I thought about the future as a path with a Y in it; it just didn’t make sense. Occam’s Hammer told me the truth was even stranger than I could currently comprehend: that was food for terror!
I turned my attention to the more practical issue: what to do? How should we avoid these twin fates, so hideous that Karly and Cory would travel through time to prevent them?
Cory’s future guaranteed the most ghastly end of mankind ever imagined. It was also, it seemed to me, the easiest to prevent. In Karly’s timeline Buck Canion never came to power. A dose of good immersive social virtualities, enough to do the on-line experiments that would provide an alternative to dictatorial government, was all we needed to stop the madman. It was funny, really, that there was not even a hint of VR in Cory’s world.
And it was funny that there was no hint of nanotech in Karly’s.
I blinked, and shook my head from side to side. Thinking of the future as a pretzel made my head hurt. I could hardly achieve a cogent thought, much less a coherent cause/effect pattern, but in the end I came to the following understanding:
Karly and Cory were mutually responsible for creating each other’s timelines.
Karly, in destroying all vestige of VR work, created the VR-less world in which Buck Canion could thrive. Cory, in destroying all progress in molecular manufacture, created Karly’s future, in which the machinery was not reliable enough for survival during a phase when humanity was struggling to redefine its relationship to itself.
These two timelines were not random selections, nor contradictory: rather, they were a stable configuration as a pair. One could only “exist” if the other existed too. Each brought the other into existence as a necessary precursor to itself.
It made sense, but only the kind of sense a madman could embrace. Or a physicist, if that was not the same thing.
It was almost time to go to the VR coffee klatch. I was eager to see Karly, to tell her what I had learned, to explain the true nature of the solution. I started to trot as fast as my bad knee could carry me.
As I hustled along I thought about how happy she would be. It was a good thing she had accepted my offer of help so easily, else I would not have had the time to figure it out. So easily… I paused to catch my breath, and realized the enormity of my error. I straightened up and ran, ran faster than I had run since the accident. My knee throbbed, then screamed in white flashes of agony. I ran faster.
I stood in the darkness, recovering my breath, favoring my right leg. The meeting was about to start, and I started hoping that my paranoid nature had done Karly a disservice…
A light footfall entered the room, the sound of feet that should have been happy. The lights came up.
“Hi, Karly,” I greeted her, choking down my disappointment. “I was afraid I’d find you here.”
“Eric!” She stared at me in surprise. Her hand was in her pocket.
“I wondered why you gave in so easily,” I said. “After all, you traveled all the way through time to destroy these people. Sometimes I’m a touch dense, but I eventually realized why you were so agreeable. I gave you the perfect time and place to get all the most important people, didn’t I? If you set a bomb off at some seminar during the day, you might have missed someone crucial, out for a donut or leaving the conference early. But no. I told you the one time, the one place, where everyone would be.”
Karly started to circle me, one hand holding a box the size of a hand-grenade, one hand in her pocket. There was no laughter in her eyes at all now, and as she looked back and forth between my face and her pocket, I knew how deadly serious this meeting had become.
“We can do this together,” she whispered. She showed me the bomb, told me how it worked. “It’s easy. Then we can be together.”
I moved to intercept her. The meeting was going on in a corner room; this was the only adjacent room; Karly was moving to the shared wall. “You love Gary,” I reminded her.
“I… you are so much like him,” she said, and the surprise still made her voice catch. But she didn’t stop trying to get past me.
“Karly!” I cried out. “I know how to stop this madness. I know why your future came to be, I know how to stop it!” I rushed into an explanation.
For a moment my words held her. But soon it became clear I had failed. Can you blame her for doubting me? I barely understood the twin timelines myself. Surely my talk of her twin sister Cory, whom she would create so she could create Karly, was the raving of a lunatic.
Could I have done better? I have asked myself that question a thousand times. Yes, surely today I could give a more succinct answer. But would even an answer cultivated and evolved over years of thought have been good enough? Such a useless question; I can never know.
We were face to face; I could feel the warmth of her breath on my neck, smell the perfume of her hair.
“Please, Eric, stand back,” she said.
I stepped closer.
With a desperate cry of sorrow, she drew her right hand from her pocket, and thrust a six-inch knife blade toward my stomach. I deflected the knife, but not before she put a long ragged cut down my left arm.
She was strong and fast, but I was stronger and faster. She had tried to kill me; some primitive defense instinct took over as the blood dripped down my arm. I stepped aside, grabbed her knife hand, bent it toward her, and plunged the knife into her chest. I reached around behind her and plucked the bomb from her other hand.
She fell against my chest. “Eric, you have to stop them. Promise me you’ll stop them.”
“I promise,” I said as tears streamed down my face, “I know how to fix it. Everything will be OK.”
She shuddered one last time, and the light departed from her eyes.
I don’t know how long I stood there, holding her. But in the end I laid her gently on the floor, wiped my eyes, and walked quietly to Moscone North, to sit in the dark of the room adjacent to the nanotech party, to wait for Cory.
With only the sound of my own breathing to accompany me, I had a few minutes to think about what to say to Cory. I sank into the realization that I dared not say anything. Cory was a nanotechnologically engineered person—her singing voice proved that much. She could be effectively impossible for a mere human to kill, even with the advantage of surprise. Without the advantage of surprise, what chance would I stand?
Cory! I desperately wanted to tell her that she couldn’t do what she was about to do, that if she did, she would create the Karly’s world, and Gary would still die, and she would fail again. But if I told her and she didn’t believe me, how could I stop her? And if I couldn’t even convince Karly to stop, what chance had I of convincing the sole survivor of a nightmare beyond any form of genocide?
And I had promised Karly that I would prevent her future from occurring, no matter what the cost.
I told myself that I couldn’t really kill Cory, that after all, she hadn’t even been born yet; indeed, since I had already killed Karly, Cory would never be born… at least, not as Cory.
No sound announced her arrival; I just saw her shadow in the hint of light trickling through the door. I flipped the lights.
She was already looking at me; with her nanotech enhancements, she had seen me in the pitch blackness, and I knew then just how difficult stopping her would be.
“Eric!” she whispered.
“Cory!” My eyes were full of tears as I stepped up to her.
I hugged her tight. Then I reached behind her ear. I pulled forth a purple rose. “For you,” I choked out. While I was getting the rose, of course, 1 had delicately placed Karly’s bomb on her back. I sobbed.