“What’s wrong?” she murmured.
“I will never forget this moment,” I replied, “I promise you, everything will be all right.” I stepped back, pressing my hands together.
She looked at me in puzzlement, then her eyes flashed as she felt the weight on her back. She reached around, quick as a cat, and—
The force of the explosion threw her dying body forward into my arms. The noise was deafening. I had a vague notion that the building was collapsing down on me, and that I deserved it. That was my last thought for a long time, that I deserved it.
Cory saved my life even as I was ending hers. Her molecular engineering was not enough to save her from direct contact with the blast, but it was enough to deflect the blast that otherwise would have left nothing of me to identify except maybe a couple of teeth.
Of course, with an explosion like that, it was still a miracle I survived. The ceiling did indeed collapse, and it took half a day for them to pull me out. Other people in the room next door were hurt as well, but there were no fatalities. Except for Cory, of course, who should have provided a most surprising autopsy.
But the police report said that there were no fatalities at all. Neither bomb fragments nor bodies were ever found, neither Karly’s nor Cory’s.
The police quite understandably picked me as the most likely suspect for planting a bomb. Indeed, while I was in the hospital, babbling on the pain killers, I think a plainclothesman interrogated me. But all he got was a lot of gibberish about trying to stop a beautiful girl from an alternate future from trying to blow up the Nanotechnology conference, and a duplicate girl from another alternate future trying to blow up Virtuality. In the end, with neither a motive to assign to me, nor even any evidence a bomb had been involved, they searched for other explanations. A multimillion dollar investigation found a cause: in a billion-to-one chance, a deep, secure natural gas pipeline had cracked, and a fissure had let gas trickle into the room, setting up the explosion. I later went over the evidence myself: they were right. In our timeline, that is what happened. I presume that, once their interlocked future histories were expunged from all possible timelines, Karly and Cory just… never existed.
It took a year or so for me to get my head straight. When I finally did, I realized that my relationship with Karly and Cory had only just begun. After all, I had promises to keep.
I switched tracks from biochemistry to finance. The change of direction thrilled my father, though it filled me with a regret that I will never outlive. Still, with Dad’s financial backing, and my unique knowledge of the future of technology, I did quite well… better, in fact, than anyone in history. Dad was quite shocked when I sold VThink and JouleView short and helped capitalize a little startup called DreamPaint. He was shocked again when I shorted NTools and took options on MoleFab after Austin Zerr joined up. But his grin was wide as Texas when things went as I had already known they would.
It wasn’t till after the Entitlement Crash—during which I was completely out of the American stock market, diversified into metals and other enterprises in debt-free Asian countries—that the columnists started arguing whether I was the New Bill Gates or the New Michael Milken. The one thing they all agreed on was that I was the richest man in the free world. I created the KC Futures Foundation to grant scholarships to promising young people entering college. One scholarship was won by Harold Rodin, to study nanotechnology; another was won by Gary Mocineau, to study kinesthetic virtualities. To my knowledge, in our present history, those two people have never met.
The Entitlement Crash, by the way, was the first indication that I had created a future different from either Karly’s or Cory’s. There were executions, unlike Karly’s future, but fewer of them than in Cory’s. The mobs shot all the living presidents, starting with the current one, and then burned the Congressional committee chairmen to death, but most of the rest were allowed to live. Many were later let out on parole, and allowed to enter honorable professions; a handful of these even became respected members of their communities.
Meanwhile, hundreds of new sociopolitical systems were simulated in virtualities. We didn’t figure out the Principles of Self-Organizing Groups, but we did manage to at least amend the Constitution with the new Bill of Inviolable Rights.
Stuart Glennan and I became good friends, though in all these years we’ve never actually met in person. I fear he was one of the losers in the new reality. He never did become famous, though he did do one beautiful song, one that I personally like better than his greatest works in the other futures.
Virtuality and nanotechnology progressed rapidly, neither quite as fast as they had in their own futures, but fast enough to keep the whole world on its toes.
At first, I dreamed often of Karly and Cory, but with time even the dreams faded. The dreams came back once, briefly, as I contemplated asking another woman to be my wife. I never did marry.
I look back now and wonder at the unlikely chain of events that led me here. Invariably it leads me to ponder the nature of time and the Universe. Quantum mechanics defines its own set of virtualities, a seething emptiness teeming with untold trillions of virtual particles, of which only those that lead to a more stable, more valid state ever see the light of day. Are there virtual universes too? Did the universe, in its own ponderous way, sift trillions of slightly different universes to find one more stable than the Karly/Cory mutual future creation configuration? Could there have been “losers,” universes in which:
—I looked slightly less like Karly/Cory’s boyfriend?
—Stuart Glennan wasn’t on-line when I went looking for him?
—That man on the white bicycle, so long ago, didn’t speak to me of visions of the future?
—I reacted one second faster that night in a speeding car, and married Shea and played basketball? Oh God, don’t let that have been a universe that could have been!
Well, the might-have-beens can be pondered forever by moldering philosophers. Meanwhile, I still had things to do and promises to keep.
The last and most painful part of my promise brought me here, to my little flower stand, for two hours on the specified day. The stand, at Berkeley’s famous intersection of Durant and Telegraph, was open from 11 A.M. till 1 P.M. on July 10 every year. It was hot out here, but that was not the main reason I had to keep clearing the sweat from my eyes. My heart was beating a jagged rhythm; somehow, I was sure that this day, this year, was the end of my journey.
Though the People’s Republic of Berkeley in the twenty-first century bore only a slight resemblance to the polyglot culture it had been in the twentieth, the street was still crowded with people who would have been distinctive anywhere but here. Still, when I saw him, I knew him; he stood out even here. Just as I myself did.
He was a tall fellow, wiry, with big hands—the kind of hands that looked natural only when wrapped around a basketball. He looked as I had, once upon a time, in a youth long ago. I understood clearly now, fifty years later, why Karly had stopped in her tracks when she first saw me.
All, Karly, Cory, who are you now, in the future that I have written for you? It didn’t make any difference; I was so close now.
He had a purposeful stride, unlike everyone else on the sidewalk. He tried to stride right past my flower stand—but here he found someone as purposeful as himself. “Flowers,” I said, blocking his way, jamming red and purple roses to his nose. “They’re free, Gary, for you, for that wonderful girlfriend of yours.”
I could see the puzzlement flicker in his eyes, though the flowers blocked my view of the rest of his face. I knew his thoughts: Who is this guy? Wait, he looks familiar, like I’ve seen him before. Do I know him? How does he know me? And, finally, God, these roses smell wonderful! She would love them!