two countries without worrying about showing passports.
Lloyd rented the apartment furnished; although he'd been at CERN two years, he
didn't think of it as being his home, and the idea of buying furniture, which would be
a bear to import back to North America, didn't make sense to him. The provided
furnishings were a bit old-fashioned and ornate for his tastes, but at least everything
coordinated well: the dark wood, the burnt-orange carpet, the dark-red walls. It had
a cozy, warm feel, at the expense of making the place look smaller than it really
was. But he had no emotional attachment to this apartment --he'd never been
married or lived with anyone of the opposite sex, and, in the twenty-five years since
he'd moved out on his own, he'd had eleven different addresses. Still, tonight there
was no question that they should go to his place, not hers. There would be too much
of Tamiko at the flat in Geneva, too much to face so soon.
Lloyd's apartment was in a forty-year-old building, heated by electric radiators.
They sat on the couch. He had an arm around her shoulder, and he was trying to
comfort her. "I'm sorry," said Lloyd.
Michiko's face was still puffy. She had periods of calm, but the tears would
suddenly start again and they seemed to go on forever. She nodded slightly.
"There was no way to foresee this," said Lloyd. "No way to prevent it."
But Michiko shook her head. "What kind of mother am I?" she said. "I took my
daughter half a world away from her grandparents, from her home."
Lloyd said nothing. What could he say? That it had seemed like a wonderful thing
to do? Getting to study in Europe, even if only at age eight, would have been a
terrific experience for any child. Surely bringing Tamiko to Switzerland had been the
right idea.
"I should try to call Hiroshi," said Michiko. Hiroshi was her ex-husband. "Make
sure he got the e-mail."
Lloyd thought about observing that Hiroshi probably wouldn't evince any more
interest in his daughter now that she was dead than he had when she was alive.
Even though he'd never met him, Lloyd hated Hiroshi, on many different levels. He
hated that Hiroshi had made his Michiko sad --not just once or twice, but for years
on end. It pained Lloyd to think of her trudging through life without a smile on her
face, with no joy in her heart. He also, if he were brutally honest with himself, hated
Hiroshi because he had had her first. But Lloyd didn't say anything. He simply
stroked Michiko's lustrous black hair.
"He didn't want me to bring her here," said Michiko, sniffling. "He wanted her to
stay in Tokyo, go to a Japanese school." She wiped her eyes. " 'A proper school,' he
said." A pause. "If only I'd listened to him."
"The phenomenon was worldwide," said Lloyd gently. "She would have been no
safer in Tokyo than in Geneva. You can't blame yourself."
"I don't," said Michiko. "I --"
But she stopped herself. Lloyd couldn't help wondering if she was going to say, "I
blame you."
Michiko hadn't come to CERN to be with Lloyd, but there was no doubt in either of
their minds that he was the reason she'd decided to stay. She'd asked Sumitomo to
keep her on here, after the equipment she was responsible for was installed. For the
first two months, Tamiko had been back in Japan, but Michiko, once she'd decided to
extend her stay, had arranged to have her daughter brought to Europe.
Lloyd had loved Tamiko, too. He knew the lot of stepfather was always a difficult
one, but the two of them had hit it off. Not all youngsters are pleased when a
divorced parent finds a new partner; Lloyd's own sister had broken up with her
boyfriend because her two young sons didn't care for the new man in her life. But
Tamiko had once told Lloyd that she liked him because he made her mother smile.
Lloyd looked at his fiancée. She was so sad, he wondered if he'd ever see her
smile again. He felt like crying himself, but there was something stupid and
masculine that wouldn't let him do that while she was also crying. He held it in.
Lloyd wondered what impact this was going to have on their upcoming marriage.
He had brought no other agenda to his proposal than simply that he loved Michiko,
totally and completely. And he did not doubt Michiko's love for him, but, nonetheless,
to some degree, there had to have been a secondary reason for Michiko to want to
marry him. No matter how modern and liberated a woman she was, and, by
Japanese standards at least, Michiko was very modern, she still had, in some
measure, to have been looking for a father for her child, someone who would have
helped her to bring up Tamiko, who would have provided a male presence in her life.
Had Michiko really been in the market for a husband? Oh, yes, she and Lloyd were
terrific together --but many couples were terrific together without marriage or any
long-term commitment. Would she still wish to marry him now?
And, of course, there was that other woman, the one in his vision, the proof, vivid
and full-blown ...
The proof that, just as his own parents' marriage had ended in divorce, so, too,
would the one he was supposed to enter with Michiko.
Day Two: Wednesday, April 22,2009
NEWS DIGEST
The death count keeps rising after yesterday's Flashforward
phenomenon. In Caracas, Venezuela, Guillermo Garmendia, 36,
apparently disconsolate over the death of his wife, Maria, 34, shot and
killed his two sons, Ramon, 7, and Salvador, 5, then turned the gun on
himself.
The government of Queensland, Australia, has declared a formal state
of emergency, following the Flashforward.
Bondplus Corporation of San Rafael, California, is in a great state of
turmoil. The chief executive officer, chief financial officer, and entire
board of directors perished when their corporate jet crashed on take-off
during the Flashforward. Bondplus was in the middle of defending itself
from a hostile takeover bid from arch-rival Jasmine Adhesives.
A one-billion-dollar (Canadian) class-action suit has been launched
against the Toronto Transit Commission, on behalf of transit riders injured
or killed during the Flashforward. The suit claims that the Commission
was negligent in not providing padded flooring at the bottom of staircases
and escalators to protect people in the event of a fall.
A massive sell-off of Japanese yen has precipitated yet another crisis in
the Japanese economy, following indications from the Flashforward that
the yen will be worth only half its current value against the U.S. dollar in
2030.
The race was on.
Theo had his head bent down, poring over the computer logs strewn across his
desk. There had to be an answer --a rational explanation for what had happened.
Throughout the CERN campus, physicists were investigating, exploring, and debating
possible explanations.
The door to Theo's office opened and Michiko Komura came in, some pieces of
paper held in her hand. "I hear you're looking for information about your own
murder," she said.
Theo felt his heart rate increasing. "Do you know something?"
"Me?" Michiko frowned. "No. No, sorry."
"Oh." A beat. "Then why bring it up?"
"Well, I was thinking, that's all. You can't be the only one desperate to know more
about his or her future."
"I guess."
"And, well, it seems to me there should be a central method for coordinating that.
I mean, I saw your newsgroup posting this morning --and it was hardly the only one
like that."
"Oh?"
"Their are tons of people looking for information about their futures. Not everyone
is looking for facts about their own deaths, of course, but --well, here, let me read
some of them to you."
She sat down and began to read from the pieces of paper. " 'Anyone with
information about the future whereabouts of Marcus Whyte, please contact ... '
'University student seeking career advice: if your vision indicated anything about
which jobs are in demand in 2030, please let me know.' 'Information sought about
the future of the International Committee of the Red Cross ... ' "
"Fascinating," said Theo. He knew what Michiko was doing: burying herself in
something --anything --rather than thinking about the loss of Tamiko.
"Isn't it, though?" she said. "And there are also a bunch of display ads on the Web
already --come-ons from big corporations, looking for information that might help
them. I didn't know you could get a banner ad placed so quickly, but I guess almost
anything's possible if you're willing to pay for it." She paused and looked away;
doubtless a thought of Tamiko had come to the front of her mind --some things,
unfortunately, were impossible at any price. After a moment, she went on. "In fact,
you know, you probably shouldn't go public with the info about your upcoming
murder. I was saying to Lloyd this morning that life-insurance companies are
probably already gathering details about anyone who is dead in the next twenty
years so that they can turn down policy applications."
Theo felt his stomach fluttering. He hadn't thought of that. "So you think someone
should coordinate all this?" he said.
"Well, not the corporate stuff --I wouldn't let my bosses at Sumitomo hear me
say this, but I don't care about which companies get rich. But the personal stuff -people
trying to figure out what their own futures hold, trying to make sense of their
visions. I think we should help them."
"You and me?"
"Well, not just us. All of CERN."
"Béranger will never go for that," said Theo, shaking his head. "He doesn't want
us to admit any involvement."
"We don't have to. We can just volunteer to coordinate a database. We've
certainly got the computing and, after all, CERN's got a history of altruistic
computing. The World Wide Web was created here, after all."
"So what do you propose?" asked Theo.
Michiko lifted her shoulders a bit. "A central repository. A Web site with a form:
describe your vision in, I don't know, maybe two hundred words. We could index all
the descriptions so that people could search them via keywords and Boolean
operators. You know, all visions that mention Aberdeen but not sporting events.
Stuff like that. Of course, the indexing program would automatically cross reference
hockey, baseboru, and so on, to general terms like 'sporting events.' Not only would
it help you, it would help a lot of other people."
Theo found himself nodding. "That makes sense. But why limit the length of the
entries? I mean, storage space is cheap. I'd encourage people to be as detailed in
their accounts as possible. After all, what's seemingly irrelevant to the person having
the vision might be vitally important to somebody else."
"Good point," said Michiko. "As long as Béranger's moratorium on using the LHC is
in effect, I've really got nothing much to do, so I'm willing to work on this. But I'll
need some help. Lloyd is useless when it comes to programming; I thought maybe
you could give me a hand." Lloyd and Theo's partnership had begun because Lloyd
needed someone with much more programming expertise than he had to encode his
physics ideas into experiments that could be run using ALICE.
Theo was already thinking of an angle. They could announce it with a press
release --that woman in public relations who had knocked herself out during her
vision could send it out to wherever such things went. But in the press release, they
could use Theo's own case as an example --it would be the perfect way of making
sure his problem got worldwide attention. "Sure," said Theo. "Sure thing."
After Michiko left, Theo turned back to his computer and checked his e-mail.
There were the usual things, including spam from some company in Mauritania. The
Mauritanian government had pulled off a remarkable coup: by being one of the few
nations not to ban spamming by domestic companies, they'd brought thousands of
businesses to their shores.
Theo clicked through the other messages. A note from a friend in Sorrento. A
request for a copy of a paper Theo had coauthored; for some researcher at MIT, at
least, it was back to business as usual. And --
Yes! More information about his murder.
It was from a woman in Montreal. She was French, but had been born in France,
not Canada, and so followed news from her homeland. CERN, of course, straddled
the Switzerland/France border, and although Geneva was the closest city, a murder
at the facility was as much a French story as a Swiss one.
Her vision had been of reading the write-up in Le Monde about Theo's murder.
The facts all matched what Kathleen DeVries had related --the first confirmation
Theo had actually had that the South African woman wasn't perpetrating a hoax. But
the words of the news report, as she relayed them, were quite different. It wasn't
just a translation of the one DeVries had seen; rather, it was a completely different
article. And it contained one salient fact that had been absent from the Johannesburg
account. According to this French woman, the name of the detective who would be
investigating Theo's murder was Helmut Drescher of the Geneva police.
The woman concluded her e-mail with, "Bonne chance!"
Bonne chance. Good luck. Yes, he'd certainly need a lot of that.
Theo knew the emergency number for the Geneva police off by heart: 1-1-7;
indeed, it was printed on a sticker attached to all of CERN's phones. But he had no
