Day Two: Wednesday, April 22,2009

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?"

"Their 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."

"Beranger 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 Beranger'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 Montreal. 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.