13. Talia
Talia
On Monday morning, Talia gawked as she stepped foot onto Omni’s campus.
It would’ve been inaccurate to call it anything less than that, because it wasn’t a single structure—it was a sprawling network of twenty different buildings across acres of manicured grounds, as if the tech behemoth had grown up like mushrooms in the middle of a lush park.
There were paved paths that connected everything from the main headquarters to the engineering quad, from the biotech labs to the cafeteria, and from the outdoor amphitheater to the meditation and yoga space.
“On your left!” someone said, before zooming by Talia on a skateboard.
“On your left again,” another person said, this one on a bicycle.
“And one more!” a man on roller skates said, spinning and waving to Talia with a grin as he passed by.
She blinked as the Omni employees disappeared from view. Then she tapped on her Omni 3Ds, and a digital map appeared, showing her where her meeting with the executive team would be.
It was all the way on the other side of campus! The walk would take fifteen minutes, according to the map, and her meeting began in ten. No wonder the people who worked here all had wheels.
Talia hated to be late, especially to an important meeting like this.
She already knew several Omni people, including Raj Banerjee and Melanie Goldschmid, but today was going to be her first time in a room with the big bigwigs.
Raj had told her that Jack Zimmer—the CEO! —might even stop in to say hi.
She started to compose an apology message that she was on campus but a little lost.
Queen Elizabeth buzzed into view on her glasses:
Ideal Life Queen Elizabeth: Anxiety signals are spiking, and I can see from the map and your message what the conundrum is.
However, sending such a note may give off the wrong first impression of you.
May I suggest an alternative? The Omni campus map shows there is a Transport Hub nearby, marked on the map with the letter T.
The closest one is T-3. You can borrow a mode of transport there.
“Thanks, Queen Elizabeth. That is a better idea.”
Transport Hub 3 looked like a bus stop and an REI store had had a baby.
The kiosk offered five different skateboards, a row of electric scooters, bikes, a maintenance station with tire pumps and other tools, a water bottle refill station, and a vending machine full of energy bars, all free of charge.
The only problem was you needed to scan an employee badge to unlock any of them.
“Crap,” Talia muttered. The meeting was starting in five minutes, and she should have been there already.
Walking in exactly on time wasn’t a great way to introduce yourself when you were the new kid on the block.
Even Erin knew that as an intern; that’s why she was always the first in any conference room.
And yet, Talia had not budgeted enough time for herself.
Unless…
She glanced at her watch.
It still made the scientist part of her uncomfortable that she didn’t understand how the watch worked, but she had mostly accepted that she might never know. Plus, she’d run a number of experiments by now—each using the watch in a slightly different way—and each instance had turned out fine.
So there wasn’t really anything stopping Talia from using the watch now, right?
Sure, it wasn’t a movie night rewind, but why did she have to limit herself to trivial things?
Preventing the Tinder murder had proven that she could effectively turn back time for substantive, beneficial purposes, too.
And here, Talia could have a second shot at making a first impression, which was crucial.
“Just do it,” she whispered to herself.
After a few deep breaths, Talia turned the crown.
The world spun dizzyingly fast around her as she reversed in time to an hour and a half before.
“Oh god.” She braced her hands on her knees as the scenery around her stopped whirring. “I’ve got to remember to turn that knob slower.” She ought to know better by now, but the urgency and importance of this meeting had distracted her.
Once her stomach stopped roiling, Talia checked her surroundings. Yep, she was back in her apartment kitchen, the morning’s news opened on her phone mid-scroll, a cup of coffee half drunk.
This was where she could shave off some time.
It was amazing how you could lose yourself to the infinite feed, even when you didn’t care anymore about what you were reading.
Was it crucial that Talia learn about the bioluminescent moss that had been discovered in Antarctica? And that she do it right now?
No, but she recognized it for what it probably was—allowing yourself to be subsumed by the endless scroll was a way of procrastinating or avoiding something more concrete that required actual effort. Like facing your nerves about an important meeting and getting out the door to attend it.
Talia turned off the news feed, ordered a self-driving car to pick her up, and ran to the bathroom to brush the coffee breath out of her mouth before it arrived.
Exactly six minutes later, she hurried downstairs and slipped into the back seat of the car.
It deposited her at the entrance of Omni’s campus seventeen minutes later.
She would have plenty of time to spare to get to her meeting.
All guests had to register at Omni Security. As she filled in her information (again) on a tablet at Reception, Talia asked, “I noticed the campus here is huge. And I heard there were Transport Hubs where you could borrow scooters and stuff. Are they available to visitors, too?”
“Oh, sure,” the receptionist said. “I’ll just need you to sign an extra liability waiver and then I can get you a temporary badge to access the hubs.
” Another form appeared on the tablet in front of Talia.
“Basically, it says that if you get in an accident, you won’t sue Omni.
And if you fail to return your transport, then you’ll be charged the full market value for it. ”
“I can’t imagine I’m going to jet away on an electric scooter and try to get on the freeway with it,” she joked as she signed.
The receptionist sat there, stone-faced. “You’d be surprised what people do.”
With that taken care of, Talia put on the lanyard that labeled her as a visitor and took the temporary access badge back to T-3.
As she perused the offerings, a man in his early twenties rolled up almost silently on a Segway and parked it at the end of the kiosk, scanning his badge to check it back in to the hub.
“Whoa… I didn’t know Segways still existed,” Talia said as she walked over to examine it.
It was goofy looking, like someone had taken a lectern or podium, encased it in metal, and stuck two enormous tires on it.
She still remembered when Segways had been introduced to the world as the future of transportation.
Instead, only mall cops ended up using them.
Once, she’d witnessed the somewhat comical pursuit of a shoplifter at Valley Fair mall.
The thief sprinted easily in and out of the crowds while the hapless police officer tried to chase him on his giant motorized podium.
Now, though, the Omni employee stroked the Segway as if it were a beloved pet.
“Yeah, we have something like a hundred Segways here. You know how there are sanctuaries where racehorses or other animals go to retire? They get to live out their days roaming across pastures and woods? Well, the Omni campus is kind of like a retirement sanctuary for Segways.” He laughed. “You want to give it a whirl?”
“I’ve always wondered what riding one would be like.”
“It’s all yours.” He patted the Segway once more, as if saying, Good job, buddy, before he jogged off into the nearest building.
What an eccentric place, Talia thought. And then she realized, this would soon be her eccentric place, once Omni closed their acquisition of Ideal Life. That was a big part of why she was here today—to get introduced to her future bosses.
She scanned her badge on the Segway’s charging station and it clicked as it unlocked. Talia climbed on to figure out how to drive the thing.
It surged backward from its parking spot—“Holy shit!”—and Talia went flying. She landed hard on her face on the cement path, hands and knees scraped and bleeding, her right cheek, too.
A couple of Omni employees started hurrying toward her. From the other direction on the walkway, another one rushed over on his skateboard.
“Are you okay?”
“I’m calling on-site medical services,” a woman said.
“No, it’s all right. I’m fi—” Talia started to say.
But the woman was already issuing the request via voice command on her Omni 3Ds.
Talia’s own Omni 3Ds were lying a few yards away on the ground. This, at least, was a relief. She didn’t want to know what Ideal Life Queen Elizabeth would say about what had just happened.
In the meantime, a campus surveillance drone had flown over and begun shooting video of Talia probably to document it for Omni Security to make sure she didn’t try to sue them, despite the liability waiver.
Would this make her late to the meeting?
Knowing how corporate legal departments worked, there would probably be more paperwork to fill out.
And they would probably make a fuss with a medical exam to make sure there really was nothing wrong with Talia that she could later try to use against them, regardless of all the liability waivers.
Nope. I am not going to deal with all that. Talia reached for her watch and whirled the crown backward.
“Aw, fuck!” Talia ran over to her kitchen sink and threw up. In her haste to rewind out of that embarrassing Segway scene, she’d forgotten again to turn the watch knob slowly, and going backward at hyperspeed was like jolting her stomach way past zero g.
Once she rinsed out her mouth and her stomach settled, Talia checked the time. Back to where she’d last restarted. Good.
She ordered another self-driving car and brushed her teeth. On her way to the Omni campus, she watched a Segway-driving tutorial on her Omni 3Ds. By the time she arrived on campus, she understood how the damn things worked.
But ugh, did she really have to go through signing in at Reception for the third time?
Wait. What if I turn the watch crown forward?
It hadn’t worked on the night of the acquisition celebration, but maybe that was because Talia had already been at the future-most moment that she’d lived through up to that point.
But now, she had already lived past this current moment, and she didn’t need to change the next few minutes.
Tentatively and slowly, she turned the knob on her watch.
The world around her went a little blurry, like she was on fast-forward but not too fast. Talia grinned.
She kept the pressure on the crown until she reached T-3 and the Omni employee petting the Segway goodbye. She released her watch as he jogged away into the building.
“All right, let’s try this again.”
This time, Talia managed to ease the Segway out of its station gently. She experimented with leaning forward, then slightly to the left, then right, to test out its supposedly “intuitive” steering.
It worked.
Soon, she was whirring along the pathways toward the headquarters, which sat in the middle of the campus.
The breeze rippled through her hair as she increased speed, and she almost whooped out loud as she maneuvered the Segway all over the map.
It drove so smoothly, the controls incredibly responsive to a simple lean this way or that. Amazing!
Talia had been wrong—this wasn’t a motorized podium.
It was more like she’d suddenly grown wheels of her own and they were a part of her.
What a shame Segways hadn’t been more popular!
She understood now why that Omni employee had petted it like a favorite horse.
When she worked here in the future, she, too, would take the Segways out for a ride every day.
Alas, she did have a meeting to attend. Talia was tempted to play hooky and continue her joyride and just rewind later to undo it.
But she’d never once ditched a day of school—even when she called in a sick day, she always ended up going to school anyway because she was too responsible and too afraid to fall behind in class—so she docked at Transport Hub 7 outside the main headquarters building, whispered a thank-you to her Segway, and went inside.
After the meeting, Talia did a postmortem on her performance.
She’d dopily said her name over and over as she shook hands with the two dozen people in the room—“Hi, I’m Talia Morgan. I’m Talia Morgan. I’m Talia Morgan.”
She’d been too quiet during the first hour, which left her feeling more like a little girl than a CEO.
And then Jack Zimmer, Omni’s founder and CEO, had come in during the second hour, and Talia had stood up like an idiot, as if he were the king and all his subjects were expected to rise.
Everyone else, of course, had remained seated.
She’d bumbled then and forgotten her own name when he approached her.
Which was even more stupid, given that she’d repeated “Talia Morgan” a couple thousand times not long before.
Ideal Life Queen Elizabeth: Next time, perhaps you could role-play ahead of an important meeting to be better prepared for performance under unfamiliar and stressful situations.
“Next time,” Talia said, “is right now.”
She rewound her watch—not too quickly—and did the meeting again.
Talia did not repeat her name each time she was introduced to another Omni executive.
She piped up with incredibly insightful comments during the first hour. (One exec said Talia was so sharp she was almost prescient.)
And when Jack Zimmer came in, she did not rise or expect heralds to start playing “God Save the King.” Instead, she smiled professionally and only stood when he came over to shake her hand. She did so as an equal—one confident, self-possessed CEO to another.
Talia: Nailed it.
Sam: Congrats! I knew you would.
Talia: I admit that I gave myself a redo.
Sam: Ah.
Talia: But it still counts anyway, right?
Sam:
Talia: I mean, it’s like retaking a test. It’s the second better score that gets recorded for posterity.
Sam:
Talia: Hello?
Sam: Just…
Talia: Just what?
Sam: Don’t overuse it, okay, Tal? We don’t really know what the consequences of using it are, long term. I know you always want to improve yourself, but I worry.
Talia: Trust me, I’m fine, Sam. It’s only a tool, and I’ve got it under control.