It helped that she’d made up her own vocabulary, with useful words like premory. She had memories and she had premories, and that made it seem less weird.
Memories could be set off by most things, and they came with pictures, smells and sounds, and with a knowledge of what it was that had happened. Like she didn’t just see an image of a giant rock gorge in her mind, but she smelled the dust and felt the dry heat of the desert and knew that it was the Grand Canyon and that she’d been there with her family in 2001. Memories were complex things that could change a little over time as items were forgotten or new ones recalled. They were never complete.
Premories were never complete either. Like memories, they came with a knowledge of what they meant. No vision of standing by a giant rock gorge and wondering where the hell it was that she was going to be. The knowledge that this was the Grand Canyon was as clear in a premory as it was in a memory.
However, she couldn’t just will them out of nowhere. They could be set off by sights, sounds and smells, but they were mostly set off by touch. She wasn’t sure why. Skin-to-skin contact was by far the strongest trigger. Touching objects recently touched by someone else or touching someone through clothing occasionally would bring on a premory, but luckily not all the time. The latter took intent and concentration, which worked out well considering that she was always touching something with some part of her body. What kind of life would it have been if premories intruded every time she took a step or picked up a fork?
She made her own life easier by avoiding physical contact with people, except of course for some occasional sexual experimentation. This left others with the impression that she was a little cold, but nothing could have been further from the truth. Ariel had a warm heart and cared a great deal for the people she was close to. She just preferred not to touch them.
Once she left for college, she was dismayed to discover that her premories required less stimulation to set them off, and they now occurred more frequently with no effort on her part. She’d grab a door handle or a drink at a water fountain, and a random bit of knowledge about a complete stranger’s best or worst experience next week would pop into her mind. It was annoying. She started to carry a water bottle and wear gloves.
Ariel speculated that the new onslaught of information might have been brought on by her being on her own for the first time. Perhaps her subconscious was just trying to help her take better care of herself? It wasn’t working so well.
Drinking, however, did work well to stop the premories. Ariel knew that if she partied again tonight she could shut them all out until morning. That was not a good long-term solution, and Ariel knew it, but some days you had to do what you had to do.
******
As a new, untenured professor at a small engineering school in Copenhagen, Carl had not expected to have a small office of his own, but fortune had smiled upon him. He had grown up with almost no space of his own in far off Greenland, and after the crowded quarters he had shared in school, this little office meant a great deal to him. He tried to repay the university in his own way, by making himself available to his students during ample office hours and meeting one-on-one with even the lowliest of undergrads as they struggled with the difficult material. Yet he knew that it was his research that was far more valued by the university than his efforts to teach, so he tried to find ways to do both well.
The man who stood outside of his office door today looking for permission to enter was not a colleague, too old to be a normal student and too young to be a normal student’s parent. Curious, Carl motioned him inside.
The man spoke English with a heavy Irish accent, and the desperation in his eyes made Carl question if the man was entirely stable. The obvious high quality of the man’s clothes, shoes and briefcase argued against insanity, even though Carl knew it shouldn’t. The wealthy had their share of crazy people too. They just were used to being treated better.
The more the man talked, the more concerned Carl became. This visitor had an uncommon knowledge of aeronautics for a layman, and he wanted to help fund private space exploration. That didn’t indicate any loss of grip on reality—a lot of people shared that dream.
This man fervently believed that the future of the human race lay in permanent settlements off of the Earth. Carl didn’t disagree. It was a popular notion, and it was perhaps true, and no one could doubt the conviction in this man’s voice. The man wanted to know specifically what he could do to help put mankind into space. Carl sighed and tried to answer kindly.
Cost and timing were both enormous. Even a well-informed layman could hardly understand the obstacles to making a meaningful contribution to establishing any sort of permanent human foothold off of the planet Earth. Of course it sounded appealing. But no one person really had that kind of money, and no sane hobbyist wanted to devote themselves to something like this for the decades that would be needed.
“Find another passion,” Carl suggested, with as much gentleness in his voice as he could muster. “There are plenty of worthwhile endeavors out there for a man with money who wants to make the world better. Almost any one of them will produce more tangible results.”
“Yes, but not one of them will matter in the end,” the visitor answered sadly. “That is, they won’t matter after 2352. How can a person know this, and not try to do something?”
Carl froze in his chair. Another man would have embraced the theory of “crazy visitor” at that point, and Carl would have too, except. Except that he had heard the year 2352 mentioned in the same context before.
Carl had a mostly Inuit cousin and childhood friend back in Greenland who had always claimed to see the future. Many of the Inuit made claims like that, frankly, and Carl, who grew up in one of Greenland’s more Danish homes, had been taught to take such with a grain of salt.
But this little boy, a cousin of roughly the same age who became his best friend at family gatherings, insisted that he really did have visions. The predictions he made were always of events that would not occur at least for decades, so they were of little interest to any of the adults in the boy’s life, be they Inuit, Danish or the mix that made up Carl’s family.
Carl, however, loved science fiction, and as a child he had read nothing but stories of rocket ships and robots. The future fascinated him. He loved to listen to his cousin, and he would join in, adding his own ideas from whatever he was reading at the time. For years, at every family wedding and funeral, the two boys would sneak off together and collaborate on a shared version of tomorrow that was half prophecy and half comic books and pulp fiction.
Then one day in their early teens, his cousin had somberly informed him that he had become certain that the human race would soon be extinct. They had argued about it, with the passion that only the young can have for a dispute that is so philosophical. Carl believed deeply that humans would soon be so far flung across the galaxy that even the sun going supernova would not be able put an end to his species. But his cousin remained adamant.
It would all end, and it would be far sooner than Carl thought. In fact, the cousin even insisted that he knew the exact year. For the first time in their friendship, Carl retorted that the boy was full of shit and it was about time that someone told him so.
After Carl’s outburst, he and his cousin stopped playing their shared game of designing the future. The next time that they met Carl apologized for his outburst, of course, and there were no more harsh words between them, but the fun had gone out of their friendship. Teenage activities began to keep Carl away from family events, and the two boys lost touch.
Carl hadn’t thought of his cousin’s dire prediction for a long time, but now he stared at his visitor with curiosity. “You’re sure this happens in exactly 2352?”
The visitor nodded sadly. “I’m positive. There are so many variations, but it is always that year, no matter how it goes.” Carl scooted his chair forward, the better to hear the man.
“You are the second person to mention this particular year
to me. Please,” Carl said. “Tell me more.”
*****
Ariel and her best friend Laura headed over to the frat party already lightly buzzed, thanks to a little pre-party cocktail shared with friends in the sorority. Only instead of having its usual soothing effect, tonight the alcohol was making Ariel more agitated. She’d made the mistake of opening a care package from her mom earlier, and apparently the connection with things that her mother had packed for her was strong enough to get her started. Damn. The images in her head had kept getting clearer, clamoring for her attention like inmates who see a jailor in the distance.
“Are you okay?” Laura asked her as they walked through the crowded university courtyard. Usually a quiet and even aloof girl, Laura got more friendly and solicitous when she drank. “You seem kind of off tonight.”
“Yeah, I feel kind of off. You think maybe there was something else in that drink?”
Laura shook her head. “No. I feel fine. I don’t think I had as much as you did though.”
“I’ll be okay. Damn, I left my phone back in the room. I wish I’d brought it. Oh well.” Ariel shook it off with a determined laugh. “Come on. Let’s go have some fun.”
Only the party wasn’t much fun, at least not for Ariel. The harder she tried to enjoy herself, the more overwhelmed she became. Tonight she couldn’t get the images to solidify or even slow down, and for the first time she couldn’t get herself to ignore them. There was some unexpected and serious possibility emerging and it concerned her family. Mom, Dad, thirteen-year-old sister Teddie and older brother Zane swam in and out of her focus, the mélange of video clips repeating in her head until she started to see a pattern.
This wasn’t normal. She usually saw how much fun something was going to be. Or not. Or if a pair of shoes she admired was likely to go on sale or if a girl down the hall was likely to pass her math test. Let’s face it, she thought. I see stupid stuff about myself and others. Ignore it, pay attention to it, believe it or not. It never really matters.
One of the odd things about the future was that her knowledge about it always came with a vague sense of likelihood. It was just a feeling of real likely, sort of likely, outside chance—that sort of thing. Ariel knew that she tended to assign fractions to her premories, like a one out of three chance of happening, or a ninety-percent probability, even though she was guessing. Usually, if she wanted, she could see at least some of the other possible outcomes, and if she really concentrated, sometimes she could even get to the possibilities way out on the fringe. Weird options lived out there, and she knew enough to ignore them.
But tonight, for some reason, what had once been unlikely possibilities in her life had begun to turn into significant probabilities. To start with, there was a reasonably high chance that her mother was going to die. Not eventually, but soon. Next weekend. Drown, in fact. Drown? Her mother hated the water and could barely swim—no way she was drowning.
Ariel made her way outside, pushing past those who tried to talk to her or, worse yet, grab at her as she brushed against them. “I feel sick,” she muttered to anyone who got close. She walked far enough away from the frat house to find some measure of silence and she took a few deep breaths.
Water. Ninety-percent chance that her mother, Lola Zeitman, was going to be hearing rushing water while she fought for air. Ariel was sure of it and that was ridiculous. Or was it? Weren’t Mom and Dad going canoeing next weekend? Yeah, Dad had been all excited about putting together some kind of surprise for her outdoors-loving mother, and it was on some little creek up in Arkansas. Were creeks deep enough to drown in? Ariel concentrated. The premory was filled with heavy rains, rendering rivers swollen from the storms. Shit. It looked like she finally knew something that she could not ignore.
Ariel decided that this might be the night that she needed to stop trying to hide what she did. Her heart started to pound. She needed to call her parents now and talk them out of going on this trip. She would tell them whatever she needed to, as long as they believed her and stayed home.
As Ariel contemplated making the phone call, she got dizzier. She sat on the curb while she tried to clear her head. These days she understood that disorientation meant that new possibilities were being incorporated into what she premembered, and that some of those new outcomes had to do with actions she was about to take.
As she tried to sort out which of the various possibilities were tied to which course of action, she saw filmy threads emerge in her mind, linking one bit of behavior to several, but not all, outcomes. She noticed that the same end result could be achieved by a variety of different actions as well. The strength of the cord was probably related to the strength of the causality, right?
So it wasn’t a line, it was a web. The past, present and future touched in an intricate spider’s creation in which some actions mattered very little and some were key to countless outcomes. Everything could be achieved many ways and any action could produce several results. Ariel stared in delight at the clarity of this revelation.
Life and time and cause and effect were so much more complex than she had realized. This particular premonition was far more complicated than any that Ariel had ever experienced. It was probably because it was so much more important than anything that had come before. She studied it carefully.
If her mother went on the river, there was a ninety-percent chance that she was going to get trapped under a canoe and not be able to make it back up to the surface, but less than a forty-percent chance that she would die. It was more likely that she would find a way out of the situation, although Ariel could not see how.
And if she didn’t die, then there was nearly a one-hundred-percent chance that her Dad, Alex, would try to rescue Mom as she flailed her way downstream afterwards without a life jacket. What happened to her mom’s life jacket? Never mind.
Once it went this way, there was maybe a twenty-percent chance that her dad would die trying to pull her mom out of the raging river. What the hell were her parents doing in this river anyway? Didn’t they have more sense that this?
Apparently her family had never skirted disaster so closely or she would have dealt with this situation before. Ariel started walking home slowly as she tried to clear her head. She absolutely, positively had to get back to the sorority and get her phone.
But the sparkling threads began rotating in her mind as she moved, giving her a three-dimensional look at this vision. It came with the most compelling feelings of knowing that she had ever experienced with a premory. Look over here. Her mother needed to be in that river, she needed to almost drown, because then and only then would that something wonderful happen over there. Not just to her mother, either, because it appeared that the results of the time in the river were great for lots of people. The canoe accident was a nexus point, one of the big shining loci that mattered so much more than most other things did.
She looked further. Her dad had to wade out into the cold fast water because it caused him to learn something important, and he needed that knowledge over in another other part of the web. If he lived, which he probably would, he’d be different from then on and that difference would not only save his own life later, it would help him save other lives too. It looked like her dad was going to be quite a hero someday, but only if he waded out there and lived through it.
Ariel’s walk had brought her home, and as she made her way to her room she was glad that it was Friday night and the sorority house was deserted. She could feel tears running down her cheeks at the enormity of the choice that she was about to make.
Thanks to unusually heavy rains, her parents were poised to acquire a destiny, a chance for making a positive difference in the world. Yet this future happened only if Ariel stopped and did not make a phone call home. She had to sit tight for a whole week and let it all unfold, as though her gift of seeing the future never existed.
Ariel thought of how awful it would be if any of it turned out poorly. She looked to see if she could possibly find the worst-c
ase images in the fleeting, floating mirage. Like headlights on a car at night, her vision only seemed to penetrate so far in the gloom ahead. Now, she studied the furthest she could see with a new urgency. If she did nothing and let the weekend unfold as it would, it was true that there were possible outcomes that were very sad. Others, the more probable others, were okay. In the end, there was no mistaking the fact that her interference would introduce a higher probability of a worse outcome somehow, somewhere down the road. She was sure of that.
Either you believe in a gift of prophecy or you don’t. If you don’t believe, why call people and get them all upset? And if you do? Damn that care package from Mom. Ariel knew that her best course of action was to pretend like this whole stream of information had never made it into her consciousness.
She got up and pulled a beer out of the mini-fridge hidden under Laura’s bed and chugged it down, wondering how many more she was going to need to get through an entire week of this. She realized that she was more tired than she had ever been and in less than a minute she was sound asleep on her bed, still fully dressed.
Part 1. Touching the Sky to Save the World
3. Winter Begins in 2011
Distance from her family and their many recent misadventures was one reason why getting a job in London had seemed perfect to Ariel last spring as she finished her master’s degree in the growing IT field of equity trading technology. Sure, going to Europe was an exciting opportunity in its own right, and she had already enjoyed a long weekend in Paris and another in Prague.
Yet she had not gone to Europe just for fun, or even for resume building. The whole incident with the canoeing accident two and half years ago had left Ariel worried about her ability to keep quiet the next time that the safety of those she loved and cared about became an issue. Luckily that horrible weekend had ended as well as it could have. She didn’t want to be around for the next catastrophe that she was powerless to prevent. Not because she didn’t love them, but because she did.
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