3. Talia
Talia
She bolted upright in her bed. Her vision was still wobbly, though, and Talia had to brace herself against the headboard until her brain caught up with her body and where they were in time.
Her brain immediately prodded at the boundaries of her impromptu science experiment. Is that the limit?
Talia carefully turned the crown toward the up arrows.
The crown wouldn’t move.
Okay, then. At least based on this small sample size of results, it seemed like Talia could rewind up to twenty-four hours max.
Then her eyes went wide.
Could she go forward again? Could she return to where she’d started?
Shh, don’t panic, she thought. If she couldn’t, it wasn’t a big deal to redo a single day.
Still, her heart beat a little faster.
But the most important thing right now was that Talia was being given a chance to stop the murder of an innocent person.
She shouldn’t waste the opportunity with worrying about whether she could fast-forward, or how this was possible at all.
You didn’t look a wish horse in the mouth.
(Yes, she knew that wasn’t the actual saying, but close enough.)
First things first. She turned on the light, then crossed the room to get her laptop.
Talia lived in a studio apartment—the bedroom, living room, and kitchen were all a single space—because she spent most of her waking hours in the Ideal Life offices anyway.
It didn’t make sense to pay astronomical Bay Area rent on a bigger apartment she was never in.
She also lived frugally because she took only a modest salary from Ideal Life; Talia wanted her startup to be able to use its resources for getting better, rather than paying her.
And the Omni money wouldn’t come through until the deal closed.
So Talia didn’t have much by way of furniture, either.
There was a small Ikea dining table and chairs, a single bookshelf, and her bed.
The only decoration in the apartment was a waist-high robot sculpture made of old computer parts that Sam had found at a flea market; it stood by the door holding a tray for keys and other miscellany.
Talia opened up her laptop and logged into Ideal Life.
As CEO, she had access to everything on her dashboard.
There were real-time performance metrics, including currently active users, server response times, and a panel on system health indicators like error rates and API status.
Under the more technical section of the dashboard, she could see bug reports, cybersecurity alerts, and details about things like resource utilization.
And of course, there were all the customer profiles.
Ideal Life’s chief privacy officer, Sara Trankjaer, would be upset over what Talia was about to do. But what Sara didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her, and if Talia didn’t do this, then someone would die.
She found Rebecca Lawrence’s profile and double-clicked.
A new window popped up, populated with the personal history Rebecca had provided to Ideal Life, as well as her brain-activity logs for the three months she’d been using Ideal Life’s app.
That invention—wireless brain monitors in the form of small circular stickers—had been Talia’s innovation during her PhD.
But she wasn’t interested in Rebecca’s brain-activity log right now. What Talia wanted was the right side bar of Rebecca’s profile, where a drop-down menu gave the following actions:
Export Data
Issue Warning
Suspend Temporarily
And finally, a red button that read Freeze Account.
“Gotcha,” she said.
But Talia’s cursor hovered over the red button without clicking.
Just a touch of her fingertip, and she would literally erase the past.
If it worked.
Her heart was trying to throttle itself out of her chest. Was this really happening? Could it really happen?
Her Ideal Life Friend, the cartoon bumblebee wearing a crown, appeared as an augmented reality image, overlaid onto what Talia was seeing through her Omni 3D glasses. The posh British voice came through tiny speakers in the Omni 3Ds.
Ideal Life Queen Elizabeth: Are you feeling all right? I am detecting some hyperactivity in your left amygdala, which may indicate heightened emotions.
“Dismiss!” Talia said. “And ignore my brain-activity indicators for the rest of the day.” She couldn’t have Queen Elizabeth piping up every two seconds when Talia was trying to do something that was obviously going to be stressful.
Obediently, the bee flew off the Omni 3Ds’ display.
“Okay, focus,” Talia said, eyes back on her computer. “I can do this. I should.”
But what were the downstream effects of changing the past?
It’ll be worth it, she told herself.
Talia clicked on the red button and entered her employee passkey to confirm the action.
ACCOUNT FROZEN.
“Holy shit. It worked.” She let out a long breath. Thank god.
Rebecca Lawrence was now locked out of the Ideal Life app, which meant she would never see the suggestion later today that she should “eliminate” Gabe Marques.
Talia collapsed backward into her chair.
She had literally just saved a life.
And yet, she was still mortified that it had come to this.
If Gabe Marques had died, it would have been Ideal Life’s fault, which might as well have been Talia’s own personal fault, as far as she was concerned.
The startup might look like a company to outsiders, but to Talia, it was an extension of herself.
She had dropped out of grad school before finishing her dissertation, lost touch with friends, and put every drop of her heart and soul into this desire to help people live better lives.
So yeah, any failure of Ideal Life was a direct failure of Talia.
Had she done enough here in the past to ensure that harm like it wouldn’t happen again?
Talia wanted to talk to the engineering team, but unfortunately, that would have to wait until regular office hours.
Unless she could simply turn the watch hands forward to 9 a.m.?
She touched her fingers to the crown.
But then she moved them away. She didn’t want to risk it going forward, since she wasn’t entirely sure yet how this thing worked.
If she was wrong and something else happened…
like time zoomed to the original starting point and erased what she’d just done, and she couldn’t rewind again because it was a one-time wish.
It occurred to Talia that since she was here redoing Thursday, she might as well call the French attorneys to light a fire under them and make sure they sent over that missing document.
Even though it was the wee hours of the night here in California, it was already the workday in France.
And if Talia got that final French appendix before the lawyers here began their day, then Omni would be able to sign the acquisition documents on time, before the celebration party.
Oof, this mini rewound timeline was getting tricky to keep track of. To make sure she didn’t screw it up, Talia wrote down the key times:
Thursday a.m. (French time): Get missing document.
Thursday a.m. (Pacific time): OmnisZcience and Ideal Life finalize and sign acquisition documents.
Thursday p.m.: Rebecca Lawrence does not kill Gabriel Marques.
Thursday p.m.: Celebration at Sugiyama restaurant downstairs.
Having confirmed Thursday, take two, Talia turned on the translation function on her Omni 3Ds. Then she called Jean-Marc Dubois, the partner of the French law firm, from her computer. He picked up on the third ring; he was also wearing Omni 3Ds.
“Good morning, Talia. How are you?” (In reality, he’d probably said something like, “Bonjour, Talia. Comment ca va?” but the glasses converted it in real time to English for her.)
“Hello, Jean-Marc,” Talia said. “Apologies for bothering you, as I know that my attorneys have been pestering you as well, but we really need that technology-transfer preapproval letter today. It’s the only thing we’re missing for the appendices of the acquisition documents.”
“Yes, yes, of course; don’t worry—it will arrive.”
But Talia knew for a fact that it would not. At least, not if Jean-Marc just waited in his office. She had already been through this part of the day before.
“I must respectfully disagree,” Talia said.
“However, Ideal Life will pay extra to send one of your junior attorneys down to the government office to physically retrieve the document from them. We must have it by the end of your workday. Everything else is set for Omni to sign the acquisition agreement today.”
“Hmm, I do not know if we have anyone to spare—”
“Please, Jean-Marc. I’ll send you a bottle of your favorite wine.”
“Are you stereotyping me?” But he laughed. “Fine, fine, I will get one of our young attorneys to go down to the office. But don’t send me French wine. Send me a bottle from Sonoma Valley. That’s near you, isn’t it?”
“You got it. Thank you, Jean-Marc.”
That hopefully taken care of, Talia hung up. There was still plenty of time before she had to head into the office, so she took a long, hot shower, washing away the disaster of last night (which technically hadn’t happened yet, but it still felt good to soap the memory away).
Then she brewed a huge pot of coffee and set to work making a list of all the things she wanted her engineering team to look at in order to head off problems with Ideal Life’s suggestions in the future.
Talia was back in Ideal Life’s offices at 8 a.m. It was peaceful at this hour, before everyone else came in. The startup had begun across the hall in a three-room suite; now they took up the entire second, third, and fourth floors of the building.