Flashforward

by Robert J. Sawyer

  Sun glinted off the rocky pinnacles of the Jura mountains. There was a Globus Gateway bus in the parking lot; mostly deserted CERN wasn’t a starred attraction in the Guide Michelin, of course, and, with the hubbub surrounding the replication attempt, no tourists were allowed on site, anyway. This bus had been chartered to bring a crowd of journalists from the airport; they had flown in to cover the work leading up to the replication.

  Theo walked over to his car, a red Ford Octavia—good, serviceable transportation. He’d spent his youth playing with billion-dollar particle accelerators; he hardly needed a fancy car to establish his worth.

  The car recognized him as he approached, and he nodded at it to indicate he really did want to enter. The driver-side door slid up into the roof. You could still buy cars with doors that hinged out to the side, but with parking spaces so tight in most urban centers doors that required no special clearance were more convenient.

  Theo entered the car and told it where he wanted to go. “At this time of day,” said the car in a pleasant male voice, “it’ll be fastest to take Rue Meynard.”

  “Fine,” said Theo. “You drive.”

  The car began to do just that, lifting off the ground and starting on its way. “Music or news?” said the car.

  “Music,” said Theo.

  The car filled with one of Theo’s favorite bands, a popular Korean jag group. But the music did little to calm him. Dammit all, he knew he shouldn’t even be here in Switzerland, but the Large Hadron Collider was still the biggest instrument of its type in the world; periodic attempts prior to the invention of the TTC to revive the Superconducting Supercollider project, killed by the U.S. Congress in 1993, had all failed. And running and repairing particle accelerators was a dying art. Most of those who had built the original LEP accelerator—the first one mounted in CERN’s giant subterranean tunnel—were either dead or retired, and only a few of those involved with the LHC, which first went into service a quarter of a century ago, were still in that line of work. So: Theo’s expertise was needed in Switzerland. But he was damned if he was going to be a sitting duck.

  The car stopped outside the destination Theo had requested: Police Headquarters in Geneva. It was an old building—more than a century old, in fact, and although internal-combustion motors were illegal on any car manufactured after 2021, the building still showed the grime of decades of automobile exhausts; it would have to be sandblasted at some point.

  “Open,” said Theo. The door disappeared into the ceiling.

  “There are no vacant parking spots within a five-hundred-meter radius,” said the car.

  “Keep driving around the block, then,” said Theo. “I’ll call you when I’m ready to be picked up.”

  The car chirped acknowledgment. Theo put on his cap and shades and stepped outside. He crossed the sidewalk, made his way up the steps, and entered the building.

  “Bonjour,” said a large blond man sitting behind a desk. “Je peux vous aider?”

  “Oui,” said Theo. “Détective Helmut Drescher, s’il vous plaît.” Young Helmut Drescher was indeed a detective now; Theo, with then-idle curiosity, had checked on that several months before.

  “Moot’s not in,” said the man, still speaking in French. “Can somebody else help you?”

  Theo felt his heart sink. Drescher, at least, might understand, but to try to explain it to a complete stranger…“I was really hoping to see Detective Drescher,” said Theo. “Do you expect him back soon?”

  “I really don’t—oh, say, this must be your lucky day. There’s Moot now.”

  Theo turned around. Two men both about the right age were entering the building; Theo had no idea which one might be Drescher. “Detective Drescher?” he said tentatively.

  “That’s me,” said the one on the right. Helmut had grown up to be a fine-looking man, with light brown hair, a strong, square jaw, and bright blue eyes.

  “Like I said,” said the desk officer from behind Theo. “Your lucky day.”

  Only if I live through it, thought Theo. “Detective Drescher,” said Theo, “I need to talk to you.”

  Drescher turned to the other man he’d come in with. “I’ll catch up with you later, Fritz,” he said. Fritz nodded and headed deeper into the building.

  Drescher showed no sign of recognizing Theo. Of course, it had been twenty-one years since they’d last seen each other, and, although there had been a lot of media coverage of the upcoming attempt to replicate the time displacement, Theo had been way too busy to be interviewed much on TV lately; he’d been leaving that mostly to Jake Horowitz.

  Drescher led Theo toward the inner doors; he was dressed in plain clothes, but Theo couldn’t help noticing that he had very nice shoes. Drescher laid his hand on a palmprint reader and the paired doors swung inward, letting them into the squad room. Flatsies—paper-thin computers—were piled high on some desks and spread out in overlapping patterns on others. One entire wall was a map showing Geneva’s computer-controlled traffic, with every vehicle tracked by an individual transponder. Theo looked to see if he could spot his own car orbiting the building; it seemed his wasn’t the only one doing that just now.

  “Have a seat,” said Drescher, indicating the chair that faced his desk. He took a flatsie from a pile and placed it between him and Theo. “You don’t mind if I record this?” he said. The words—French—instantly appeared as text on the flatsie, with an attribution tag saying, “H. Drescher.”

  Theo shook his head. Drescher gestured at the flatsie. Theo realized he wanted a spoken reply. “Non,” he said. The flatsie duly recorded it, but simply put a glowing question mark where the speaker’s name should be.

  “And you are?”

  “Theodosios Procopides,” said Theo, expecting the name to ring a bell for Drescher.

  The flatsie, at least, got it in one—indeed, Theo saw a little window appear on the sheet, showing the correct spelling of his name using the Hellenic alphabet and listing some basic facts about Theo. The attribution tags for the “Non,” and the stating of his name immediately changed to “T. Procopides.”

  “And what can I do for you?” asked Drescher, still oblivious.

  “You don’t know who I am, do you?” said Theo.

  Drescher shook his head.

  “The, ah, last time we saw each other, I didn’t have the beard.”

  The detective peered at Theo’s face. “Well, I—oh! Oh, God! Oh, it’s you!”

  Theo glanced down. The flatsie had done a commendable job of punctuating the detective’s outburst. When he looked back up, he saw that all the color had drained from Drescher’s face.

  “Oui,” said Theo. “C’est moi.”

  “Mon Dieu,” said Drescher. “How that’s haunted me over the years.” He shook his head. “You know, I’ve seen a lot of autopsies since, and a lot of dead bodies. But yours—to see something like that when you’re just a kid.” He shuddered.

  “I’m sorry,” said Theo. He paused for a moment, then: “Do you remember me coming to visit you, shortly after you had that vision? Out at your parents’ house—the one with that great staircase?”

  Drescher nodded. “I remember. Scared the life out of me.”

  Theo lifted his shoulders slightly. “I’m sorry about that, too.”

  “I’ve tried to keep that vision out of my mind,” said Drescher. “All these years, I’ve tried not to think about it. But it still comes back, you know. Even after all I’ve seen, that image still haunts me.”

  Theo smiled apologetically.

  “Not your fault,” said Drescher, gesturing dismissively with his hand. “What was your vision of?”

  Theo was surprised by the question; Drescher was still having trouble connecting his own vision of that dead body with the reality of the human being sitting in front of him. “Nothing,” said Theo.

  “Oh, yeah, right,” said Drescher, slightly embarrassed. “Sorry.”

  There was awkward silence between them for a few moments, then Drescher spoke
again. “You know, it wasn’t all bad—that vision, I mean. It got me interested in police work. I don’t know that I would have signed up for the academy if I hadn’t had that vision.”

  “How long have you been a cop?” asked Theo.

  “Seven years—the last two as detective.”

  Theo had no idea if that was rapid advancement or not, but he found himself doing the math related to Drescher’s age. He couldn’t have a university degree. Theo spent far too much time with academics and scientists; he was always afraid he’d accidentally say something patronizing to those who hadn’t gone any further than high school. “That’s good,” he offered.

  Drescher shrugged, but then he frowned and shook his head. “You shouldn’t be anywhere near here. You shouldn’t be anywhere in Europe, for God’s sake. You must have been killed in or near Geneva, or I wouldn’t be the cop investigating it. If I’d had a vision that I was going to be killed here on this day, you can bet I’d be in Zhongua or Hawaii instead.”

  Theo’s turn to shrug. “I didn’t want to be here, but I have no choice. I told you, I’m with CERN. I was part of the team that led the Large Hadron Collider experiment twenty-one years ago. They need me to duplicate that the day after tomorrow. Believe me, if I had any choice in the matter, I would be somewhere else.”

  “You haven’t taken up boxing, have you?”

  “No.”

  “Because in my vision—”

  “I know, I know. You said I was killed at a boxing match.”

  “My dad, he used to watch boxing all the time on TV,” said Helmut. “Funny sport for a shoe salesman, I guess, but he liked it. I used to watch it with him, even when I was a little kid.”

  “Look,” said Theo, “you know in a way that no one else does that I really am at risk. That’s why I’ve come to see you.” He swallowed. “I need your help, Helmut. I need police protection. Between now and when the experiment is replicated in—” He glanced at the wall clock, a flatsie held up with tape, fifteen centimeter digits glowing on its surface “—in fifty-nine hours.”

  Drescher gestured at all the other flatsies strewn across his desk. “I’ve got a lot of work to do.”

  “Please. You know what might happen. Most people have this coming Wednesday off work—you know, so they can be safe at home when the time-displacement is replicated. I hate to even ask, but you could use that time to catch up on any work you might miss today and tomorrow.”

  “I don’t have Wednesday off.” He gestured at the other people in the squad room. “None of us do—in case something goes wrong.” A pause. “You have any idea who might shoot you?”

  Theo shook his head, then, glancing at the recording flatsie, said, “No. None. I’ve wracked my brain for twenty-one years trying to figure it out—trying to determine who I might have pissed off so much that they’d want me dead, or who could profit from having me out of the way. But there’s no one.”

  “No one?”

  “Well, you know, you go crazy; you get paranoid. Something like this—it makes you suspect everybody. Sure, for a time, I thought maybe my old partner, Lloyd Simcoe, had done it. But I spoke to Lloyd just yesterday; he’s in Vermont, and has no plans to come over to Europe anytime in the near future.”

  “It’s only—what?—a three-hour flight, if he takes a supersonic,” said Drescher.

  “I know, I know—but, really, I’m sure it’s not him. But there is somebody out there, some—what do you guys say? What’s the phrase? Some person or persons unknown who may indeed make an attempt on my life today. And I’m asking you—I’m begging you, please—to keep that person or persons from getting at me.”

  “Where do you have to be today?”

  “At CERN. Either in my office, in the LHC control center, or down in the tunnel.”

  “Tunnel?”

  “Yeah. You must have heard of it: there’s a tunnel at CERN twenty-seven kilometers in circumference buried a hundred meters down; a giant ring, you know? That’s where the LHC is housed.”

  Drescher chewed on his lower lip for a moment. “Let me talk to my captain,” he said. He got up, crossed the room, and rapped his knuckles against a door. The door slid aside, and Theo could see a stern, dark-haired woman within. Drescher entered, and the door closed behind him.

  It seemed he was gone for an eternity. Theo looked about nervously. On Drescher’s desk was a hologram of a young woman who might be his wife or girlfriend, and an older man and woman. Theo recognized the older woman: Frau Drescher. Assuming it was a recent shot—and, really, it must be; holocameras had been priced out of reach of an honest cop until a couple of years ago—then the decades had been kind to her. She was still a very attractive woman, content to let her hair show its gray.

  Finally, the door at the far end of the room opened again, and Detective Drescher emerged. He crossed the busy squad room and returned to his desk. “I’m sorry,” he said, as he sat back down. “If someone had made a threat or something…”

  “Let me speak to your captain.”

  Drescher snorted. “She won’t see you; half the time she won’t even see me.” He softened his voice. “I am sorry, Mr. Procopides. Look—just be careful, that’s all.”

  “I thought you—you, of all people—would understand.”

  “I’m just a cop,” said Drescher. “I take orders.” He paused, and a sly tone slipped into his voice. “Besides, maybe coming here was a big mistake. I mean, what if I’m the guy who shot you the first time out? Didn’t Agatha Christie write a story like that once, in which the detective was the killer? It’d be kind of ironic, then, you coming to see me, no?”

  Theo lifted his eyebrows. His heart was pounding, and he didn’t know what to say. Jesus Christ, he had been shot with a Glock, a gun favored by police officers all over the world…

  “Don’t worry,” said Drescher, grinning. “I’m just kidding. Figured I deserved to give you a fright after what you did to me all those years ago.” But he did reach down and use a couple of swipes of his index finger to erase the last few lines of the transcript from the flatsie.

  “Good luck, Mr. Procopides. Like I said, just be careful. For billions of people, the future turned out unlike what their visions portrayed. I shouldn’t have to tell you this, you being a scientist and all, but there really is no good reason to think that your vision is going to be the one that actually comes true.”

  Theo used his cellular phone to call his car, and when it arrived, he got back in.

  Drescher was doubtless right. Theo felt embarrassed about his panic attack; probably a bad dream the night before, coupled with anxiety about the upcoming replication, had brought it on. He tried to relax, looking out at the countryside as his car drove him back to the LHC control center. The tour bus was still there. It made him a bit nostalgic. Globus Gateway buses were seen all over Western Europe, of course. He’d never taken one of their tours himself, but as a horny teenager he and a couple of his friends had always watched for them in July and August. North American girls, looking for a summer of excitement, often traveled in such things; Theo had enjoyed more than one romantic evening with an American schoolgirl during his teenage years.

  The pleasant memory faded to sadness, though; he was thinking of home, of Athens. He’d only been back twice since Dim’s funeral. Why hadn’t he made more time for his parents? Theo let his car find a vacant spot. He got out and headed into the LHC control center.

  “Oh, Theo,” said Jake Horowitz, coming at him from the other end of the mosaic-lined corridor. “I’ve been trying to get hold of you. I called your car but it said you’d been arrested or something.”

  “Funny car,” said Theo. “Actually, I was just visiting—visiting someone I thought was an old friend.”

  “There’s a problem with the LHC that Jiggs doesn’t know how to fix.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah, something with one of the cryostat clusters—number four-forty, in octant three.”

  Theo frowned. It had been years since
the LHC had been cranked up to full power. Jiggs, all of thirty-four, was head of the maintenance division; he’d never actually seen the collider used at 14-TeV levels.

  Theo nodded; cryostat controls were notoriously finicky. “I’ll go have a look.” In the old days, when CERN had a staff of three thousand, Theo never would have gone down into the LHC tunnel alone, but with his current skeleton crew, it seemed the best way to apportion his limited manpower, and, well, it was probably the safest place to be: sure, a crazy person might make it onto CERN’s campus, looking to shoot Theo, but doubtless such an intruder would be stopped long before he could get down into the tunnel. Besides, no one but Jake and Jiggs—both of whom he trusted completely—would even know that he was down there.

  Theo took the elevator to the minus-one-hundred-meter level. The air in the particle-accelerator tunnel was humid and warm, and smelled of machine oil and ozone. The light was dim—a bluish white from overhead fluorescents punctuated at regular intervals by yellow emergency lamps mounted on the walls. The throbbing of equipment, the hum of air pumps, and the clack of Theo’s heels against the concrete floor all echoed loudly. In cross-section, the tunnel was circular, except for the flat floor, and its diameter varied between 3.8 and 5.5 meters.

  As he’d often done before, Theo Procopides looked down the tunnel in one direction then turned and looked in the opposite direction. It wasn’t quite straight. He could see along it for a great distance, but eventually the walls curved away.

  Hanging from the tunnel roof was the I-beam track for the monorail, and, hanging from that, the monorail itself; Jiggs had left it parked here. The monorail consisted of a cab big enough to hold a single person, three small cars each designed for cargo rather than passengers, and a second cab, facing the opposite direction, capping the end. The cargo cars weren’t much more than hanging baskets made of metal painted peacock-blue. Each cab was an open, orange frame with headlights mounted above its sloping windscreen and a wide rubber bumper mounted below. The windscreens sloped at a sharp angle.