7
“Are you sure that’s right?”
I laughed and pulled the girl closer. “Everything is right when I’m with you.”
She wriggled away, giggling. “Quit it. Is that the right time?”
I looked up at the curved clock face. “Yeah, I think so, nearly eight.”
“Come on then, we’re going to be late!”
She pulled me along, and I looked up from the clock at the high vaulted ceiling of New York’s Grand Central Station. This place always inspired a sense of awe in me, or, if not exactly awe, then a deep feeling of history. I felt a certain sense of nostalgia for all the human stories that had passed through this place, or, like me, were dragged through.
Looking up and around as we wound our way through the hustle and bustle across the white marble floors, my eyes came to rest on the news display at one end. She was looking at it as well.
“Carrier groups set to high alert,” read the rolling display. “NSA warnings of cyberattacks.”
She let go of me and stared at the news display, then looked back at me. Her blue eyes shone, twinkling in the station’s lighting. She was so beautiful.
“Are you sure it’s safe?”
I looked briefly up at the news before looking back into her eyes.
“These things always blow over,” I reassured her.
“Seriously, Vince, you’re the expert. You’re sure, right?” She stood stock still, looking into my face.
“Yes, I’m sure. If we don’t take this one, they’ll probably cancel everything later.”
A huge snowstorm was descending on New York and Boston. We had to hurry if we were going to make it on time to catch the last train out.
She shrugged. “Okay.”
We began running again, hand in hand, and soon we were on the Metronorth, cuddled up together for the ride to New Haven to visit her parents, the soft ka-chunk-ka-chunk of the tracks lulling us into a peaceful slumber as the miles rolled away.
What seemed like moments later, I awoke with a start, my heart racing. Somebody was yelling. Sitting upright, I looked out the window into a swirling whiteout.
Then the screams and the terrible squeal of metal tearing and gnashing into itself as the train car pitched back and forth. I jammed my feet into the seat into front of me, bracing myself for what was to come, holding onto the girl who clutched desperately back onto me.
The world exploded.
Sucking in air, I sat bolt upright in bed, looking around, but she was gone. I hadn’t died in that reality, but then, that one was in the past, now an unchangeable part of my timeline. I didn’t die in the train crash, but she had—Sophie, the love of my young life, back when I was an engineering student at MIT. I calmed my breathing, telling myself that everything was all right, but even now, over forty years later, I knew that it wasn’t—that it never would be.
It was a perpetually recurring dream, dulled only slightly with time, of the day when I’d lost her. I’d promised her there was nothing to worry about, and it had cost her life. I’d been in the middle of my master’s degree at the MIT Media Lab, an expert in the cyber realm, with Patricia Killiam as my thesis professor. I’d been studying the use of predictive systems in social networks, a pursuit that became a passion after the accident. If I’d just been able to see the future a little more clearly, been able to know a little more, I could have saved her. That’s what I could never forgive myself for.
I wiped the sweat off my forehead, rubbing my eyes. Why had she returned to my dreams now? I sighed. It must be the baby shower I was going to later in the day. Family events always made me think of her and a life I’d lost so long ago, a life I’d filled with senseless fluff but was now defending with everything I had.
Perhaps it’s not worth it. Why am I even trying?
I could save my own life, but the future of the world? I knew the future, and it wasn’t something I wished I did know. It was something I’d been doing my best to forget.
I laid down in bed, put my heart back away, and closed my eyes.