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“Partially true. I bought the ticket. I picked the numbers.”

“Oooookay,” she said, still not getting it.

“Here, let me show you something,” I said, leaning forward and grabbing the laptop. “You know about our joint bank account, right? And the one I share with my parents?”

“Yeah…” she trailed off, realizing I was serious about something, but unable to connect whatever it might be to the computer.

I opened the browser and went to our bank’s website. I told her to login, and she did, but the look she gave me was full of confusion. I showed her our joint account, a balance of just over seven hundred thousand dollars. Then I logged out, and logged into a different bank website, one she’d never been told about, which made her expression become a mix of concern and what I was sure was anger.

“Don’t say anything. Not yet,” I said, seeing her mouth opening to yell at me. “Here, look at this.”

I pointed to the list of accounts, and the balance numbers next to each. She inhaled sharply when she noticed the first one had a balance of just over five million dollars. I don’t think she breathed again until she got to the bottom of the list. Kass turned her face away from the monitor and looked at me.

“Tyler… there’s over fifty million dollars here.”

“I know,” I said, smiling. So far so good.

“But your parents… I thought they took the lump sum and got like seventy million?”

“They did.”

“Did they give all of that to you?”

“No. They gave me five million. They wanted to give me half, but I told them that it was a bad idea for a twenty-one year old kid to have that much money. Like thirty million would be any better or worse than five million, right?” I laughed nervously, wondering if I was making this whole thing out to be worse than it really was. “I took the money and started investing it.”

“Okay,” she said, more confused than ever. “What does this have to do with winning the lottery? Or the computer?”

“The computer on my desk is what I used to pull the winning lottery numbers, and then to make a killing in the stock market.”

“Uh huh. People use computers all the time to… wait. Did you hack into the lottery computer somehow? Or the stock exchange?”

I laughed, probably harder than I should have, as it made her angry. I held up a hand to stop her from saying anything.

“Look. The computer that was on my desk, it isn’t like any computer ever built. It’s a bunch of parts that are quantum components or something. I guess, anyway. That’s what all of the packaging said. When I hooked it all up, I was fooling around with it one night and opened a different kind of browser. A browser that can, uh, see into the future a little ways, I guess.” I could almost hear her brain slamming shut, refusing to hear any more of it. She thought I was pulling an elaborate prank.

“This isn’t funny anymore, Tyler,” she said, standing up. “It wasn’t really funny to begin with, but it’s just stupid now.”

“Wait,” I said, depositing the laptop on the coffee table and grabbing her hand. “Kassandra Elizabeth Gallagher, I’ve never lied to you about anything,” I lied, but I felt justified because of the nature of the only lies I ever told her. “I’m not lying to you right now. I know you think I’m playing some stupid joke on you, but I’m not. And I’m going to show you, so before you get mad, just do me a favor and remember I’ve never lied to you. Okay?”

“Okay,” she said softly, now more confused and upset than ever.

I led her to my bedroom, our bedroom now since we were married, and she could
sleep over
now that we were married. We’d decided to stay with my parents until our house was finished. I sat her in the chair, told her to wait, and went to my closet. I pulled the funky monitor out and took it to the desk, then went back and grabbed the case. I plugged in the power cell.

“Computer, power on,” I said, instead of hitting the power button on the front. I wanted her to understand exactly what kind of craziness I had been dealing with.

The ghostly blue light produced dark shadows on my desk, and gave her face an ethereal glow until the monitor turned on and began to project its screen. I extended the monitor below and to the right, then opened the normal browser, dragging the window off to the right extension. On the center screen, I opened the Qwerry browser. I looked at the alarm clock on my dresser. One in the afternoon meant the news cycles were just kicking into gear, but most of the sports teams on the east coast were still a couple of hours from getting their games underway.

“Okay, listen. The right one, that’s the
normal
browser. Notice how it’s on Google’s page? Okay, now the center one, this is what I call the
future
browser. This is a bit impromptu, but that’s actually good, as you won’t be able to accuse me of setting you up for some kind of complex scam.” I turned and cupped her cheeks in my hands, and gave her my most serious look. “Kassi, I would never pull some lame joke like this. Everything you are going to see and hear is going to be the truth, though it might take a couple of hours for you to realize it, and probably a day or two for your mind to completely accept it.”

“Go on…” she said, squinting one eye at me. It made me laugh, because it told me she was keeping an open mind. For now, at least.

“Okay, so, since the market closes in an hour, we’ll start there. Here, write shit down.” I handed her a notebook and a pen. She didn’t take it for a few seconds, only staring at me as if she was back to thinking I was joking with her. “Just take it. Write this stuff down when I tell you.”

“You’re starting to irritate me again,” she said, and I wasn’t sure if she was joking. She didn’t sound like she was joking.

“I’m going to scare the shit out of you real soon.”

She looked behind her, as if Dave or Joey were hiding just outside of the bedroom, ready to pounce and make her scream in fright. I snapped my fingers to get her attention, then pointed to the notebook. The look she gave me might have killed a lesser man that wasn’t in love with her.

“Okay. Let’s look up today’s market activity in Google.” I pulled up the Dow, S&P, and NASDAQ numbers. The Dow was up by almost sixty points, looking to close at another record high. The S&P was almost even, and the NASDAQ was up almost seventy points, a huge gain for the index. “See, the market is still open. Watch the tickers.” I waited until I was sure her eyes were following the changing numbers on the screen, every few seconds one of the major index numbers going slightly up or down.

“So?” she asked.

“Markets are still open for another forty minutes or so. In the future browser, I’m going to find out what the three indexes closed at.”

Kassi’s look was skeptical, bordering on disbelief. I pulled up the market numbers in Qwerry, and stepped back to let her read them. I pointed to the notebook again when she looked up at me, letting her know it was to be written down:

Dow: 17,539.53

S&P: 2,005.39

NASDAQ: 4,941.06

“At two, we’ll look again at the final closing numbers,” I said. “It will be four in New York, and the markets will have just closed. If you want, we can write down some of the individual stocks, just so you won’t be able to say I somehow manipulated the webpage or whatever.”

She shook her head, but I could see that she was already tired of whatever it was I was trying to tell her. It made me frustrated, because I’d spent months agonizing over telling her, then how to tell her, and now it felt like she didn’t even care, that she didn’t believe anything I was saying.

“Okay. Let’s go look at some sports scores,” I said, charging ahead, not giving her a moment to voice her annoyance. “Look at these teams playing tonight,” I said, pointing to the normal browser. “Five NBA games, seven NHL games, and some college football games.” I opened up the sports scores for tonight on the future browser. “Write all of these scores down. If you want, we can go into the box scores and you can get details.”

“Why don’t you just print them out?” she asked.

“Yeah, well, I would, except I don’t know how to connect it to a printer.”

She laughed. “Really? The Master of Nerds can’t figure out how to connect a printer?”

“It’s not like that. It’s not that easy,” I said. Now I was the one getting annoyed.

“Why not?”

“I’ll tell you later. If I told you right now, it would be just one more thing you think I’m bullshitting you about.”

“Tyler—”

“No, stop. I don’t mean to be rude, Kassi, but just stop. This is the most important thing I’ll ever tell you other than how much I love you.”

She closed her mouth and cocked her head at an angle, searching my face, my eyes, for some kind of clue about what I was up to. She nodded her head and began writing the scores down. She definitely didn’t believe anything I was telling her, but because I’d used the “nuclear option,” my love for her being only slightly more important than whatever ridiculous scheme or gag I was playing out, she went along with it. I knew that if somehow, some way, something went wrong, it would create a wound in her so deep that our marriage would be in real trouble.

“Last thing for now,” I said, feeling nervous suddenly.

My quantum computer had never failed me before, yet I couldn’t help fear that it knew exactly what was going on, and would give me bogus data just to keep the secret between it and me. Him and me? Her? It kind of creeped me out to think of it as anything other than a machine. Not as much as it creeped me out because of what it could do.

“The big national and state lotteries are all on Saturday, and we’ll write those numbers down in a minute, but first, let’s look up a few state lotteries. Some pick-four and pick-three games.”

I navigated the future browser to California, Idaho, Illinois, New York, and Florida lotto sites. I had her write down all of the winning numbers that would be drawn tonight. Once she was finished and looked up at me, I knelt down in front of her chair.

“Computer. Hibernate.”

The blue glow winked out after the projection screen went dark. I took the notebook and pen from her hands and put it on the desk, then laid my head in her lap. I was shaking, afraid that the computer was going to screw me over, make me look like an asshole. A lying asshole. I felt her fingers begin to gently stroke my hair, her other hand on my cheek. I know she had a million questions, probably all of them rightfully suspicious, but she remained silent. We stayed like that for almost fifteen minutes before she lifted my head up, kissed me on the lips, then got out of the chair. Kass led me to the bed, and we lay there for a while, holding each other. I think I’d begun to scare her. I’d scared myself.

*

We must have dozed off for a bit, as when I came to, the room was dark. I nudged her, and she woke up. She gave me a kiss on the cheek then headed for the bathroom. I stood up and walked to the desk to grab the notebook, but just as my hand was about to grab it, I pulled back. I didn’t want to touch anything. It had to be all her, all Kass, finding out for herself, with no room in her mind to be suspicious that I’d somehow tricked her. When she came back, I pointed to the notebook. The look she gave me mostly relayed a
not this again
kind of feeling, but she took the notebook.

“Where are you going?” she asked when I walked out of the bedroom.

“Going to turn on the TV so you can look at the stock market results.”

“Why not just turn the computer on?”

“I don’t want you to be able to say, or even think, that I manipulated web pages, or somehow programmed the computer to fool you. If you see it on CNBC or Bloomberg, you have to admit, it would be a pretty goddamn complex conspiracy.”

She gave me the first smile I’d seen in hours. I motioned for her to follow, and we sat on the couch. Within a minute, CNBC’s Kudlow Report was on the television, the stock ticker along the bottom rolling almost faster than the eye could keep up. However, the important numbers, the index closing numbers, were easily visible along the top of the screen. I watched Kass’ eyes scan the numbers, then the notebook, then the numbers, then the notebook again. It seemed like she did it at least ten times, as if she couldn’t remember the numbers by the time her eyes were back on the notebook. Or maybe she was triple and quadruple checking the numbers, unable to believe that they were the same as the ones in the notebook.

After two full minutes, me holding my breath the entire time, she looked up at me. Her eyes were wide, but her voice was almost a whisper. “Tyler. How did you do this?”

“I told you, I didn’t do it. The computer did it.”

“Bullshit.”

“Kassandra, think about it seriously for a minute. It
is
possible that I built bogus web pages and put those numbers there just to mess with you. It’s totally possible. I’ve been known to carry a joke that far with some of my friends. But there’s no possible way I could get CNBC to agree to such a scheme. Turn it to 359 and watch Bloomberg for a few minutes if you don’t believe me. Turn it to CNN, MSNBC, all of them will have the numbers. They’ll all match what’s in your notebook. But I need
you
to turn to all of those channels. I need
you
to see that I’m not fucking with you.”