Flashforward

by Robert J. Sawyer

  The view changed to show Sydney with the white sails of the Opera House in the background, lit up against a dark sky. A male reporter was standing in the center of the shot. “Bernie, it’s just after four A.M. here in Sydney. There’s no one image I can show you to convey what’s happened down here. Reports are only slowly coming in as people realize that what they experienced was not an isolated phenomenon. The tragedies are many: we have word from a downtown hospital of a woman who died during emergency surgery when everyone in the operating theater simply stopped working for several minutes. But we also had a story of an all-night convenience-store robbery thwarted when all parties—including the robber—collapsed simultaneously at 2:00 A.M. local time. The robber was knocked unconscious, apparently, as he struck the floor, and a patron who woke up before he did was able to get his gun. We still have no good idea what the death count is here in Sydney, let alone the rest of Australia.”

  “Paul, what about the hallucinations? Are those being reported down under, as well?”

  A pause while Shaw’s question bounced off satellites from Atlanta to Australia. “Bernie, people are buzzing about that, yes. We don’t know what percentage of the population experienced hallucinations, but it seems to be a lot. I myself had quite a vivid one.”

  “Thanks, Paul.” The graphic behind Shaw changed to the American Presidential seal. “President Boulton will address the nation in fifteen minutes, we’re told. Of course, CNN will bring you live coverage of his remarks. Meanwhile, we have a report now from Islamabad, Pakistan. Yusef, are you there—?”

  “See,” said Jake, sotto voce. “It had nothing to do with CERN.”

  Theo felt simultaneously shocked and relieved. Something had affected the entire planet; surely their experiment couldn’t have done that.

  And yet—

  And yet, if it hadn’t been related to the LHC experiment, then what could have caused it? Was Shaw right—was it some sort of terrorist weapon? It had only been a little over two hours since the phenomenon. The CNN team was showing amazing professionalism; Theo was still struggling to get his own equilibrium back.

  Shut off the consciousness of the entire human race for two minutes, and what would the death toll be?

  How many cars had collided?

  How many planes had crashed? How many hang-gliders? How many parachutists had blacked out, failing to pull their ripcords?

  How many operations had gone bad? How many births had gone bad?

  How many people had fallen from ladders, fallen down stairs?

  Of course, most airplanes would fly just fine for a minute or two without pilot intervention, as long as they actually weren’t taking off or landing. On uncrowded roads, cars might even manage just to roll safely to a stop.

  But still…still…

  “The surprising thing,” said Bernard Shaw, on the TV, “is that as near as we can tell, the consciousness of the human race shut off at precisely noon Eastern Time. At first it seemed that the various times were not all exactly the same, but we’ve been checking the clocks of those who’ve reported in against our own clocks here at CNN Center in Atlanta, which, of course, are set against the time signal from the National Institute for Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colorado. Adjusting for slightly incorrect settings that other people had, we find that the phenomenon occurred to the second at 12:00 noon Eastern, and—”

  To the second, thought Theo.

  To the second.

  Jesus Christ.

  CERN, of course, used an atomic clock. And the experiment was programmed to begin at precisely 17h00 Geneva time, which is—

  —is noon in Atlanta.

  “As he has been for the last two hours, we have astronomer Donald Poort of Georgia Tech with us,” said Shaw. “He was to be a guest on CNN This Morning, and we’re fortunate that he was already here in the studio. Dr. Poort looks a little pale; please forgive that. We rushed him onto the air before he had a chance to go through makeup. Dr. Poort, thank you for agreeing to join us.”

  Poort was a man in his early fifties, with a thin, pinched face. He did indeed look pallid under the studio lights—as though he hadn’t seen the sun since the Clinton administration. “Thanks, Bernie.”

  “Tell us again what happened, Dr. Poort.”

  “Well, as you observed, the phenomenon occurred precisely to the second at noon. Of course, there are thirty-six hundred seconds in every hour, so the chances of a random event occurring precisely at the top of the clock—to use a phrase you broadcasters like—are one in thirty-six hundred. In other words, vanishingly small. Which leads me to suspect that we are dealing with a human-caused event, something that was scheduled to occur. But as to what could have caused it, I have no idea…”

  Damn it, thought Theo. God damn it. It had to be the LHC experiment; it couldn’t be a coincidence that the highest-energy particle collision in the history of the planet happened at precisely the same moment as the onset of the phenomenon.

  No. No, that wasn’t being honest. It wasn’t a phenomenon; it was a disaster—possibly the biggest one in the history of the human race.

  And he, Theo Procopides, had somehow caused it.

  Gaston Béranger, CERN’s Director-General, came into the lounge at that moment. “There you are!” he said, as if Theo had been missing for weeks.

  Theo exchanged a nervous glance with Jake, then turned to the Director-General. “Hi, Dr. Béranger.”

  “What the hell have you done?” demanded Béranger in angry French. “And where’s Simcoe?”

  “Lloyd and Michiko went off to get Michiko’s daughter—she’s at the Ducommun School.”

  “What happened?” demanded Béranger again.

  Theo spread his hands. “I have no idea. I can’t imagine what could have caused it.”

  “The—the whatever it was occurred at precisely the scheduled time for your LHC experiment to begin,” said Béranger.

  Theo nodded, and jerked a thumb at the TV. “So Bernard Shaw was saying.”

  “It’s on CNN!” wailed the French man, as if all were now lost. “How did they find out about your experiment?”

  “Shaw didn’t mention anything about CERN. He just—”

  “Thank God! Look, you’re not to say anything to anyone about what you were doing, understand?”

  “But—”

  “Not a word. The damage is doubtless in the billions, if not the trillions. Our insurance won’t cover more than a tiny fraction of it.”

  Theo didn’t know Béranger well, but all science administrators worldwide were doubtless cut from the same cloth. And hearing Béranger go on about culpability brought it all into perspective for the young Greek. “Dammit, there was no way we could have known this would happen. There’s no expert anywhere who could claim that this was a foreseeable consequence of our experiment. But something has occurred that has never been experienced before, and we’re the only ones who have even a clue as to what caused it. We’ve got to investigate this.”

  “Of course we’ll investigate,” said Béranger. “I’ve already got more than forty engineers down in the tunnel. But we’ve got to be careful, and not just for CERN’s sake. You think there aren’t going to be lawsuits launched individually and collectively against every single member of your project team? No matter how unpredictable this outcome was, there’ll be those who will say it was a result of gross criminal negligence, and we should be personally held accountable.”

  “Personal lawsuits?”

  “That’s right.” Béranger raised his voice. “Everyone! Everyone, your attention please.”

  Faces turned toward him.

  “This is how we’re going to handle this issue,” he said to the group. “There will be no mention of CERN’s possible involvement to anyone outside the facility. If anyone gets email or phone calls asking about the LHC experiment that was supposed to be performed today, reply that its scheduled running had been delayed until seventeen-thirty, because of a computer glitch, and that, in the afterm
ath of whatever it was that happened, it didn’t get run at all today. Is that clear? Also, absolutely no communication with the press; it all goes through the media office, understand? And for God’s sake, no one activates the LHC again without written authorization from me. Is that clear?”

  There were nods.

  “We’ll get through this people,” said Béranger. “I promise you that. But we’re going to have to work together.” He lowered his voice and turned back to Theo. “I want hourly reports on what you’ve learned.” He turned to go.

  “Wait,” said Theo. “Can you assign one of the secretaries to watch CNN? Somebody should be monitoring this stuff in case anything important comes up.”

  “Give me a little credit,” said Béranger. “I’ll have people monitor not just CNN, but the BBC World Service, the French all-news channel, CBC Newsworld, and anything else we can pull off a satellite; we’ll save it all on tape. I want an exact record of what’s reported as it happens; I don’t want anyone inflating damage claims later.”

  “I’m more interested in clues as to what caused the phenomenon,” said Theo.

  “We’ll look for that, too, of course,” said Béranger. “Remember, update me every hour, on the hour.”

  Theo nodded, and Béranger left. Theo took a second to rub his temples. Damn, but he wished Lloyd were here. “Well,” he said at last, to Jake, “I guess we should start a complete diagnostic on every system here in the control center; we need to know if anything malfunctioned. And let’s get a group together and see what we can make of the hallucinations.”

  “I can round some people up,” said Jake.

  Theo nodded. “Good. We’ll use the big conference room on the second floor.”

  “Okay,” said Jake. “I’ll meet you there as soon as I can.”

  Theo nodded, and Jake left. He knew he should spring into action, too, but for a moment he just stood there, still stunned by it all.

  Michiko managed to pull herself together enough to try to call Tamiko’s father in Tokyo—even though it was not yet 4:00 A.M. there—but the phone lines were jammed. It wasn’t the sort of message one wanted to send by email, but, well, if any international communications system was still up and running, it would be the Internet, that child of the Cold War designed to be completely decentralized so that no matter how many of its nodes had been taken out by enemy bombs, messages would still get through. She used one of the school’s computers and dashed off a note in English—she had a kanji keyboard in her apartment, but none was available here. Lloyd had to actually issue the commands to send the message, though: Michiko broke down again as she was trying to click the appropriate button.

  Lloyd didn’t know what to say or do. Ordinarily, the death of a child was the biggest crisis a parent could face, but, well, Michiko was surely not the only one going through such a tragedy today. There was so much death, so much injury, so much destruction. The background of horror didn’t make the loss of Tamiko one whit easier to bear, of course, but—

  —but there were things that had to be done. Perhaps Lloyd never should have left CERN; it was, after all, his and Theo’s experiment that had likely caused all this. Doubtless he’d accompanied Michiko not just out of love for her and concern for Tamiko but also because, at least in part, he’d wanted to run away from whatever had gone wrong.

  But now—

  Now they had to return to CERN. If anyone was going to figure out what had happened—not just here but, as the radio reports and comments from other parents he’d overheard indicated, all over the world—it would be the people at CERN. They couldn’t wait for an ambulance to come to take the body—it might be hours or days. Surely the law was that they couldn’t move the body, either, until the police had looked at it, although it seemed highly unlikely that the driver could be held culpable.

  At last, though, Madame Severin returned, and she volunteered that she and her staff would look after Tamiko’s remains until the police came.

  Michiko’s face was puffy and red, and her eyes were bloodshot. She’d cried so much that there was nothing left, but every few minutes her body heaved as if she were still sobbing.

  Lloyd loved little Tamiko, too—she would have been his stepdaughter. He’d spent so much time comforting Michiko that he hadn’t really had a chance to cry himself yet; that would come, he knew—but for now, for right now, he had to be strong. He used his index finger to gently lift Michiko’s chin. He was all set with the words—duty, responsibility, work to be done, we have to go—but Michiko was strong in her own way, too, and wise, and wonderful, and he loved her to her very soul, and the words didn’t need to be said. She managed a small nod, her lips trembling. “I know,” she said in English, in a tiny, raw voice. “I know we have to head back to CERN.”

  He helped her as she walked, one arm around her waist, the other propping her up by the elbow. The keening of sirens had never stopped—ambulances, fire trucks, police cars, warbling and wailing and Doppler shifting, a constant background since just after the phenomenon had occurred. They made their way back to Lloyd’s car through the dim evening light—many of the streetlamps were out of commission—and drove along the debris-littered streets to CERN, Michiko hugging herself the whole time.

  As they drove, Lloyd thought for a moment about an event his mother had once told him about. He’d been a toddler, too young to remember it himself: the night the lights went out, the great power failure in Eastern North American in 1965. The electricity had been off for hours. His mother had been home alone with him that night; she said everybody who had lived through that incredible blackout would remember for the rest of their lives exactly where they were when the power had failed.

  This would be like that. Everyone would remember where they’d been when this blackout—a blackout of a different sort—had occurred.

  Everyone who had lived through it, that is.

  4

  BY THE TIME LLOYD AND MICHIKO RETURNED, Jake and Theo had gathered a group of LHC workers together in a conference room on the second floor of the control center.

  Most of CERN’s staff lived either in the Swiss town of Meyrin (which bordered the east end of the CERN campus), a dozen kilometers farther along in Geneva, or in the French towns of St. Genis or Thoiry, northwest of CERN. But they had come from all over Europe, as well as the rest of the world. The dozen faces now staring at Lloyd were widely varied. Michiko had joined the circle, too, but was detached, her eyes glazed. She simply sat in a chair, rocking slowly back and forth.

  Lloyd, as project leader, led the debriefing. He looked from person to person. “Theo told me what CNN’s been saying. I guess it’s pretty clear that there were a variety of hallucinations worldwide.” He took a deep breath. Focus, purpose—that’s what he needed now. “Let’s see if we can get a handle on exactly what happened. Can we go around the circle? Don’t go into any detail; just give us a single sentence about what you saw. If you don’t mind, I’ll take notes, okay? Olaf, can we start with you?”

  “Sure, I guess,” said a muscular blond man. “I was at my parents’ vacation home. They’ve got a chalet near Sundsvall.”

  “In other words,” said Lloyd, “it was a place you’re familiar with?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “And how accurate was the vision?”

  “Very accurate. It was exactly as I remembered it.”

  “Was there anyone else besides yourself in the vision?”

  “No—which was kind of strange. The only reason I go there is to visit my parents, and they weren’t there.”

  Lloyd thought of the wizened version of himself he’d seen in the mirror. “Did you—did you see yourself?”

  “In a mirror or something, you mean? No.”

  “Okay,” said Lloyd. “Thanks.”

  The woman next to Olaf was middle-aged and black. Lloyd felt awkward; he knew he should know her name, but he didn’t. Finally, he simply smiled and said, “Next.”

  “It was downtown Nairobi, I think,” said
the woman. “At night. It was a warm evening. I thought it was Dinesen Street, but it looked too built-up for that. And there was a McDonald’s there.”

  “Don’t they have McDonald’s in Kenya?” asked Lloyd.

  “Sure, but—I mean, the sign said it was McDonald’s, but the logo was wrong. You know, instead of the golden arches they had this big M that was all straight lines—very modern looking.”

  “So Olaf’s vision was of a place he’d often been to, but yours was of somewhere you’d never been before, or at least of something you’d never seen before?”

  The woman nodded. “I guess that’s right.”

  Michiko was four places away around the circle. Lloyd couldn’t tell if she was absorbing any of this or not.

  “What about you, Franco?” asked Lloyd.

  Franco della Robbia shrugged. “It was Rome, at night. But—I don’t know—it must have been some video game, really. Some VR thing.”

  Lloyd leaned forward. “Why do you say that?”

  “Well, it was Rome, all right. Right by the Coliseum. And I was driving a car—except I wasn’t driving, not exactly. The car seemed to be working of its own volition. And I couldn’t tell for sure about the one I was in, but a lot of the cars were hovering maybe twenty centimeters off the ground.” He shrugged. “Like I said, a simulation of some sort.”

  Sven and Antonia, who had both spoken of flying cars earlier in the day, were nodding vigorously. “I saw the same thing,” said Sven. “Well, not Rome—but I did see floating cars.”

  “Me, too,” said Antonia.

  “Fascinating,” said Lloyd. He turned to his young grad student, Jacob Horowitz. “Jake, what did you see?”

  Jake’s voice was thin, reedy. He ran freckled fingers nervously through his red hair. “The room was pretty nondescript. A lab somewhere. Yellow walls. There was a periodic table on one of the walls, though, and it was labeled in English. And Carly Tompkins was there.”