Flashforward

by Robert J. Sawyer

  “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 Flash-forward 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 Flash-forward 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 astr
onauts 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.