"That's… that's crazy," said Lloyd. "It's wishful thinking."

They were passing a pub. Loud music, with French lyrics, spilled through the heavy closed door. "No, it's not. It's quantum physics. And the result is the same: those people are just as dead, or just as maimed, as if the accidents had actually taken place. I'm not suggesting there's any way around that — as much as I wish there were.

Lloyd squeezed Michiko's hand, and they continued walking, up the road, into the future.

Time passes; things change.

In 2017, a team of physicists and brain researchers mostly based at Stanford devised a full theoretical model for the time displacement. The quantum-mechanical model of the human mind, proposed by Roger Penrose thirty years earlier, had turned out to be generally true even if Penrose had gotten many of the details wrong; it was perhaps not surprising, then, that sufficiently powerful quantum physics experiments could have an effect on perception.

Still, the neutrinos were a key part of it, too. It had been known since the 1960s that Earth's sun was, for some reason, disgorging only half as many neutrinos as it should — the famous "solar-neutrino problem."

The sun is heated by hydrogen fusion: four hydrogen nuclei — each a single proton — come together to form a helium nucleus, consisting of two protons and two neutrons. In the process of converting two of the original hydrogen-provided protons into neutrons, two electron neutrinos should be ejected… but, somehow one out of every two electron neutrinos that should reach Earth disappears before it does so, almost as if they were somehow being censored, almost as if the universe knew that the quantum-mechanical processes underlying consciousness were unstable if too many neutrinos were present.

The discovery in 1998 that neutrinos had a trifling mass had made credible a long-standing possible solution to the solar-neutrino problem: if neutrinos have mass, theory suggested that they could perhaps change types as they traveled, making it only appear, to primitive detectors, that they had disappeared. But the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory, which was capable of detecting all types of neutrinos, still showed a marked shortfall between what should be produced and what was reaching Earth.

The strong anthropic principle said the universe needed to give rise to life, and the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics said it requires qualified observers; given what was now known about the interaction of neutrinos and consciousness, the solar-neutrino problem seemed to be evidence that the universe was indeed taking pains to foster the existence of such observers.

Of course, occasional extrasolar neutrino bursts happened, but under normal circumstances they could be tolerated. But when the circumstances were not normal — when a neutrino onslaught was combined with conditions that hadn't existed since just after the big bang — time displacement occurred.

In 2018, the European Space Agency launched the Cassandra probe toward Sanduleak—69 202. Of course, it would take millions of years to reach Sanduleak, but that didn't matter. All that mattered was that now, in 2030, Cassandra was 2.5 trillion kilometers from Earth — and 2.5 trillion kilometers closer to the remnant of Supernova 1987A — a distance that light, and neutrinos, would take three months to travel.

Aboard Cassandra were two instruments. One was a light detector, aimed directly at Sanduleak; the other was a recent invention — a tachyon emitter — aimed back at Earth. Cassandra couldn't detect neutrinos directly, but if Sanduleak oscillated out of brown-hole status, it would give off light as well as neutrinos, and the light would be easy to see.

In July 2030, light from Sanduleak was detected by Cassandra. The probe immediately launched an ultra-low-energy (and therefore ultra-high-speed) tachyon burst toward Earth. Forty-three hours later, the tachyons arrived there, setting off alarms.

Suddenly, twenty-one years after the first time-displacement event, the people of Earth were given three months' notice that if they wanted to try for another glimpse of the future, they could indeed do so with a reasonable chance of success. Of course, the next attempt would have to be made at the exact moment the Sanduleak neutrinos would start passing through Earth — and it couldn't be a coincidence that that would be 19h21 Greenwich Mean Time on Wednesday, October 23, 2030 — the precise beginning of the two-minute span the last set of visions had portrayed.

The UN debated the matter with surprising speed. Some had thought that because the present had turned out to be different from what the first set of visions portrayed, people might decide that new visions would be irrelevant. But, in reality, the general response was quite the opposite — almost everybody wanted another peek at tomorrow. The Ebenezer Effect still was powerful. And, of course, there was now a whole generation of young people who had been born after 2009. They felt left out, and were demanding a chance to have what their parents had already experienced: a glimpse of their prospective futures.

As before, CERN was the key to unlocking tomorrow. But Lloyd Simcoe, now sixty-six, would not be part of the replication attempt. He had retired two years ago, and had declined to come back to CERN. Still, Lloyd and Theo had indeed shared a Nobel prize. It had been awarded in 2024, not, as it turned out, in honor of anything related to the time-displacement effect, or the Higg's boson, but rather due to their joint invention of the Tachyon-Tardyon Collider, the tabletop device that had put giant particle accelerators at places ranging from TRIUMF to Fermilab to CERN out of business. Most of CERN was abandoned now, although the original Tachyon-Tardyon Collider was housed on the CERN campus.

Maybe it was because Lloyd's marriage to Michiko had crumbled after ten years that Lloyd didn't want to be involved with this attempt to replicate the original experiment. Yes, Lloyd and Michiko had had a daughter together, but always, down deep, not even acknowledged by her at first, there was a feeling on Michiko's part that Lloyd had somehow been responsible for her first daughter's death. She'd surprised herself, no doubt, the first time that charge had come out during an argument between her and Lloyd. But there it was.

That Lloyd and Michiko loved each other there was no doubt, but they ultimately decided that they simply couldn't go on living together, not with that hanging, however diffusely, over everything. At least it hadn't been a painful divorce, like that of Lloyd's parents. Michiko moved back to Nippon, taking their daughter Joan with her; Lloyd got to visit with her only once a year, at Christmas.

Lloyd wasn't crucial to the replication of the original experiment, although his help would have been a real asset. But he was now happily remarried — and, yes, it was to Doreen, the woman he'd seen in his vision, and, yes, they did now own a cottage in Vermont.

Still, Jake Horowitz, who had long since left CERN to work at TRIUMF with his wife Carly Tompkins, did agree to come back for three months. Carly came as well, and she and Jake endured the gentle kidding of people asking them which labs at CERN they were going to baptize. They had been married for eighteen years now, and had three wonderful kids.

Theodosios Procopides and about three hundred other people still worked at CERN, running the TTC there. Theo, Jake, Carly, and a skeleton crew raced against time to get the Large Hadron Collider ready to run again, after five years of disuse, before the Sanduleak neutrinos hit.