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FLASHFORWARD (v1.1)
Robert J. Sawyer, 1999
A team of physicists trying to prove the existence of a theoretical particle
inadvertently shifts the consciousness of humankind forward 20 years. Only two
minutes are "lost," but memories of the future inspire new cults, seemingly illogical
stock market speculations, and a host of new patents. Rivalry between two of the
male physicists for one woman heats up, since the flash-forward has shown her to be
married to the "wrong" man. One of the rivals, Lloyd Simcoe, foresees his own
murder, though not his murderer. Even though the event is 21 years away, Lloyd is
panic-stricken and searches worldwide for clues in the visions of others. In the end,
these brief glimpses of the future prove addictive, and a new team repeats the
experiment in a more controlled fashion, which treats the reader to visions of an
apocalyptic, almost Wellsian future. There is also Simcoe's sad avoidance of his own
death, which he accomplishes by becoming painstakingly cautious.
BOOK I
APRIL 2009
He who foresees calamities suffers them twice over.
--Beilby Porteus
Day One: Tuesday, April 21, 2009
A SLICE THROUGH SPACE TIME ...
The control building for CERN's Large Hadron Collider was new: it had been
authorized in A.D. 2004 and completed in 2006. The building enclosed a central
courtyard, inevitably named "the nucleus." Every office had a window either facing in
toward the nucleus or out toward the rest of CERN's sprawling campus. The
quadrangle surrounding the nucleus was two stories tall, but the main elevators had
four stops: the two above-ground levels; the basement, which housed boiler rooms
and storage; and the minus-one-hundred-meter level, which exited onto a staging
area for the monorail used to travel along the twenty-seven-kilometer circumference
of the collider tunnel. The tunnel itself ran under farmers' fields, the outskirts of the
Geneva airport, and the foothills of the Jura mountains.
The south wall of the control building's main corridor was divided into nineteen
long sections, each of which had been decorated with a mosaic made by an artist
from one of CERN's member countries. The one from Greece depicted Democritus
and the origin of atomic theory; the one from Germany portrayed the life of Einstein;
the one from Denmark, that of Niels Bohr. Not all of the mosaics had physics as their
themes, though: the French one depicted the skyline of Paris, and the Italian one
showed a vineyard with thousands of polished amethysts representing individual
grapes.
The actual control room for the Large Hadron Collider was a perfect square, with
wide, sliding doors positioned precisely in the centers of two of its sides. The room
was two stories tall, and the upper half was walled with glass, so that tour groups
could look down on the proceedings; CERN offered three-hour public tours Mondays
and Saturdays at 09h00 and 14h00. Hanging flat against the walls below the
windows were the nineteen member-state flags, five per wall; the twentieth spot was
taken up by the blue-and-gold flag of the European Union.
The control room contained dozens of consoles. One was devoted to operating the
particle injectors; it controlled the beginnings of experiments. Adjacent to it was
another with an angled face and ten inlaid monitors that would display the results
reported by the ALICE and CMS detectors, the huge underground systems that would
record and attempt to identify the particles produced by LHC experiments. Monitors
on a third console showed portions of the gently curving underground collider tunnel,
with the I-beam monorail track hanging from the ceiling.
Lloyd Simcoe, a Canadian-born researcher, sat at the injector console. He was
forty-five, tall, and clean-shaven. His eyes were blue and his crewcut hair so dark
brown that one could get away with calling it black --except at the temples, where
about half of it had turned gray.
Particle physicists weren't known for their sartorial splendor, and Lloyd had until
recently been no exception. But he'd agreed a few months ago to donate his entire
wardrobe to the Geneva chapter of the Salvation Army, and let his fiancée pick out
all-new things for him. Truth be told, the clothes were a little flashy for his taste, but
he had to admit that he'd never looked so sharp. Today, he was wearing a beige
dress shirt; a coral-colored jacket; brown pants with exterior pouches instead of
interior pockets; and --in a nod to fashion tradition --black Italian leather shoes.
Lloyd had also adopted a couple of universal status symbols that also happened to
be bits of local color: a Mont Blanc fountain pen, which he kept clipped to his jacket's
inside pocket, and a gold Swiss analog watch.
Seated on his right, in front of the detector console, was the master of the
makeover herself, his fiancée, engineer Michiko Komura. Ten years Lloyd's junior at
thirty-five, Michiko had a small, upturned nose and lustrous black hair that she had
styled in the currently popular page-boy cut.
Standing behind her was Theo Procopides, Lloyd's research partner. At twentyseven,
Theo was eighteen years younger than Lloyd; more than one wag had
compared the conservative middle-aged Lloyd and his fiery Greek colleague to the
team of Crick and Watson. Theo had curly, thick, dark hair, gray eyes, and a
prominent, jutting jaw. He almost always wore red denim jeans --Lloyd didn't like
them, but no one under thirty wore blue jeans anymore --and one of an endless
string of T-shirts depicting cartoon characters from all over the world; today he had
on the venerable Tweety Bird. A dozen other scientists and engineers were
positioned at the remaining consoles.
Moving up the cube ...
Except for the gentle hum of air conditioning and the soft whir of equipment fans,
the control room was absolutely silent. Everyone was nervous and tense, after a long
day of preparing for this experiment. Lloyd looked around the room then took a deep
breath. His pulse was racing, and he could feel butterflies gyrating in his stomach.
The clock on the wall was analog; the one on his console, digital. They were both
rapidly approaching 17h00 --what Lloyd, even after two years in Europe, still
thought of as 5:00 P.M.
Lloyd was director of the collaborative group of almost a thousand physicists using
the ALICE ("A Large Ion Collider Experiment") detector. He and Theo had spent two
years designing today's particle collision --two years, to do work that could have
taken two lifetimes. They were attempting to recreate energy levels that hadn't
existed since a nanosecond after the Big Bang, when the universe's temperature was
10,000,000,000,000,000 degrees. In the process, they hoped to detect the holy grail
of high-energy physics, the long-sought-after Higgs boson, the particle whose
interactions endowed other particles with mass. If their experiment worked, the
Higgs, and the Nobel that would likely be awarded to its discoverers, should be
theirs.
The whole experiment was automated and precisely timed. There was no great
knife switch to pull down, no trigger hidden under a spring-loaded cover to push.
Yes, Lloyd had designed and Theo had coded the core modules of the program for
this experiment, but everything was now under the control of a computer.
When the digital clock reached 16:59:55 Lloyd started counting down out loud
with it. "Five."
He looked at Michiko.
"Four."
She smiled back encouragingly. God, how he loved her -
"Three."
He shifted his gaze to young Theo, the wunderkind --the kind of youthful star
Lloyd had hoped to have been himself but never was.
"Two."
Theo, ever cocky, gave him a thumbs-up sign.
"One."
Please, God ... thought Lloyd. Please.
"Zero."
And then --
And then, suddenly, everything was different.
There was an immediate change in the lighting --the dim illumination of the
control room was replaced with sunlight coming through a window. But there was no
adjustment, no discomfort --and no sense that Lloyd's pupils were contracting. It
was as if he were already used to the brighter light.
And yet Lloyd couldn't control his eyes. He wanted to look around, to see what
was going on, but his eyes moved as if under their own volition.
He was in bed --naked, apparently. He could feel the cotton sheets sliding now
over his skin as he propped himself up on one elbow. As his head moved, he caught
a brief glimpse of dormer windows, looking out apparently from the second floor of a
country house. There were trees visible, and --
No, that couldn't be. These leaves had turned, frozen fire. But today was April 21
--spring, not autumn.
Lloyd's view continued to shift and suddenly, with what should have been a start,
he realized he wasn't alone in bed. There was someone else with him.
He recoiled.
No --no, that wasn't right. He didn't physically react at all; it was as if his body
were divorced from his mind. But he felt like recoiling.
The other person was a woman, but --
What the hell was going on?
She was old, wrinkled, her skin translucent, her hair a white gossamer. The
collagen that had once filled her cheeks had settled as wattles at the sides of her
mouth, a mouth now smiling, the laugh lines all but lost amongst the permanent
creases.
Lloyd tried to roll away from the hag, but his body refused to cooperate.
What in God's name was happening?
It was spring, not autumn.
Unless --
Unless, of course, he was now in the southern hemisphere. Transported,
somehow, from Switzerland to Australia ...
But no. The trees he'd glimpsed through the window were maples and poplars; it
had to be North America or Europe.
His hand reached out. The woman was wearing a navy-blue shirt. It wasn't a
pajama top, though; it had buttoned-down epaulets and several pockets -adventure
clothing made of cotton duck, the kind L. L. Bean or Tilley sells, the kind a
practical woman might wear to do her gardening. Lloyd felt his fingers brushing the
fabric now, feeling its softness, its pliancy. And then --
And then his fingers found the button, hard, plastic, warmed by her body,
translucent like her skin. Without hesitation, the fingers grasped the button, pushed
it out, slipped it sideways through the raised stitching around the buttonhole. Before
the top fell open, Lloyd's gaze, still acting on its own initiative, lifted again to the old
woman's face, locking onto her pale blue eyes, the irises haloed by broken rings of
white.
He felt his own cheeks drawing tight as he smiled. His hand slipped inside the
woman's top, found her breast. Again he wanted to recoil, snapping his hand back.
The breast was soft and shriveled, the skin hanging loosely on it --fruit gone bad.
The fingers drew together, following the contours of the breast, finding the nipple.
Lloyd felt a pressure down below. For a horrible moment, he thought he was
getting an erection, but that wasn't it. Instead, suddenly, there was a sense of
fullness in his bladder; he had to urinate. He withdrew his hand and saw the old
woman's eyebrows go up inquisitively. Lloyd could feel his shoulders rise and fall, a
little shrug. She smiled at him --a warm smile, an understanding smile, as if this
were the most natural thing in the world, as if he often had to excuse himself at the
outset. Her teeth were slightly yellow --the simple yellow of age --but otherwise in
excellent shape.
At last his body did what he'd been willing all along: it rolled away from the
woman. Lloyd felt a pain in his knee as he did so, a sharp jab. It hurt, but he
outwardly ignored it. He swung his legs off the bed, feet slapping softly against the
cool hardwood floor. As he rose, he saw more of the world outside the window. It
was either mid-morning or mid-afternoon, the shadow cast by one tree falling
sharply across the next. A bird had been resting in one of the boughs; it was startled
by the sudden movement in the bedroom and took wing. A robin --the large North
American thrush, not the small Old World robin; this was definitely the United States
or Canada. In fact, it looked a lot like New England --Lloyd loved the fall colors in
New England.
Lloyd found himself moving slowly, almost shuffling across the floorboards. He
realized now that this room wasn't in a house, but rather a cottage; the furnishings
were the usual vacation-home hodgepodge. That night table --low-slung, made of
particle board with a wallpaper-thin veneer of fake woodgrain on top: he recognized
it, at least. A piece of furniture he'd bought as a student, and had eventually put in
the guest room at the house in Illinois. But what was it doing here, in this unfamiliar
place?
He continued along. His right knee bothered him with each step; he wondered
what was wrong with it. A mirror was hanging on the wall; its frame was knotty pine,
covered over with clear varnish. It clashed with the darker "wood" of the night table,
of course, but --
Jesus.
Jesus Christ.
Of their own accord, his eyes looked into the mirror as he passed, and he saw
himself --
For a half-second he thought it was his father. But it was him. What hair was left
on his head was entirely gray; that on his chest was white. His skin was loose and
lined, his gait stooped.
Could it be radiation? Could the experiment have exposed him? Could --
No. No, that wasn't it. He knew it in his bones --in his arthritic bones. That wasn't
it.
He was old.
It was as if he'd aged twenty years or more, as if --
