Epilogue

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  Love at first sight.

  Not everyone has experienced it. Not everyone believes in it. But it’s a fact. Well, technically it’s a flaw. It’s a flaw in the PDO operating system. Darla told me all about it while we were lying in bed watching the sun come up the morning after Robbie’s miraculous recovery.

  From what she’d gathered from several passages in the printout, a handful of people who’d been powerfully bonded to one another in reality had passed on artifacts of those feelings to their avatars in PDO. While it was a very small number of people, there was a chance that it would disrupt the parallel flow of history, what with the butterfly effect. So Goliath’s engineers had been trouble-shooting the bug along with a few other issues when the world ended.

  This phenomenon explained why Darla and I had fallen so hard for one another so quickly. Of course, the mystery had nagged at me more than Darla. She’d been able to chalk up her feelings of familiarity and déjà vu to the emotional placebo of reading about our union before we’d met. I’d had no such rationale and, being the way I was, it seemed wildly out of character.

  How the other Henry and Darla had gotten together, we didn’t know. Given his undiluted trust issues, and a lack of love-at-first-sight programming, their union seemed improbable. But I suspected his guilt and regret over distancing himself from Margaret and Robbie had eventually forced him to question his instincts enough to let Darla halfway in, and maybe the couples therapy had done the rest. But that wasn’t the only curiosity I harbored about my other self. Why hadn’t he spent his credits to inspire me to try to save my dad? Or stop my mother from leaving? Or catch the diagnosis that took my aunt before it was too late?

  Maybe it was because the NeuroVista tech hadn’t come along until they were gone and I didn’t trust PDO to “Jurassic Park” them together. Or maybe it was because Robbie had been just a kid when he’d died. But looking back, I wish I’d gotten some answers from Nancy’s mom the next time we saw her, what with it being the last time.

  A couple of days after Robbie was released from the hospital, Margaret had left him at my place while she ran some errands. It was the first time Darla, Robbie, and I had been alone together since he’d woken up.

  We’d found pretty quickly that none of us were able to say anything about Project Do-Over or RIP to anyone but one another. As I write it all down, I know it will be incomprehensible to anyone who tries to read it. But I’m writing it down anyway, just in case the rules change.

  We weren’t thrilled to discover the strange magical paralysis with which we’d been struck, but we were thankful that we hadn’t been mindwiped. Whether that was the product of Nancy’s mom’s grace or her mild dementia, we’ll never know.

  Of course, living with the unique insight we possessed was going to take some adjustment—especially for Robbie.

  “So we’re supposed to just keep on truckin’?” he asked.

  “What do you mean?” I replied.

  “I mean, we’re just supposed to ignore the fact that humanity is gone?”

  “Well, we’re humanity,” Darla said.

  “He means the real humanity,” I clarified.

  “You think those people up there were more real than you?” Nancy’s mom exclaimed vexedly as she appeared out of nowhere, jutting a thumb up at the sky. “Sitting around, telling themselves soothing little stories about who made them and what they’re made of?”

  “Well—” I started.

  “Oh, everything is molecules and atoms and protons and electrons and quarks and . . . on and on until everything is made of stuff so small that it’s nothing? Oh, and also there was a time before time, when time began. What a bunch of hogwash.”

  “What does that have to do with any—” Darla tried unsuccessfully to cut in.

  “How was their reality more real than yours? Their whole existence was predicated on delusion—security blankets called religion and science that don’t really explain anything. The whole third dimension is most likely a simulation being run in the fourth. And everyone up there was just like you—they did what they did and felt what they felt without asking questions.”

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  At first, I couldn’t understand why she’d set out this mind-bending proposal with such vigor. But then I realized that she resented the notion that the world she had created was somehow less legitimate than the world in which she had been created. And as I sat there in her world, I realized she had a point. How were my feelings and actions and hopes and dreams any less valid than those of the version of me living in a world made of something different but ultimately no more tangible or substantive than this one?

  “This is as real as it gets. So get your crap together and live your lives,” she finished.

  She turned to make her big exit, but stopped dead, as Robbie called after her.

  “For how long?”

  She turned to look back and found his eyes locked on hers.

  “I’ve lived my whole life waiting for the end, and now I’m going to do it for another, what, twenty years?”

  Darla and I had had time to digest the possibility that humanity might still be doomed—time to trade in that shock for the hope that came with a second chance. Robbie hadn’t yet.

  Nancy’s mom paused for a beat—a beat longer than he could tolerate.

  “So . . . ” he persisted. “Are we doomed?”

  She gave him the same faint smile she’d given me in the hospital and answered simply, “That’s up to you isn’t it?”

  Then, for the last time, she vanished.

  In the moment, I don’t think I really knew what her last words meant. I assumed she was simply saying that from here on out, she’d be staying out of the world’s affairs. I thought she was using “you” in the general sense, affirming that humanity’s survival was up to humanity.

  But thinking back three decades later, I think she was talking to Robbie. Because when you look at all the speeches he’d go on to give, all the negotiations he’d broker, all the votes he’d earn, and all the good he’d do, the future really was up to him. There’s only one thing that stokes hope—only one thing that brings people together to fix what’s broken and build a better world. That thing is heart. And coronary birth defect or not, nobody’s got more heart than my nephew.

  Suffice it to say, it’s hard to imagine that Nancy’s mom’s parting sentiment wasn’t infused with a knowledge of Robbie’s potential impact on the future. She’d implied she didn’t know what was in store for humanity. But had her last words given her away? Were they an impulsive glimpse into a future she had engineered in the craziest way imaginable?

  What with her going batty, she hadn’t made my crucible a walk in the park. No question, I could have bought the farm on countless occasions. But I had encountered a few strokes of luck, from my Car Guy-killing upholstery to the Belgian Boxer Shorts drop to Robbie’s perfectly-timed awakening and revelation regarding attunement. So I was inclined to believe that, even in her dementia, Nancy’s mom had indeed been rooting for us. Perhaps one of the bugs or viruses running unchecked through her system had infected her with something resembling compassion or humanity. Maybe, just maybe there’d been more to her choosing me than the fact that I was the saddest, most pathetic person ever to sign up for the PDO beta.

  Anyway, it turns out that Nancy’s mom’s name was Delila. I looked her up. She’d been living in Boca Raton for several years before her doppelganger showed up at my door. Sure, the PDO operating system had taken her form as part of the RIP torment-a-thon. But in the process, it had given me a version of the woman that would ultimately evoke nothing but gratitude. Hence, our choice to name our daughter Delila.

  There’s a lot more to tell about what happened in subsequent years. And in truth, we’ll never know exactly how it all tracks against Reality 1.0. But an uptick in conflicting data toward the end of the print out suggested that we’d reached a tipping point where our world’s history diverged starkly from that of its predecessor.

  Of course, the print out’s account of our future was far from complete. It was only a snapshot of a future in flux based on the choices that had been made by beta players. But it was still somewhat useful for a time. To wit, there were a few stock tips that set us up pretty well after a series of legal machinations transferred all of Cyril Cunningham’s assets to an assortment of charities, per his will.

  In theory, we could have tried to replicate the system hack. We could have found some folks with the right technical backgrounds and gone looking for the Zuni shaman who had guided Darla’s uncle on his vision quest. But our questions about what had been and what would be notwithstanding, we decided against it.

  When push came to shove, we didn’t want to know what we didn’t know—specifically whether the other us had had kids who perished with everyone else in Reality 1.0. When we thought about how much we loved Delila, we didn’t think we could handle the vicarious grief. So we just tried to get back to living normal lives—as normal as possible anyway.

  Soon after Robbie’s recovery, I’d left my job. But not because I’d killed my boss. As it turned out, after RIP had wrapped up, the deaths that had been essential to raising the stakes during the game became more trouble than they were worth. It was easier for Nancy’s mom to resurrect Frank and his step-aerobics sweetheart than to keep them dead, as their untimely demise was a taxing deviation from the natural course of the code. The same went for Marty Malomar. (All memories were adjusted accordingly.)

  Anyway, after telling Frank where to shove it, I didn’t go to work for Goliath as I apparently had in Reality 1.0. I’d started my own agency, serving non-profit causes. But I wasn’t the only one blazing a new trail. And as the chain reaction triggered by all the other beta avatars continued to ripple through our world, it evolved.

  After a few years, the printout had very little light to shed on the future. It certainly seems like we’ve steered clear of any version of what happened our first time around. But we really don’t have enough data to be sure. All we know was that humanity needed a do-over. And I like to think that we’re making the best of it. Things aren’t perfect. But we’re still here.

  THE END