The prime minister of Canada likewise endorsed the visions, since they showed Quebec still a part of her country. The President of the United States was less enthused: although America clearly continued to be the world's leading power two decades hence, there was substantial concern among the President's advisors that the first glimpse had already done much to damage national security, with people — children, even — who were not yet bound by oaths of secrecy having access to all sorts of back-room information. And, of course, it rankled the Democrat incumbent that the Republican Franklin Hapgood, currently a political-science professor at Purdue, was apparently destined to hold the office in 2030.

So the American delegation continued to argue against replication: "We're still burying our dead," said one ambassador. But the Japanese delegation countered by claiming that even if the visions hadn't portrayed the actual future, they clearly represented a working future. The U.S. — a country in which a very high percentage of people had had meaningful, daytime visions — was trying to hoard to itself the technological benefits to be gleaned from those visions. The first Flashforward had been to 11:21 A.M. in Los Angeles, and 2:21 P.M. in New York, it had been to 3:21 A.M. in Tokyo; most Japanese had had visions of nothing more exciting than themselves dreaming in the future. America was capitalizing on new technologies and new inventions portrayed in its citizens' visions; Japan and the rest of the Eastern hemisphere was being unfairly left behind.

That set off the Chinese delegation again; they had apparently been waiting for someone to raise this very issue. The Flashforward had been to 2:21 A.M. Beijing time; most Chinese likewise had simply had visions of themselves asleep in the future. If another Flashforward was to be invoked, surely, they argued, it should begin at a time offset twelve hours from the last attempt. That way, if consciousness jumps ahead the same fixed twenty-one years, six months, two days, and two hours, then those in the Eastern hemisphere would reap the most benefits this time, balancing things out.

The Japanese government immediately supported the Chinese on this point. India, Pakistan, and both Koreas chimed in that this was only fair.

The east was perhaps right about America trying to gain the technological upper hand: if there was going to be replication, the U.S. argued strongly that it should be at the same time of day. They couched their argument in scientific terms: replication was, in fact, replication, so as much as humanly possible, every experimental parameter must be the same.

Lloyd Simcoe was called back to address the General Assembly on this point. "I would caution strongly against changing any factor needlessly," he said, "but, since we don't yet have a full working model for the phenomenon, I cannot say categorically that doing the experiment at night instead of during the day would make any difference. The LHC tunnel is, after all, heavily shielded against radiation leakage — and that shielding has the effect of keeping solar and other external radiation out as well. Still, I would argue against changing the time of day."

A delegate from Ethiopia pointed out that Simcoe was an American, and therefore likely to be trying to protect American interests. Lloyd countered that he was, in fact, a Canadian, but that didn't impress the African; Canada, too, had benefited disproportionately from the glimpses its citizens had had of the future.

Meanwhile, the Islamic world had mostly embraced the visions as ilham (divine guidance directly exerted upon the human mind and soul), rather than wahy (divine revelation of the actual future), since, by definition, only prophets were capable of the latter. That the visions turned out to indeed be of a malleable future apparently confirmed the Islamic view, and, although Islamic leaders did not invoke the Scrooge metaphor, the concept of receiving insight that would allow one to improve oneself along religious and spiritual lines was interpreted by most as being fully congruent with the Qur'an.

Some Muslims held the dissenting view that the visions were demonic, part of the unfolding destruction of the world, rather than divine. But either way, the Islamic spiritual leaders rejected wholeheartedly the notion that a physics experiment had been the cause: that was a misguided secular, Western interpretation. The visions clearly were of spiritual origin, and hardware was irrelevant to such experiences.

Lloyd had feared that the Islamic nations would oppose replication of the LHC experiment on that basis. But first the Wilayat al-Faqih in Iran, then the Shayk al-Azhar in Egypt, and then shaykh after shaykh and iman after iman across the Muslim world came to favor attempted replication, precisely so that when the attempt failed, the infidels would have it proven to them that the original occurrence had indeed been spiritual, not secular, in nature.

Of course, governments in Islamic nations were often at odds with the faithful in their lands. For those governments that kowtowed to the west, supporting replication, so long as it was offset, as the Asians were insisting, by twelve hours from the first occurrence, was a win-win scenario: if replication failed, the Western scientists would end up with egg on their faces, and the secular worldview would take a drubbing; if it succeeded, the economies of Muslim nations would get a boost, by having their citizens attain the same sort of insights into future technologies that Americans had already received.

Lloyd had expected those who had had no vision — those who were apparently dead in the future — to be against replication, too, but, in fact, most of them turned out to favor it. Younger people who were visionless — dubbed "The Ungrateful Dead" by Newsweek — often cited a desire to prove that some other explanation besides their own deaths explained their lack of visions the first time. The older visionless, mostly already resigned to the fact that they would be dead twenty-one years hence, were simply curious to learn more, through others' accounts, about the future they would never otherwise live to see.

Some nations — Portugal and Poland among them — argued for delaying replication for at least a year. Three compelling counterarguments were presented. First, as Lloyd pointed out, the more time that elapsed, the more likely some external factor would change sufficiently to prevent replication. Second, the need for absolute safety during a replication was clear in the public's mind right now; the more the severity of the accidents that occurred last time faded into memory, the more likely that people would be cavalier in their preparations. Third, people wanted new visions that confirmed or denied the events portrayed in their first visions, letting those with disturbing insights see if they were indeed now on track to avoiding those futures. If the new visions would also be of a time twenty-one years, six months, two days, and two hours ahead of the moment at which the replicated experiment began, each passing day diminished the chances that the second vision would be sufficiently related to the first to make a comparison between the two possible.

There was also a good economic argument in favor of rapid replication, if replication were to happen at all. Many businesses were currently operating at reduced capacity, because of damage to equipment or personnel that had occurred during the first Flashforward. A work stoppage in the near future to accommodate a second Flashforward would result in less lost productivity than would one months or years down the road when all businesses and factories were back to full operation.

The debates ranged over countless topics: economics, national security (what if one nation launched a nuclear attack against another just prior to the departure of consciousness?), philosophy, religion, science, and democratic principles. Should a decision that affects everyone on the planet really be made on a one-vote-per-nation basis? Should votes be weighted according to each nation's population, in which the Chinese voice should be heard the loudest? Or should the decision be differed to a global referendum?