Flashforward

by Robert J. Sawyer

  “I lost my wife during the—whatever you call it. The German press has been referring to it as Der Zwischenfall—‘the incident.’” He shook his head. “Seems a wholly inadequate name to me.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I’d been here at home when it happened. I don’t teach on Tuesdays.”

  “Teach?”

  “I’m an associate professor of chemistry. But my wife—she was killed on her way home from work.”

  “I am so sorry,” said Theo, sincerely.

  Rusch shrugged. “That doesn’t bring her back.”

  Theo nodded, conceding the point. He was glad, though, that Béranger had so far vetoed Lloyd going public with CERN’s involvement in the accident—he doubted Rusch would be talking to him at all if he knew of the relationship.

  “How did you find me?”

  “A tip—I’ve been getting a bunch of them. People seem intrigued by my…my quest. Someone emailed me saying you had told them that your vision involved watching a television news report about my death.”

  “Who?”

  “One of your neighbors. I don’t think it matters which one.” Theo hadn’t actually been sworn to secrecy, but it didn’t seem prudent to name his source, either. “Please,” he said, “I’ve come a long way, at considerable expense, to speak with you. There must be more that you can tell me than what you said on the phone.”

  Rusch seemed to soften a bit. “I guess. Look, I’m sorry. You have no idea how much I loved my wife.”

  Theo cast his eyes about the room. There was a photo on a low bookcase: Rusch, looking about ten years younger than his current mid-thirties, and a beautiful dark-haired woman. “Is that her?” Theo asked.

  Rusch looked as though his heart had skipped a beat—as though he thought Theo was pointing to his wife, in the flesh, miraculously made whole again. But then his eyes lighted on the picture. “Yes,” he said.

  “She’s very pretty.”

  “Thank you,” mumbled Rusch.

  Theo waited a few moments, then simply went on. “I’ve spoken to a few people who were reading newspaper or online articles about my—my murder, but you are the first I’ve found who actually saw something on TV. Please, what can you tell me about it?”

  Rusch finally indicated that Theo should sit down, which he did, near the picture of the late Frau Rusch. On the coffee table, there was bowl full of grapes—probably one of the new genetically engineered varieties that stayed succulent even without refrigeration.

  “There isn’t much to tell,” said Rusch. “Although there was one strange thing, now that I think about it. The news report wasn’t in German. Rather, it was in French. Not many French newscasts here in Germany.”

  “Were there call letters or a network logo?”

  “Oh, probably—but I didn’t pay any attention to them.”

  “The newscaster—did you recognize him?”

  “Her. No. She was efficient, though. Very crisp. But it’s no surprise I didn’t recognize her; she was certainly under thirty, meaning she’d be less than ten years old today.”

  “Did they superimpose her name? If I can find her today, her vision, of course, would be of her giving that newscast, and maybe she remembered something that you didn’t.”

  “I wasn’t watching the newscast live; it was recorded. My vision started with me fast-forwarding; I wasn’t using a remote, though. Rather, the player was responding to my voice. But it was skipping ahead. It wasn’t videotape; the sped-up image was absolutely smooth, with no snow or jerkiness.” He paused. “Anyway, as soon as a graphic came up behind her showing a picture of—well, it was of you, I guess, although you were older, of course—I stopped fast-forwarding, and began to watch. The words under the graphic said ‘Un Savant tué’—‘death of a scientist.’ I guess that title intrigued me, you know, being a scientist myself.”

  “And you watched the whole report?”

  “Yes.”

  A thought crossed Theo’s mind. If Rusch had watched the whole report, then it must have lasted less than two minutes. Of course, three minutes was an eternity on TV, but…

  But his whole life, dismissed in under one minute and forty-three seconds…

  “What did the reporter say?” asked Theo. “Anything you can remember will be a help.”

  “I honestly don’t recall much. My future self may have been intrigued, but, well, I guess I was panicking. I mean—what the hell was going on? I’d been sitting at the kitchen table, over there, drinking some coffee and reading some student papers, then suddenly everything changed. The last thing I was interested in was paying attention to the details of some news story about somebody I didn’t know.”

  “I understand that it must have been very disorienting,” said Theo, but having not had a vision himself he suspected he really didn’t understand. “Still, as I said, any details you could remember would be helpful.”

  “Well, the woman said you were a scientist—a physicist, I think. Is that right?”

  “Yes.”

  “And she said you were—you will be—forty-eight years old.”

  Theo nodded.

  “And she said you were shot.”

  “Did she say where?”

  “Ah, in the chest, I think.”

  “No, no. Where I was shot—what place?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “Was it at CERN?”

  “She said you worked at CERN, but—but I don’t recall her saying that was where you were killed. I’m sorry.”

  “Did she mention a sports arena? A boxing match?”

  Rusch looked surprised by the question. “No.”

  “Do you remember anything else?”

  “I’m sorry, no.”

  “What was the story that came on after the one about me?” He didn’t know why he asked that—maybe to see where he had fitted into the pecking order.

  “I’m sorry, I don’t know. I didn’t watch the rest of the newscast. When the piece on you was finished, a commercial came on—for a company that lets you create designer babies. That did fascinate me—the 2009 me—but my 2030 self seemed to have no interest in it. He just turned off the—well, it wasn’t really a TV, of course; it was a hanging flatscreen thing. But he just turned it off—he said the word ‘Off’ to it, and it went dark, just like that; no fading out. And then he—me—we turned around and—I guess I was in a hotel room; there were two large beds in it. I went and lay down on one of the beds, fully clothed. And I spent the rest of the time just staring at the ceiling, until my vision ended and I was back at the kitchen table.” He paused. “I had a nasty bump on my forehead, of course; I’d smashed it into the tabletop when the vision began. And I’d spilled hot coffee on my hand, too; I must have knocked over my mug when I pitched forward. I was lucky that I wasn’t seriously burnt. It took me a while to collect my wits, and then I found out that everyone in the building had also had some sort of hallucination. And then I tried to call my wife, only to find out that…that…” He swallowed hard. “It took them a while to find her, or, at least, to contact me. She’d been walking up a steep flight of stairs, coming out of the subway. She’d almost made it to the top, according to others who saw her, and then she’d blacked out, and fallen backwards, down sixty or seventy steps. The fall broke her neck.”

  “My God,” said Theo. “I’m sorry.”

  Rusch nodded this time, simply accepting the comment.

  There was nothing else to be said between them, and, besides, Theo had to get back to the airport; he didn’t want to run up the cost of a hotel room in Berlin.

  “Many thanks for your time,” said Theo. He reached into his pocket and pulled out his business-card case. “If you recall anything else that you think might be helpful, I’d really appreciate it if you’d give me a call or drop me an email.” He handed Rusch a card.

  The man took it, but didn’t look at it. Theo left.

  Lloyd went back to Gaston Béranger’s office the next day. This time the journey took e
ven longer: he was waylaid by a unified-field-theory group on their way over to the Computer Center. When he at last made it to Béranger’s office, Lloyd began, “I’m sorry, Gaston, you can try to oust me if you want, but I’m going to go public.”

  “I thought I was clear—”

  “We have to go public. Look, I just got through speaking to Theo. Did you know he went to Germany yesterday?”

  “I can’t keep track of the comings and goings of three thousand employees.”

  “He went to Germany—on a moment’s notice, and he got a cheap fare. Why? Because people are afraid to fly. The whole world is still paralyzed, Gaston. Everyone is afraid that the time displacement is going to happen again. Check the newspapers or the TV, if you don’t believe me; I just did myself. They’re avoiding sports, driving when only absolutely necessary, and not flying. It’s as if—it’s as if they’re waiting for the other shoe to drop.” Lloyd thought again about the announcement that his father was leaving. “But it isn’t going to happen, isn’t it? So long as we don’t replicate what we were doing here, there’s no way in which the time-displacement will repeat. We can’t leave the world hanging. We’ve done enough damage already. We can’t let people be afraid to get on with their lives, to go back—as much as possible—to the way things were before.”

  Béranger seemed to be considering this.

  “Come on, Gaston. Someone is going to leak it soon enough anyway.”

  Béranger exhaled. “I know that. You think I don’t know that? I don’t want to be obstructionist here. But we do need to think about the consequences—the legal ramifications.”

  “Surely it’s better if we come forward of our own volition, rather than waiting for someone to blow the whistle on us.”

  Béranger looked at the ceiling for a time. “I know you don’t like me,” he said, without meeting Lloyd’s eyes. Lloyd opened his mouth to protest, but Béranger raised a hand. “Don’t bother denying it. We’ve never gotten along; we’ve never been friends. Part of that is natural, of course—you see it in every lab in the world. Scientists who think the administrators exist to stymie their work. Administrators who act as though the scientists are an inconvenience instead of the heart and soul of the place. But it goes beyond that, doesn’t it? No matter what our jobs were, you wouldn’t like me. I’d never stopped to think about stuff like that before. I always knew some people didn’t like me and never would, but I never figured it might be my fault.” He paused, then shrugged a little. “But maybe it is. I never told you what my vision showed…and I’m not about to tell you now. But it got me thinking. Maybe I have been fighting you too much. You think we should go public? Christ, I don’t know if that’s the right thing to do or not. I don’t know that not going public is the right thing, either.”

  He paused. “We’ve come up with a parallel, by the way—something to toss the press if it does leak out, an analogy to demonstrate why we aren’t culpable.”

  Lloyd raised his eyebrows.

  “The Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse,” said Béranger.

  Lloyd nodded. Early on November 7, 1940, the pavement on the Tacoma Narrows suspension bridge in Washington state began to ripple. Soon the whole bridge was oscillating up and down, massively heaving, until, at last, it collapsed. Every high-school physics student in the world had seen film of this, and for decades they were given the best-guess explanation: that perhaps the wind had generated a natural resonance with the bridge, causing it to undulate in waves.

  Surely the bridge-builders should have foreseen that, people had said at the time; after all, resonance was as old as tuning forks. But the resonance explanation was wrong; resonance requires great precision—if it didn’t, every singer could shatter a wine glass—and random winds almost certainly couldn’t produce it. No, it was shown in 1990 that the Tacoma Narrows Bridge had collapsed due to the fundamental nonlinearity of suspension bridges, an outgrowth of chaos theory—a branch of science that hadn’t even existed when the bridge was built. The engineers who had designed it hadn’t been culpable; there was no way with the knowledge then available that they could have predicted or prevented the collapse.

  “If it had just been visions,” said Béranger, “you know, we wouldn’t need to cover our asses; I suspect most people would thank you. But there were all those car accidents and people falling off ladders, and so on. Are you prepared to take the blame? Because it won’t be me that takes the fall, and it won’t be CERN. When it comes right down to it, no matter how much we talk about Tacoma Narrows and unforeseen consequences, people will still want a specific human scapegoat, and you know that’s going to be you, Lloyd. It was your experiment.”

  The Director-General stopped talking. Lloyd considered all this for a time, then said, “I can handle it.”

  Béranger nodded once. “Bien. We’ll call a press conference.” He looked out his window. “I guess it is time we came clean.”

  BOOK II

  SPRING 2009

  Free will is an illusion.

  It is synonymous with incomplete perception.

  —Walter Kubilius

  12

  Day Five: Saturday, April 25, 2009

  THE ADMINISTRATIVE BUILDING AT CERN had all sorts of seminar halls and meeting spaces. For the press conference, they were using a lecture hall with two hundred seats—every one of which was filled. All the PR people had needed to do was tell the media that CERN was about to make a major announcement about the cause of the time displacement, and reporters arrived from all over Europe, plus one from Japan, one from Canada, and six from the United States.

  Béranger was being true to his word: he was letting Lloyd take center stage; if there were to be a scapegoat, it was going to be him. Lloyd walked up to the lectern and cleared his throat. “Hello, everyone,” he said. “My name is Lloyd Simcoe.” He’d been coached by one of CERN’s PR people to spell it out, and so he did just that: “That’s S-I-M-C-O-E, and ‘Lloyd’ begins with a double-L.” The reporters would all receive DVDs with Lloyd’s comments and bio on them, but many would be filing stories immediately, without a chance to consult the press kits. Lloyd went on. “My specialty is quark-gluon plasma studies. I’m a Canadian citizen, but I worked for many years in the United States at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. And for the last two years, I’ve been here at CERN, developing a major experiment for the Large Hadron Collider.”

  He paused; he was buying time, trying to get his stomach to calm down. It wasn’t that he had a fear of public speaking; he’d spent too long as a university professor for any of that to remain. But he had no way of knowing what the reaction would be to what he was about to say.

  “This is my associate, Dr. Theodosios Procopides,” continued Lloyd.

  Theo half-rose from his chair, next to the lectern. “Theo,” he said, with a little smile at the crowd. “Call me Theo.”

  One big happy family, thought Lloyd. He spelled Theo’s first and last names slowly for the reporters, then took a deep breath and pressed on. “We were conducting an experiment here on April 21, at precisely 1600 hours Greenwich Mean Time.”

  He paused again and looked from face to face. It didn’t take long for it to sink in. Journalists immediately started shouting questions, and Lloyd’s eyes were assaulted by camera flashes. He raised his hands, palms out, waiting for the reporters to be quiet.

  “Yes,” he said, “yes, I suspect you’re right. We have reason to believe that the time-displacement phenomenon had to do with the work we were doing here with the Large Hadron Collider.”

  “How can that be?” asked Klee, a stringer for CNN.

  “Are you sure?” called out Jonas, a correspondent for the BBC.

  “Why didn’t you come forward before this?” called the Reuters reporter.

  “I’ll take that last question first,” said Lloyd. “Or, more precisely, I’ll let Dr. Procopides take it.”

  “Thanks,” said Theo, standing now and moving to the mike. “The, ah, reason we did not come forwar
d earlier is that we didn’t have a theoretical model to explain what happened.” He paused. “Frankly, we still don’t; it has, after all, only been four days since the Flashforward. But the fact is we engineered the highest-energy particle collision in the history of this planet, and it occurred precisely—to the very second—at the moment the phenomenon began. We can’t ignore that a causal relationship might exist.”

  “How sure are you that the two things are linked?” asked a woman from the Tribune de Genève.

  Theo shrugged. “We can’t think of anything in our experiment that could have caused the Flashforward. Then again, we can’t think of anything else other than our experiment that could have caused it, either. It just seems that our work is the most likely candidate.”

  Lloyd looked over at Dr. Béranger, whose hawklike face was impassive. When they’d rehearsed this press conference, Theo had originally said “the most likely culprit,” and Béranger had sworn a blue streak at the word choice. But it turned out to make no difference. “So are you admitting responsibility?” asked Klee. “Admitting all the deaths were your fault?”

  Lloyd felt his stomach knot, and he could see Béranger’s face crease into a frown. The Director-General looked like he was ready to step in and take over the press conference.

  “We admit that our experiment seems the most likely cause,” said Lloyd, moving over to stand next to Theo. “But we contend that there was no way—absolutely none—to predict anything remotely like what happened as a consequence of what we did. This was utterly unforeseen—and unforeseeable. It was, quite simply, what the insurance industry calls an act of God.”

  “But all the deaths—” shouted one reporter.

  “All the property damage—” shouted another.

  Lloyd raised his hands again. “Yes, we know. Believe me, our hearts go out to every person who was hurt or who lost someone they cared about. A little girl very dear to me died when a car spun out of control; I would give anything to have her back. But it could not have been prevented—”