Flashforward

by Robert J. Sawyer

  Lloyd looked at the clock sitting on one of the shelves mounted against the dark red walls of his apartment. It was 21h30—meaning it’d only be 1:30 in the afternoon at the Colorado/Utah border, where Dinosaur National Monument was located; Lloyd had been there himself once. He thought for a few minutes more, then picked up the phone, spoke to a directory-assistance operator, and finally to a woman who worked in the gift shop at Dinosaur Monument.

  “Hello,” he said. “I’m looking for a particular item—a paperweight made out of malachite.”

  “Malachite?”

  “It’s a green mineral—you know, an ornamental stone.”

  “Oh, yes, sure. The ones we’ve got have little dinos on them. We’ve got one with a T. rex, one with a Stegosaurus, and one with a Triceratops.”

  “How much is the Triceratops?”

  “Fourteen ninety-five.”

  “Do you do mail order?”

  “Sure.”

  “I’d like to buy one of those and send it to…” He stopped to think; where the heck was Duke? “To North Carolina.”

  “Okay. What’s the full address?”

  “I’m not sure. Just put ‘Professor Raymond Alexander, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina.’ I’m sure it’ll get there.”

  “UPS?”

  “That would be fine.”

  Keyclicks. “The shipping is eight-fifty. How’d you like to pay for it?”

  “On my Visa.”

  “Number, please?”

  He pulled out his wallet, and read the string of digits to her; he also gave her the expiration date and his name. And then he hung up the phone, settled back into the couch, and folded his arms across his chest, feeling quite satisfied.

  Dear Dr. Simcoe:

  Forgive me for bothering you with an unsolicited email; I hope this makes it through your spam filter. I know you must be inundated with letters ever since you went on TV, but I just had to write and let you know the impact my vision had on me.

  I’m eighteen years old, and I’m pregnant. I’m not very far along—only about two months. I hadn’t told my boyfriend yet, or my parents. I thought getting pregnant was the worst thing that could have possibly happened: I’m still in high school, and my boyfriend will start university in the fall. We both still live with our parents, and we have no money. There was no way, I thought, that we could bring a child into the world…and so I was going to have an abortion. I’d already made the appointment.

  And then I had my vision—and it was incredible! It was me, and Brad (that’s my boyfriend) and our daughter, and we were all together, living in a nice house, twenty-one years down the road. My daughter was all grown up—even a little older than I am now—and she was so beautiful and she was telling us about how she was seeing this guy at school, and could she bring him over for dinner one night, and she knew we’d just love him, and of course we said yes, because she was our daughter and it was important to her, and…

  Well, I’m babbling. The point is that my vision let me see that things were going to work out. I canceled the abortion, and Brad and I are looking for a small place to live together, and, to my surprise, my parents didn’t freak and they’re even going to help us a bit with expenses.

  I know a lot of people will be telling you how their visions ruined their lives. I just wanted you to know that it improved mine enormously, and that it actually saved the life of the little girl I’m carrying inside me now.

  Thank you…for everything.

  Jean Alcott

  Dr. Simcoe,

  You hear on the news about people who had fascinating visions. Not me. My vision had myself in the exact same house I live in today. I was all alone, which isn’t unusual—my kids are grown and my wife is often busy with her work. Indeed, although a few things looked different—furniture slightly rearranged, a new painting on one wall—there was nothing to give any real indication that this was the future.

  And you know what? I like that. I’m a happy man; I’ve got a good life. That I’m going to have another couple of decades of precisely the same life is a very soothing thought. This whole vision thing has turned a lot of people’s lives upside down, apparently—but not mine. I just wanted you to know that.

  Best wishes

  Tony DiCiccio

  POSTINGS TO THE

  MOSAIC PROJECT WEB SITE

  Brooklyn, New York: Okay, there was this American flag in my dream, right? And it had, I think, 52 stars: a row of 7, then a row of 6, then 7, then 6, like that, for a total of 52. Now, I’m figuring that the 51st star, that must be Puerto Rico, right? But it’s driving me crazy trying to guess what the 52nd might be. If you know, please e-mail…

  •

  Edmonton, Alberta: I am not smart. I have Down’s Syndrome, but I am a good person. In my vision, I was talking and using big words, so I must have been smart. I want to be smart again.

  •

  Indianapolis, Indiana: Please stop sending me email saying that I will be the President of the United States in 2030; it’s flooding my mailbox. I know I’ll be President—and when I come to power, I will have the IRS audit anyone who tells me again…

  •

  Islamabad, Pakistan (autotranslated from the original Arabic): In my vision, I have two arms—but today, I have only one (I am a veteran of the India-Pakistan ground war). It didn’t feel like a prosthesis in the vision. I’d be interested in hearing from anyone who has any information on artificial limbs or possibly even limb regeneration twenty-one years hence.

  •

  Changzhou, China (autotranslated from the original Mandarin): I am apparently dead in twenty-one years, which does not surprise me for I am mightily old now. But I would be interested in any news of the success of my children, grandchildren, or great grandchildren. Their names are…

  •

  Buenos Aires, Argentina: Almost everybody I’ve spoken to is celebrating a holiday or is off work during the Flashforward. Well, the third Wednesday in October isn’t a holiday anywhere I know of in South America, so I’m thinking maybe we’ve gone to a four-day workweek, with Wednesdays off. Me, I’d prefer a three-day weekend. Anybody know for sure?

  •

  Auckland, New Zealand: I know four of the winning numbers in the New Zealand Super Eight draw of October 19, 2030—in my vision, I was cashing a ticket that earned a $200 prize for matching those four numbers. If you know other winning numbers in the same lottery, I would like to pool my information with yours.

  •

  Geneva, Switzerland (posted in fourteen languages): Anybody with information about the murder of Theodosios (“Theo”) Procopides, please contact me at…

  14

  Day Six: Sunday, April 26, 2009

  LLOYD AND THEO WERE EATING LUNCH together in the large cafeteria at the LHC control center. Around them, other physicists were arguing theories and interpretations to account for the Flashforward—a promising lead related to a supposed failure of one of the quadrapole magnets had been torpedoed in the last hour. The magnet, it turned out, was operating just fine; it was the testing equipment that was faulty.

  Lloyd was having a salad; Theo a kebab he’d made the night before and had reheated in the microwave. “People seem to be dealing with things better than I would have thought,” said Lloyd. The windows looked out on the nucleus courtyard, where the spring flowers were in bloom. “All that death, all the destruction. But people are dusting themselves off, getting back to work, and getting on with their lives.”

  Theo nodded. “I heard a guy on the radio this morning. He was saying that there had turned out to be far less call for counseling services than people had predicted. In fact, a lot of people have been apparently canceling their previously scheduled therapy sessions since the Flashforward.”

  Lloyd lifted his eyebrows. “Why?”

  “He said it’s because of the catharsis.” Theo smiled. “I tell you, good old Aristotle knew exactly what he was talking about: you give people a chance to purge their emotions, and t
hey actually end up more healthy after it. So many people lost someone they cared about during the Flashforward; the outpouring of grief has been very good psychologically. The guy on the radio said something similar happened a dozen years ago when Princess Diana died; there was a huge reduction worldwide in the use of therapists for months following that. Naturally, the biggest catharsis was in England, but just after Di was killed, even twenty-seven percent of Americans felt as though they had lost someone they knew personally.” A pause.

  “Of course, you don’t get over the loss of a spouse or a child easily, but an uncle? A distant cousin? An actor you liked? One of your coworkers? It’s a big release.”

  “But if everyone’s going through it…”

  “That was his whole point,” said Theo. “See, normally, if you lose someone in an accident, you go to pieces, and it goes on for months or years…with everyone around you reinforcing your right to be sad. ‘Take some time,’ they say. Everyone provides emotional support for you. But if everyone else is dealing with a loss, too, there isn’t that crutch effect; there’s no one to say soothing words. You’ve got no choice but to get a grip and go back to work. It’s like those who live through a war—any war is much more devastating in gross terms than any isolated personal tragedy, but after a war is over, most people just go on with their lives. Everybody suffered the same; you have to just wall it off, forget about it, and go on. That’s what’s happening here, apparently.”

  “I don’t think Michiko will ever get over the loss of Tamiko.” Michiko would come home from Japan that evening.

  “No, no, of course not. Not in the sense that it’ll ever stop hurting. But she is going on with her life; what else can she do? There really is no other choice.”

  At that moment, Franco della Robbia, a middle-aged, bearded physicist, appeared at their table, holding a tray. “Mind if I join you?”

  Lloyd looked up. “Hi, Franco. Not at all.”

  Theo shuffled his chair to the right, and della Robbia sat down.

  “You’re wrong about Minkowski, you know,” said della Robbia, looking at Lloyd. “The visions can’t be of an actual future.”

  Lloyd took a forkful of salad. “Why not?”

  “Well, look: let’s take your premise. Twenty-one years from now, I will have a connection between my future self and my past self. That is, my past self will see exactly what my future self is doing. Now, my future self may not have any overt indication that the connection has begun, but that doesn’t matter; I’ll know to the second when the connection will start and end. I don’t know what your vision showed, Lloyd, but mine had me in what I think was Sorrento, sitting on a balcony, overlooking the Bay of Naples. Very nice, very pleasant—but not at all what I’d be doing on October 23, 2030, if I knew I was in contact with myself in the past. Rather, I’d be somewhere utterly free of anything that might divert my past self’s attention—an empty room, say, or simply staring at a blank wall. And at precisely 19h21 Greenwich Mean Time that day, I would start reciting out loud facts that I wanted my past self to know: ‘On March eleven, 2012, be careful crossing Via Colombo, lest you trip and break your leg;’ ‘In your time, stock in Bertelsmann is selling for forty-two euros a share, but by 2030, it’ll be six hundred and ninety euros a share, so buy lots now to pay for your retirement;’ ‘Here are the winners of the World Cup for every year between your time and mine.’ Like that; I would have it all written out on a piece of paper, and would just recite it, cramming as much useful information as possible into that one-minute-and-forty-three-second window.” The Italian physicist paused. “The fact that no one has reported a vision of doing anything like that means that what we saw couldn’t be the actual future of the timeline we’re currently in.”

  Lloyd frowned. “Maybe some people did do that. Really, the public only knows the content of a tiny percentage of the billions of visions that must have occurred. If I was going to give myself a stock tip, and I didn’t know that the future was immutable, the first thing I’d say to my past self was, ‘Don’t share this with anyone.’ Maybe those who did what you’re suggesting are simply keeping quiet about it.”

  “If a few dozen people had visions,” said della Robbia, “that might be possible. But with billions? Someone would have said that that was what they were doing. In fact, I firmly believe almost everyone would be trying to communicate with their past selves.”

  Lloyd looked at Theo, then back at della Robbia. “Not if they knew it was futile; not if they knew that nothing they said could change things that were already carved in stone.”

  “Or maybe everyone forgot,” said Theo. “Maybe, between now and 2030, the memory of the visions will fade. The memories of dreams fade, after all. You can recall one when you first wake up, but hours later, it’s gone completely. Maybe the visions will erase themselves over the next twenty-one years.”

  Della Robbia shook his head emphatically. “Even if that were the case—and there’s no reason at all to think it might be—all the media reporting about the visions would still survive until the year 2030. All the news reports, all the TV coverage, all the things people wrote about themselves in their own diaries and in letters to friends. Psychology isn’t my field; I won’t debate the fallible nature of memory. But people would know what’s happening on October 23, 2030, and many would be attempting to communicate with the past.”

  “Wait a minute,” said Theo. His eyebrows were high. “Wait a minute!” Lloyd and della Robbia turned to look at him. “Don’t you see? It’s Niven’s Law.”

  “What is?” said Lloyd.

  “Who’s Niven?” said della Robbia.

  “An American science-fiction writer. He said that in any universe in which time travel is a possibility, no time machine will ever be invented. He even wrote a little story to dramatize it: a scientist is building a time machine and just as he gets it finished, he looks up and sees the sun going nova—the universe is going to snuff him out, rather than allow the paradoxes inherent in time travel.”

  “So?” said Lloyd.

  “So communicating with yourself in the past is a form of time travel—it’s sending information back in time. And for those people who tried to do it, the universe might block the attempt—not by anything as grandiose as blowing up the sun, but simply by preventing the communication from working.” He shifted his gaze from Lloyd to della Robbia and back again. “Don’t you see? That must have been what I was trying to do in 2030—I’d been attempting to communicate with myself in the past, and so, instead, I simply ended up having no vision at all.”

  Lloyd tried to make his voice sound gentle. “There seems to be a lot of supporting evidence from other people’s visions that you really are dead in 2030, Theo.”

  Theo opened his mouth, as if to protest, but then he closed it. A moment later, he spoke again. “You’re right. You’re right. Sorry.”

  Lloyd nodded; he hadn’t really realized before just how hard all of this must be on Theo. He turned and looked at della Robbia. “Well, Franco, if the visions weren’t of our future, then what did they portray?”

  “An alternative timeline, of course. That’s completely reasonable, given MWI.” The many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics says that every time an event can go two ways, instead of one or the other way happening, both happen, each in a separate universe. “Specifically, the visions portray the universe that split from this universe at the moment of your LHC experiment; they show the future as it is in a universe in which the time-displacement effect did not occur.”

  But Lloyd was shaking his head. “You don’t still believe in MWI, do you? TI demolishes that.”

  A standard argument in favor of the many-worlds interpretation is the thought experiment of Schrödinger’s cat: put a cat in a sealed box with a vial of poison that has a fifty-fifty chance of being triggered during a one-hour period. At the end of the hour, open the box and see if the cat is still alive. Under the Copenhagen interpretation—the standard version of quantum mechanics—until
someone looks in, the cat is supposedly neither alive nor dead, but rather a superposition of both possible states; the act of looking in—of observing—collapses the wave function, forcing the cat to resolve itself into one of two possible outcomes. Except that, since the observation could go two ways, what MWI proponents say really happens is that the universe splits at the point at which the observation is made. One universe continues on with a dead cat; the other, with a living one.

  John G. Cramer, a physicist who had often done work at CERN, but was normally with the University of Washington, Seattle, disliked the Copenhagen interpretation’s emphasis on the observer. In the 1980s, he proposed an alternative explanation: TI, the transactional interpretation. During the nineties and aughts, TI had become increasingly popular amongst physicists.

  Consider Schrödinger’s hapless cat at the moment it is sealed in the box, and the observer’s eye, at the moment, an hour later, that it looks upon the cat. In TI, the cat sends out an actual, physical “offer” wave, which travels forward into the future and backward into the past. When the offer wave reaches the eye, the eye sends out a “confirmation” wave, which travels backward into the past and forward into the future. The offer wave and the confirmation wave cancel each other out everywhere in the universe except in the direct line between the cat and the eye, where they reinforce each other, producing a transaction. Since the cat and the eye have communicated across time, there is no ambiguity, and no need for collapsing wave fronts: the cat exists inside the box exactly as it will eventually be observed. There’s also no splitting of the universe into two; since the transaction covers the entire relevant period, there’s no need for branching: the eye sees the cat as it always was, either dead or alive.

  “You would like TI,” said della Robbia. “It demolishes free will. Every emitted photon knows what will eventually absorb it.”

  “Sure,” said Lloyd, “I admit that TI reinforces the block-universe concept—but it’s your many-worlds interpretation that really demolishes free will.”