barbecue around back. It was dark, and it was clear, and she had struck up a
conversation with him, after noting that he was looking up at the stars. She didn't
know any of their names, and was stunned that he could point out Polaris, plus the
three corners of the Summer Triangle, Vega, Deneb, and Altair. He started to show
her Cassiopeia, but it was hard to see, half obscured by the trees rising up behind
the house. And yet he wanted her to see it --the great W in the sky, one of the
easiest constellations to spot once you've been introduced to it. And so he said, here,
cross the street with me, you'll be able to see it from the other side. It was a nice
suburban street, devoid of traffic at that time of night, with lit-up houses behind
neatly trimmed lawns.
She looked at him and said, "No."
He didn't get it --not for half a second. She thought he might try to throw her
behind a bush, try to rape her. Emotions ran through him: offense at the suggestion
--he was Howie's cousin, after all! And a sadness, too: a regret for what it must be
to be a woman, constantly on the lookout, always afraid, always checking for escape
routes.
Jake had shrugged a little, and had walked away, so stunned that he couldn't
think of anything else to say. Clouds had rolled in shortly after that, obscuring the
stars.
"Oh," Jake said, to Carly; he could think of no other response to her lie about Bob.
Carly moved her shoulders. "Sorry. A woman has to be careful."
He hadn't been thinking about settling down --but ... but ... what a gift! Here she
was, a beautiful, intelligent woman, working in the same field he was in, and the
certain knowledge that they'd still be together, and still be happy, two decades
hence.
"What time do you have to be at work tomorrow?" asked Jake.
"I think I'll call in sick," Carly said.
He rearranged himself on the bed, facing her.
Dimitrios Procopides sat on the mess-covered couch, and stared at the wall. He'd
been thinking about this ever since his brother Theo's visit two days ago. That
thousands --maybe even millions --were contemplating the same thing didn't make
it easier for him.
It would be such a simple thing to do: he'd bought the sleeping pills over the
counter, and he'd had no trouble finding information on the World Wide Web about
how big a dose of this particular brand would be required to insure fatality. For
someone who weighed seventy-five kilos, as Dimitrios did, seventeen pills might be
enough, and twenty-two would surely do the trick, but thirty would likely induce
vomiting, defeating the purpose.
Yes, he could make it happen. And it would be painless --just falling into a deep
sleep that would last forever.
But there was a Catch-22 --one of the few American novels he'd read had
introduced him to that concept. By committing suicide --he wasn't afraid to think the
word --he could prove that his future wasn't predestined; after all, in not just his
own vision, but in that of the restaurant manager, he was alive twenty years hence.
So, if he killed himself today --if he swallowed the pills right now --he'd
demonstrate conclusively that the future wasn't fixed. But it would be like Pyrrhus's
defeats of the Romans at Heraclea and Asculum, the kind of victory that still bears
his name, a victory at a horrible cost. For if he could commit suicide, then the future
that had so depressed him was not inevitable --but, of course, he'd no longer be
around to pursue his dream.
There were lesser ways, perhaps, to test the reality of the future. He could pluck
out an eye, cut off an arm, get a tattoo on his face --anything that would make his
appearance permanently different from what others had seen of him in their visions.
But no. That wouldn't work.
It wouldn't work because none of those things were permanent. A tattoo could be
removed; an arm could be replaced with a prosthetic; a glass eye could be fitted in
the vacated socket.
No: he couldn't have a glass eye; in his own vision of that damnable restaurant
he'd had normal stereoscopic sight. So, plucking out an eye would be a convincing
test of whether the future was immutable.
Except ...
Except they were making advances in prosthetics and genetics all the time. Who
was to say that two decades down the road they wouldn't be able to clone him a new
eye, or a new arm? And who was to say that he would refuse such a thing, a chance
to overcome the damage caused by an impetuous act in his youth?
His brother Theo desperately wanted to believe that the future was not fixed. But
Theo's partner --that tall guy, the Canadian --what's his name? Simcoe, that was it.
Simcoe said the exact opposite --Dim had seen him on TV, making his case for the
future being carved in stone.
And if the future was carved in stone --if Dim was never going to make it as a
writer --then he really did not want to go on. Words were his only love, his only
passion --and, if he were honest, his only talent. He was lousy at math (how hard it
had been to follow Theo through the same schools, with teachers expecting him to
share his older brother's talent!), he couldn't play sports, he couldn't sing, he
couldn't draw, computers defeated him.
Of course, if he really was going to be miserable in the future, he could kill himself
then.
But apparently he had not.
Of course not. Days and weeks slip by easily enough; one doesn't necessarily
notice that one's life isn't moving forward, isn't progressing, isn't becoming what
you'd always dreamed it would be.
No, it would be easy to end up living like that --the empty life he saw in his vision
--if you let it sneak up on you, day after dreary day.
But he'd been given a gift, an insight. That Simcoe fellow had spoken of life as an
already exposed film --but the projectionist had put the wrong reel on the projector,
and it had been two minutes before he'd realized his mistake. There'd been a jump
cut, a sharp transition from today to a distant tomorrow, and then back again. That
perspective was different from life just unrolling one frame after another. He could
see now, with clarity, that the life ahead of him wasn't one that he wanted --that, in
a very real sense, as he served up moussaka and set saganaki ablaze, he was
already dead.
Dim looked at the bottle of pills again. Yes, countless others, all over the world,
were doubtless contemplating their futures, wondering if, now that they knew what
tomorrow held, it was worth going on.
If even one of them actually did it --actually took his or her own life --surely that
would prove the future was mutable. Doubtless this thought had occurred to others,
as well. Doubtless many were waiting for someone else to do it first --waiting for the
reports that would surely flood the nets: "Man seen by others in 2030 found dead."
"Suicide proves future is fluid."
Dim picked up the amber-colored plastic bottle again, rolling it back and forth,
hearing the pills clatter over one another inside it.
It would be so easy to take off the lid, pressing it into his palm --he did that now
--and twisting, defeating the safety mechanism, letting the pills spill out.
What color were they? he wondered. Crazy, that: he was thinking of taking his
own life, and yet had no idea what color the potential instrument of his demise was.
He removed the lid. There was some cotton, but not enough to hold the pills
immobile. He pulled the batting out.
Well, I'll be --
The pills were green. Who would have thought that? Green pills; a green death.
He tipped the bottle, tapped its base until a pill fell out into his hand. It had a
crease down its middle, where the pressure of a thumbnail could presumably cleave
it in two for a smaller dose.
But he didn't want a small dose.
There was bottled water at hand; he'd gotten it without fizz --in contrast to his
usual preference --lest the carbonation interfere with the action of the pills. He
popped the pill in his mouth. He'd half-expected a lime or mint flavor, but it had no
flavor at all. A thin coating covered the tablet --the kind you got on premium
aspirin. He lifted the water bottle and took a swig. The film did its job; the pill slid
smoothly down his throat.
He tipped the pill bottle again, tapped out three more of the green tablets, popped
all three into his mouth, and chased them with a large gulp of mineral water.
That was four; the maximum adult dose, marked on the bottle, was two tablets,
and there was a warning about avoiding use on consecutive nights.
Three had gone down easily enough at a single gulp. He put a new trio in his
palm, dropped them into his mouth, and took another swig of water.
Seven. A lucky number, that. That's what they said.
Did he really want to do this? There was still time to stop. He could call the
emergency number; he could stick a finger into the back of his throat.
Or --
Or he could think about it some more. Give himself a few additional minutes to
reflect.
Seven pills probably wasn't enough to do any real harm. Surely not. Surely that
kind of minor overdose happened all the time. Why, the Web site had said he'd need
at least another ten ...
He spilled some more pills into his palm, and stared at them, a pile of little green
stones.
20
Day Nine: Wednesday, April 29, 2009
"I want to show you something," said Carly.
Jake smiled and indicated with a hand gesture for her to proceed. They were at
TRIUMF now, the Tri-University Meson Facility, Canada's leading particle-physics
laboratory.
She began walking down a corridor; Jake followed. They passed doors with
science-related cartoons taped to them. They also passed a few other people, each
wearing cylindrical dosimeters that served the same purpose but looked nothing like
the film badges everyone sported at CERN.
Finally, Carly came to a stop. She was standing in front of a door. On one side of
it was a coiled-up fire hose behind a glass cover; on the other, a drinking fountain.
Carly rapped her knuckles on the door. There was no response, so she turned the
knob and opened it up. She went in and beckoned with a crooked finger and smile
for Jake to follow. He did so, and once he was inside, Carly closed the door behind
him.
"Well?" she said.
Jake lifted his shoulders, helpless.
"Don't you recognize it?" asked Carly.
Jake looked around. It was a good-sized lab, with beige walls, and -
--oh, my God! --
Yes, the walls were beige now, but sometime in the next twenty years they'd be
repainted yellow.
It was the room in the vision. There was the chart of the periodic table, just as
he'd seen it. And that workbench right there --that's the bench they'd been doing it
on.
Jake felt his face grow flush.
"Pretty neat, huh?" said Carly.
"That it is," said Jake.
Of course they couldn't inaugurate the room just now; it was the middle of the
work day ...
But his vision ... well, if the time estimates were correct, then it was of 7:21 P.M.
Geneva time, which was --what? --2:21 P.M. in New York, and --let's see --11:21
A.M. here in Vancouver. Eleven twenty-one in the morning ... on a Wednesday.
Surely TRIUMF would have been busy then, too. How could they possibly have been
making love here at that time on a weekday? Oh, doubtless sexual mores would
continue to loosen up over the next twenty years just as they had over the last fifty,
but surely even in the far-off year of A.D. 2030 you didn't run off with your sweetie
for a boink-break while at work. But maybe October 23 was a holiday; maybe
everyone else was off work. Jake had a vague recollection that Canadian
Thanksgiving was sometime in October.
He walked around the room, comparing its present reality to what he'd seen in his
vision. There was an emergency shower, common enough in labs where chemicals
are used, and some equipment lockers, and a small computer workstation. There'd
been a personal computer on the same spot in the vision, but it had been quite a
different model, of course. And next to it ...
Next to it, there'd been a device, cubic in shape, about a half-meter on a side,
with two flat sheets rising up out of its top, facing each other.
"That thing that was there," said Jake. "I mean, that thing that will be there. Any
idea what it is?"
"Maybe a Tachyon-Tardyon Collider?"
Jake lifted his eyebrows. "That could --"
The door to the lab swung open, and a large Native Canadian man walked in. "Oh,
excuse me," he said. "Didn't mean to interrupt."
"Not at all," said Carly. She smiled at Jake. "We'll come back later."
"You want proof?" said Michiko. "You want to know for sure whether we should
get married? There's one way to do that."
Lloyd had been alone in his office at CERN, examining a series of printouts of the
last year's worth of 14-TeV LHC runs looking for any indication of instability prior to
the first 1,150-TeV run --the one that produced the time-displacement. Michiko had
just come in, and those were her first words.
Lloyd raised his eyebrows at her. "A way to get proof? How?"
"Repeat the experiment. See if you get the same results."
"We can't do that," said Lloyd, stunned. He was thinking of all the people who had
died the last time. Lloyd had never believed in the 'there are some things humanity
is not meant to know' philosophy, but if there ever was a test that shouldn't be done
again, doubtless this was it.
"You'd have to announce the new attempt in advance, of course, said Michiko.
