“What happened?” asked Barbara, looking around the off-white chamber.
The tall person in the white robe smiled. “We get a lot of that. You turned left on the corner of State and Delaware just as a driver lost control of his SUV. You were caught between the grille and the window washer’s scaffold.” He bowed his head. “You died instantly.”
“Oh!” Barbara clutched her purse to her chest. “I remember wondering whether I should stop for coffee before or after I bought the groceries…if I’d decided to do it after and went on for the groceries….”
The tall figure nodded. “Things would have been different, yes.”
Barbara scowled. “I might have lived another thirty years!”
“Eleven, actually.” The person floated around behind a tall beige desk. “If we can….”
“Eleven? You know that?”
“Well, yes,” said her host. “I have your life record right here, and if I look back to the moment you turned for coffee, change the decision, and roll forward, I can see…but that’s immaterial now.” A keyboard clicked out of Barbara’s sight. He smiled again. “You are saved the trouble of moving to the new house.”
Barbara took two steps forward. The desk and the figure behind it seemed much larger now. “What new house?”
The figure’s lips pursed. “That’s not important, but you would have…here, look.”
Barbara came around to his side of the desk. At the height of her shoulders was a shelf on which sat a viewer with an eyeshield, and a keyboard next to it. “It’s like watching a video on a website,” said her host. “You click the action back to the right moment, pause it, type in “Do not turn left, and then watch how events would have followed.”
He pulled aside and Barbara found that by standing on tiptoe, she could look down the eyeshield into the viewer. “Okay, I buy groceries, I go for coffee, I go home, and…it skipped a scene.”
“Yes, it shows you just the significant parts of the….”
She waved at him to be quiet. “I’m looking at the television and the lottery ticket I got at the store and…I win? I would have won the lottery?”
“If you had bought groceries, you would have had the change to buy a lottery ticket on impulse, and….”
“I would have.” Barbara sighed and drew back from the viewer. “Oh well. Too late now.”
“Thank you for understanding that,” said her host. “Now….”
She put a hand on the viewer. “Could I do that to anywhere in my life?”
“You can look at any decision you made in your life, though you really don’t have any need now to do so.”
“It’s just that I’ve always wondered what would’ve happened if I hadn’t chickened out and skipped the cheerleader tryouts. Would I have made the squad?”
Her host sighed. “I can let you look at one more. Scroll back to the year….”
“I know the year.” She found the cursor and slid her finger on the pad to the right of the keyboard. Nodding at her younger self, she typed “Don’t go home.”
“Oh, there’s Sharon! And Sue! And all the other….” She shook her head and watched unhistory play out. “And there’s Mrs. Kinnick posting the names of the…. And I didn’t make it. I knew….”
She watched as her young self turned away from the list, shoulders slumped. Her eyes widened as a taller woman came up next to her, and put an arm around her waist. Her mouth dropped open as scenes skipped ahead.
“We were…but she hardly ever spoke to me in…we’re friends. Oh! Well, that’s friendlier than I…which meant I was with her when she went on to professional women’s basketball. And because I was there, she didn’t lose the big game and she didn’t get into meth, and…that’s…..”
“Yes.” It sounded as if a foot was tapping under her host’s robe. “You see that….”
She held up a hand to hold him off. “Wait a minute, wait a minute. What if I hadn’t gone to that party in college and wound up marrying that….”
Barbara slid the cursor a little ahead, and typed in “Skip New Year party.” She watched in silence as that evening unfolded, but ats the fifth scene passed her line of vision, she emitted a little shriek, slapped her purse on the shelf, and climbed onto the high stool.
Her host’s voice was grave. “There’s no point in….”
“Just hang on,” she told him. “What if I….” She sent the cursor back along her lifeline.
The white-robed character waited a few more moments and then stepped quietly out of the room, locking it behind him. Down the hall, he stepped into a much larger cubicle, where a much larger individual sat behind a desk.
“She’s throwing things now.” A long hand indicated the other room, out in the endless corridor. “And she broke two fingernails down to the quick.”
“Excellent, How long will it take her to go through all the decisions of her life?”
“Roughly three thousand years, though once she starts second-guessing the decisions in the alternate time streams….it could take an eternity,”
“Very good. And every alternative will turn out better than what she actually lived.”
“Yes. She does, er, still think she’s in Heaven.”
“But she’s miserable and in pain? And things will get worse?”
“Yes, indeed.”
“Then let’s not lose sight of our goals in the details. Carry on with the next arrival.” The tall figure leaned back and blew a smoke ring which did not involve any tobacco product.
Blogsy Babbles 