Flashforward

by Robert J. Sawyer

  God damn it! His hovercart was dying, its battery exhausted. It had probably sounded an alarm earlier, but Theo had been unable to hear it over the noise the overtaxed engines were making. The cart dropped to the tunnel floor, skidding a distance along its concrete surface before coming to a dead halt. Theo grabbed the bomb and began to run. As a teenager, Theo had once participated in a re-creation of the run from Marathon to Athens made in 490 B.C. to announce a Hellenic victory over the Persians—but he’d been thirty years younger then. His heart was pounding now as he tried to go faster.

  Kablam!

  Another gunshot. Rusch must have gotten his cart going again. Theo kept running, his legs pounding, at least in his mind, like pistons. There, ahead, was the main campus staging area, a half dozen hovercarts parked along its wall. Only another twenty meters—

  He glanced back. Rusch was closing rapidly. Christ, he couldn’t stop here, either—Rusch would pick him off like a sitting duck.

  Theo forced his body to make it the last few meters, and—

  The chase continued.

  He tumbled into another hovercart and sent himself careening once more down the tunnel, still heading clockwise. He looked back. Rusch dumped his own hovercart, presumably worried about its batteries, and transferred to a fresh one. He headed off in hot pursuit.

  Theo glanced at the bomb’s timer. Only twenty minutes left, but for once Theo seemed to have a decent lead. And, because of that, he actually stopped to think for a moment. Could Rusch possibly be right? Could there be a chance to undo all the damage, all the death that had occurred twenty-one years ago? If there had never been visions, Rusch’s wife might still be alive; Michiko’s daughter Tamiko might still be alive; Theo’s brother Dimitrios might still be alive.

  But, of course, no one conceived after the visions—no one born in the last twenty years—would be the same. Which sperm penetrated an egg was dependent on a thousand details; if the world unfolded differently, if women got pregnant on different days, or even different seconds, their children would be different. There were—what?—something like four billion people who had been born in the last two decades. Even if he could rewrite history, did he have any right to do so? Didn’t those billions deserve the rest of their allotted three score and ten, rather than to be simply snuffed out, not even killed but completely expunged from the timeline?

  Theo’s cart continued its journey around the tunnel. He glanced back; Rusch was emerging in the distance from behind the curve.

  No. No, he wouldn’t change the past even if he could. And besides, he didn’t really believe Rusch. Yes, the future could be changed. But the past? No, that had to be fixed. Upon that much he’d always agreed with Lloyd Simcoe. What this Rusch was saying was crazy.

  Another gunshot! The bullet missed him, impacting the tunnel wall up ahead. But there would doubtless be more, if Rusch realized where Theo was headed—

  Another kilometer slipped by. The bomb’s timer now read just eleven minutes. Theo looked at the wall markings, trying to make them out in the dim light of his headlights. It had to be just ahead, and—

  There it was! Just where he’d left it!

  The monorail, hanging from the ceiling. If he could make it there—

  A new shot rang out. This one did hit the hovercart, and Theo almost lost control of the vehicle again. The monorail was still a hundred meters ahead. Theo fought with the joystick again, swearing at the cart, demanding it go faster, faster—

  The monorail had five components—a cab at each end, and three cars in the middle. He had to make it to the far cab; the train would only move in the direction it thought of as forward.

  Almost there—

  He didn’t slow the hovercart gently; instead, he just slammed the brake. The vehicle pitched forward, Theo being tossed with it. It smashed onto the tunnel floor, skidding along, sparks flying. Theo got out, grabbing the bomb, and—

  Yet another shot and—

  God!

  A shower of Theo’s own blood splashing against his face—

  More pain than he’d ever felt in his life—

  A bullet tearing into his right shoulder.

  God—

  He dropped the bomb, scrambled for it again with his left hand, and staggered into the monorail’s cab.

  The pain—incredible pain—

  He hit the monorail’s start button.

  Its headlights, mounted above the angled windscreen, snapped on, illuminating the tunnel ahead. After the dimness of the last half hour, the light was painfully bright.

  The monorail heaved into motion, whining as it did so. Theo pushed the speed control; the train moved faster and faster still.

  Theo thought he was going to black out from the pain. He looked back. Rusch was negotiating his cart past Theo’s abandoned one. The monorail used magnetic levitation; it was capable of very high speeds. Of course, no one had ever tested its maximum velocity in the tunnel—

  Until now.

  The bomb’s display said eight minutes.

  Another bullet rang out, but it missed its mark. Theo glanced back just in time to see Rusch’s cart fall back around the curve of the tunnel.

  Theo leaned his head out the side of the cab; there was wind in his face. “Come on,” he said. “Come on…”

  The tunnel’s curving walls flashed by. The mag-lev generators hummed loudly.

  There they were: Jake and Moot, the physicist attending to the cop, who was now sitting up, mercifully alive. Theo waved at them as the monorail zoomed past.

  Kilometers passed, and then—

  Sixty seconds.

  He’d never make it to the far access station, never make it to the surface. Maybe he should just drop the bomb; yes, it would disable the LHC no matter where it exploded, but—

  No.

  No, he had come too far—and he had no fatal flaw; his downfall was not preordained.

  If only—

  He looked at the timer again, then at the wall markings.

  Yes!

  Yes! He might just make it!

  He urged the train to go even faster.

  And then—

  The tunnel straightened out.

  He hit the emergency brake.

  Another shower of sparks.

  Metal against metal.

  His head whipping forward—

  Agony in his shoulder—

  He clambered out of the cramped cab and staggered away from the monorail.

  Forty-five seconds—

  Staggered a few meters farther along the tunnel—

  To the entrance to the huge, empty, six-story-tall chamber that had once housed the CMS detector.

  He forced himself to go on, into the chamber, placing the bomb in the center of the vast empty space.

  Thirty seconds.

  He turned around, ran as fast as he could, appalled to see the river of blood he’d left on his way in—

  Back out to the monorail—

  Fifteen seconds.

  Clambering back into the cab, hitting the accelerator—

  Ten seconds.

  Zipping along the roof-mounted track—

  Five seconds.

  Around the curve of the tunnel—

  Four seconds.

  Almost unconscious from the pain—

  Three seconds.

  Urging the train to go faster.

  Two seconds.

  Covering his head with his hands, his shoulder protesting violently as he lifted his right arm—

  One second.

  Wondering briefly what the future held—

  Zero!

  Ka-boom!

  The explosion echoing in the tunnel.

  A flash of light from behind sending a huge shadow of the monorail’s insectoid form onto the curving tunnel wall—

  And then—

  Glorious, healing darkness, the train speeding on as Theo collapsed against the tiny dashboard.

  Two days later.

  Theo was in the LHC control room. It
was crowded, but not with scientists or engineers—almost everything was automated. Still, dozens of reporters were present, all of them were lying on the floor. Jake Horowitz was there, of course, as were Theo’s own special guests, Detective Helmut Drescher, his shoulder in a sling, and Moot’s young wife.

  Theo started the countdown, then also lay down on the floor, waiting for it to happen.

  31

  LLOYD SIMCOE OFTEN THOUGHT OF HIS SEVEN-year-old daughter, Joan, who now lived in Nippon. Of course, they talked every couple of days by video phone, and Lloyd tried to convince himself that seeing and hearing her was as good as hugging her, and bouncing her on his knee, and holding her hand as they walked through parks, and wiping her tears when she fell down and skinned her knee.

  He loved her enormously and was proud of her beyond words. True, despite her occidental name, she looked nothing like him; her features were completely Asian. Indeed, more than anything, she looked like poor Tamiko, the half-sister she would never know. But externals didn’t matter; half of what Joan was had come from Lloyd. More than his Nobel Prize, more than all the papers he had authored or co-authored, more than anything else, she was his immortality.

  And even though she came from a marriage that hadn’t lasted, Joan was doing just fine. Oh, Lloyd had no doubt that sometimes she wished her mommy and daddy were still together. Still, Joan had attended Lloyd’s wedding to Doreen, capturing everyone’s hearts as flower girl for the woman who would soon be her stepmother.

  Stepmother. Half-sister. Ex-wife. Ex-husband. New wife. Permutations; the panoply of human interactions, of ways to constitute a family. Hardly anyone got married in a big ceremony anymore, but Lloyd had insisted. The laws in most states and provinces in North America said if two adults lived together for sufficient time, they were married, and if they ceased living together, they ceased to be married. Clean and simple, no muss, no fuss—and none of the pain that Lloyd’s parents had gone through, none of the histrionics and suffering that he and Dolly had watched, wide-eyed, stunned by it all, their world crumbling around them.

  But Lloyd had wanted the ceremony; he had forgone so much because of his fear of creating another broken home—a term, he’d noted, that his latest Merriam-Webster flagged as “archaic.” He was determined never to be daunted by that—by the past—again. And so he and Doreen had tied one on as they tied the knot—a great party, everyone had said, a night to remember, full of dancing and singing and laughter and love.

  Doreen had been past menopause by the time she and Lloyd got together. Of course there were procedures now, and techniques, and had she wanted a child she could still have had one. Lloyd was more than willing; he was a father already, but he surely wouldn’t deny her the chance to be a mother. But Doreen had declined. She had been content with her life before meeting Lloyd, and enjoyed it even more now that they were together—but she didn’t crave children, didn’t seek immortality.

  Now that Lloyd had retired, they spent a lot of time at the cottage in Vermont. Of course, both of their visions had placed them there on this day. They’d laughed as they furnished the bedroom, making it look exactly as it had when they’d first seen it, precisely positioning the old particle-board night table and knotty-pine wall mirror.

  And now Lloyd and Doreen were lying side by side in their bed; she was even wearing a navy-blue Tilley work shirt. Through the window, trees dressed in glorious fall colors were visible. They had their fingers intertwined. The radio was on, counting down to the arrival of the Sanduleak neutrinos.

  Lloyd smiled at Doreen. They’d been married now for five years. He supposed, being the child of divorce and now being himself once divorced, that he shouldn’t be thinking naïve thoughts about being together with Doreen forever, but nonetheless he found himself constantly feeling that way. Lloyd and Michiko had been a good fit, but he and Doreen were a perfect one. Doreen had been married once before, but it had ended more than twenty years ago. She had assumed she’d never marry again, and had been getting on with a single life.

  And then she and Lloyd had met, him a Nobel-Prize-winning physicist, and her a painter, two completely different worlds, more different in many ways than Michiko’s Nippon was from Lloyd’s North America, and yet they had hit it off beautifully, and love had blossomed between them, and now he divided his life into two parts, before Doreen and after.

  The voice on the radio was counting down. “Ten seconds. Nine. Eight.”

  He looked at her and smiled, and she smiled back at him.

  “Six. Five. Four.”

  Lloyd wondered what he would see in the future, but of one thing he had no doubt, no doubt whatsoever.

  “Two! One!”

  Whatever the future held, Doreen and he would be together, always.

  Zero!

  Lloyd saw a brief still frame of him and Doreen, much older, older than he would have thought it possible for them to be, and then—

  Surely they didn’t die. Surely he would be seeing nothing if his consciousness had ceased to be.

  His body might have faded away but—a quick glimpse, a flash of an image…

  A new body, all silver and gold, smooth and shiny…

  An android body? A robot form for his human consciousness?

  Or a virtual body, nothing more—or less—than a representation of what he was inside a computer?

  Lloyd’s perspective shifted.

  He was now looking down on Earth, from hundreds of kilometers up. White clouds still swirled over it, and sunlight reflected off the vast oceans…

  Except…

  Except, in the one brief moment during which he was perceiving this, he thought perhaps that those weren’t oceans, but rather the continent of North America, glinting, its surface covered over with a spiderwork of metal and machinery, the whole planet literally having become the World Wide Web.

  And then his perspective changed again, but once more he glimpsed Earth, or what he’d thought might have been Earth. Yes, yes, surely it was, for there was the moon, rising over its limb. But the Pacific ocean was smaller, covering only a third of the face he was seeing, and the west coast of North America had changed radically.

  Time was whipping by; the continents had had millennia enough to drift to new locations.

  And still he skimmed ahead…

  He saw the moon spiraling farther and farther away from the Earth, and then—

  It seemed instantaneous, but perhaps it had taken thousands of years—

  The moon crumbling to nothing.

  Another shift…

  And the Earth itself reducing, shrinking, being whittled away, growing smaller, a pebble, and then—

  The sun again, but—

  Incredible…

  The sun was now half-encased in a metal sphere, capturing every photon of energy that fell upon it. The Moon and Earth hadn’t crumbled—they had been dismantled. Raw materials.

  Lloyd continued his journey ahead. He saw—

  Yes, it had been inevitable; yes, he’d read about it countless years ago, but he’d never thought he would live to see it.

  The Milky Way galaxy, the pinwheel of stars that humanity called home, colliding with Andromeda, its larger neighbor, the two pinwheels intersecting, interstellar gas aglow.

  And still he traveled on, ahead, into the future.

  It was nothing like the first time—but then what in life ever is?

  The first time the visions had occurred, the switch from the present to the future had seemed instantaneous. But if it took a hundred thousandth of a second, who would have noticed? And if that hundred thousandth of a second had been allotted as 0.00005 seconds per year jumped ahead, again, who would have been aware of that? But 0.00005 seconds times eight billion years added up to something over an hour—an hour spent skimming, gliding over vistas of time, never quite locking in, never quite materializing, never quite displacing the proper consciousness of the moment, and yet sensing, perceiving, seeing it all unfold, watching the universe grow and change
, experiencing the evolution of humanity step by step from childhood into…

  …into whatever it was destined to become.

  Of course Lloyd wasn’t really traveling at all. He was still firmly in New England, and he had no more control over what he was seeing or what his replacement body was doing than he’d had during his first vision. The perspective shifts were doubtless due to the repositioning of whatever he’d become as the millennia went by. There must have been some sort of persistence of memory, analogous to the persistence of vision that made watching movies possible. Surely he was touching each of these times for only the most fleeting moment; his consciousness looking to see if that slice through the cube was occupied, and, when it discovered that it was, something like the exclusion principle—Theo had emailed him all about Rusch and his apparent ravings—barring it from taking up residence there, speeding onward, forward, farther and farther into the future.

  Lloyd was surprised that he still had individuality; he would have thought that if humanity were to survive at all for millions of years surely it would be as a linked, collective consciousness. But he heard no other voices in his mind; as far as he could tell, he was still a unique separate entity, even if the frail physical body that had once encapsulated him had long since ceased to exist.

  He’d seen the Dyson sphere half-encasing the sun, meaning humanity would one day command fantastic technology, but, as yet, he’d seen no evidence of any intelligence beyond that of humans.

  And then it hit him: a flash of insight. What was happening meant there was no other intelligent life anywhere—not on any of the planets of the two hundred billion stars that made up the Milky Way, or—he stopped to correct himself—the six hundred billion stars comprising the currently combined supergalaxy formed by the intersection of the smaller Milky Way with larger Andromeda. And not on any of the planets of any of the stars in the countless billion other galaxies that made up the universe.