“Well, in fairness, you did have a habit of repeating classified information.” We were sitting on the porch of the farmhouse where she lived, our violins resting between us.
“I was reckless. Tempting fate, I suppose. She said she was about to move to the Far Colonies, and strongly suggested I come with her, but the Far Colonies have an extradition treaty with the moon, so she suggested once we got there that perhaps that shouldn’t be my final destination.”
“And that was thirty years ago?”
“Twenty-six.”
I could see it when I looked at her, that quarter-century of living on this farm. Her skin was darkened by the sun and she had a peacefulness about her.
“What are they like?” I asked. “The Far Colonies?”
“They’re beautiful,” she said, “but I didn’t like living underground.”
8
We were married within a year, Talia and I, and when Clara and Mariam died, they left the farm to us.
This, I found myself thinking in the years that followed, on nights when my wife and I played the violin together, when we cooked together, when we walked in our fields watching the movements of the farm robots, when we sat on the porch watching the airships rise up like fireflies on the horizon over Oklahoma City, this is what the Time Institute never understood: if definitive proof emerges that we’re living in a simulation, the correct response to that news will be So what. A life lived in a simulation is still a life.
9
A countdown had begun. I sensed it in the background of all my days. Sometime soon, I knew, I would move to Oklahoma City. I was scheduled to begin playing the violin in the airship terminal by 2195. I knew, because I remembered the interview, that my wife was going to die first.
10
Quietly
in the night
of an aneurysm
when she was seventy-five.
11
When Talia was gone I sat alone on the porch every night for a while, watching the airships rising over the distant city. My dog, Odie, lay beside me, head on his paws. At first I thought I was putting off moving to the city because I loved the farm, but one night it hit me: I longed for those lights. After all this time, I wanted to be around people again.
“I’ll take you with me,” I told Odie, who wagged his tail.
12
What someone—anyone!—at the Time Institute really should have caught, given how intelligent everyone was supposed to be over there, was that I was the anomaly. No, that’s not fair. I triggered the anomaly. How did no one catch that I was interviewing myself? Because thanks to the documentation Zoey had created, on paper my name was Alan Sami and I’d been born and spent my life on a farm outside of Oklahoma City.
I watched the anomaly from the airship terminal. On an October day in 2195, I was playing the violin, my dog beside me, and I noticed two people almost at the same time.
Olive Llewellyn was walking along the corridor, pulling her silver suitcase. She didn’t notice the man walking toward me a few meters ahead of her, but I did. The man had just stepped out of a utility closet.
As the man walked toward me, crossing Olive Llewellyn’s path, the air seemed to ripple behind him. He didn’t notice, because he was focused on me, and because he was a little anxious; this was, after all, his first interview for the Time Institute.
I kept playing, sweating now, holding on for dear life to my lullaby for Talia. The rippling intensified; the software, if that was the word for it, whatever unknowable engine kept our world intact, was struggling to reconcile the impossibility of both of us being here. But it wasn’t just that the same person was in the same place twice; the engine, the intelligence, the software, whatever it was, it had detected a third Gaspery, somewhere else altogether in time and space, in the forest at Caiette, and now things were truly coming apart: this moment was corrupted, but so was that place, that point in the forest where in 1912 Edwin St. Andrew gazed up into the branches, where in 1994 I hid behind ferns and watched Vincent Smith. There was a strange wave of darkness behind the approaching man, light rippling away. Olive Llewellyn stopped as if struck. I saw myself kneeling in 1994, and Edwin St. Andrew in exactly the same spot—we were superimposed on one another—and nearby was Vincent Smith, thirteen years old with a camera in her hand.
An airship ascended at a nearby port, that unmistakable whoosh, and the specters were gone. Time was running smoothly again. The file corruption was repairing itself, the threads of the simulation knitting into place around us, and Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, my younger self, new recruit and distressingly inept investigator for the Time Institute, had noticed none of it. It had all transpired behind his back. He did glance over his shoulder, but—I remembered the moment—chalked up his overwhelming sense of wrongness to runaway nerves.