Three seconds.

Urging the train to go faster.

Two seconds.

Covering his head with his hands, his shoulder protesting violently as he lifted his right arm—

One second.

Wondering briefly what the future held—

Zero!

Ka-boom!

The explosion echoing in the tunnel.

A flash of light from behind sending a huge shadow of the monorail's insectoid form onto the curving tunnel wall—

And then—

Glorious, healing darkness, the train speeding on as Theo collapsed against the tiny dashboard.

Two days later.

Theo was in the LHC control room. It was crowded, but not with scientists or engineers — almost everything was automated. Still, dozens of reporters were present, all of them were lying on the floor. Jake Horowitz was there, of course, as were Theo's own special guests, Detective Helmut Drescher, his shoulder in a sling, and Moot's young wife.

Theo started the countdown, then also lay down on the floor, waiting for it to happen.

Lloyd Simcoe often thought of his seven-year-old daughter, Joan, who now lived in Nippon. Of course, they talked every couple of days by video phone, and Lloyd tried to convince himself that seeing and hearing her was as good as hugging her, and bouncing her on his knee, and holding her hand as they walked through parks, and wiping her tears when she fell down and skinned her knee.

He loved her enormously and was proud of her beyond words. True, despite her occidental name, she looked nothing like him; her features were completely Asian. Indeed, more than anything, she looked like poor Tamiko, the half-sister she would never know. But externals didn't matter; half of what Joan was had come from Lloyd. More than his Nobel Prize, more than all the papers he had authored or co-authored, more than anything else, she was his immortality.

And even though she came from a marriage that hadn't lasted, Joan was doing just fine. Oh, Lloyd had no doubt that sometimes she wished her mommy and daddy were still together. Still, Joan had attended Lloyd's wedding to Doreen, capturing everyone's hearts as flower girl for the woman who would soon be her stepmother.

Stepmother. Half-sister. Ex-wife. Ex-husband. New wife. Permutations; the panoply of human interactions, of ways to constitute a family. Hardly anyone got married in a big ceremony anymore, but Lloyd had insisted. The laws in most states and provinces in North America said if two adults lived together for sufficient time, they were married, and if they ceased living together, they ceased to be married. Clean and simple, no muss, no fuss — and none of the pain that Lloyd's parents had gone through, none of the histrionics and suffering that he and Dolly had watched, wide-eyed, stunned by it all, their world crumbling around them.

But Lloyd had wanted the ceremony; he had forgone so much because of his fear of creating another broken home — a term, he'd noted, that his latest Merriam-Webster flagged as "archaic." He was determined never to be daunted by that — by the past — again. And so he and Doreen had tied one on as they tied the knot — a great party, everyone had said, a night to remember, full of dancing and singing and laughter and love.

Doreen had been past menopause by the time she and Lloyd got together. Of course there were procedures now, and techniques, and had she wanted a child she could still have had one. Lloyd was more than willing; he was a father already, but he surely wouldn't deny her the chance to be a mother. But Doreen had declined. She had been content with her life before meeting Lloyd, and enjoyed it even more now that they were together — but she didn't crave children, didn't seek immortality.

Now that Lloyd had retired, they spent a lot of time at the cottage in Vermont. Of course, both of their visions had placed them there on this day. They'd laughed as they furnished the bedroom, making it look exactly as it had when they'd first seen it, precisely positioning the old particle-board night table and knotty-pine wall mirror.

And now Lloyd and Doreen were lying side by side in their bed; she was even wearing a navy-blue Tilley work shirt. Through the window, trees dressed in glorious fall colors were visible. They had their fingers intertwined. The radio was on, counting down to the arrival of the Sanduleak neutrinos.

Lloyd smiled at Doreen. They'd been married now for five years. He supposed, being the child of divorce and now being himself once divorced, that he shouldn't be thinking naive thoughts about being together with Doreen forever, but nonetheless he found himself constantly feeling that way. Lloyd and Michiko had been a good fit, but he and Doreen were a perfect one. Doreen had been married once before, but it had ended more than twenty years ago. She had assumed she'd never marry again, and had been getting on with a single life.

And then she and Lloyd had met, him a Nobel-Prizewinning physicist, and her a painter, two completely different worlds, more different in many ways than Michiko's Nippon was from Lloyd's North America, and yet they had hit it off beautifully, and love had blossomed between them, and now he divided his life into two parts, before Doreen and after.

The voice on the radio was counting down. "Ten seconds. Nine. Eight."

He looked at her and smiled, and she smiled back at him.

"Six. Five. Four."

Lloyd wondered what he would see in the future, but of one thing he had no doubt, no doubt whatsoever.

"Two! One!"

Whatever the future held, Doreen and he would be together, always.

Zero!

Lloyd saw a brief still frame of him and Doreen, much older, older than he would have thought it possible for them to be, and then—

Surely they didn't die. Surely he would be seeing nothing if his consciousness had ceased to be.

His body might have faded away but — a quick glimpse, a flash of an image…

A new body, all silver and gold, smooth and shiny…

An android body? A robot form for his human consciousness?

Or a virtual body, nothing more — or less — than a representation of what he was inside a computer?

Lloyd's perspective shifted.

He was now looking down on Earth, from hundreds of kilometers up. White clouds still swirled over it, and sunlight reflected off the vast oceans…

Except…

Except, in the one brief moment during which he was perceiving this, he thought perhaps that those weren't oceans, but rather the continent of North America, glinting, its surface covered over with a spiderwork of metal and machinery, the whole planet literally having become the World Wide Web.

And then his perspective changed again, but once more he glimpsed Earth, or what he'd thought might have been Earth. Yes, yes, surely it was, for there was the moon, rising over its limb. But the Pacific ocean was smaller, covering only a third of the face he was seeing, and the west coast of North America had changed radically.

Time was whipping by; the continents had had millennia enough to drift to new locations.

And still he skimmed ahead…

He saw the moon spiraling farther and farther away from the Earth, and then—

It seemed instantaneous, but perhaps it had taken thousands of years—

The moon crumbling to nothing.

Another shift…

And the Earth itself reducing, shrinking, being whittled away, growing smaller, a pebble, and then—

The sun again, but—

Incredible…

The sun was now half-encased in a metal sphere, capturing every photon of energy that fell upon it. The Moon and Earth hadn't crumbled — they had been dismantled. Raw materials.

Lloyd continued his journey ahead. He saw—

Yes, it had been inevitable; ye s, he'd read about it countless years ago, but he'd never thought he would live to see it.