Flashforward Page 7

  Theodosios Procopides, a native of Athens, working at CERN, will be murdered Monday, October 21, 2030. If your vision related to this crime, please contact procopides@cern.ch.

  He thought about leaving it at that, but then added a final line: “I am hoping to prevent my own death.”

  Theo could translate it into Greek and French himself; in theory, his computer could translate it into other languages for him, but if there was one thing that his time at CERN had taught him it was that computer translations were often inaccurate—he still remembered the horrible Christmas-banquet incident. No, he would enlist the aid of various people at CERN to help him—and also to advise him which newspapers were significant in which countries.

  But one thing he could do immediately: post his note to various newsgroups. He did that before going home to bed.

  Finally, at one in the morning, Lloyd and Michiko left CERN. Again, they abandoned her Toyota in the parking lot—it was hardly unusual for people at CERN to pull all-nighters.

  Michiko worked for Sumitomo Electric; she was an engineer specializing in superconducting-accelerator technology, on long-term assignment to CERN, which had bought several components for the LHC from Sumitomo. Her employer had provided her, and Tamiko, with a wonderful apartment on Geneva’s Right Bank. Lloyd was less well paid, and didn’t have a housing allowance; his apartment was in the town of St. Genis. He liked living in France while working mostly in Switzerland; CERN had its own special border crossing that allowed its staff to pass between the 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.

  7

  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?”

  “There 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 Montréal. 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 idea what the general-inquiry number was. He used the telephone keyboard on his phone, found the number, and dialed it.

  “Allo,” said Theo. “Détective Helmut Drescher, s’il vous plaît.”

  “We don’t have a detective by that name,” said the male cop at the other end of the phone.

  “He might have some other position. Something more junior.”

  “There’s no one here by that name at all,” said the voice.

  Theo considered. “Do you have a directory of other police departments in Switzerland? Is there any way to check?”

  “I don’t have anything like that here; we’d have to dig around a bit.”

  “Could you do that?”

  “What’s this all about?”

  Theo decided that honesty—or, at least, semi-honesty—was the best policy. “He’s investigating a murder, and I’ve got some information.”

  “All right; I’ll look into it. How can I reach you?”

  Theo left his name and number, thanked the officer, then hung up. He decided to try a more direct approach, tapping out Drescher’s name on the telephone keyboard.

  Pay dirt. There was only one Helmut Drescher in Geneva; he lived on Rue Jean-Dassier.

  Theo dialed the number.

  8

  NEWS DIGEST

  Striking hospital workers in Poland vot
ed unanimously to return to work today. “Our cause is just, and we will take labor action again—but for now, our duty to humanity must come first,” said Union leader Stefan Wyszynski.

  •

  Cineplex/Odeon, a large movie-theater chain, has announced free tickets for all patrons who were attending movies during the Flashforward. Although apparently the movies played on during the event, the audience lost consciousness, missing about two minutes of the action. Other theater chains are expected to follow suit.

  •

  After a record number of applications were filed in the last 24 hours, the United States Patent Office has closed until further notice, pending a decision from Congress on the patenting of inventions gleaned from the visions.

  •

  The Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal has issued a press release, pointing out that although we don’t yet have an explanation for the Flash-forward, there is no reason to invoke supernatural causes.

  •

  European Mutual, the largest insurance company in the European Union, has declared bankruptcy.

  It was time, sooner than they’d thought. The shock of yesterday had pushed Marie-Claire Béranger into labor. Gaston took his wife to the hospital in Thoiry; the Bérangers lived in Geneva, but it was important emotionally to them both that their son be born on French soil.

  As CERN’s Director-General, Gaston was well rewarded, and Marie-Claire, a lawyer, made a good income, too. Still, it was reassuring to know that regardless of their means, Marie-Claire would have gotten all the medical care she needed while she was expecting. Gaston had heard that in the United States many women see a doctor for the first time during their pregnancy on the day they give birth. It was no wonder that the U.S. had an infant-mortality rate many times higher than did Switzerland or France. No, they were going to give their son the best of everything. He knew it was a boy, and not just because of the vision. Marie-Claire was forty-two, and their doctor had recommended a series of sonograms during the pregnancy; they had quite clearly seen the little feller’s little feller.