What If It’s You?

Chapter Twenty-One

I kept trying to delay the inevitable, urging Ollie to put on one more episode of the TV show we were bingeing, to stay up with me a little longer reading, to chat with me after I reluctantly flipped off my bedside lamp.

But eventually his breaths grew slower and more regular, and his hand slackened in mine, and it was just me in the dark room, sensing him beside me but unable to see more than the barest hint of his silhouette. And try as I might—the Pixel powers that be could pull the plug on the program at any moment, after all, how could I waste even a second on sleep when that was true?—eventually, I couldn’t fight it anymore, and I drifted off beside him.

When I woke up, Ollie was already emerging from the shower, towel hanging off his sharp hips. He grinned at me as he pulled open his underwear drawer.

“I think I like this new and improved Laurel. Lazy looks good on you.”

“Oh yeah? Wanna play hooky with me again? I could really lean into it today. Fake a doctor’s note to send my manager, call in with a really feeble-sounding voice and then pretend I’m about to puke so I can end the call sooner…”

“I wish. Too many lessons this afternoon to cancel. And Ryan and I are grabbing coffee with a possible investor this morning.” He tried to say it casually, but I could see the prospect of it electrifying him, giving his usually languid movements an uncharacteristic bounciness. Every cell in me wanted to wrap around him until he was safe inside, a permanent part of me, but instead of telling him that, I said:

“That’s awesome. Call me when it’s done, yeah? I want to hear every detail.”

“Okay. Yeah.” His smile widened infinitesimally. That. That would be the last memory I had of him. If I had to cease to exist, at least I’d dissolve into the ether holding on to that.

The morning whizzed by, routines speeding up the already too-fast progress of time, and before I knew it, I was leaning in to peck Ollie on the lips before heading out for the office—after all, if I didn’t go, he’d worry, and I couldn’t risk anything ruining this for him, least of all me.

He caught the nape of my neck and turned it into a deeper kiss, his tongue deftly parting my lips, the pressure and movement of his mouth on mine somehow both reassuringly familiar and tantalizingly new. It made me wonder why more people didn’t turn the itch at the base of their spine into a chance to find a new version of each other, to fall in love with the person they’d already chosen over and over again, instead of simply assuming it meant it was time to move on.

“Even if things have been a little…tense lately, I love you. You know that, right?” He tilted his forehead against mine. “I’m so incredibly lucky to have you, Lo.”

“I love you too,” I choked out. “I can’t wait to see what you do next.” And this. This would be my last memory of him, the love pouring off of both of us so palpable I could almost see it filling the space between our bodies, glowing softly, a color that didn’t have a name.

And then I was tripping down the stairs, muscle memory doing what my brain and heart were begging me not to: leaving him behind.

I decided to walk to the office, slowly, really taking in the world around me, the one Ollie and I had made our home. The sun was bright and the sky the vivid blue you only seemed to get on late fall days, the crispness in the air bringing the rest of the world into sharper focus. Trees exploded with color, the morning light catching the curling edges of individual leaves and turning them to stained glass in every shade of red and gold. The breeze over my face was redolent of…well, mostly bus exhaust. I was still in the middle of Somerville, after all. But occasionally, a whisper of that crumbling, dusty fall scent would sneak in, and the city would fade into the background.

It was so ordinary, and beautiful in a way that squeezed the air out of my lungs.

Before long, I was swiping my way into the Pixel offices, making small talk with colleagues as we waited for our coffees to brew, the riotous funhouse geometry of the offices visible in a way it hadn’t been in years, making it hard to focus on the conversations.

Any minute now. My stomach clenched and my hands balled to fists, a useless attempt to weather the storm that was already black on my horizon, gusting toward me, ready to drag me up into its center and spin me away to who knows where.

But by the time I finished my first coffee, it still hadn’t. I was still here.

I bluffed my way through my morning stand-up, operating on autopilot, promising I’d “offline” about anything that required a more complicated answer than I could build from my various bricks of marketing jargon. On another day, I’d have been equally amused and appalled at how little difference it seemed to make—all these years I’d been giving a hundred and ten percent when apparently a grab bag of key phrases and no more than a quarter of my brain did the trick just as effectively.

And by the end of the meeting I was, improbably, still here. The tiny sprout of hope that I thought had withered from lack of oxygen and sunlight tentatively unfurled a leaf. Maybe I’d just lucked out? Won the game of quantum roulette?

By eleven I still hadn’t snuffed out of existence, and my direct reports had all separately asked whether I was really feeling better, darting wary glances at me and stepping away in case my glassy-eyed daze was catching. Unable to resist the temptation anymore, I opened a chat to Drew.

Laurel:

So? Did you fix it?

Drew:

meant to update you, sry

come to the lightning offices if you have a sec

It took a lot of effort not to flat-out sprint.

The now familiar room was mostly empty, the click of my heeled boots on the concrete floors startling in the near-silent space. A woman I didn’t recognize unhuddled from her workstation just long enough to elevator-eye me, then turned back to her work, the reflection of the lines of code unfurling rapidly on her screen turning her glasses opaque.

I stopped at Drew’s shoulder, hesitant to break his focus. After about thirty seconds of watching him squint at the screen, totally oblivious to my presence, I coughed. Then coughed louder. Then tapped his shoulder.

“Drew?”

“Oh, hey Laurel.” He blinked, clearly surprised to see me. “Did you just get here?”

“I wouldn’t say just .” I raised an eyebrow and Drew laughed, sheepish.

“Sorry, you know how I get. Plus, I didn’t really sleep last night.”

“So? Are you going to put me out of my misery?”

“I mean…it works again. Clearly.” Drew rolled his eyes as if that were the most obvious thing in the world, and a flare of the annoyance other-me felt toward him, a sense memory of couple’s fights I had no actual memory of, shot through me.

But it was quickly doused by a tsunami of relief so powerful it almost swept my legs out from under me.

“What genius move did you come up with to fix it?” I croaked out, pulling a chair from a nearby desk and collapsing into it. Luckily, Drew didn’t seem to notice how shaky I was.

“Nothing.”

“If it’s some state secret, you can just say that.”

“No, I’m serious. Here, let me show you.” He clicked open the program. As it loaded, he turned to me, his bright, eager gaze totally at odds with the heavy dark circles beneath his eyes. “After we talked, I decided to break for dinner and a shower, I was spinning my wheels pretty hard, and I guess I hoped I’d have one of those eureka moments people always talk about?” His lips quirked into a rueful smile. “Spoiler alert, I didn’t. Apparently, after thirty-six hours awake, ‘don’t fall asleep standing’ is as much as my brain can handle.”

“Jesus, Drew.”

“Not the first time I’ve pulled an all-nighter,” he said with a shrug. “Anyway, after the shower I was moving kinda slow, and I decided to take a power nap to see if it would help refocus me—studies show twenty minutes of sleep is actually the most effective amount for—”

“Drew.”

“Right. Point is I was gone for maybe an hour? And when I got back to my computer the program was just…working.”

“How?”

“Wish I knew. But here’s the weird thing. That unknown user? It still was you. Except…Well, take a look.”

He clicked a few times and a list of registered users appeared. I immediately spotted my laurel.e@pixel handle. But as I moved farther down the list, I saw it.

“Wait…what?”

“Right?” Drew’s eyes were huge with the repressed glee that overtook him whenever he was presented with a particularly interesting puzzle.

And this one was a doozy. Because at the very bottom of the list was a new name.

Lo.Everett

“That’s you, right? People call you Lo sometimes?”

“Yeah,” I murmured, mouth agape as I tried to process what I was seeing. “But how…?”

“No clue. I would have messaged last night but it was really late, and anyway, I had no idea what was going on. And the profile isn’t giving me any clues—all I can see is the name, and the fact that it ran a single sequence that seems to have started sometime yesterday? I couldn’t find it in the back end, but honestly I wouldn’t know where to start looking. We shouldn’t even be able to set up profiles that don’t attach to a Pixel employee ID. The ramifications for computer learning here are just…” He got a distant, dreamy look, almost like he was having a religious vision.

“And there’s nothing else that can explain the new profile? Where it came from or…you know, what I have to do with it?”

“Nope. I’ve been turning it over all night—I even did an exercise to try to lucid-dream about it in case my subconscious had more information…” I bit back a laugh. Of course Drew had devised a way to work in his sleep . “But all I could come up with is that there must have been some bug that made the program think one of those inflection points during your setup was actually another user? And it was using all that processing power to separate your actual profile from this one.” He clicked a line nestled under the new user name, reopening the sequence, eyes flying over the code on his screen.

But…that didn’t actually make sense. Didn’t solve for the echo chamber effect that had been plaguing computers in both worlds: There were too many of me, all of them too similar for the program to tell apart, an interworld shell game it had been trying—and failing—to solve.

“Maybe the whole time I needed to choose a different version of me, not just a different person to be with,” I murmured.

“Sorry, what did you say?” Drew glanced over, already half-lost in whatever secrets the code had been whispering to him.

“Nothing, just…relieved it worked out,” I said. He smiled absently and turned back to the screen. “Can you see whether my real profile is fully set up?”

“Already checked, it should work now. And no sequences running, checked that too, but you should be able to start a new one now if you want. Or one of the ones you were trying to start during your calibration. Though…I wouldn’t run the one you were running…” He coughed, awkward, suddenly very focused on the code on his screen.

“Don’t worry, that’s not a question I have any interest in pursuing further.” I physically rolled my chair back, raising both hands. “No offense.”

“None taken.” Drew’s lips quirked, a quick exhale the only tangible sign of relief. Tenderness squeezed me for a moment, but that was all. No desire, no what if . Just appreciation for my brilliant and kind and thank-god-not-still-pining friend. “Well, once you’ve dug out, just say the word if you want to play around in here again. And I’ll let you know if I figure out more about the mysterious Lo Everett.” He grinned hugely and turned back to the screen, already absorbed in his work again.

I made my way back to my desk, thoughts flying by so fast it almost made me dizzy. Not vertigo dizzy, thank god, but close.

I couldn’t say why, but I was certain I was right, that the all-important change hadn’t been my decision to stay with Ollie—I’d made that days ago—it was something bigger, more fundamental, it was me changing. The moment I’d been willing to lose him? Or the moment I’d decided to tell Drew the truth? Or later, my telling Ollie that he should look for a job he loved, and I would be the one to make it work for once? It could have been any of them, or all of them, or something else entirely.

Whatever it was, I wasn’t going to question it, not when I’d finally realized what really mattered to me.

Besides, I needed all my focus for finding a local writing group. One that could push me to keep at it, whatever “it” wound up being. Though I had the start of an idea…

“And no one has been able to access the user profile since?”

“Nope. I mean, I could probably solve the mystery of my own password if I put my mind to it, it’s clearly some version of me, but I honestly don’t have much interest in engaging with AltR again in the near future. Or ever.”

Dana tilted her head to the side, acknowledging that, and took a long, slow sip of her latte. Her eyes were narrowed, gaze fixed on some point in the middle distance. I could almost see her brain whirring and spinning, as complex as any quantum computer and possibly even more precise. She’d emailed the day after AltR had miraculously resolved its processing issues, her message characteristically no-nonsense: Would love to know whether your problem sorted itself out. If you have no idea what I’m referring to or who I am, please do let me know that as well, as it will be highly informative to me. I’d imagine a search of our recent correspondence would clarify things some, but not fully, in that instance. At the very least I hope said correspondence would prompt you to respond to this message.

“The only thing I could come up with—and I know this sounds a little ridiculous,” I said, cupping both hands around my mug of cocoa, letting the warmth ground me. In the last week and a half, the weather had seesawed from the “lingering glimpses of summer” phase of fall into the color-leached chill of winter-is-coming, and the windows of the coffee shop were fogged, the late afternoon light fading rapidly outside. I thrust my tongue into my cheek, trying to excavate the words. “I think the program…maybe recognized a new version of me, if that makes sense?”

“How do you mean?”

“Like…that last day with Ollie, I realized that it’s not just about who I want to be with, it’s about how I want to be with them?” I scrunched up my face, shaking my head, unable to express myself precisely enough to meet Dana’s scientific standards. “I think maybe…something important about our relationship changed—or about me in our relationship—and that’s what the program responded to. Sorry, I know that’s vague, but it’s the best I can do.” I shrugged.

“It is. But this isn’t an undergraduate course.” She smiled slyly. Then it slipped away and she squinted again, clearly turning over what I’d said. “And honestly…I think you might be on to something. After all, the problem, as far as we can tell, is that the computers were running far too many versions of you, and the overlap between them was too great for the program to accurately parse you anymore.”

“Right.” Parse me sounded highly detached and vaguely sinister, but then nothing could get more literally detached than I had been recently.

“Maybe simply making a firm choice wasn’t enough to extricate you by the end. You needed to change enough for the program to recognize where you belonged. It functionally needed to see you as an entirely new person. ”

“So you agree, then? I basically just…personal-growthed my way out of Schrodinger’s box?”

“If you want to be reductive about it,” she said tartly, rolling her eyes. Then she took a deep breath and bit her lower lip. “But I do think something like that must be in play here, yes. If that’s the case, the implications for the multiple worlds interpretation would be profound.” The light flickering on in her eyes was familiar, remarkably similar to Drew’s shiny new puzzle look. “The breadth of possibilities for how to split off universes—and how they might overlap—could be even wider than we imagined. I wonder, if you were willing to access that new profile—”

“I’m sure nothing like this would happen again. Especially since it’s possible the whole thing was just some fluke of the AI training itself in the background until it finally, you know…learned whatever it needed to.”

“I suppose that’s possible,” Dana said, her knowing smile returning. “For now, of course, it will all remain in the realm of the theoretical.”

“Where it belongs,” I said.

“Hear, hear.” She raised her mug and I clinked mine against it. The sound of a church bell tolling in the distance managed to cut through the buzz of the coffee shop, and I clicked my phone to check the time.

“On that note, I should get going. Ollie’s going to propose tonight, I want to pick the right outfit. He’ll probably have a photographer waiting in the wings.”

Dana cocked her head again, eyes questioning.

“Sorry if I’m being dense, I’ve always found certain social rituals tedious, but if you know he’s planning to propose…isn’t that knowledge itself the proposal?”

“No, it’s proof that we understand each other well enough that I’d be an idiot not to say yes.”

“If you say so.”

When I showed up at Mother Hen two hours later, ten minutes early and practically bouncing with excitement, Ollie was already waiting, perched on the edge of the narrow bench just inside the door, tapping his fingers rapidly against his thigh. Occasionally he’d give a quick nod, like he was reassuring himself. Part of me wanted to sit out there and watch him for a few more minutes, take the opportunity to really see the person he was apart from me, recognizable but shifted from the Ollie I knew. But the longer I waited outside, the longer it would be before I got to see all the love in Ollie’s eyes, the promise that for us, forever would mean forever, at least as long as we kept making the effort to find each other, to see each other. To take risks and give each other the space and trust to try big new things and fail hugely and just be instead of trying to so carefully tend to our lives that we wound up choking them off.

Well, really, I’d been the one doing that.

I pushed open the door and made a show of spotting him.

“There she is.” Ollie popped up, then lifted my chin with a forefinger, gentle yet insistent, to place a soft kiss on my lips. I could feel a familiar tingle swirl through me, and I wrapped my arms around his neck, drawing out the moment. Well…as much as I could in public. The glimmer in his eye as I pulled away told me we’d be holding the same thought until we got home that night. I couldn’t imagine a better celebration.

Ollie helped me out of my coat and we followed the hostess to our usual table, his hand at the small of my back. While we made a show of studying the menu—we both knew what we would order—he glanced up at me from across the table.

“You look extra beautiful tonight. Did you do something to your hair?”

“No. But I was thinking about a change, actually.” I fingered the ends of a long curl, the same style I’d been wearing for longer than I could remember. “Maybe go darker for winter.” I imagined the reflection of that other Laurel, the sharp bob framing her face in deep, shiny black. “I might even try a bob. One of the ones that cuts right across your jawbone, you know?” I mimed the severe borders of the hairstyle.

“Sorry, but…none of that meant anything to me.”

I rolled my eyes indulgently and pulled up a picture on my phone.

“Like this.”

Ollie glanced between the image and my face, then raised an eyebrow.

“Not that I don’t think it would look good on you—it would be impossible for something not to look good on you—but doesn’t it feel kinda…wrong?”

“Wrong how?”

“I don’t know.” He shrugged and handed the phone back to me. “It just doesn’t feel like you. But if you like it, go for it.”

“Naw, you’re right. It’s not really me. Just something I was playing around with.”

“Maybe she’s a character in your book.” Ollie pointed at the sharply bobbed woman with the tines of his fork. “She’s got a…superspy vibe.”

“Actually…she could be. Though that’s not really the story I had in mind.”

“Oh?” His eyebrow quirked. “What idea did you have?”

“I’m still sorting out the details, but at its heart it’s a romance.”

“Perfect. Dead in your wheelhouse.”

“But the actual story is this woman, like…slipping between two different lives. In two totally different universes. And to get back to the life she’s meant to be in, she needs to find out what she has to change, but she doesn’t realize that the answer is that she needs to change…” I shrugged. “I don’t know, I’m still sorting out the details. But it’s a love story. You know…in the multiverse.”

Ollie tilted his head to one side, a slow smile dawning.

“That sounds…incredible. How is she going to get between the lives? Like…have you worked out the mechanism yet? I’ve always loved a classic ‘cursed object’ story but maybe that’s a little trite? You tell me, you’re the writer.”

I tucked my phone away and started haltingly sketching out the idea that—surprise, surprise—I couldn’t seem to get out of my head, Ollie’s rapt attention almost more enticing than what I knew was coming next, probably with “surprise” champagne just after the dessert course. I was still scared—terrified, really. The future was so vast, the possibilities endless. What we felt right now might not always burn so bright, it might slip out of sight or occasionally vanish altogether.

I couldn’t guarantee that nothing bad would ever happen to us, or that we’d always feel the way we did in this very moment. There’s no such thing as guaranteeing happiness, or risk-proofing life. But I knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that I was exactly where I was supposed to be. And whatever unknowable future I would be entering into after tonight, when the ring I knew was nestled inside Ollie’s pocket at that very moment perched instead on my left hand, one thing was abundantly clear: We were meant to walk into it together.