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“Bullshit,” she said, turning over to face me. I saw the tears streaked across her face and felt the pit in my stomach grow larger.

“I’m not, trust me,” I said. “I truly believe that one man can change the world, but when big-time players like governments with nuclear weapons and modern armies are involved, they’d roll over me in seconds. Worse, you and my parents would suffer whatever I did, maybe worse, since I think I’m the only one that can use the computer.”

“I can use it.”

“Yeah, but that’s because I’m the one that turns it on. If I told the computer to lock itself with security, I doubt even the NSA could crack it open, even if they co-opted every computer and supercomputer on the planet to try and break the encryption. But they’d just torture you and my mom and dad until I unlocked it. They might let me keep a few fingers for only having to make them cut off one of your hands.”

“God, Tyler, you’re really morbid.”

“I think I need to be. These people don’t fuck around, Kassi. This is some serious shit. This isn’t three dudes from a local gang that can be outsmarted or outgunned. If even a whiff of what this computer can do gets anywhere outside of you and me, there’d be a dozen Blackhawk choppers and the SEALs and Delta Force and God knows who else kicking in our doors and windows. To even try to interfere would be suicide. We’d never see daylight again.”

“Now you’re scaring me,” she said, and I could sense she was about to cry again.

“I know, baby. I’m not trying to, but at the same time, I’m trying to make sure you understand. Remember the talk I gave you when I first told you about the computer? How serious this whole time thing is?” She nodded her head. “This is just as serious. Shit, they just unfroze my Fidelity accounts three days ago after deciding I wasn’t a terrorist and hadn’t been getting my money from terror groups.”

“Because Wall Street isn’t just Hezbollah in expensive Armani suits,” she said, trying to make a joke that she’d heard my father make a few times.

“Save it for your granola-eating, bike-riding, tree-hugging Greenpeace group meetings,” I said, getting a shove that put me on my back. I rolled back onto my side and put my hand on her hip, giving it a gentle squeeze. “It’s a bit frightening when the government locks you out of all of your accounts just because they can. All of our money is clean, unless they can prove somehow I cheated and bought a lottery ticket thanks to knowledge from the future, but it was still a cold shock to login to the bank and be told that I had an available balance of zero, and then login to Fidelity to be given a scary message that my accounts were frozen because I was under investigation.”

I shuddered at the memory of it, instantly growing cold with fear that somehow they’d found me out. I’d begun to worry that they had their own quantum computer and had been using it to find out if anyone else had one, and once they found me, they were going to pounce. I’d even imagined myself smashing the computer into pieces and flushing what I could as if it were weed and the drug squad was banging on the front door.

“What are we going to do?” she asked.

“I think for now, pretty much what we’ve been doing. I’ll keep making some money, but I’ll be even more careful,” I said, seeing her about to protest. “I promise. Plus I’m going to kick the shit out of the contractor to finish our house. The sooner we are up in the foothills in a solid house, the safer I’ll feel.”

“Why? What’s wrong with your parents’ house?”

“Nothing. I don’t know. I’m just getting a bit paranoid maybe. Neither of us have read anything about bad shit going down here in Boise, but I’d still feel safer up in the foothills. I think I’m going to try and talk Mom and Dad into moving with us.”

“I told you she’d never let me have you,” Kass said with an evil grin, though it looked almost pathetic with the amount of tears drying on her cheeks and the puffiness invading her too-red eyes.

“I bet she blew up those refineries just so all of this would happen and I’d have to keep her around, right?” I asked, laughing.

“What if she’s been using your computer when you aren’t around, manipulating time just to make sure you’d never be alone with me?”

I laughed even harder at this. “We’re alone right now, aren’t we?”

Kassi snuggled in tight with me, and within ten minutes she was breathing heavy, sleep having taken over for her mental and emotional exhaustion. I held her for a long time, my brain spinning up and going into overdrive as I tried to decide exactly what our best course of action would be. I wondered if my ten year plan was going to become a two year plan, or maybe a no year plan. I needed to know more. After an hour, my right arm falling asleep from her head resting on it, I detached myself from her and sat down at the computer. I gave it the evil eye, then began typing on the virtual keyboard to learn more.

I searched ahead to 2025, just to see if I could find some kind of “looking back” article or even some history pages detailing exactly what had happened in the preceding decade. I became annoyed when Qwerry kept trying to tell me there was no data for any dates I put in. I grunted and tried 2030, but got the same results. Nothing. I tried December 31, 2020. The search results streamed down the page, and I began to work my way through them.

Lorraine Roosevelt Harvey was definitely going to be the 46th President of the United States of America. Somehow she’d defeated Gregory in a close race. I read a bit more and kept seeing labels attached to her like “liberal” and “left-wing democrat.” It was odd, but at the same time, it gave me some hope. Kass had been worried about the ISA bill and the censorship lockdown, but it seemed I had been right about the American public not being able to accept such a dick move.

I searched for December 31, 2021 out of curiosity. My heart lurched in my chest when I read a headline from November that mentioned President Patterson. I let out a mostly silent
what the fuck?
and began a new search. The fear grew within me the more I read. President Harvey had been assassinated by a sniper as she stood next to the German Chancellor in Berlin on August 30th, 2021.

The icing on that particularly foul cake was that Vice President Kenneth Aaron Wei was killed six days later when the Marine One helicopter was either shot down over Annandale, Virginia, or had crashed. Official news reports called it a mechanical failure. There seemed to be a lot of pushback from a lot of residents who claimed that two surface-to-air missiles hit it within seconds of each other. It was hard to tell because the country was already in a state of confusion and information lockdown, and two assassinations in six days caused a complete blackout of any information for almost two weeks.

When the internet, cellular, and satellite networks were restored, pandemonium broke out. I sat in disbelief as I read report after report of what sounded like an all-out civil war breaking out on American soil. I even watched a few of the videos that a group called Righteous Patriots had uploaded to a few sites. The shaky videos showed gangs of heavily armed men going house to house in Cleveland, kicking in doors and dragging “subversives” into the street, executing them without any explanation to the victims or to the camera.

I felt bile coming up from my stomach and thought for a moment I might hurl all over the desk. I sat for a couple of minutes, finally feeling my stomach calming down. I wanted to scream at myself
THIS IS WHY YOU DON’T LOOK AT THE FUTURE!
I wanted to also scream at myself that this was somehow my fault, that if I’d never fucked around with the stupid computer, none of this would ever have happened.

I knew it was completely foolish at the same time. I wasn’t an expert on time and paradoxes, but I couldn’t possibly see how winning a single lottery and then winning and losing some money on the stock market could cause a dirty bomb, two presidential assassinations, and a civil war. Especially since the money my parents won, and the money they gave to me, plus whatever I’d earned from playing the market, none of it had ever gone to anything out of the ordinary.

I was having a half-million dollar house built in the foothills. My father owned a Mercedes that cost him six figures. We bought a couple thousand dollars’ worth of craft beer. Kassandra wore the most beautiful wedding dress ever designed. None of it, I thought, could possibly be connected in any way to any of this.

With fading hope, I typed in December 31, 2024. No results. I felt the pit in my stomach grow. I tried December 31, 2023. Nothing. December 31, 2022. Nothing. I started to shake in my chair, becoming more frightened than I’d ever been, and I didn’t even know why. July 31, 2022. Nothing. May 31, 2022. Nothing. April 30, 2022. Nothing. March 31st. Nothing. I couldn’t remember if 2022 was a Leap Year, so I tried February 28.

The search results were so jumbled and crazy that I couldn’t make sense of them for a few minutes. All-out war across the Pacific. Limited nuclear strikes in Pakistan, eastern China, and southern Russia. I felt the vomit coming and just barely kept it down. I had to grip the arms of my chair to keep from falling out of it, and to steady myself as I shifted through extreme heat and cold, sweat breaking out all over my body in places I didn’t even know could sweat.

The sour tang of it made me gag. It wasn’t the musky sweat from playing hockey or working in the yard in the summer. It was the rancid, stress-induced stench my armpits produced before getting into a fight, breaking up with a girl, or worrying that the government was on to my little scheme and would start shutting down my bank and stock trading accounts. I let out two gasping breaths, blinking rapidly and willing the contents of my stomach to go back home where they belonged.

March 7, 2022. More crazy shit that I didn’t even want to look at right now. March 14, 2022. There seemed to be a lot fewer results, but the ones that showed up were so insane that I couldn’t even believe them. I refused to believe them. March 21, 2022. Nothing. I began to go run down the last date that showed up like it was a base runner caught between a shortstop and third baseman.

I tagged the runner out on March 19, 2022. There was no March 20, 2022. I quickly scanned the first three search results. I never got to read the fourth as my dinner came flying up and splattered all over the desk, the computer case, and the monitor, not to mention my lap and the wall. I slipped out of the chair and onto the floor and cried out as my stomach continued to contract until there was nothing left. The last thing I remembered was Kassi’s hands pulling my head back out of a pile of vomit on the carpet.

Epilogue - A Change of Plans

March 9, 2016

“Do you really think this is a good idea?” Kassi asked me, straightening my tie one last time.

“I don’t know,” I said, refusing to look into her eyes.

“You’ve said ‘I don’t know’ at least ten thousand times since we met.” Her smile made me go a little queasy inside, the good kind of queasy that meant she was still the woman I couldn’t imagine ever spending the rest of my life without.

“I don’t know,” I said, ducking a swipe, “I don’t think it has been ten thousand times. Eight or nine for sure, but ten is stretching it a bit.”

Her face changed into
Business Kassandra
. “I’m scared. Really scared. What if this turns out to be the worst thing we could have done? You’re not a politician, Tyler. You’re good enough at it, like, you’re all grown up inside, but all they’ll see you as is a twenty-three year old kid with a lot of money. Money that you’re willing to throw at them so they’ll make promises that they can’t possibly keep once they get ground under the Capitol Hill machine.”

I was proud of her in that moment more than I could ever remember. As far as I was concerned, her maturity made me look like a toddler that just learned the word “no.” Even as goofy and weird as she could be, she was a woman, not a girl. A woman with a playful side, but a woman that was a lot sharper than me in almost everything. She’d gone from a college girl who couldn’t even figure out why a Democrat president and a Republican vice-president was too unbelievable, to what could be mistaken for a poly science major.

“I know I’m not a politician,” I said, grabbing one of her hands in mine. “I’m kind of like a lobbyist. Or a booster. Whatever it takes to get my foot in the door so we can maybe gain some influence.”

“Tyler,” she said, getting ready to lecture me again, “you know that politics is a long-term game, right?”

“I know, but what else can we do?”

“We have six years left. Elections for this year are already mostly wrapped up. We need something like ten or twelve years to even get within range of a national party candidate.”

“Maybe not,” I said, stubborn as ever when I thought I was right. It concerned me that I thought I was right a little too often lately. I wasn’t concerned that I might actually be wrong. I was concerned that I didn’t seem interested in weighing the possibilities. “This year we can maybe get some strong state candidates elected, something, get some influence, and then in 2018 we can work on a national senate race or governor’s race. Something.”

“And then what? What’s the overall plan here? Get a few senators and congressmen in our pocket then what? Sit them down at a lobbyist luncheon and let them know that their new president is a whacko, and you can prove it by showing them stuff you found on the internet? An internet from the future? Really?”

“What do you want me to do?” I shouted, my voice too loud as it rebounded from the car’s glass in every direction. “I’m sorry. But are we supposed to just go hide in our house up on the hill and watch the world burn? Do you need to watch the video again?”