"I'm sorry, honey," said Lloyd. "It's tearing me apart but, I just don't know what I want to do."

"Your parents long ago booked flights to come to Geneva, and so did my mother," said Michiko. "If we're not going to go through with the wedding, we have to tell people. You've got to make a decision."

She didn't understand, thought Lloyd. She didn't understand that his decision was already made; that whatever he would do/had done was described for all time in the block universe. It wasn't that he had to make a decision; rather, the decision that had always been made simply had to be revealed.

And so—

It was time for Theo to go home. Not to the apartment in Geneva that he'd called home for the last two years, but home to Athens. Home to his roots.

It also, frankly, would be wise for him to not be around Michiko for a while. Crazy thoughts about her kept running through his head.

Theo didn't suspect that anyone in his family had anything to do with his death — although, as he'd begun reading up on such things, it became apparent that it was usually the case, ever since Cain slew Abel, ever since Livia poisoned Augustus, ever since O. J. killed his wife, ever since that astronaut aboard the international space station had been arrested, despite the seemingly perfect alibi, for having killed her own sister.

But, no, Theo suspected none of his family members. And yet, if any visions were likely to shed light on his own death, surely it would be those of his close relatives? Surely some of them would have been doing investigations of their own twenty-one years hence, trying to figure out who had killed their dear Theo?

Theo took an Olympic Airlines flight to Athens. The seat sales were over; people were flying again as before, assured that the consciousness-displacement would not recur. He spent the flight time poking holes in a model for the Flashforward that had been emailed to him by a team at DESY, the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron, Europe's other major particle-accelerator facility.

Theo hadn't been home for four years now, and he regretted it. Christ, he might be dead in twenty-one years — and he'd let a span of one-fifth that length slip by without hugging his mother or tasting her cooking, without seeing his brother, without enjoying the incredible beauty of his homeland. Yes, the Alps were breathtaking, but there was a sterile, barren quality about them. In Athens, you could always look up, always see the Acropolis looming above the city, the midday sun flaring off the restored, polished marble of the Parthenon. Thousands of years of human habitation; millennia of thought, of culture, of art.

Of course, as a youth, he had visited many of the famous archeological sites. He remembered being seventeen: a school bus had taken his class to Delphi, home of the ancient oracle. It had been pouring rain, and he hadn't wanted to get off the bus. But his teacher, Mrs. Megas, had insisted. They had clambered over slippery dark rocks through lush forest, until they came to where the oracle had once supposedly sat, dispensing cryptic visions of the future.

That kind of oracle had been better, thought Theo: futures that were subject to interpretation and debate, instead of the cold, harsh realities the world had recently seen.

They'd also gone to Epidaurus, a great bowl out of the landscape, with concentric rings of seats. They'd seen Oedipus Tyrannos performed there — Theo refused to join the tourists in calling it Oedipus Rex; "Rex" was a Latin word, not Greek, and represented an irritating bastardization of the play's title.

The play was performed in ancient Greek; it might as well have been in Chinese for all the sense Theo could make of the dialog. But they'd studied the story in class; he knew what was happening. Oedipus's future had been spelled out for him, too: you will marry your mother and murder your father. And Oedipus, like Theo, had thought he could circumvent destiny. Forearmed with the knowledge of what he was supposed to do, why, he'd simply avoid the issue altogether, and live a long, happy life with his queen, Iocasta.

Except…

Except that, as it turned out, Iocasta was his mother, and the man Oedipus had slain ye ars before during a quarrel on the road to Thebes had indeed been his father.

Sophocles had written his version of the Oedipus story twenty-four hundred years ago, but students still studied it as the greatest example of dramatic irony in western literature. And what could be more ironic than a modern Greek man faced with the dilemmas of the ancients — a future prophesied, a tragic end foretold, a fate inevitable? Of course, the heroes of ancient Greek tragedies each had a hamartia — a fatal flaw — that made their downfall unavoidable. For some, the hamartia was obvious: greed, or lust, or an inability to follow the law.

But what had been Oedipus's fatal flaw? What in his character had brought him to ruin?

They'd discussed it at length in class; the narrative form employed by the ancient Greek tragedians was inviolate — there was always a hamartia.

And Oedipus's was — what?

Not greed, not stupidity, not cowardice.

No, no, if it were anything, it was his arrogance, his belief that he could defeat the will of the gods.

But, Theo had protested, that's a circular argument; Theo was always the logician, never much for the humanities. Oedipus's arrogance, he said, was only evidenced in his trying to avoid his fate; had his fate been less severe, he'd never have rebelled against it, and therefore never would have been seen as arrogant.

No, his teacher had said, it was there, in a thousand little things he does in the play. Indeed, she quipped, although Oedipus meant "Swollen Foot" — an allusion to the injury sustained when his royal father had bound his feet as a child and left him to die — he could just as easily be called "Swollen Head."

But Theo couldn't see it — couldn't see the arrogance, couldn't see the condescension. To him, Oedipus, who solved the vexing riddle of the Sphinx, was a towering intellect, a great thinker — exactly what Theo felt himself to be.

The riddle of the Sphinx: what walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, and three in the evening? Why, a man, of course, who crawls at the beginning of life, walks erect in adulthood, and requires a cane in old age. What an incisive bit of reasoning on Oedipus's part!

But now Theo would never live to need that third leg, would never see the natural sunset of his span. Instead, he'd be murdered in middle-age… just as Oedipus's real father, King Laius, was left dead at the side of a well-worn road.

Unless, of course, he could change the future; unless he could outwit the gods and avoid his destiny.

Arrogance? thought Theo. Arrogance? It is to laugh.

The plane started its descent into nighttime Athens.

"Your parents long ago booked flights to come to Geneva, and so did my mother," Michiko had said. "If we're not going to go through with the wedding, we have to tell people. You've got to make a decision."

"What do you want to do?" asked Lloyd, buying time.

"What do I want to do?" repeated Michiko, sounding stunned by the question. "I want to get married; I don't believe in a fixed future. The visions will only come true if you make them do so — if you turn them into self-fulfilling prophecies."

The ball was back in his court. Lloyd lifted his shoulders. "I'm so sorry, honey. Really, I am, but — "

"Look," she said, cutting off words she didn't want to hear. "I know your parents made a mistake. But we aren't."

"The visions — "

"We aren't," said Michiko firmly. "We're right for each other. We're meant for each other."