Chapter 64
Monday, 14 March 2022 – 5:20 a.m.
MST
“What’s wrong?” Ramesh asked as Quinn ended his call with
Valerie.
“Our network and security manager was found dead in his
office this morning.”
“Safer with you?” Ramesh reminded.
Quinn shook his head. “Truthfully, I don’t know anymore.
I’m completely blind until we can get this problem fixed.”
“You rely too much on your technology.”
Quinn looked up at Ramesh. “I don’t know how to be without
it. I haven’t made a single decision without the futurestream for twenty-five
years.”
“So you are going to try to fix it?”
“I have to. There are too many important decisions that
still have to be made. Laura is doing so well and...”
“She will succeed in spite of the futurestream,” Ramesh
interrupted. “She has not yet used it nor will she ever need to.”
“But I need to know. I need to know when we’re safe and when
we’re not. I need to know the best times to be in public. I need to make sure
she’s protected.”
“There are other ways to do that. Seven billion people on
this planet make those kinds of decisions every day without the futurestream.”
Ramesh shook his head.
“How will I know which decisions are best?”
“You won’t always know. But you have a brain Quinn. Use
it.”
Quinn sat in silence. He slowly shook his head. “I can’t live
without it.”
“Then this war will not end.”
Ramesh sat back and buckled his seat belt. Quinn could see
the disgust and disappointment in his face.
“I’m prepared to negotiate my surrender,” Quinn said
quietly.
“Sorry?”
“I said that I’m ready to negotiate. I was going to retire
in November anyway. It was going to be a surprise for Laura when she wins. I
have made all of the arrangements.” Quinn slowly rubbed his eyes as he
continued. “I’m going to ask Sireesha to let me retire and give up my claim to
the futurestream in exchange for Laura’s life. With the messenger and the
material Brad sent, I think I can make a strong case and I’ll always have
something to ensure she doesn’t reconsider.”
“For what it’s worth, Quinn, I think it’s too late.”
“It’s never too late. There is always room for last-minute
negotiating. Especially when someone has something new to bring to the table,”
Quinn smiled. He withdrew the messenger from his pocket and turned it over in
his hands. “Brad may have done me a favor.”
“Yes,” Ramesh answered. “But probably not in the way you
are expecting.”
Quinn cast a puzzled glance at Ramesh. “I don’t remember
you being so cynical.”
“I don’t remember you being so pathologically apathetic
about human life.”
“That was unnecessary.”
“Quinn, you called me for a reason. You have hundreds of
‘yes men’ that you could have sent to Durban to pick up this precious
messenger, but you called me. Why? Because you trust me. Because you can
trust me. Don’t presume to think that I agree with any of this. I’m here
because I care. I care about you. I care about Laura. I care about people.
What do you care about?”
Quinn set the messenger aside and rubbed his hands
together. “My family,” he said. His head was low. He did care, but he had
taught himself to balance his life. He had justified his long hours with
constant claims that he was working for his family and for their future. There
were times that he cared more about his work. He knew it and he knew that
Laura knew.
“Then take Brad’s advice. He wouldn’t steer you wrong. I
must admit that I understood little of the message, but Brad gave you options.
Pick the best one and do it. Do it before we arrive in Phoenix. End this
now,” Ramesh pleaded.
Quinn reclined back in his seat a bit. “Okay, Ram. I’ll
give you the choices and you tell me which you would choose. You tell me it’s
a simple decision.”
“I never said it was simple. I believe if Brad provided
three options, then at least one of them must be the right decision.”
“Fine,” Quinn retorted, “but there is no black and white.
No matter how firmly you hold to that opinion, there is no black and white.”
Ramesh frowned. “Arguing beliefs is never fruitful.”
“Brad gave us three choices. The first choice is to do
nothing. Unfortunately for us, he nullified that option by starting a general
broadcast of the details of the futurestream. If we do nothing, eventually
someone else will stumble on the message he sent and exploit it. That’s what
has destroyed the futurestream already.”
“Because,” Ramesh interrupted, “someone has already begun
using it?”
“Not necessarily yet, but eventually one or more other
people will discover it. Let’s say that in the next month, three people start
using the futurestream and that each one begins altering their decisions based
on their goals. If each of the three has a conflicting goal, there will be
chaos. Now imagine that hundreds of people with conflicting goals all get
access to the future. Eventually all of the conflicting goals will create
chaos in the future as we had known it.”
“And it will negate the usefulness of the futurestream,”
Ramesh said. “Because of all the conflicting goals.”
“Exactly,” Quinn continued. “The futurestream is corrupt
now because the future is corrupt.”
“But you cannot hope to contain this now?”
“I don’t know. If even a single person has started
investigating the futurestream, then it cannot be contained. But I don’t know
if anyone has started. I won’t know until we stop the dissemination of
information that Brad started.”
“And if there is already someone investigating?” Ramesh
asked.
“I fear for that person,” Quinn answered. “Because of
Sireesha.”
“So you need to shut it down,” Ramesh said, half asking.
“That is one option. But if there is already a breach, it
will be too late.”
“Then shut it down now,” Ramesh urged. “Shut it down and
minimize the loss.”
“I can’t do that right now. This is only part of the
messenger.”
“How do you mean?”
“Brad said that he sent the messenger in two pieces to the
most ethical people he knew,” Quinn answered. “I suspect Laura has the other
part.”
Ramesh remembered hearing Brad say that in his message. “You
would shut it down if you could?”
Quinn glanced at the floor. “I don’t know ... but I’m not
prepared for the third option.”
“What is it? Brad was very vague. He spoke of the agency
delta and a discovery ... and a friend.”
“I don’t know about his friend. Like I said before, Brad
was brilliant, but he was no engineer. He would have needed a close friend to
build this. I suspect his friend was involved in the development of Sireesha’s
futurestream. If so, he’s dead too.”
Quinn paused for a moment. Brad had sent several additional
files with his message to Quinn. Many of them were news clips and video
footage of some random accidents that had occurred at Naidu Technical in the
early years of their research and development. One story recounted how nearly
the entire network development team had been trapped in a small office fire and
how most of them had died. It was listed as a tragic accident, but Quinn
assumed that Brad had sent it because it was not an accident. There were
several similar pieces of information from Brad that implicated Sireesha’s
involvement in burying corporate secrets.
“The agency delta,” Quinn continued, “is the name of a
phenomenon that baffled us when we first began using the futurestream. Most future
events have a probability associated with them. Truly random events – weather,
natural disasters, meteor impacts – events that cannot be affected by human
intervention can have a one-hundred percent probability in the future.
Everything else has some non-zero probability of not happening.”
“I understand,” Ramesh answered.
“The really strange ones, though, were deaths.” Quinn
looked up at Ramesh. “Even after a person had died, there were many instances
that we found a future event in their lives.”
“A mistake? Or maybe just a message about the person in the
future?” Ramesh asked.
“No, something big – like a marriage announcement or the
receipt of an award. Or something trivial like a parking ticket or mention in
a news story.”
“But if they had died...” Ramesh started to ask.
“Exactly. Then there should be zero probability of any
future events for that person. But that’s not what we found. Not all the
time. We started to call it the delta – the difference between reality and
some problem with our software or our database. Over time we noticed that the
delta only applied to events that could be altered by some human interaction,
some act of human will – an act of human agency. It became the agency delta –
the difference between what seemed like the only realistic future and errors in
the futurestream.”
“So it’s an error?” Ramesh asked.
“Apparently not,” Quinn replied. He turned the watch over
in his hands. “The messenger – and Brad’s involvement in creating it – make
it, or him responsible for the delta.”
“How?”
“His primary goal in creating the messenger was to make
changes to the past. He never forgave himself for the mistakes we made.”
“Is that possible?”
“Brad and Daniel hypothesized that it could be done. Brad
persisted in its development. That was the main reason why he left me and went
with Sireesha. Daniel agreed to look into the idea,” Quinn answered. “It was
a ruse to get Brad over there.”
“So, if Brad wanted to correct the past, why didn’t he just
do it?”
Quinn stared through Ramesh into the distance. “Think about
it for a moment,” he said. “Really think about it. If you could change any
event in your life, what would it be? At what point would you intervene? How
would you do it?”
“I would not let them get on that airplane,” Ramesh answered
solemnly.
“That’s perfect,” Quinn continued in a bit more subdued
tone. “Since that day, consider anything good that has occurred in your life.”
“Nothing.”
“Seriously, Ram, think about it. Is there really nothing at
all in your life since then that you might regret losing if you changed that
event?”
“No. I am being completely serious. Quinn, they were my
life ... my whole life.”
Quinn stared at his old friend for quite some time. He had
really never thought much about Ramesh since that day. He had never considered
that Ramesh had been so completely destroyed that he had never recovered.
“I am so sorry,” Quinn said quietly. “I really had no idea
... I should have stayed in touch.”
Ramesh shook his head. “It would have made no difference.
When they died, my life ended. I pushed everything away. I only write to
forget, but I have no passion for it. Each day I wake ... I pray is the last
...”
Quinn could forge no response. Silence filled the cabin for
several minutes. Ramesh allowed himself to indulge in the memories of his past
for a time, but stopped before he became emotional. He looked at Quinn. He
could see that he had stunned Quinn with his honesty.
“I do understand what you were trying to say,” Ramesh said.
“Brad could not risk losing the love of his life by tampering with his past.
He could not use the device he created.”
“Yes. Exactly. There is no way to estimate the effects of
changing the past,” Quinn responded. “Attempting to fix one mistake could
ripple through the timeline and impact thousands and millions of other
decisions.”
Ramesh nodded. “But if that happened, you would never
really know it. Right?”
“We wrestled with that for a long time,” Quinn answered. “I
think you’re right. Let’s say that I use the messenger to warn myself about
Daniel and Sireesha in the past. So I don’t hire them. That changes so many
things.”
Quinn sat forward in his chair. “Sireesha recruited Valerie
at a job fair, for example. And did you know that Sireesha was involved in our
adoption of Jordan?”
Ramesh shook his head.
“She was. Sireesha had been our liaison with the attorney’s
office for a time when we were a very small company. She had been made aware
of a young homeless girl who was seeking to place a child for adoption. Sireesha
had recommended us because she knew we were waiting. So what would have
happened if I never hired Sireesha?”
“It’s impossible to say,” Ramesh answered.
“But maybe we wouldn’t have adopted Jordan.”
“But you would never have known about Jordan. You wouldn’t experience the loss,” Ramesh continued.
Quinn shrugged. “Could you do it? Throw away what you know
... even with all its ugliness and difficulty and guilt ... for something you
could not possibly predict?”
Ramesh shook his head. “No,” he answered.
“I have always been opposed to the idea of tampering with
the past. Brad and I argued about it ... a lot. He said that we needed to
consider everyone else, not just ourselves, because we tampered with so many
lives. He reminded me in every argument that we had forced others to
experience losses that they would never realize and that we had to correct it –
he wanted to undo it all. That is his third option.”
“Undo it all?”
“Yes, stop me from discovering the futurestream at all,”
Quinn said. “Then everything would return to its correct state. We would be right
with the Universe, he would say.”
Ramesh leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. “It is
the right thing to do.”
“There is no black and white,” Quinn replied.
Ramesh continued to speak without looking at Quinn. “Yes,
Quinn, there is. There is black and white. But black and white is difficult.
Choosing shades of gray is the simple choice. It allows you to live without
the burden of guilt or the recognition of consequences. Choosing black and
white requires character.”
“I can’t risk losing this all,” Quinn replied defensively. “I
have three beautiful children, a loving supportive wife who is going to be the
best President of the United States in a century. I have built a business that
provides healthcare, technical and communications services to billions of
people worldwide. I can’t just throw it all away. There is always another
option.”
“You are already at risk of losing it all,” Ramesh
reminded. “At least the most important of it.”
“I won’t allow that to happen.”
“I think you should consider Brad’s options. He clearly
thought it would be best,” Ramesh retorted.
“He didn’t have all the information... If he were here...”
“He’s not here, Quinn,” Ramesh interrupted. He sat forward
and stared at Quinn. “He ... is ... not ... here. He died because of this and
when he died he gave you an option. I believe it is your only option. Brad
believed it was your only option.”
Quinn shook his head but said nothing. The remainder of the
flight was spent in excruciating silence. It seemed to last forever. Both
Quinn and Ramesh continued the argument in their minds, but neither spoke.
Watch 
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