Seven. A lucky number, that. That's what they said.

Did he really want to do this? There was still time to stop. He could call the emergency number; he could stick a finger into the back of his throat.

Or—

Or he could think about it some more. Give himself a few additional minutes to reflect.

Seven pills probably wasn't enough to do any real harm. Surely not. Surely that kind of minor overdose happened all the time. Why, the Web site had said he'd need at least another ten…

He spilled some more pills into his palm, and stared at them, a pile of little green stones.

Day Nine: Wednesday, April 29, 2009

"I want to show you something," said Carly.

Jake smiled and indicated with a hand gesture for her to proceed. They were at TRIUMF now, the Tri-University Meson Facility, Canada's leading particle-physics laboratory.

She began walking down a corridor; Jake followed. They passed doors with science-related cartoons taped to them. They also passed a few other people, each wearing cylindrical dosimeters that served the same purpose but looked nothing like the film badges everyone sported at CERN.

Finally, Carly came to a stop. She was standing in front of a door. On one side of it was a coiled-up fire hose behind a glass cover; on the other, a drinking fountain. Carly rapped her knuckles on the door. There was no response, so she turned the knob and opened it up. She went in and beckoned with a crooked finger and smile for Jake to follow. He did so, and once he was inside, Carly closed the door behind him.

"Well?" she said.

Jake lifted his shoulders, helpless.

"Don't you recognize it?" asked Carly.

Jake looked around. It was a good-sized lab, with beige walls, and—

— oh, my God!—

Yes, the walls were beige now, but sometime in the next twenty years they'd be repainted yellow.

It was the room in the vision. There was the chart of the periodic table, just as he'd seen it. And that workbench right there — that's the bench they'd been doing it on.

Jake felt his face grow flush.

"Pretty neat, huh?" said Carly.

"That it is," said Jake.

Of course they couldn't inaugurate the room just now; it was the middle of the work day…

But his vision… well, if the time estimates were correct, then it was of 7:21 P.M. Geneva time, which was — what? — 2:21 P.M. in New York, and — let's see — 11:21 A.M. here in Vancouver. Eleven twenty-one in the morning… on a Wednesday. Surely TRIUMF would have been busy then, too. How could they possibly have been making love here at that time on a weekday? Oh, doubtless sexual mores would continue to loosen up over the next twenty years just as they had over the last fifty, but surely even in the far-off year of A.D. 2030 you didn't run off with your sweetie for a boink-break while at work. But maybe October 23 was a holiday; maybe everyone else was off work. Jake had a vague recollection that Canadian Thanksgiving was sometime in October.

He walked around the room, comparing its present reality to what he'd seen in his vision. There was an emergency shower, common enough in labs where chemicals are used, and some equipment lockers, and a small computer workstation. There'd been a personal computer on the same spot in the vision, but it had been quite a different model, of course. And next to it…

Next to it, there'd been a device, cubic in shape, about a half-meter on a side, with two flat sheets rising up out of its top, facing each other.

"That thing that was there," said Jake. "I mean, that thing that will be there. Any idea what it is?"

"Maybe a Tachyon-Tardyon Collider?"

Jake lifted his eyebrows. "That could — "

The door to the lab swung open, and a large Native Canadian man walked in. "Oh, excuse me," he said. "Didn't mean to interrupt."

"Not at all," said Carly. She smiled at Jake. "We'll come back later."

"You want proof?" said Michiko. "You want to know for sure whether we should get married? There's one way to do that."

Lloyd had been alone in his office at CERN, examining a series of printouts of the last year's worth of 14-TeV LHC runs looking for any indication of instability prior to the first 1,150-TeV run — the one that produced the time-displacement. Michiko had just come in, and those were her first words.

Lloyd raised his eyebrows at her. "A way to get proof? How?"

"Repeat the experiment. See if you get the same results."

"We can't do that," said Lloyd, stunned. He was thinking of all the people who had died the last time. Lloyd had never believed in the 'there are some things humanity is not meant to know' philosophy, but if there ever was a test that shouldn't be done again, doubtless this was it.

"You'd have to announce the new attempt in advance, of course, said Michiko. "Warn everybody, make sure no one is flying, no one is driving, no one is swimming, no one is on a ladder. Make sure the whole human race is sitting down or lying down when it happens."

"There's no way to do that."

Sure there is," she said. "CNN. NHK. The BBC. The CBC."

"There are places in the world that still don't get TV, or even radio, for that matter. We couldn't warn everyone."

"We couldn't easily warn everyone," said Michiko, "but it could be done, certainly with a ninety-nine-percent success rate."

Lloyd frowned. "Ninety-nine percent, eh? There are seven billion people. If we missed just one percent, that's still seventy million who wouldn't be warned."

"We could do better than that. I'm positive we could. We could get it down to a few hundred thousand who didn't get word — and, let's face it, those few hundred thousand would be in nontechnological areas, anyway. There's no chance they'd be driving cars or flying planes."

"They could be eaten by animals."

Michiko stopped short. "Could they? Interesting thought. I guess animals didn't lose consciousness during the Flashforward, did they?"

Lloyd scratched his head. "We certainly didn't see the ground littered with dead birds that had fallen out of the sky. And, according to the news reports, no one found giraffes that had broken their legs by falling. The phenomenon seemed to be one of consciousness; I read in the Tribune that chimpanzees and gorillas who've been questioned by sign language reported some sort of effect — many said they were in different places — but they lacked the vocabulary and the psychological frame of reference to confirm or deny that they'd actually seen their own futures."

"It doesn't matter. Most wild animals won't eat unconscious prey anyway; they'll think it's dead, and natural selection long ago bred out carrion feeding from most life forms. No, I'm sure we could reach almost everyone, and the few that we don't reach are unlikely to be in any sort of hazardous position anyway."

"All well and good," said Lloyd, "but we can't just announce that we're going to repeat the experiment. The French or Swiss authorities would stop us, if no one else did."

"Not if we got their permission. Not if we got everyone's permission."

"Oh, come on! Scientists might be curious as to whether it's a reproducible result, but why would anyone else care? Why would the world give its permission — unless, of course, they needed to reproduce the results in order to find me, or CERN, culpable."

Michiko blinked. "You're not thinking, Lloyd. Everyone wants another glimpse of the future. We're hardly the only ones with loose ends left by the first set of visions. People want to know more about what tomorrow holds. If you tell them that you can let them see the future again, no one is going to stand in your way. On the contrary, they'll move heaven and earth to make it possible."