2. Talia
Talia
The Omni executives left in a flurry after DeVon told them about the breaking story.
“We have a lot to think about,” Raj had told Talia. “But it’s probably best that we haven’t signed the acquisition documents yet.”
And then he left. But she knew that “a lot to think about” was just the euphemism to tide her over until an official letter from the lawyers came in the morning to inform her that the acquisition was off.
All around Talia, though, the party continued, her employees totally oblivious.
They had no clue that their joy would be crushed soon, that Laura only needed to add in Talia’s bumbling quote and DeVon’s “No comment,” and then she’d send her article to her editor.
It would be on the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle by morning.
How could this have happened? How could Ideal Life have led to murder?
Talia’s idea for this technology had been so pure, so optimistic.
But a real person—not just an anonymous name or a series of 0s and 1s—had died tonight because of her.
“Hey, boss, are you okay?” Erin came over, her flame-red hair a little wilder after all the celebrating. She set down a glass of water for Talia. “Here. In case you’ve had a little too much sake. No judgment, of course. Those porcelain cups look deceptively small.”
“Do I look that bad?” Talia tried to laugh, but it came out flat.
“Maybe a little tired,” Erin said. “I honestly don’t know how you do it. You’re brilliant on the tech side of the business, but you can also talk to investors and do interviews with journalists.”
If only you knew, Talia thought.
“Anyway,” Erin said, “I wanted to check in to see if you needed anything else. Otherwise, I’m going to head back to campus and get some sleep before the big signing in the morning. I’ll be in early to help set up.”
“Um, about that… We’ve delayed it a little. No reason to make the Omni execs come to our office if we’re not sure yet that we’ll have that French document we need. So why don’t you sleep in? You can come in late.”
“Really?” Erin grinned. “Okay! I mean, not that I don’t love work—I do—but I wouldn’t mind a couple extra hours of sleep. Thanks, Talia!”
With Erin gone, Talia sank farther into the deep armchair in her corner of the restaurant. She wished Sam hadn’t already left for the airport. He might not be able to change things, but at least he always knew what to say to make her feel a little calmer.
She pulled her phone out again to send him a message or maybe call him, but then she remembered that his phone would be off by now.
Like method actors, Sam believed in going deep into whatever he was working on.
If he was writing a pitch for an author event at his bookstore, he worked in silence, with no music, no podcasts, just him and his words, connected by his intense focus.
And if he had a poker tournament like he did tomorrow, he would shut off all his devices so he could get into a game theory mind frame; the process began in the evening before each tournament so that there was nothing for his brain to latch on to except poker before bed, poker during sleep, then poker all day long during the competition.
He had once tried to explain it to Talia like a very long, immersive meditation session. She hadn’t been able to understand, because she was always juggling ten things at once.
Not that it stopped Talia from trying to call Sam now, but as expected, it went straight to voicemail. She didn’t leave a message. After the tournament ended, he’d turn his phone back on and see the news anyway, and then he’d call her immediately.
Did Talia have any other friends she could call? It was getting close to midnight, though, and you didn’t call someone this late unless it was an emergency.
This was, of course, an emergency. But she didn’t really have friends outside of work anymore besides Sam.
Startup life demanded eighty-to-one-hundred-hour weeks.
Her entire world was Ideal Life. Honestly, she probably would have lost Sam, too, if he hadn’t insisted on not letting their friendship die.
Not far from Talia, a sheet cake with Ideal Life’s purple star logo sat mostly uneaten. She stood abruptly from the armchair, grabbed a fork, and took the whole cake upstairs to the fourth floor.
She walked quickly through the reception area, then wound her way in the dark through the cubicles. When she got to her office, she closed the door and locked it, leaning against it for a long moment, as if the physical barrier could shield her from the world.
But of course it couldn’t.
Talia slumped into her chair and set the cake on her desk, where she shoveled giant chunks of it into her mouth, bite after bite, without stopping.
She got through about a third of the cake before the buttercream was just too much, and she threw it all up into her trash can.
Then she crawled onto the purple sofa on the opposite side of her office—the one she’d catnapped on many times during the all-nighters she’d pulled to build this company—and curled up as small as she could.
Talia hadn’t meant to fall asleep—she wouldn’t have thought it possible, given the circumstances—but she had. It was still dark outside her office windows, though, so she couldn’t have been out for too long.
Groaning, she sat up and wiped the drool from the corner of her mouth, the glass face of her watch cold against her skin.
Wait, what?
She didn’t wear a watch.
But there was definitely a watch on her wrist now.
It was an elegant analog clock with a silver link strap, black roman numerals on a white face, showing that it was one thirty in the morning. On the right was a blue knob—the crown—with two little arrows on it, one pointing up and the other, down.
Talia had never seen this watch before in her life.
She jumped up from the sofa and poked her head outside of her office door. “Hello? Are you guys pranking me?” Maybe some of her employees had come back upstairs, seen their boss passed out in a sugar fugue, and decided to play a joke on her.
There was no one there, though. And Talia was a light sleeper. Surely, she would have noticed if someone took her arm and strapped a watch onto it.
Also, she had locked the door to her office.
What if I was the one who put the watch on and forgot? But that was unlikely. Talia had had about half a glass of champagne the whole evening. She couldn’t have procured a nice watch and then completely blanked about it.
Maybe she was too groggy to figure it out right now. She turned her attention instead to the watch itself—namely, the arrows on the crown.
“Why label it?” she mumbled. “Kind of obvious that the knob goes either one way or the other.”
Still, she turned the crown in the direction of the down arrow.
Nothing happened. The knob didn’t budge, and the hands on the watch didn’t move like they ought to. It was like it was stuck on the current time.
She used a little more force, but the crown still didn’t give.
So Talia turned it the other way.
The crown spun easily with an accompanying mechanical whirring beneath it as the internal gears moved the watch’s hands backward.
But all around Talia, her vision whipped into a frenzy, too, like she was rewinding a movie at 4x speed.
“What the…?”
She stopped turning the watch crown.
All of a sudden, she found herself not sitting on the couch but at her desk with a partially demolished sheet cake in front of her and a fork in her hand. Her stomach lurched a bit, as if she were on a roller coaster. In reverse.
What just happened?
The time on the watch said it was 12:30 a.m., a full hour earlier than it had been a few seconds ago.
Talia shook her head. This has to be a dream.
The watch still claimed it was 12:30 a.m.
If Sam were here, he would be giving her an “I’ve told you before” shrug. He was always wary of new technology and warned Talia against cavalierly adopting it. Usually, she laughed him off. But what the heck had she just done?
She reached over to her phone on the desk and tapped the screen. It confirmed the time—12:30 a.m.
Talia slapped herself across the cheek, then pinched herself really hard. Wake up.
She opened her laptop to check the time there.
12:31 a.m.
How is this possible?
Then Talia gasped. “No…”
At 11:11, she had wished she could rewind the day to stop the murder.
“Holy shit.”
But that couldn’t really be what had happened, right?
Talia was a scientist, which meant she never accepted the first result without deeper experimentation. So she took a deep breath and turned the crown upward again, just a little, but slowly this time.
Everything around her reversed. Including a bite of cake coming out of her mouth and back onto the fork, then back into the cake itself.
That was gross, but it also wasn’t like spitting out food, because the cake reverted back to being uneaten.
She stared at the reconstructed purple-frosting star. This was very, very difficult to wrap her head around.
Still, the scientist in Talia persevered, and she verified the time on the watch itself, her phone, and her laptop.
12:25 a.m. She’d gone six minutes into the past.
Oh my god.
Her pulse sped up at the possibility that maybe she could go back and stop the Tinder murder from happening.
She wouldn’t know unless she tried.
Talia spun the watch crown hard, and her vision and her body flew into reverse as if sucked into the past at hyperspeed.