At the nursing home, Morrow waited just outside the door to Mrs. Oehlsen’s room while she talked to her paraself. Now they were using video for their conversations instead of text; she knew she didn’t have long left, so there was no point in conserving the prism’s pad for later. This made things difficult for the parallel Mrs. Oehlsen, though, who was now actually watching a version of herself die. Their conversation was strained—Morrow had left a microphone in the room so he could listen to them through an earpiece—although the dying Mrs. Oehlsen didn’t seem to notice.
When they were done, Mrs. Oehlsen raised her voice slightly to tell Morrow to come back in. “How did your conversation go?” he asked.
“Fine,” she said. Her breathing was labored. “If there’s one person you can talk to without pretense, it’s your own self.”
Morrow lifted the prism from the overbed table and repacked it into the carton. “Mrs. Oehlsen, if you don’t mind, I’d like to suggest something.”
“Go ahead.”
“You’ve said you don’t know anyone who really deserves your money. If you really feel that way, maybe you ought to give the money to your paraself.”
“You can do that?”
Confidence was the key to selling any lie. “Money is just another form of information,” he said. “We can transmit it through a prism the same way that we transmit audio or video information.”
“Hmm, that’s an interesting idea. I know she’d put it to better use than my son would.” Her face puckered slightly as she thought about him. “How would I go about that? Would I ask my lawyer to adjust my will?”
“You could, but it will take some time before your estate is settled, and you might want to transfer the money sooner rather than later.”
“Why is that?”
“There’s a new law that goes into effect next month.” He pulled out his phone and showed her an article he had dummied up. “The government wants to discourage people from moving money out of this timeline, so they’re imposing a fifty-percent tax on fund transfers to other timelines. If you send the money before the law goes into effect, you can avoid that tax.” He could see from her expression that the idea appealed to her. “SelfTalk could handle it for you right away.”
“Make the arrangements,” she said. “We’ll do it when you visit next week.”
“I’ll have everything ready,” said Morrow.
When he got back to SelfTalk, Morrow used the prism to send a message to his parallel self, asking him to play along. The two of them would tell the parallel Mrs. Oehlsen that this one was becoming delusional from the pain medication, believing that she had sent money across the prism, and it would be better to humor her in her remaining days. That would probably suffice, but if necessary, they could always put an end to the video conversations altogether by saying that another client had unexpectedly exhausted the prism’s pad.
Once that was done, Morrow began setting up the dummy account to receive the funds. He wasn’t expecting a fortune from this; Mrs. Oehlsen presumably had some money saved, but she wasn’t wealthy. The big score would come, if they were lucky, from Nat’s support group.
As part of his job for SelfTalk, Morrow maintained a list of support groups for people struggling with their prisms. He knew some people in those groups would wind up selling their prisms, so he’d regularly go to the churches and community centers where those groups met and put up flyers: WE’LL BUY YOUR PRISM; TOP DOLLAR PAID. Three months ago Morrow had been stapling a flyer to a bulletin board when a couple of support-group members were standing nearby, cups of coffee in their hand, chatting before the room opened up. Morrow could hear them talking.
“Do you ever wonder if you ruined someone else’s life by activating your prism?”
“What do you mean?”
“Like, maybe someone might die in a car crash in the other branch but not in this one, and all because you activated the prism.”
“Now that you mention it, you remember that car crash in Hollywood a few months back? In my paraself’s branch, Scott died in that crash instead of Roderick.”
“That’s exactly the sort of thing I mean. You activating the prism had a huge impact on someone else’s life. Do you ever think about that?”
“Not really. Maybe I’m too self-absorbed, but I’m usually thinking about my own life.”
The guy had been talking about a celebrity couple, pop singer Scott Otsuka and movie star Roderick Ferris. They’d been en route to a movie premiere when their limousine had been hit by a drunk driver; Roderick had been killed, and Scott was left a grieving widower. But this guy’s prism connected to a branch where Scott had been the one who was killed and Roderick was the survivor.
That prism could be worth a lot of money, but Morrow couldn’t just go up to him and offer to buy it. So he had sent Nat into the group to pretend she was someone wanting to kick her prism habit. The guy’s name was Lyle, and her job was to make friends with him. Nothing sexual—Morrow knew better than to ask her to do that—just a support-group buddy, someone he liked and trusted. That way she could gently nudge him in the direction of giving up his prism. And when he was ready, Nat would tell him she was ready to get rid of hers, too, and she knew someone who was paying good prices for used prisms, so how about the two of them sell theirs together? And then she’d bring Lyle to SelfTalk, where Morrow would buy both of their prisms.
Then Morrow would arrange a visit with Scott Otsuka and offer to sell him a prism that let him talk with his dead husband.
No prism would ever allow communication to a branch that had split off prior to its moment of activation, so there’d be no reports from branches where Kennedy hadn’t been assassinated or where the Mongols had invaded western Europe. By the same token, there were no fortunes to be made by patenting inventions gleaned from branches where technological progress had taken a different route. If there were going to be any practical benefits gained from using a prism, they would have to derive from subsequent divergences, not earlier ones.
Occasionally, random variations made it possible to avert an accident: once, when a passenger plane crashed, the FAA notified its counterpart in another branch, which was able to ground its version of the plane and perform a closer inspection, identifying a component in the hydraulic system that was on the verge of failing. But there was nothing to be done about accidents caused by human error, which were different in every branch. Nor was it possible to send advance notice of natural disasters: a hurricane in one said nothing about the likelihood of a hurricane in another, while earthquakes happened simultaneously in every branch, so no early warning was possible.
An army general purchased a prism because he thought he’d be able to use a branch as a supremely realistic military simulation: he intended to have his parallel self make an aggressive move in the other branch so they could see what the response was. He discovered the flaw in this plan as soon as he communicated with his parallel self, who intended to use him in exactly the same way. Every branch was of paramount importance to its inhabitants; no one was willing to act as a guinea pig for anyone else.
What prisms did offer was a way to study the mechanisms of historical change. Researchers began comparing news headlines across branches, looking for discrepancies and then investigating their causes. In some cases the divergence arose from an explicitly random event, such as a wanted fugitive being arrested during a traffic stop. In other cases the divergence was the result of an individual choosing different actions in two branches, in which case researchers would request an interview, but if the person was a public figure, they rarely offered details on why they had made the choice they did. For cases that didn’t fall into those categories, the researchers had to comb through the news stories from the preceding weeks to try to identify the causes of the discrepancy, which usually led to scrutinizing the stochastic jitters of the stock market or social media.