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 really fallen for 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 that pesky human extinction had spoiled their plans.

This tidbit explained why Darla and I had fallen so hard for one another. I wasn’t surprised. While Darla had initially chalked up her whirlwind feelings for me to the fact that she’d read about our romance before we’d even met, I’d had no such rationale for the inexplicably powerful sense of familiarity and déjà vu I’d felt since I laid eyes on her. So love at first sight was an easy sell.

How the other Henry and Darla had gotten together, we didn’t know. Given my trust issues, it seemed like something of a miracle. But I suspected his guilt and regret over distancing himself from Margaret and Robbie had eventually forced him to work through his trust issues enough to let Darla halfway in, and the couples therapy Nancy’s mom had mentioned had done the rest.

Looking back, I wish I’d gotten some clarity from Nancy’s mom the next time we’d seen her, what with it being the last time we’d see her.

It was a couple of days after Robbie was released from the hospital, and Margaret had left him at my place while she ran some errands. It was the first time Darla, Robbie, and I had been alone to talk. We’d discovered pretty quickly that none of us were able to say anything about Project Do-Over or RIP to anyone but one another. It was a strange sort of paralysis. Granted, 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. But it was one of many reasons that moving forward 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,” I said.

“He means the real humanity,” Darla 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.”

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 that 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?

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“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?”

I realized he hadn’t just been asking about how we could go on knowing the real humanity was gone, but how we could do it knowing the real humanity was to blame for its extinction, and that we were likely on track to repeat their mistakes. As he’d said, he’d spent a life waiting for the end and the notion that nothing had really changed was eating him up.

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

Nancy’s mom paused for a while and then answered simply, “That’s up to you isn’t it?”

And then, for the last time, she vanished.

In the moment, I didn’t know exactly what her last words meant. I assumed she was simply saying that from here on out, she was staying out the world’s affairs. I thought she was talking in the abstract sense, affirming that humanity’s survival was up to humanity.

But thinking back three decades later, I know she was talking only to Robbie. Because when you look at all the speeches he’d go on to give, all the negotiations he’d broker, and all the votes he’d earn, 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’s heart. And nobody’s got more of it than my nephew.

It’s hard to imagine Nancy’s mom’s last words weren’t infused with a knowledge of Robbie’s bright political 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 was engineering in the craziest way imaginable? What with her going batty, she hadn’t made my crucible a walk in the park, but I had encountered a few strokes of luck—most notably my Car Guy-killing upholstery and the Belgian Boxer Shorts drop. And as clumsy and stat-less as Robbie’s inclusion in the game had been, he had been cast in a central role, giving him a hand in the outcome. 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 like 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 get a brain scan.

In any event, I see Robbie often. Especially because our daughter works in his cabinet. Her name is Delila. Turns out that was Nancy’s mom’s name. I looked her up. She’d been living in Boca Raton for several years before her doppelganger showed up at my door.

There’s a lot more to tell about what happened in subsequent years. And in truth, we’ll never know how it all tracks against the original version. The feed hadn’t yet filled in a lot of the finer details of our personal lives before Darla had printed it and Merrick had melted down the equipment room.

Granted, while it was only a snapshot of a future in flux based on the choices that had been made by beta players, the printout 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.

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 when we thought about how much we loved Delilah, we were both thankful that the printout hadn’t mentioned whether the other us had had kids—the vicarious grief at their loss in the original timeline would have been too much. Suffice it to say, we didn’t want to know what we didn’t know.

Soon after Robbie’s recovery, I’d left my job. But not because I’d killed my boss. As it turned out, now that RIP was over, the death toll had served its purpose. 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 diverged from 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.

THE END