Flashforward

by Robert J. Sawyer

“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 Königsberg, 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 Königsberg in 1894, then going to Zurich here in Switzerland in 1896, and at last to the University of Göttingen, in central Germany, in 1902.”

  The changing maps reflected his movements.

  “And he stayed in Göttingen 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 Göttingen.”

  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. An
d 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 Béranger 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.