Flashforward

by Robert J. Sawyer

  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 together 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 f
uture 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 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.”