would have everything ready to go in another day.

  A window popped up on Theo’s monitor announcing that he had new mail. Normally, he would have ignored it until a more convenient time, but the subject line demanded immediate attention: “Betreff: Ihre Ermordung,” German for “Re: Your Murder.”

  Theo told the computer to display the message. The whole thing was in German, but Theo had no trouble reading it. Michiko, looking over his shoulder, didn’t read any German, though, and so he translated it for her.

  “It’s from a woman in Berlin,” said Theo. “It says something like, ‘I saw your posting forwarded to a newsgroup I read. You’re looking for people who might know something about your murder. Well, a person who lives in the same apartment building I do knows something about it. We all’—it’s congregated, gathered, something like that—‘we all gathered in the lobby after whatever it was happened, and shared our visions. A fellow—I don’t know him that well, but he lives one floor above me—had a vision of watching a television newscast about the murder of a physicist at, I thought he said, Lucerne but when I read your posting I realized he’d actually said CERN, which, I confess, I’d never heard of. Anyway, I’ve forwarded a blind copy of your message to him, but I don’t know if he’ll get in touch with you or not. His name is Wolfgang Rusch, and you can reach him at…’ That’s what it says.”

  “What are you going to do?” asked Michiko.

  “What else? Contact this guy.” He picked up the phone, dialed his billing code for personal long-distance calls, then tapped out the number that was still glowing on his screen.

  11

  NEWS DIGEST

  A national day of mourning has been declared in the Philippines, to honor President Maurice Maung and all the other Filipinos who died during the Flashforward.

  •

  A group calling itself the April 21 Coalition is already lobbying Congress to approve a memorial on the Washington, D.C., mall in honor of the Americans killed during the Flashforward. They propose a giant mosaic, depicting a view of Times Square in New York City, as it will apparently be in 2030, based on accounts of thousand of people whose visions depicted that locale. There would be one tile in the mosaic for each individual who perished in the event, with each tile laser inscribed with an individual’s name.

  •

  Castle Rock Entertainment has announced a delay in the release of its much-anticipated summer blockbuster Catastrophe “until a more appropriate time.”

  •

  Separatist sentiment in Quebec is at an all-time low, according to a Maclean’s opinion poll: “The apparently certain knowledge that Quebec will still be part of Canada twenty-one years hence has caused even many diehard separatists to throw in the towel,” observed a Maclean’s editorial.

  •

  As an emergency measure to free up doctors to deal with those physically injured during the Flashforward, the United States Food and Drug Administration has approved eleven formerly prescription antidepressants for over-the-counter sales for a one-year period.

  That night, Lloyd and Michiko sat again on the couch in Lloyd’s apartment, a five-centimeter-thick stack of printouts and reports Lloyd had brought home sitting on the coffee table. Michiko hadn’t cried once since they got home, but Lloyd knew that she would doubtless cry herself to sleep again tonight, as she had the last two nights. He was trying to do the right thing: he didn’t want to avoid the topic of Tamiko—that, he knew, was tantamount to denying that she had ever existed—but he would only pursue it if Michiko herself mentioned her.

  And, of course, he wanted to avoid the topic of their wedding and their visions, and all the doubts that were swirling through his minds. And so they sat, and he held her when she needed holding, and they talked about other things.

  “Gaston Béranger was going on about the role of science today,” said Lloyd. “And, dammit all, he got me to thinking maybe he was right. We’ve been saying outrageous things, we scientists. We’ve been deliberately using loaded words, making the public think we’re doing things that we aren’t.”

  “I admit we haven’t always done a good job of presenting scientific truths to the public,” said Michiko. “But—but if CERN is responsible…if you—”

  If you are responsible…

  That’s doubtless what she’d started to say before she’d caught herself. If you are responsible…

  Yes, if he was responsible—if his experiment, his and Theo’s, had somehow been responsible for all that death, all that destruction, for the death of Tamiko…

  He’d sworn to himself that he’d never make Michiko sad, that he’d never do to her what Hiroshi had done. But if his experiment had been what had led, however inadvertently, however indirectly, to Tamiko’s death, then he’d
harmed Michiko far more than all Hiroshi’s indifference and neglect ever had.

  Wolfgang Rusch had seemed reluctant to talk on the phone, and Theo had finally declared outright that he was coming to Germany to see him. Berlin was only eight hundred and seventy kilometers from Geneva. He could drive it in a day, but he decided to first call a travel agent, on the off-chance that there might be a cheap seat available.

  It turned out that there were a lot of seats available.

  Yes, there had been a slight reduction in the world’s fleet of airplanes—some had crashed, although most of the thirty-five hundred planes that had been aloft during the Flashforward had flown on merrily without pilot intervention. And, yes, there was an influx of people who had no choice but to travel in order to deal with family emergencies.

  But, according to the travel agent, everyone else was staying home. Hundreds of thousands of people worldwide were refusing to get on planes—and who could blame them? If the blackout effect happened again, more aircraft would smash into runways. Swissair was waiving all the usual travel restrictions—no advanced booking required, no minimum stay needed—and was giving quadruple frequent-flyer points, plus granting First Class seating on a first-come, first-served no-extra-cost basis; other airlines were offering similar deals. Theo booked a flight, and was in Germany less than ninety minutes later. He’d put the flight time to good use, running some more lead-nuclei collision simulations on his notebook computer.

  When he arrived at Rusch’s apartment, it was a little after 8:00 P.M. “Thank you for agreeing to see me,” said Theo.

  Rusch was in his mid-thirties, thin, with blond hair and eyes the color of graphite. He stood aside to let Theo into the small apartment, but didn’t seem at all happy to have a visitor. “I have to tell you,” he said in English, “I wish you hadn’t come. This is a very difficult time for me.”

  “Oh?”