Variations in Dreampaint

Illustration by Janet Aulisio

I wiped the perspiration from my forehead again, scratched my beard, and stood patiently at my little flower stand. I watched the crowd, seeing if anyone recognized me… seeing if I could find him. I was not worried that I wouldn’t recognize him; I knew him too well to miss him, though we had never met. I had never even seen his photo.

I was more worried that someone in the crowd would recognize me. It had happened once, ten years before, despite my garish clothing, and the DreamPaint 1010HR sunglasses I wore. Occasional recognition was inevitable, if your face had appeared on every magazine cover from Time to Byte to Forbes; if you were the only man to be compared to both Bill Gates and Michael Milken in the same breath. Fortunately, being the wealthiest man alive not only made me recognizable, but it also made correcting the problem straightforward: the lucky lady who’d spotted me ten years earlier now inhabited the only Swiss chalet on the Great Barrier Reef, and she did not want to lose it.

It was 11:45 A.M. I couldn’t tell if today was the day that my nineteen-year ritual would end. Part of me hoped it would; part of me, a dark part, hoped it would not.

As usual, as I stood sweating at my flower stand, I daydreamed of the joyful way the tragedy had begun, the moment when my wealth, and my flower stand, became inevitable parts of a future history I would have to write, alone.

I bent low, so I could get my head down to the open car window. “Thanks, Chris, see you in the conference,” I said, and waved her on so she could catch a parking spot close by, rather than farther away from Moscone Center.

“Sure, Eric. Get done with these guys soon, so you can get in on the real action, OK?” Chris said before shifting the car back into gear.

“Wait!” I said with the urgent sincerity I had practiced faking for years. I reached behind her ear. “Got it,” I said, handing her the pink rose I seemingly pulled from behind her ear.

Chris just rolled her eyes. “Don’t you ever tire of silly magic tricks? Couldn’t you at least learn a new one?” She started to pull away, and stopped one last time. “By the way, we’re having a special midnight bull session tomorrow night.”

“Goodness. The Virtuality Con is having a special bull session tomorrow night, too. At 11 P.M.”

“Well, Eric, that’s cool, but you better leave their party at midnight and come to ours. Everybody who’s anybody will be there. Including someone you’ve wanted to meet. Someone very special.” Her eyes laughed at me.

As she left, I straightened up to my full height—at 6’ 7’’, that meant a lot of straightening, and I was used to people staring at me as I did it.

I’d been a starter on the Stanford basketball team for one semester. But then one Saturday night a drunk driver veered into my lane, and I didn’t dodge fast enough. Shea, my girlfriend, never came out of her coma. I was lucky, only getting my right knee banged up. Permanently.

I grieved for Shea, but it was the knee that ruined me. My whole future, my whole purpose—to play in the NBA—was wiped out. I was getting good grades in school, but I was empty.

I don’t know what would have happened to me if it hadn’t been for the guy on the white mountain bike. He was the VP of some company in Palo Alto, and he rode his bike to work from his home in Redwood City every day, cutting across the Stanford campus. Anyway, he stopped next to me one day while I was admiring the palm trees by the campus center; he wanted to admire them too. We started talking, pretty uneasily at first: we were very different kinds of people, the jock and the nerd. But he told me about the work he was doing, and he told me about virtual reality—not the weirdo stories typical in the news, but explaining its underlying value, why it would make the world a better place. Eventually he told me about nanotechnology, too. And he got me hooked.

I never would have guessed I could fit in with the nerds and the hackers, but looking back now I guess I was always a nerd at heart. I switched from not having a major to chemistry. I took up virtual world construction as a hobby, and the development of molecular tips for Scanning Tunneling Microscopes as a plan for a career.

Which left me in a quandary the year the Foresight Institute put on the Nanotechnology Conference in the Moscone Center North on the same weekend that the VRML Standards Committee put on the Virtuality Conference in Moscone South. Unable to decide which to attend, I tried to attend both. That was how I’d wound up being dropped off at the Virtuality Conference by Chris O’Keefe, who was organizing the Nanotechnology Conference.

I walked into the building. The registration lines were to the right, but I already had my badge thanks to Linda Scharansky, another friend who was helping organize the VR con. I snapped it on and strolled over to the display of events, at the base of the stairs leading to the mezzanine.

Despite the staccato clatter of background noise in the hall, I heard a remarkably distinct sound: the sound of happy feet, dancing down the steps behind me. I couldn’t help turning to see who projected such joy and laughter. I only caught a glimpse of her before she crashed into me.

She was too tall to be of faerie blood, too silly with her arms flying wildly to be a goddess, too surprised at being caught in my arms to be an angel. But as I lifted her bodily off the floor and put her carefully back down, she felt and looked like all three to me. My heart beat just a little faster. I hadn’t really been involved with anyone since Shea, but…

I smiled at her, my most open, winning smile. She smiled back, a bit dazed. For a moment a huge warmth suffused her face, then disappeared. “Sorry,” she said, “I’m not used to steps and staircases.”

“So you’re from Kansas, then, where everything’s flat,” I said, in a weak effort at a joke.

She laughed uncertainly. “No, actually, I’m from Berkeley,” she replied. She stared at me for a moment, so analytically it stopped my next foolish response dead in my mouth. She continued, “You wouldn’t believe how much you look like my boyfriend.”

Suddenly all my thoughts of love, romance, and sex, not necessarily in that order, were smashed. “Does your boyfriend play basketball?” I asked.

She looked away. “Gary’s dead,” she explained. She smiled half-heartedly. “Besides, they don’t play basketball anymore.”

No basketball in Berkeley? I should have questioned it—but the thought suffocated beneath the wave of new hope that thrilled me, since she was unattached. Sure, it was a shame her boyfriend had died; I guess I would have preferred he was OK for her sake, but it did mean I had a chance.

“I’m sorry,” I said, with reasonable sincerity.

“It’s OK. It’s not your fault. At least, it’s probably not very much your fault,” she finished rather mysteriously. “What’s your name?” she asked rather pointedly.

“Eric, Eric Rinaldi,” I said.

Her face fell, like she had expected me to be someone famous, then brightened like I had passed a test. “I’m Karly. Nice to meet you, Eric. Sorry I ran you down. Gotta motor,” she finished.

It was now or never. “Karly, wait!” I cried. “You have to let me buy you dinner. Meet me right here, at 6 P.M.”

She paused in lonely reflection. In the end, my resemblance to her beau probably made the difference. “OK.” She turned to leave again.

“One last thing,” I said rapidly. “This is a stupid question, but I have to ask. Are those VR glasses you’ve got there?” I pointed at the sunglasses she had propped on her forehead, glasses that were just a little too thick, glasses I thought I saw lit up on the inside when she first turned away.

She stared at me again, then grabbed the glasses off her forehead and jammed them into her pocket—but not before I caught a glimpse of the inner side of the lens. I stood in shock as she muttered, “I knew I shouldn’t have brought them.” She bounced away, unable to conceal her inner buoyancy despite her obvious irritation.

I just stood there a moment, savoring her passage… and savoring, of all strange things, the glimpse I’d had of her glasses. The resolution, just from what I’d seen in that moment, was beyond anything I’d ever seen or heard of. And I’d never heard of the manufacturer, either—the label on the inner edge of the left earpiece said, “DreamPaint 2020EHR.” Either she was wandering around the con with the most remarkable innovation of the decade, or… or I didn’t know what.

I checked out the events and seminar schedule for Virtuality. It was going to be a great gathering, with all the glitterati of the field: Will Jaeger, Lisa Strang, and Paul Greenfield were all scheduled to attend.

Next I trotted across the street to try to catch up with Chris. There was a rumor that Dr. Drexler would show up at this year’s convention, and I really wanted to meet the founder of the field, though I had nothing particularly clever to say to him. The president of NTools was going to be there as well, and the fourteen-year-old genius from MIT, Austin Zerr, was on the schedule for the third day. Rumor had it that Austin had met half the requirements to win the Feynman Prize in Nanotechnology, an awesome development if it were true.

I was scanning the crowd for Chris when I saw her for the second time—Karly!

She was turned partly away from me, scanning the crowd much as I was.

Truth be told, I almost didn’t recognize her, she had changed so much. Minutes ago she had been the living incarnation of a fireworks display; now she was subdued, in a dark gray jumpsuit with sky blue stripes that enhanced her athletic build. And her hair—I would have sworn it had been longer. She must have pulled it up in some fiendishly clever female way… and all in a matter of seconds!

A more thoughtful person would have asked himself if this might be Karly’s sister, but I did not. I cat-stepped up behind her. As I was about to shout “Surprise!” in her ear, however, she spun on me in some kind of combat stance. In a cool voice she asked, “Who on Earth are you?”

“Eric,” I replied with foolish surprise. At last my brain caught up with reality: “You’re not Karly, are you?”

A smile touched her lips. “I’m Cory.” She shrugged. “At least, I think that’s how it would translate.”

I just stared at her, unable to believe my eyes. “I don’t suppose you have a sister named Karly?”

She shook her head; so much for the simple explanation. She returned my stare. She broke the silence first. “You… look remarkably like my boyfriend,” she admitted at last. She reached out, took my hand in hers; her touch was as cool as her expression, though she seemed to be warming up.

“Your hands are large and strong, just like his.”

I took a deep breath; this was going to be a very strange bit of déjà vu. “But Gary just died, didn’t he?”

Tears welled in her eyes. “He was getting into his car at the intersection of Telegraph and Durant, and…” The tears cleared away; she stared at me in amazement. “How did you know?” she demanded.

Was this a bad dream, or the beginning of an adolescent fantasy, with two stunning women—twins, they had to be twins—coming into my life at the same time? For the moment, I decided to play along with whatever the Fates had concocted for me.

“Cory. Meet me here, tonight, at 11 P.M. I will then tell you all about yourself.” Ha! I was now able to treat Her as mysteriously as They had treated me. I gave Cory my brightest smile.

Impishly, she smiled right back, and suddenly her inner radiance broke through, and she owned me, just as surely as Karly had owned me just minutes before.

So where do you take a hot first date in San Francisco? There are many answers, of course, lots of places you could go, all depending on your hot date and your intentions. My intentions were all a bit outside the usual motivations. One goal was to determine if Karly knew more about her twin Cory than Cory knew about her. Another was to test my own best theory about the twins, both of whom had lost boyfriends named Gary recently. My theory was simple: one girl with two personalities equaled a beautiful woman who needed great psychotherapy more than she needed any kind of boyfriend.

Last but not least, whereas other guys on other dates might care about other articles of clothing, one of my goals was to get into Karly’s glasses. I couldn’t get my mind off those DreamPaint 2020s.

In the end, I took her to the dining room atop the Marriott. It was close to Moscone, and there was no better view in the city—at least to the south. It was also fun to tell her I was taking her to the Wurlitzer Building—so nicknamed because it looked like a giant pipe organ, dozens of stories tall.

I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised when she didn’t have a clue when I described the Wurlitzer—she muttered about how she didn’t get across the Bay Bridge very often. I confess it was fun taking her there for the first time. I was not surprised that she stepped right up to the window and looked straight down: most people don’t, the window is full-length, with nothing between your toes and a long spiraling plunge except an inch or two of pure transparency. It’s sort of like a glass bottom boat twenty stories in the sky. I’d always loved it myself, an E-ticket ride, even if I did feel just a bit dizzy when I stepped back with my palms ever so slightly cold and damp.

She laughed at me. “You’ve got a compensatory personality,” she accused me, “If you’re not good at something, or you’re afraid, you have to prove yourself by being better at it than anybody.”

“And what are you?” I asked, laughing in turn.

She quirked the corner of her lip. “I’ve got a crusading personality,” she said.

I had a rush of inspiration. “You’re here to avenge Gary’s death,” I guessed.

Her eyes widened, a cat caught in headlights. She replied haltingly, “More like an effort to prevent deaths like his from happening again.” A spirited light came into her smile, “And, of course, it would be better still if I could bring Gary back to life.”

I wanted off the subject of Gary, but couldn’t help one last show of compassion. “If I could bring him back, I would,” I said with conviction. Before she could respond, I reached behind her ear and pulled out a red rose. This time her eyes widened with childish delight. My smile was a little bit forced; I had not only pulled out the flower, but also tapped the back of her ear with a dot of indelible black ink, completing Phase I of my plan to tell if Karly were crazy: Phase II would occur when I met Cory later. If Cory had the same dot, I would know who she was.

Of course, if Cory did not have that dot, I would be really stumped.

The magic flower set the stage for a truly wonderful dinner; we didn’t even get to dessert before I’d invited her to accompany me to the private soiree of the great minds of VR, the following night at 11 P.M. As I listed the people who’d be there, her eyes grew wide. “All in one place at one time!” she exclaimed like a little girl.

“In the flesh!” Technically it wasn’t my place to invite anyone to this shindig, but, hey, my mouth was following where my heart led. Right now, there was nothing in the world I’d deny to my heartbreaking mystery girl.

Dinner ended too swiftly, and the lights of the city beckoned. By the time we reached Moscone Park we were walking hand in hand, laughing.

Karly pointed at the white structure we were passing. “What’s that?” she asked.

“That’s an amphitheater,” I said, a bit puzzled that she hadn’t a clue. I laughed, “It is the finest singing stage on Earth.” I jumped up on the stage. I began to sing. It was not one of my greater talents.

“Stop! Stop!” she implored.

“If you don’t want me to sing, then I want to hear you sing.” I smiled wickedly: a key element in good blackmail is good humor.

Underneath her reluctance I could see a glimmer of acceptance. I continued, more softly yet more commanding, “Come on, now.”

She frowned, but ascended to the stage nonetheless. She waved her hands at me. “Shoo,” she said.

I stepped down. She began to sing. And I stood transfixed by the beauty and power of her voice.

I am sure my reaction was not strictly the result of my personal bias toward her; I still remember that a small child, four or five years old, curly blonde hair and innocent blue eyes, was drawn to the stage to listen with me. At first I thought the little girl was an apparition called into existence by the singing, just a natural element of the song itself. But when her parents joined us a minute later, they too shared the entrancement.

Karly sang of unalloyed joy, spots of bright sunshine reflected from raindrops, but with no need for raindrops to carry them; or perhaps there were raindrops, for when she finished, I had to wipe my hand across my face to dry them off.

“Beyond imagining,” I said.

She laughed, jumping lightly off the podium to join me. “You’ve heard it before, I’m sure,” she said.

“Never—whose work was that?”

“Stuart Glennan.” She looked puzzled. “You haven’t heard of the most famous songwriter in the world?” Her expression changed, as she came to some internal realization. “Uh, I guess I’m not surprised. He’s really only famous where I come from.”

“He certainly deserves to be famous,” I said. “Why hasn’t he published on the Web?”

“He has… or I guess I should say, he will,” she concluded. “I guess he hasn’t gotten around to it yet.”

“He sure as hell ought to!” I couldn’t believe such beautiful music hadn’t been published yet! “Listen. Let’s chat him up—why don’t you come on down to my place, we’ll log on, and find him and get him publishing! He deserves a larger audience!”

The more I talked, the more unhappy she became. She was slowly backing away from me; I realized she was already out of reach of my long arms.

“Gotta go,” she said in a small voice.

“Wait,” I cried, to no avail. She was running silently across the path, her hair streaming out in moonlit splendor behind her.

I started after her; I could have caught her, even with my bum knee, I’m sure. But she did not want me, and that ended the race before it had begun.

Slumping as I watched her disappear into the darkness, I suddenly realized how late it was. Cory! I straightened up with an electric rush. Was that why Karly had run off? Because her alternate personality had kicked in and told her she needed to change costumes for her next meeting? I trotted around the side of Moscone North; from the crest of the hill I could see the entrance to Moscone South where I was to meet Cory, and at the same time I could watch to see if she came from the same direction in which Karly had disappeared. I guess I was a bit too sure that she’d come that way, because I was looking at the Wurlitzer building when the word “Boo!” suddenly whispered in my ear. Cory’s warm breath tickled my ear.

I didn’t quite jump out of my skin. “How’d you do that?” I asked as I turned to her.

She was a different person from the grim Cory I’d met earlier. Oh, she wasn’t transformed into Karly, but she had Karly’s radiance; she was bubbling over with joy. “It’s wonderful here,” she said, twirling around with her arms thrown wide. “It’s so free!”

“Unlike Berkeley,” I replied dryly.

Her arms fell. “Well, that’s not exactly what I meant.”

“It’s OK.” I didn’t know what was OK, but she suddenly needed consoling. I put my arms around her, pulling her close. Now my breath was as warm on her neck as hers was on mine. I was relishing the moment till I noticed a little detail, barely discernible in the light from the street lamps—there was no black dot of ink on her neck. Cory and Karly really were different people. The good news: I wasn’t falling head over heels for a multiple-personality escapee from a psycho ward. The bad news: I was falling for two different people.

People who happened to be twins but who didn’t know each other. Twins who had both lost their tall boyfriends named Gary, in Berkeley, just recently. Gary must have been a brilliant two-timer, to keep these two on a string without finding out about each other.

Sure he was, and I had a flying saucer in Brooklyn left to me by an expired maiden aunt. I needed a better explanation. All I could come up with was that somehow, Karly had found and removed the (supposedly) indelible mark on her neck in the few minutes between leaving and returning; the mark she didn’t even know she had when she left. Yeah, right.

Inspiration struck. “I have a favor to ask of you.”

She smiled inquiringly.

I took her hand and guided her to the amphitheater. “Will you to sing for me? Your favorite song?”

“Well…” She looked very doubtful.

“Please. I know you have a beautiful voice.”

She closed her eyes. And a new melody unlike anything yet heard on earth filled the park.

Where Karly’s song had been a burst of joy, this was a haunting work of despair, of lonely terror in the dark, of empty eternities… of missed opportunity. Her voice had an eerie, otherworldly quality, an almost inhuman tenor.

I cried again, as I had cried for Karly’s song, but this time the tears were cold, carried by the chill midnight air.

When she had finished, I abruptly sat on the grass: my legs seemed unable to support me. She plopped down beside me then, and hugged me as I had hugged her. “It’s all right,” she said, “it’s not going to happen. I promise,” she said cryptically.

“Who wrote that?” I asked, still in a bit of a daze—although I already knew the answer. “Don’t tell me Stuart Glennan wrote that one too.”

Ha! This time I had amazed her. Her face filled with wonder. “How did you know?”

“Because your twin sister, or your clone, or whoever Karly is that she is a perfect replica of you, also has an incredible favorite song by the same guy.”

Her voice fell. “Eric, I told you before, I don’t have a sister, and I cannot possibly have a clone, either.” She thought for a moment. “At least, I cannot possibly have a clone here, at this time.”

For the next hour we didn’t talk so much as I interrogated her. She never denied the clear implication that there was something very funny about her, never refuted my strange questions with the simple observation that I was strange myself. Clearly, her heart wanted me to figure it out, to understand her, to share her grief and pain. But her mind fought it, believing it too dangerous to trust anyone, even me, the smart nice guy who looked so much like the love she had lost.

“What do you think of the future of VR?” I asked.

“Silly stuff,” she replied, a different answer that was yet symmetrical to an answer Karly had given me during dinner, when I had talked with her about nanotech: “Nothing important will come of it,” Karly had said. Now Cory cleared her throat and spoke of VR: “Nothing important will come of it.” Cory’s voice, like Karly’s earlier, was full of confidence and scorn.

Unthinkingly, I posed another test to her. “Come with me, let’s talk to Stuart Glennan on the Web.”

“No! I have to leave now.”

She broke away from me and disappeared into the night. And so, having scared off the two most remarkable women of my life in one night, I found myself alone again.

It was past 2 A.M. when I finally reached my apartment. I was exhausted, more tired than I had ever been even after working the washing machine assembly line as a summer job, putting the output hose on the pump on the baseplate 1,200 times every night.

But tired as I was, I could not sleep. I needed to find out about Stuart Glennan. And Gary.

I started with Gary. It should have been easy to find him on the Web, there couldn’t have been too many Garys who had died recently at the intersection of Telegraph and Durant. I searched the obituaries for all the local Berkeley and San Francisco news sites, and quickly came up with… nothing. Big zippo. No one by that name had died at that location in the history of the Web, much less in the past year. Could “Gary” have been a nickname? No, that didn’t help either: no one by any name had died at that intersection in the last year. Another mystery. I was too tired to curse.

I struck pay dirt with Stuart Glennan, though there was a lot of regular dirt to shovel first. Over a dozen Stuart Glennans had postings out there. After beating the pages till I was blue, I found one, a professor of philosophy, specializing in hermeneutics, who dabbled with the occasional piece of music.

He happened to be on-line. I could hardly type coherently by this time, much less think a straight thought. But I couldn’t stop, driven by my twin mysteries. What else could I do, except chat him up?

>>Sir, are you the author of a song with these words? My girlfriend just sang this dynamite song for me and told me you had written it.<< I typed in a passage from Karly’s refrain.

The response was a bit more vehement than it should have been. >>How the Hell did you find that lyric! I just came up with that passage last week, and I haven’t shown it to anyone! Not even my girlfriend.<<

That set me back. >>Are you sure? My girlfriend sang the whole song for me.<<

I could tell Stuart needed to get some sleep; he was losing it. >>What did your girlfriend do—come back in a time machine?<<

I chuckled. >>I suppose we shouldn’t rule it out. I just met her today… or rather, yesterday, at this point.<< I thought about it for a moment. »Would you, ah, like to hear the rest of the lyrics? Just so you can get the words right, so we don’t accidentally screw up the future? :-) <<

That finally got a smile out of him. >>»Thanks for the offer, but no thanks :-) I think I’ll struggle along on my own.<<

>>OK, but please forgive me for pestering you one last time. What about this song?<< Now I sent him a bit of Cory’s lyric; just typing it made me shudder with cold.

Another long pause ensued. At last he answered, >>I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. That’s another song I started but never finished. I… wasn’t… sad enough… to finish it. Besides, it was unsingable. No one in the world has the range to sing it properly.<<

I shook my head. Unsingable? Cory had not only sung it, she had filled it with life! I went back in my mind over her performance. I tried to separate her voice from the music; so strong, so clear, such crisp, lilting highs… such hauntingly powerful lows. Yes, Stuart was right. No normal human voice could sing this song. Now I understood why the melody had such an eerie, otherworldly quality. The mystery of Cory was no longer even who she was, but what.

By this time the Sun was coming up, and I was brain-dead. I fell into bed to sleep for a couple of hours before going back to the conferences for another day of mystery, beauty, and intense confusion.

Even before meeting the mysteries of Karly and Cory, I had always done my best thinking while asleep. For tough physics problems, where other people would bang their heads all night long, I would just knock off early, drifting off to sleep with the equations dancing lightly in my head. When I awoke, I didn’t necessarily have the answer, but I usually had its scent.

As it was with physics, so it was with my twins. Understanding the twins would require the strictest application of my own personal favorite logic, a piece I liked to call Occam’s Hammer: If there are two reasonable and simple explanations for a phenomenon, but each explanation conflicts with at least one fact, then a third explanation, much more complex, is required. Complex, counterintuitive explanations are the very stuff of quantum physics, and so my quantum physics courses had prepared me well for this situation.

I could theorize all I wanted to about split personalities, twins, and secret cloning technology, but there was only one place in spacetime where Karly and Cory could have learned songs that had yet to be written. I raced to Virtuality to confront Karly with my insights.

I spotted her coming out of a seminar on resolution illusions and eye focus tracking. She looked grim… and then she saw me. She transformed as I watched, as the grimness evaporated. I think I flushed as I realized just how much I personally had the power to change her mood.

She skipped up to me. I spoke first. “I need your help,” I said. I retreated with her down the hall, looking for a quiet place. It was pretty hopeless: the marble floors and tiled walls made a giant acoustic lens, carrying garbled echoes to every nook in the place.

“What’s up?” she asked.

“Investments,” I explained. She looked puzzled. I continued. “What do you think of JouleView Corporation as a VR company to invest in?”

She gave me one of those “you’ve got to be joking” looks.

“I see. How bout VThink Inc.?”

Another stare.

“What about DreamPaint?” I asked, holding my breath.

She lit up. “Now that’s a company to invest in.”

“I see.” I looked into her eyes. “Karly, DreamPaint hasn’t even been founded yet.”

Her chin quivered. “It’s a secret,” she said defiantly, “You just haven’t heard of them!”

“Karly, anyone who could make the DreamPaint 2020 wouldn’t keep it a secret. They’d IPO and become billionaires.”

She just stared at me.

“Tell me about the future, Karly. Tell me why you came back.”

She sobbed. I gathered her in my arms, to support her… and to make sure she didn’t go anywhere. “You must tell me, Karly. Let me help you.”

And so she told me, a rich tale of the future, a future in which DreamPaint exploded onto the scene, bringing totally immersive virtualities into every home and office. Oh, they weren’t perfect at first, and the first DreamPaints cost too much to put in a box of Crack-erjacks. But after the initial breakthrough, evolution was breathtaking, even faster than the takeoff of computing power in the heyday of the microcomputer revolution.

Not only did individuals depart into Virtuality—whole communities disappeared, for all intents and purposes, into full immersion worlds, worlds far more satisfying than any reality.

These immersive otherworlds left their people remarkably well positioned when the Millennial Depression wiped out the economy as we know it. Instead of raging at the politicians, the virtual communities ran millions of social experiments outside the reach of traditional power-seeking con artists. From the stew of alternatives they explored, they assembled a body of insights, and bound together in a small Webdoc: The Principles of Self-Organizing Groups. The Principles allowed the members of a group to build a civil society without government intervention.

Self-organization swept the impoverished planet, trampling traditional governments and their hugely expensive bureaucracies. Soon wealth started growing again, ever faster till it reached a staggering pace. Wealth led to innovation, and in this context, the quality of immersive virtuality leapt ahead—and this time everyone participated.

But then it started to fall apart. Fewer and fewer people left their idyllic virtualities to foray back into reality, and the society still needed people to tend the machines. The decay became visible first in the life-sustaining but tricky high-tech arenas. Jet aircraft became too dangerous to fly. Hospitals became unable to perform delicate surgical procedures. Eventually, even cars failed—and there was no one willing to repair them.

Karly and Gary had been crusaders of a sort, trying to get their communities back into the fresh, real air. And that was when tragedy struck. “I guess… I guess I should show you what happened,” she said. Reluctantly, she pulled her glasses out of her hair and handed them to me.

I held the DreamPaints half-reverently for a moment, then slipped them on.

My whole body blinked, and suddenly I was standing at the corner of Telegraph and Durant: I recognized the Durant entrance to the little indoor mall that ran parallel to Telegraph. I could feel the warmth of the sunshine on my forehead; it must have been just after noon, the Sun rode high in the sky. A gentle breeze laced through the hairs on my arms. I could just barely hear someone talking behind me, about how nice it was considering it was already July 10. The sounds and sensations almost frightened me, because I knew that in reality I was standing in a dark, cool hallway, wearing a long-sleeve shirt, a long way from July. But after a moment I learned how to switch focus: just as I could look through the glasses to see the hallway, I could feel through the sensations to know where I was. Feeling in control at last, I switched focus back to the scene in Berkeley.

A tall man striding down the hill caught my eye. His back was to me, but I knew who he had to be, because he was so tall, and his hands were so big. He reached his car—a sleek alien work of a car—and the car’s door started to open automatically. Suddenly another car squealed, its brakes failing, and twisted headlong into the man and his car. A brilliant flash of light wiped out my sight, and the sound of the explosion shook the sidewalk where 1 stood. I almost fell down, trying to steady myself on that sidewalk, when back in reality I was standing on the solid tiles of the Moscone Center.

I removed the DreamPaints and came back to reality. “Thank you,” I said quietly.

“You earned it,” she whispered. Then she continued with her story.

After Gary’s death, Karly could see only one way to fix the problem: to go to its source. Two physicists, Harold Rodin and Gary Mocineau, had figured out how to build a time machine, but until Karly had tracked them down no one had cared. She’d assembled the resources to come back in time… to plant a bomb and destroy this Virtuality Conference and everyone in it. Nothing like the DreamPaints would ever exist.

“And that’s why I’m here,” she finished quietly, neither defiant in her defense nor ashamed in her guilt. Perhaps she felt both, and they canceled one another out.

“Karly,” I replied, “there has to be a better way.” I gripped her shoulders in my hands, painfully. “You have to let me help you find another way.”

She looked up, into my eyes. “Yes,” she said. Her eyes were filled with love. My heart sank, for I knew she was not looking at me, but at her boyfriend whom I so resembled. I had more questions for her, but I couldn’t stand looking into those eyes that looked at someone else.

I continued, inspired. “I still want you to come with me to the meeting tonight at 11, where everybody’ll be. I want you to meet the people you want to kill. Do you understand me?”

She nodded, and after a brief hug, I turned and headed for Moscone North. My brain was ready to explode with new information, but I still didn’t have a good explanation of what was happening: if Karly was from the future, then what about Cory?

I found Cory as easily as Karly: she was one of kind, save her twin. It took longer to break her down—somehow she was more formidable than her twin—but even Cory could not resist the look in my eyes, her dead boyfriend’s eyes. And so I learned where she was from, and why she was so much tougher. She had grown up in the toughest future of all.

Molecular engineering had exploded onto the scene after the first Feynman Prize had been awarded. Advances came thick and fast… but not quite fast enough to prevent the Politician’s Depression, which ground every development to a halt. The people were hysterical, and as happens in such situations, they voted in a new president who reflected their fears. Buck Canion was swept into office on his promises to end all dealings with the countries that had stolen America’s jobs, and to stamp out the corruption in America’s heart that made us weak and undeserving of greatness. He promised to bring forth a resurgence of moral living, and a renewed America. Even rumors of ties with Neo-Nazis could not turn aside the tsunami of his popularity.

He started with a series of show trials for the former President and Congress. The Constitution notwithstanding, the charge was treason, and the crowds standing in lines outside soup kitchens all over the country cheered as they watched the televised carnage.

At first Canion invested in nanotechnology to restore America’s manufacturing base, but it became his passion when he realized how it could be applied to restore morality. With the power of molecular manufacturing he could produce and distribute miniature video cameras across the country virtually overnight: soon every room in every building was wired for the Eyes of Morality.

Imprisonment and executions for immoral behavior rose swiftly thereafter. When even Canion’s own security police balked at the toll, Canion swiftly found more efficient and reliable enforcement with the Hands of Morality, molecular killing machines Canion could personally control without human intervention. Most were too small for the eye to see, which only increased their power to terrorize.

It took only a small step for Canion to see that the only remaining threats came from foreigners; it took less than a month to spread his dominion across the whole of Earth. And the last development he allowed was the creation of Morality’s Immortal: he made himself young, and promised the world his personal Guidance, for time everlasting.

In this world Cory and Gary had uncovered the time travel theories of Rodin and Mocineau, and formed a desperate two-person rebellion. They had built a time machine out of molecular components. But the paranoid Canion had somehow come to suspect Gary’s defiance, and when Gary’s car exploded, Cory’s mission had become more personal. She had come here, to destroy the future of nanotechnology, to ensure no one ever gained the kind of power Canion held.

I shuddered. “My God, what a horrible future! No wonder you’re so determined to prevent it.”

“I was hoping you’d understand,” Cory replied.

I shook my head. “I do understand, but that doesn’t mean I agree. There has to be a better way, Cory.”

Hurt flushed her face.

“Nanotech doesn’t have to be just a tool of dictatorship,” I continued.

She shrugged. “In my world no one dies of hunger or disease,” she admitted. “But neither does anyone laugh or smile.” She waved at the bustling crowd. “There is nothing like this.”

“Cory, I swear to you, I will help you save the future. But not like this.” I paused. “Come with me tonight, to our midnight meeting. Meet the people you want to kill. They are good people too. Let us all help you.”

Her shoulders were still straight, but something inside her fell. “OK, Gar—OK, Eric.”

I wandered blindly down the streets around Moscone, trying to understand what I had learned. It took hours for me to even digest a basic facet of the truth: Karly and Cory had come from two different futures! Most people would have had enough trouble accepting one time traveler—here I had a pair of them, from mutually exclusive but parallel timelines!

I thought about the future as a path with a Y in it; it just didn’t make sense. Occam’s Hammer told me the truth was even stranger than I could currently comprehend: that was food for terror!

I turned my attention to the more practical issue: what to do? How should we avoid these twin fates, so hideous that Karly and Cory would travel through time to prevent them?

Cory’s future guaranteed the most ghastly end of mankind ever imagined. It was also, it seemed to me, the easiest to prevent. In Karly’s timeline Buck Canion never came to power. A dose of good immersive social virtualities, enough to do the on-line experiments that would provide an alternative to dictatorial government, was all we needed to stop the madman. It was funny, really, that there was not even a hint of VR in Cory’s world.

And it was funny that there was no hint of nanotech in Karly’s.

I blinked, and shook my head from side to side. Thinking of the future as a pretzel made my head hurt. I could hardly achieve a cogent thought, much less a coherent cause/effect pattern, but in the end I came to the following understanding:

Karly and Cory were mutually responsible for creating each other’s timelines.

Karly, in destroying all vestige of VR work, created the VR-less world in which Buck Canion could thrive. Cory, in destroying all progress in molecular manufacture, created Karly’s future, in which the machinery was not reliable enough for survival during a phase when humanity was struggling to redefine its relationship to itself.

These two timelines were not random selections, nor contradictory: rather, they were a stable configuration as a pair. One could only “exist” if the other existed too. Each brought the other into existence as a necessary precursor to itself.

It made sense, but only the kind of sense a madman could embrace. Or a physicist, if that was not the same thing.

It was almost time to go to the VR coffee klatch. I was eager to see Karly, to tell her what I had learned, to explain the true nature of the solution. I started to trot as fast as my bad knee could carry me.

As I hustled along I thought about how happy she would be. It was a good thing she had accepted my offer of help so easily, else I would not have had the time to figure it out. So easily… I paused to catch my breath, and realized the enormity of my error. I straightened up and ran, ran faster than I had run since the accident. My knee throbbed, then screamed in white flashes of agony. I ran faster.

I stood in the darkness, recovering my breath, favoring my right leg. The meeting was about to start, and I started hoping that my paranoid nature had done Karly a disservice…

A light footfall entered the room, the sound of feet that should have been happy. The lights came up.

“Hi, Karly,” I greeted her, choking down my disappointment. “I was afraid I’d find you here.”

“Eric!” She stared at me in surprise. Her hand was in her pocket.

“I wondered why you gave in so easily,” I said. “After all, you traveled all the way through time to destroy these people. Sometimes I’m a touch dense, but I eventually realized why you were so agreeable. I gave you the perfect time and place to get all the most important people, didn’t I? If you set a bomb off at some seminar during the day, you might have missed someone crucial, out for a donut or leaving the conference early. But no. I told you the one time, the one place, where everyone would be.”

Karly started to circle me, one hand holding a box the size of a hand-grenade, one hand in her pocket. There was no laughter in her eyes at all now, and as she looked back and forth between my face and her pocket, I knew how deadly serious this meeting had become.

“We can do this together,” she whispered. She showed me the bomb, told me how it worked. “It’s easy. Then we can be together.”

I moved to intercept her. The meeting was going on in a corner room; this was the only adjacent room; Karly was moving to the shared wall. “You love Gary,” I reminded her.

“I… you are so much like him,” she said, and the surprise still made her voice catch. But she didn’t stop trying to get past me.

“Karly!” I cried out. “I know how to stop this madness. I know why your future came to be, I know how to stop it!” I rushed into an explanation.

For a moment my words held her. But soon it became clear I had failed. Can you blame her for doubting me? I barely understood the twin timelines myself. Surely my talk of her twin sister Cory, whom she would create so she could create Karly, was the raving of a lunatic.

Could I have done better? I have asked myself that question a thousand times. Yes, surely today I could give a more succinct answer. But would even an answer cultivated and evolved over years of thought have been good enough? Such a useless question; I can never know.

We were face to face; I could feel the warmth of her breath on my neck, smell the perfume of her hair.

“Please, Eric, stand back,” she said.

I stepped closer.

With a desperate cry of sorrow, she drew her right hand from her pocket, and thrust a six-inch knife blade toward my stomach. I deflected the knife, but not before she put a long ragged cut down my left arm.

She was strong and fast, but I was stronger and faster. She had tried to kill me; some primitive defense instinct took over as the blood dripped down my arm. I stepped aside, grabbed her knife hand, bent it toward her, and plunged the knife into her chest. I reached around behind her and plucked the bomb from her other hand.

She fell against my chest. “Eric, you have to stop them. Promise me you’ll stop them.”

“I promise,” I said as tears streamed down my face, “I know how to fix it. Everything will be OK.”

She shuddered one last time, and the light departed from her eyes.

I don’t know how long I stood there, holding her. But in the end I laid her gently on the floor, wiped my eyes, and walked quietly to Moscone North, to sit in the dark of the room adjacent to the nanotech party, to wait for Cory.

With only the sound of my own breathing to accompany me, I had a few minutes to think about what to say to Cory. I sank into the realization that I dared not say anything. Cory was a nanotechnologically engineered person—her singing voice proved that much. She could be effectively impossible for a mere human to kill, even with the advantage of surprise. Without the advantage of surprise, what chance would I stand?

Cory! I desperately wanted to tell her that she couldn’t do what she was about to do, that if she did, she would create the Karly’s world, and Gary would still die, and she would fail again. But if I told her and she didn’t believe me, how could I stop her? And if I couldn’t even convince Karly to stop, what chance had I of convincing the sole survivor of a nightmare beyond any form of genocide?

And I had promised Karly that I would prevent her future from occurring, no matter what the cost.

I told myself that I couldn’t really kill Cory, that after all, she hadn’t even been born yet; indeed, since I had already killed Karly, Cory would never be born… at least, not as Cory.

No sound announced her arrival; I just saw her shadow in the hint of light trickling through the door. I flipped the lights.

She was already looking at me; with her nanotech enhancements, she had seen me in the pitch blackness, and I knew then just how difficult stopping her would be.

“Eric!” she whispered.

“Cory!” My eyes were full of tears as I stepped up to her.

I hugged her tight. Then I reached behind her ear. I pulled forth a purple rose. “For you,” I choked out. While I was getting the rose, of course, 1 had delicately placed Karly’s bomb on her back. I sobbed.

“What’s wrong?” she murmured.

“I will never forget this moment,” I replied, “I promise you, everything will be all right.” I stepped back, pressing my hands together.

She looked at me in puzzlement, then her eyes flashed as she felt the weight on her back. She reached around, quick as a cat, and—

The force of the explosion threw her dying body forward into my arms. The noise was deafening. I had a vague notion that the building was collapsing down on me, and that I deserved it. That was my last thought for a long time, that I deserved it.

Cory saved my life even as I was ending hers. Her molecular engineering was not enough to save her from direct contact with the blast, but it was enough to deflect the blast that otherwise would have left nothing of me to identify except maybe a couple of teeth.

Of course, with an explosion like that, it was still a miracle I survived. The ceiling did indeed collapse, and it took half a day for them to pull me out. Other people in the room next door were hurt as well, but there were no fatalities. Except for Cory, of course, who should have provided a most surprising autopsy.

But the police report said that there were no fatalities at all. Neither bomb fragments nor bodies were ever found, neither Karly’s nor Cory’s.

The police quite understandably picked me as the most likely suspect for planting a bomb. Indeed, while I was in the hospital, babbling on the pain killers, I think a plainclothesman interrogated me. But all he got was a lot of gibberish about trying to stop a beautiful girl from an alternate future from trying to blow up the Nanotechnology conference, and a duplicate girl from another alternate future trying to blow up Virtuality. In the end, with neither a motive to assign to me, nor even any evidence a bomb had been involved, they searched for other explanations. A multimillion dollar investigation found a cause: in a billion-to-one chance, a deep, secure natural gas pipeline had cracked, and a fissure had let gas trickle into the room, setting up the explosion. I later went over the evidence myself: they were right. In our timeline, that is what happened. I presume that, once their interlocked future histories were expunged from all possible timelines, Karly and Cory just… never existed.

It took a year or so for me to get my head straight. When I finally did, I realized that my relationship with Karly and Cory had only just begun. After all, I had promises to keep.

I switched tracks from biochemistry to finance. The change of direction thrilled my father, though it filled me with a regret that I will never outlive. Still, with Dad’s financial backing, and my unique knowledge of the future of technology, I did quite well… better, in fact, than anyone in history. Dad was quite shocked when I sold VThink and JouleView short and helped capitalize a little startup called DreamPaint. He was shocked again when I shorted NTools and took options on MoleFab after Austin Zerr joined up. But his grin was wide as Texas when things went as I had already known they would.

It wasn’t till after the Entitlement Crash—during which I was completely out of the American stock market, diversified into metals and other enterprises in debt-free Asian countries—that the columnists started arguing whether I was the New Bill Gates or the New Michael Milken. The one thing they all agreed on was that I was the richest man in the free world. I created the KC Futures Foundation to grant scholarships to promising young people entering college. One scholarship was won by Harold Rodin, to study nanotechnology; another was won by Gary Mocineau, to study kinesthetic virtualities. To my knowledge, in our present history, those two people have never met.

The Entitlement Crash, by the way, was the first indication that I had created a future different from either Karly’s or Cory’s. There were executions, unlike Karly’s future, but fewer of them than in Cory’s. The mobs shot all the living presidents, starting with the current one, and then burned the Congressional committee chairmen to death, but most of the rest were allowed to live. Many were later let out on parole, and allowed to enter honorable professions; a handful of these even became respected members of their communities.

Meanwhile, hundreds of new sociopolitical systems were simulated in virtualities. We didn’t figure out the Principles of Self-Organizing Groups, but we did manage to at least amend the Constitution with the new Bill of Inviolable Rights.

Stuart Glennan and I became good friends, though in all these years we’ve never actually met in person. I fear he was one of the losers in the new reality. He never did become famous, though he did do one beautiful song, one that I personally like better than his greatest works in the other futures.

Virtuality and nanotechnology progressed rapidly, neither quite as fast as they had in their own futures, but fast enough to keep the whole world on its toes.

At first, I dreamed often of Karly and Cory, but with time even the dreams faded. The dreams came back once, briefly, as I contemplated asking another woman to be my wife. I never did marry.

I look back now and wonder at the unlikely chain of events that led me here. Invariably it leads me to ponder the nature of time and the Universe. Quantum mechanics defines its own set of virtualities, a seething emptiness teeming with untold trillions of virtual particles, of which only those that lead to a more stable, more valid state ever see the light of day. Are there virtual universes too? Did the universe, in its own ponderous way, sift trillions of slightly different universes to find one more stable than the Karly/Cory mutual future creation configuration? Could there have been “losers,” universes in which:

—I looked slightly less like Karly/Cory’s boyfriend?

—Stuart Glennan wasn’t on-line when I went looking for him?

—That man on the white bicycle, so long ago, didn’t speak to me of visions of the future?

—I reacted one second faster that night in a speeding car, and married Shea and played basketball? Oh God, don’t let that have been a universe that could have been!

Well, the might-have-beens can be pondered forever by moldering philosophers. Meanwhile, I still had things to do and promises to keep.

The last and most painful part of my promise brought me here, to my little flower stand, for two hours on the specified day. The stand, at Berkeley’s famous intersection of Durant and Telegraph, was open from 11 A.M. till 1 P.M. on July 10 every year. It was hot out here, but that was not the main reason I had to keep clearing the sweat from my eyes. My heart was beating a jagged rhythm; somehow, I was sure that this day, this year, was the end of my journey.

Though the People’s Republic of Berkeley in the twenty-first century bore only a slight resemblance to the polyglot culture it had been in the twentieth, the street was still crowded with people who would have been distinctive anywhere but here. Still, when I saw him, I knew him; he stood out even here. Just as I myself did.

He was a tall fellow, wiry, with big hands—the kind of hands that looked natural only when wrapped around a basketball. He looked as I had, once upon a time, in a youth long ago. I understood clearly now, fifty years later, why Karly had stopped in her tracks when she first saw me.

All, Karly, Cory, who are you now, in the future that I have written for you? It didn’t make any difference; I was so close now.

He had a purposeful stride, unlike everyone else on the sidewalk. He tried to stride right past my flower stand—but here he found someone as purposeful as himself. “Flowers,” I said, blocking his way, jamming red and purple roses to his nose. “They’re free, Gary, for you, for that wonderful girlfriend of yours.”

I could see the puzzlement flicker in his eyes, though the flowers blocked my view of the rest of his face. I knew his thoughts: Who is this guy? Wait, he looks familiar, like I’ve seen him before. Do I know him? How does he know me? And, finally, God, these roses smell wonderful! She would love them!

I knew then that I had won the battle I most wanted to lose. I wasn’t done yet—the pain would continue for a minute or so more—but I had broken his pattern, interrupted his trajectory, and he would not go toward his car again until I released him from conversation.

Oh, how I wanted him to go to his car! To hurry! To be out of my way, to leave her to me!

But my inner self snorted. What, after all, could Karly/Cory see in a crippled old codger like me?

Besides, I had already killed her twice. I would not, could not, hurt her again.

So I babbled. I don’t know what I said, and it didn’t matter; I could see he was thinking of how she would respond to the gift I had given him for her.

Finally, out of the corner of my eye I saw a car carom around the corner, out of control. The sound of an explosion filled the air. I didn’t have to look to know that Gary’s car had vanished in a burst of flame, across the street, half a block away.

He looked at the fireball which had once been his prize possession. “My car!” he said, mouth hanging wide. He looked back at me, dazed.

And then I heard the sound that brought tears to my eyes. The sound of happy feet, running urgently now, came up behind me. I took a step, and another, but my will was weak. I turned back just briefly, to see her, the new her, the girl whom my planning and effort had brought into existence. I had to see her just once.