8. Talia
Talia
Talia herself looked forward to the monthly movie night poll. She drummed her fingers as she stared at her computer screen.
She wasn’t surprised at the current voting.
Either of the tech-related movies, Hackers and Free Guy, could have been a winner, but because there were two of them, they were splitting the vote.
Talia could see the appeal of Ocean’s Eleven, too, to the cerebral audience at Ideal Life.
La La Land never had a chance (although that was definitely Jonathan’s suggestion, since he loved a good musical and choreography).
And The Avengers, well… that was just relaxing, pure fun, which sounded pretty great at the end of a long day.
Jody and Jonathan were making their rounds through the floors. “Movie night in conference room A tonight—don’t forget to vote!”
“Where are you ordering the pizza from?” George from marketing asked.
“Delfina?” Henry said hopefully.
Jody clutched at her heart and staggered; her brother may have been the musical theater lover, but she was the drama queen of the two.
“Henry! George! I am mortally wounded. Are you suggesting that you come to movie night not for our excellent taste in films or for the companionship of your fine colleagues, b-but for… the pizza?”
George grinned and tilted his head. “I mean…”
Jonathan laughed. “Fine—we’ll order from Delfina.”
“Woot!” Henry said. “Then I’m in. Voting now.” He spun in his office chair and clicked on the poll.
Next, Jody and Jonathan popped into Talia’s office.
“Hey, Talia,” Jody said, “movie night is tonight. Think you might come by?”
Jonathan was already shaking his head. “The day Talia Morgan isn’t chained to her computer and has time to come to movie night is the day that I swear I will never add another musical to the film poll again.”
But Jody snickered. “We have an opportunity here, Talia. You could single-handedly put a stop to our misery.”
Talia smiled. This is what she loved about working at Ideal Life.
Even though they had grown over the years to 150 employees, there was still a definite personality to the team.
They were big enough to be noticed by the Omnis of the world, yet still small enough to know each other on a personal level.
Maybe this was an opportunity to do something social for herself.
She understood that she and her employees couldn’t be true friends, because there would always be some aura of “boss” around her, but still…
That sadness she’d felt earlier when Erin asked about Sam—when Talia had realized she had no one in her life other than him, her parents, Libby, and endless work—made her think twice about skipping movie night yet again.
“Actually,” Talia said, “my brain is fried, and I was just about to shut down my laptop. So, yeah, I will come to movie night.”
Jonathan let out an involuntary gasp.
“Don’t worry—you can still put musicals on the polls. In fact, I insist.”
Jody sighed loudly, as if terribly disappointed.
But Jonathan stuck his tongue out at his sister, then winked at Talia. “Well, in honor of you attending movie night, I think we should scuttle the poll and have you choose what we watch.”
“Oh, no, I couldn’t—”
“Yes!” Jody said, practically vibrating. “I love that!”
She flew out of Talia’s office, hopped onto a chair, and shouted to the whole floor, “Poll’s over, suckers! Talia is coming tonight, and she gets to pick what we watch!”
There was a collective, amused shrug, and then everyone went back to work. They might have had strong opinions during polling, but once it was over, they didn’t really care. As long as there was good pizza.
Conference room A was the biggest of their meeting spaces, but the turnout for movie night was twice what was expected.
Luckily, Ideal Life’s modular floor plan extended to the conference rooms, too, and Talia, Jody, and Jonathan just had to unsnap a couple of tabs on the moving wall between conference rooms A and B to slide the divider away, and voila! It was now room A/B.
Talia had chosen La La Land with the reasoning that a little bit of nontech might be a nice change of pace—not to mention balance—for her team.
Despite some groans at the announcement, the forty-five or so employees who stayed for the whole film found themselves tapping their feet to the music and shimmying a little in their plastic seats during the choreographed scenes.
Jonathan added to the atmosphere by jumping up to the front of the room whenever a dance number was about to begin, and he performed as decent a version of each dance as one might expect from a software engineer.
He bowed each time to enthusiastic whistling and applause, Jody and Talia loudest of all.
When La La Land was over and all the pizza had been demolished, everyone seemed to want to linger, to hold on to the shared moment a little longer.
Talia couldn’t remember the last time she’d skipped out on working in the evening to simply have fun—the Omni dinner the other night didn’t count, since that had definitely been work, what with the press interviews and the schmoozing with Omni execs and venture capital investors, not to mention having to do the whole day over again.
Oh! Talia thought. Tonight didn’t have to end just because La La Land was over. She glanced at her watch.
She frowned at it for a second, though. She still didn’t understand how it worked, and Talia briefly considered telling Jody and Jonathan about it to see if their brilliant engineering minds could figure it out. They wouldn’t remember anyway, after Talia rewound.
But Jody and Jonathan would want to take the watch apart to examine its gears and guts. Engineers liked to physically tinker—even software engineers who usually worked with code—and what if they dissected the watch and it didn’t work anymore when they put it back together?
Forget it, Talia thought. Besides, she didn’t want to stop the momentum of fun she was having. It was so rare to get to relax with everyone here in a casual context rather than the usual work, work, work.
Still, Talia illogically felt like she shouldn’t make them watch the same movie again, even though they wouldn’t remember.
What about butterfly effects? She’d brushed them off before when she wanted more breakfast, but now she thought of it again. Like, by picking a different film, would that somehow change something and lead to unforeseen consequences?
How can you answer a question like that definitively, though?
Time travel hypotheses were the province of theoretical physicists and science fiction writers, and neither group had figured out the answer. It was all just conjecture. Even Talia—a researcher who had actually experienced short-term time travel—couldn’t draw decisive conclusions.
But what she could do was examine each as a mini experiment of sorts, even though they were more anecdotal evidence than scientific.
1) She’d gone back to the past to change the Tinder murder.
This was certainly an alteration of the past that had measurable downstream effects—a life had been saved, and the Ideal Life AI had been improved so nothing like that would happen again.
The result had seemed like a net positive.
And the world had continued to function normally, even after Talia made that “edit” to the past.
2) Breakfast with her parents—Talia had rewound so she could choose different dishes, for a total of four times.
Each of those times, the only thing altered was what she ate.
The conversation with her parents and the behavior of the waiter had remained the same.
So that experience seemed like the opposite result of the first one—no obvious butterfly effects.
There was a flaw in her tentative logic, though. Talia was assuming that the watch behaved rationally. She was treating it like a device like her phone or Omni 3Ds. But she had no idea how this watch worked. It hadn’t exactly come with a user’s manual when it randomly appeared on her wrist.
All the more reason to gather more data, she thought. Maybe changing the movie pick would not only be fun, but also a good experiment.
Besides, if there were any obvious, immediate negative effects, she could simply rewind, choose La La Land, and then have them all relive that version instead, right?
It made her a little uncomfortable that her experiment was so unbounded; this was not how it was done in normal research. But Talia could only work with what she had.
So when she turned the crown of her watch, she went back to the moment she announced the film pick. On the way, though, it was amusing to watch Jonathan perform all the song-and-dance scenes in La La Land backward. (It was less amusing to watch people un-scarf their pizza.)
At the correct point of the rewind, Talia chose a new movie, the ’90s cult classic Hackers. It was beloved among the tech crowd, and everyone in conference room A/B cheered at her choice.
Ideal Life Queen Elizabeth: Just checking in. I’ve noticed again a slight increase in your body temperature and resting heart rate, as well as theta wave fluctuations.
Interesting. Those were the same physiological responses as when Talia redid breakfast with her parents.
“Go ahead and ignore those signals until further notice,” she told Queen Elizabeth.
The readings were consistent and not providing any new or useful data, so Talia decided she didn’t need them.
It would also save her some bother in the future to not have her Friend popping up to tell her what she already knew.
Talia settled in for Hackers.
Just as before—and thankfully—everyone had an amazing time.
Jonathan didn’t dance with this one, but Jody did lead everyone in reciting the most iconic quotes, which nearly everybody seemed to know by heart.
When they got to “Never send a boy to do a woman’s job,” Talia, Jody, and all the other women in the room shouted the line in unison.
Afterward, Talia rewound and picked The Avengers. This, too, had an aspect of Jonathan- or Jody-led crowd participation, with Jonathan leading cheers for Team Good Guys and Jody egging on the audience for Team Mischievous Bad Guy (aka Loki).
Talia thought about doing movie night again with the other two unwatched films—Free Guy and Ocean’s Eleven—but she was wiped out.
For everyone else, it was only 10:30 p.m., but for Talia, she’d been watching movies for six and a half hours, so it was effectively 2:30 a.m. for her, no matter what the clocks said.
As she grabbed her purse to head home, Talia sighed happily. That had been really, really fun. Sam might even have approved, since she’d used the rewinds for good, clean fun, and he was always trying to get her to take a break and enjoy life a little.
And as an additional bonus, the small alterations to the past had again seemed totally fine.
“Thanks for that,” she whispered to the watch. “We should do it again soon.”