The past six months in London had involved a lot of socializing with clients and attending business functions with people she barely knew and would likely seldom see again. That was so much easier. If she brushed against a man’s hand, or picked up a pen just used by another woman, she got a fleeting glimpse of a future event, but one she could ignore with little effort.
It also helped that she was learning better coping techniques. Now that she was free from the grind of constant studying and had money to play with, she took yoga classes three times a week and was enrolled in a self-defense seminar. All the breathing, stretching, kicking and punching worked to keep her calmer and more focused.
As she put some water on the stove to boil pasta, she considered that it was a plus that she enjoyed what she was learning at her job in London. The company, Ultra-Low Latency Ltd. and commonly just called Ullow, was in the process of training her to be a support engineer. The position would play well to both her social skills and her flair for understanding how computers stored and moved the massive amounts of data going to and from a stock exchange. Her first six months had mostly consisted of learning about hardware, as in the infrastructure design and network hosting services that her company provided to its high-end clients. She’d caught on quickly and she knew that Ullow was happy with her.
After Christmas, she was hoping for a new assignment that would put her in touch with the company’s real-time network monitoring systems and its personalized consulting services. She’d touched enough people and things around the office to know that odds were better than even that she’d get her wish. She popped red sauce in the microwave and poured herself a glass of Chianti. Yes, the wine still took the edge off of the premories, and she might as well make it an Italian theme night, she thought. Too bad there wasn’t a guy in the picture to join her for dinner. That would have made it worth lighting candles.
The next day Ariel’s younger sister Teddie called. As a fairly timid junior in high school, Teddie had let her best friend Michelle talk her into participating in a semester exchange program abroad and the two girls had ended up in Darjeeling, India. Thus, there would be a family Christmas gathering in Darjeeling in a few weeks as Teddie finished the semester and prepared to head back to Texas. Ariel was looking forward to the holiday even though she was also sure that being in the same hotel with her parents, her brother and sister would bring images of their futures flooding into her head with renewed intensity.
When Ariel had said goodbye to Teddie last June, there had been unavoidable touch, and Ariel had caught flickers of futures in which her little sister discovered some sort of psychic ability of her own. Was her sister going to begin to see the future, too?
Over the months since, Ariel occasionally struggled to visualize what Teddie’s capability was exactly, but it only materialized as a vague ghostly image of her sister, and Ariel suspected that it was something she did not understand.
Today’s phone call finally brought an explanation. After a few quick pleasantries, Teddie sounded embarrassed as she explained that she had almost no chance to get off campus and shop and that she had developed an interest in a kind of odd topic. Could Ariel please bring along to India any books she could find on out-of-body experiences?
Oh. So that’s what was going on. Teddie was learning to use astral projection. Ariel laughed to herself. She and her little sister, different in so many ways, were going to have one thing in common after all, assuming that having a secret talent was something that they could share.
Ariel shrugged. So out-of-body experiences were real. If you believed in one thing that was generally deemed impossible, it wasn’t much of a leap to believe in two. She assured her sister that she’d be happy to get books on any old, odd thing at all, not to worry.
After work the next day, Ariel set off on her new mission. She thought that it would be fun to go looking in the many strange little book stores that could still be found tucked away in the dodgier parts of London. As she picked up the first book, she had a premory as strong as any she had in a while. To her surprise, it wasn’t about the last person to have handled the hardcover volume. Rather, it was a vision of herself, dismayed as she found out that by paying for this book with a credit card she had caused so many more problems for Teddie. She would make her sister’s life worse if she paid with a credit card? Ariel checked her wallet for cash. She had enough to pay for this book, so why not use it? She’d pick up more money on the way home.
Over the next couple of days, Ariel amassed quite a little collection of volumes on the subject of out-of-body experiences, and she found herself oddly proud that she had done it without leaving any internet footprint at all. Some unpleasant futures were easy to avoid, she thought with satisfaction.
Then a week later Ariel got a call from her frantic mother with the shocking news that Teddie’s friend Michelle had been kidnapped in Darjeeling. The suspects were involved in human trafficking. The girls’ families and the school they were attending were all in shock.
That night, as Ariel pulled out her suitcase and started to pack, the tears rolled down her face for Michelle. With nothing to touch, Ariel could not find a way to glean more knowledge about the girl’s future, and even though she wanted to find a way to help Teddie’s friend, on some level she was glad not to see the details of what Michelle was about to face.
As the tears ran their course, she finally allowed herself a little self-pity as well. Could she have somehow prevented this if she had been working harder to see her family’s future instead of avoiding it? Should she be keeping better tabs on everyone she knew? She’d run away from not being able to avert disaster once before, but maybe she’d run too far? Was this how real life was going to be for her, always trying to strike a balance between knowing too little and knowing too much?
As she stuffed a handful of random warm socks into the corner of her bag she considered the ramifications of never knowing when to keep her distance. What if she chose wrong every time that mattered? It looked like she was zero for two so far. In that case, she thought as she tugged in frustration on the bag’s zipper, the world would be better off without her.
The next morning her mood was every bit as foul as she drug her things out through the cold heavy mist to the waiting cab, and then as the cab sat almost idle in holiday traffic heavy with honking horns and anxious people. Damn, she hated crowds and congestion. The cab inched forward as the mist turned into a hard rain and she looked internally in vain for any action at all that she could take at this point that would make anything better for Michelle. All Ariel could get as she touched the chilly, wet glass of the back seat window was that there would be a steady parade of disgruntled passengers in this cab staring out at the cold rain over the next few weeks.
When her plane finally did take off from Gatwick Airport hours later, Ariel watched the grey fog outside her little double-paned window turn into darker and denser clouds. Finally, the aircraft began to break free of the gloom. Tendrils of grey reached upwards out of the clouds as though trying to pull the aircraft back to earth, but the plane kept rising. Soon nothing but a bright glorious blue surrounded it. Ariel put her hand tight against the Plexiglas, feeling for just a second like she was touching the sky. A smile broke out over her face and she realized how long it had been since she smiled and meant it like she did now, from her heart.
The Zeitman family was happy to be together at the lovely hotel situated with a view of the Himalayas, in spite of the sad situation. They had cut their vacation back to one week and added several security precautions in response to Michelle’s abduction. Their first night happened to be Ariel’s twenty-fourth birthday, and she thought it was the oddest celebration ever, as they ate in the hotel restaurant and guards made several obvious passes by their table.
Her mother saw the look on her face.
“I’m sorry it’s not much of a party, dear,” she said as she reached over and touched Ariel’s hand. Oh no, not a good idea. Ariel gave her mother a weak smi
le as she pulled her hand away, but not before she found herself aware of the growing likelihood of a near-term future in which Mom also had friends involved in this out-of-body thing. Mom?
It looked like there was a good chance that these friends were going to contact her mother over the next few days. Ariel noted with happy surprise that Michelle’s odds of a safe rescue went up considerably with this strange new scenario. It was about time to finally see a change that was good.
“You okay Ariel?” Zane was giving her a puzzled look too.
“Better than I was few minutes ago,” she said honestly.
“Turn around and smile for a family photo.” Ariel tapped Teddie on the shoulder as she said it. They had been seeing the sights around Darjeeling for two days now and were bundled up and standing together at the town’s beautiful sixty-foot-high Peace Pagoda, an obvious place for a great picture.
Teddie obliged and turned, and Ariel posed with a fake happy grin as she gingerly put one arm around their mother who stood in the middle. Layers of coats and clothing always dulled the effect and she was so pleased that no premonitions came with the touch. After the picture, Ariel withdrew her arm as she and her mother walked on, with Ariel talking about her life in London.
“Honey, I see how tired you look and I’m worried about you. I think you work too hard. Don’t you ever get to go out? See sights, have some fun?”
“I do, Mom. The whole office goes out on Fridays for a kind of English pub version of happy hour, and a couple of the other new hires and I hang out a little. I’ve ridden the London Eye twice now,” she said, trying to make her mother feel better. But her mother had stopped listening and was looking back at Teddie who was still talking to the large man in Buddhist robes who had taken the photo.
“Teddie! Get over here now!” her mother yelled, and Ariel wished silently that her mother could learn how to relax a little more.
Two days after that, the family assembled for Christmas dinner at one of the best restaurants in Darjeeling, and the future that Ariel had seen back during their first meal began to solidify. People interrupted their celebration, and Teddie, Mom and Dad huddled together whispering as her parents reluctantly agreed to leave their sixteen-year-old in India for weeks, maybe months, more.
Later, as Teddie brushed against her, Ariel was pleased to realize that with every decision that had been made that day, the odds had increased for a good outcome for Teddie, Michelle and for several other people Ariel didn’t know. It was time to try to forgive herself for not having been in close enough contact to have been able to warn Michelle.
******
“You want me to move out of London? But I’ve only been here six months!” Ariel could hear the shrillness in her own voice, and she understood that it was not warranted. The company was well within its rights to ask her to transfer if she wanted this promotion and new assignment. It was just that it was such a surprise, and Ariel didn’t deal well with surprises. They almost never happened.
Yet if she had been paying attention she probably should have seen this one coming. The employees who had come back to work on the days between Christmas and New Years had all been talking about Gloria, a support engineer at the end of the hall whom Ariel had met at a few social events. Clyde Johnson, well known around the office as Gloria’s asshole boyfriend, had surprised everyone, including himself, by proposing to Gloria on Christmas Day.
Everyone knew that Gloria had already accepted a transfer to the Ireland office and guessed that Clyde’s strong dislike of both romance and commitment had been just barely overcome by his strong dislike of the idea of not getting to have sex nearly as often, with his main squeeze located on another island. Gloria had of course decided that she now needed to remain in London to plan the most wonderful wedding ever. Just yesterday she had rescinded her agreement to transfer to Dublin right after the first of the year.
That meant that the company needed someone else to go to Dublin immediately, and almost nobody wanted to go. The Ireland office was mostly about writing code because Ireland’s lower costs enabled Ullow to hire more young programmers while keeping the expenses down. It was something of a nuisance that a few clients insisted on being handled out of the Dublin office, and rumor had it than none of these were clients that would enhance a young engineer’s career.
In fact, Ariel had always picked up a sort of wink associated with these particular customers as well as a “you know, the Irish” tone whenever any of her bosses spoke about the Dublin office. What was it, exactly? Not condescending so much as it was a sort of unspoken understanding that the Irish would find ways to bend rules where the British would not. She got the impression that work that might raise an eyebrow in London was sometimes diverted to Dublin, where eyebrows were by custom less questioning.
Ariel had no objection to Ireland—she knew it had its charms. Unfortunately, she’d heard that the Ullow office was located in the greyest, bleakest part of town, far from anything charming. All of the company’s glamorous wining and dining was done out of the corporate headquarters in London, where the office itself was considerably nicer, the perks were greater and the chance to impress management was much higher. A transfer to Dublin was career limiting and everyone knew it. Only someone with little ambition, like Gloria, would volunteer to go there.
Ariel understood how she made the quickly assembled short list of those being considered to go instead. She was already thought to be bright enough to learn whatever she needed to know and yet, as a new hire being offered a promotion, she would have to go with little complaint. She fought to make her voice more pleasant as she reached for the manila folder that the HR man had been trying to hand her. She gave the man a weak smile as she took out the contents.
She must have touched something once handled by Gloria, because with the touch came the premory that there was a fifty-fifty chance that Clyde wouldn’t even go through with the wedding. With that came the knowledge that whether he and Gloria got married did not matter much at all, eventually not even to Gloria. What mattered was that one Ariel Zeitman, who until today had nothing particularly spectacular in her likely future, was now unexpectedly going to Ireland where she would almost certainly meet people and learn things that would change her forever.
Ariel picked up papers that held the transfer information, and ran her hands over them, willing any information to come to her.
“I’d like to think about it for a day.” She said it as calmly as she could manage.
“We’d like to get the paperwork started before the end of the year,” the man from HR said. “Tomorrow is New Year’s Eve, so you have your day. Barely, because we need to know by noon since we are going to close the office early.”
“Sure,” Ariel nodded. “Let me just take this information home with me and I’ll give you my answer first thing in the morning.”
As she stepped outside for some air, she had a pretty good idea of what her answer would be. The nice man from HR hadn’t noticed how firmly she had placed her hand against the wall after handling his manila folder, and he had no way of knowing that it was to steady herself against the kaleidoscope of new visions that came rushing at her while a tiny percent probability of a transfer turned into an almost certainty.
“Holy crap.” Ariel muttered it softly again and again as she made her way out of the building, her eyes half closed as she tried to calm her mind. “Holy crap.” She sat down on the cold concrete steps to steady herself. “Holy crap.” She couldn’t quit saying it.
What Clyde didn’t know, couldn’t know, would never know, was that in making his proposal he might have changed the fate of the human race. Ariel saw herself months from now, learning that thanks to Clyde Johnson’s sex drive, she was somehow being given a chance to play a role in the very survival of the humanity.
There was so much confusion in the premory. She couldn’t see how, she couldn’t see when and as the flashes of little specks of her most distant visions whirled their way through her brain, all she go
t with any clarity at all was that this decision mattered. A lot.
Yes, she thought she’d accept the transfer.
4. Winter in Dublin
“So they finally talked someone into coming here.” Eoin Finn barely looked up from his monitor as he continued to type away with rapid-fire strokes. Ariel stood in the doorway of her new boss’s office, waiting to be invited in, but Eoin kept his fingers moving in a manner that made it clear that he wished this interruption would go away.
As she stared at him, he looked up at her and seemed surprised to find an attractive young woman glaring at him.
“Oh. I take it back. The London office has been unusually helpful this time, now haven’t they? You’ll do nicely. Our clients will like you just fine,” he said. “And you can probably generate new business better than I ever could,” he added as he shrugged his slender, wiry frame in acceptance of what he considered a simple fact of life. When she continued to stand there, he added “Glad to have you here. Now go on. Go get settled in.”
Ariel shrugged and headed back to her desk. So, this constituted a welcome.
The day before she left London, Ariel had learned that her new boss Eoin had been personally handling all local sales efforts as well as Ullow’s three major clients in the Dublin office. Eoin had a reputation as a workaholic loner with mediocre people skills, and she wasn’t inclined to argue with that last bit. The office in Ireland didn’t get much attention from Ullow’s upper management, but they had finally acknowledged that the man was worn out from handling responsibilities that should have been shared long ago. The position Ariel was filling was created so that Eoin would have more time to focus on matters behind the scenes, and could concentrate on parts of the business that played to his strengths.
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