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Kass grabbed the remote and turned the channel to Bloomberg, checking the numbers, then to CNN. Then to MSNBC. Then Fox.

She looked up at me. “How is… no. This is stupid. I don’t know how you’re doing this, but I’ll admit that you’re scaring the shit out of me, Tyler, and I don’t like it. Please, please stop this. It’s not funny.”

I reached out and put my hand on her arm, giving it a gentle squeeze. “I know it’s not funny. It’s not meant to be funny. It’s frightening. You don’t have any idea how scared I’ve been since this thing arrived and I put it together.”

“Scared? Why would you be scared if you could use it to win the lottery or win the stock market?”

“Because… because. Because I can’t tell you the answer to that until you are completely convinced this is real. Only then will you really listen to what I’m trying to tell you.”

She put her hand over mine and gave it a squeeze. “Okay. What next?”

“Now we wait for a few hours, until the lottery drawings begin back east, and for basketball and hockey games to be over.”

By midnight, Kassandra was a complete wreck. It’s not that she was weak and couldn’t handle it. It’s more that everything she’d believed about the world had suddenly changed. Had shifted. If a computer could look into the future, what other crazy shit might be happening? What if I wasn’t the only one with one of these computers? At one point, she’d repeated
it’s not real
at least a hundred times, rocking back and forth, almost as if she were having a seizure.

I knew exactly how she felt. Now I had to tell her the rules.

CHAPTER 11 - Rules Is Rules

October 1, 2015

We sat up through the night, waiting for all of the west coast lottery numbers to be drawn, all of the California sports teams to finish their games. I’d suggested Kassi put a check mark next to each accurate prediction in the notebook, and an X next to all that were wrong. By the time she’d marked the last one in the notebook off, the tally was all checks, no X’s.

“We could have won almost five million dollars tonight just from those lotteries,” Kassandra said as we sat at the dining room table, drinking coffee at three in the morning. She looked dazed, her eyes glassy and outlined with dark circles.

“Yeah. We could have. But we don’t need to.”

“How many have you won, Tyler?” she asked.

“Just the one. I picked one that was a decent amount if you took the lump sum, and had no winners to share it with. No winners at all.”

“So no one was supposed to win the lottery you won?”

“Nope.”

“Doesn’t that screw up the flow of time, or something?”

I looked at her to see if she was mocking me and my love of science fiction. She looked scared.

“I don’t know, to be honest,” I answered.

I was uncomfortable because it was true. I hadn’t encountered any problems that I could think of. Yet. However, I hadn’t done a whole lot of experimenting or researching to see if that was actually true. If I’d have spent some time plotting it down to the last detail, maybe if I was a theoretical physicist, I guess, I’d have picked a lotto with no winners a year into the future to collect on. Then I’d have spent the entire year both researching and chronicling the major events in the world and even locally that happened after taking the payout.

I would have also spent time doing little experiments to see if I could disrupt the space-time continuum or whatever it was. I’d maybe look a day ahead at my social network posts or blog entries, then on that actual day, do something completely different. If I’d read my own entries saying I’d reviewed a new MP3 player, or saw a movie and wrote about it, I’d stay home and watch TV instead. Then I’d do little forward time checks to see if the timeline had been altered slightly from whatever it was supposed to be before I’d altered it.

It made my head hurt a lot when I really sat down and thought about it. I
had
sat down and spent a whole day plotting such a thing out, but by the time I’d been at it for four hours, I’d barely begun. The ripples along a timeline from just one person could potentially affect a billion other persons, not to mention countless other living beings like insects, animals, who knows what. In my mind, it reminded me of a computer animation that detailed humanity’s timeline all the way back to when our first ancestors began to make the trek into other parts of the world. What started as a single thread ended up becoming so vast that an entire lifetime could be wasted tracing a single individual’s lineage. A single individual in probably one hundred billion human lives over time.

Checking future events before and after I would make a little experiment would require me to pick a date five years in the future, then do nothing for those five years but research everything that happened
after
the experiment date. And where would I draw the line? How deep into future events would I research? How deep would I be able to research in the given time frame? What if I missed an important detail that I either never found in my research, or noticed it but decided it wasn’t important enough to warrant more scrutiny? By the sixth hour, I scrapped the entire idea and decided to throw the dice and take the chance that my parents winning the lottery wouldn’t cause mankind to wake up a year down the road as brain-eating zombies, or some other unfortunate, unforeseen side effect of me messing with the future.

“You don’t know?” she asked, looking even more frightened.

“It’s not like the thing came with instructions,” I said. “I stumbled upon the things it can do by accident. When I realized what it was capable of, I didn’t rush right into winning the lottery or playing the stock market. You can thank my love of science fiction for at least having an understanding, or at least what I hope is a proper understanding, of time, paradoxes, all that shit.”

“‘All that shit,’” she mimicked, “sounds like something an expert on time travel or ray guns would say.”

“Okay, so I’m not Neil deGrasse Tyson or Michio Kaku,” I said, frustrated. “You don’t know how long I sat around and pulled my hair out after finding out I
could
win lotteries. I can show you another notebook that is almost full of notes and scribblings about the things I tossed around, chewed on. If I step on a bug, will the world end in thirty-eight years somehow?

“Time is a weird thing when you start breaking it down. To most people, it’s just a second, a minute, a day of their lives. It really is nothing more than breathing air, tasting food. It’s such a part of our lives that we don’t pay any real attention to it other than having to be somewhere at a certain time, or a television show coming on at a set date and hour. But with the whole
time travel
thing, it takes on a completely new meaning.

“What if I didn’t cross a street at a certain time, and somehow someone else ended up getting run over by a car? If I do X then Y happens on a normal day, does the same hold true if I do Z instead of X? The implications of this can ripple far and wide. What if a terrorist sets off a dirty bomb in Berlin or Paris on a normal day, but I know about it, and somehow get the information to the right people in time to stop it? Instead of tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of dead persons, and probably billions of others affected by the explosion and the radiation, and the repercussions, because you know someone would be getting a nuke sandwich in return, there’s just a big news story about how the plot was foiled and the world breathes a sigh of relief. But what if the flow of time demanded that those persons all died? What if time is like a train and fucking with it can derail it?”

“You thought of all that, and still won a lottery anyway? And you’re doing the same thing on a daily basis with the stock market?” Kassi looked furious, but I thought it might be fury at me laying all of this on her, for scaring her.

“I did. I do. Not on a daily basis. Right now, I’m researched far enough ahead that I only need to do it once per week.”

“Why do you need that much money? Isn’t the money from your parents enough?”

“No, it isn’t enough.”

“Look at you,” she said, her voice dripping with disgust. “I didn’t realize I’d married someone dominated by greed.”

I reached out and grabbed her hand, firmly, and held on when she tried to pull away.

“I’m not greedy,” I said, gritting my teeth, reminding myself that it wouldn’t help to get angry at her. She had every right to be upset. “There’s a reason why I only took what I did from my parents. There’s a reason why there’s only seven hundred grand in our bank account. There’s a reason we are building a new house but not a mansion on a hundred acres with a helipad.”

“Then what do you need to keep making money for? If you’re so worried about screwing up the future, why risk it? Just to have it? Maybe plotting to buy a third-world country and install yourself as King-President?”

I couldn’t help but laugh at that. It didn’t help the situation, but it helped me.

“It’s not funny,” Kass said, not even coming close to cracking a smile, which only made me laugh more, until she tried to pull away.

“You’re right,” I said, not letting her hand go. I became serious again. “It’s not funny. I’m sorry. Just the whole ‘install yourself as dictator’ thing.” I wiped the smile off my face when I saw the death-glare from her. “Look, Kass, the money isn’t for me. It isn’t for you either, or anyone that doesn’t need it. Flip through that notebook a little, and you’ll come to a ten-year plan.”

Kassandra scowled at me, then pulled her hand away to get up and go get the notebook. I let go and waited for her to come back to the table. I sat quietly as she flipped through the notebook, pausing every few pages to read some random thought I’d had. I wondered if she’d be frightened to know that I’d filled out at least eight spiral notebooks. Being a nerd, I normally would have done it on my laptop or normal desktop, but I had a pretty heavy distrust of computers these days. I also found that writing it all out longhand helped me think about the problem, or solution, or whatever it was I was pondering, better than doing it on a computer.

She found the beginnings of the ten year plan and began to read. It was hard to judge her state of mind, but I was pretty sure as she read through it, she might either punch me in the face, or demand a divorce. Even though I’d just told her the money wasn’t important for me, everything she was reading revolved around making more and more money, as discretely as possible, but with the largest returns I thought possible without attracting the wrong kind of attention.

“All this says,” she said, looking up after scanning to the end of the plan, “is that you plan on being a multi-billionaire after ten years. I noticed the word trillionaire in there more than a few times.” Her eyes were hard, her mouth in a line so flat that it seemed she had no lips.

“I know. But that’s just the first ten years.”

“And I suppose in the second ten years, you spend it all? Buy a few countries? Finance a colony on the moon?”

“Not exactly. I plan on putting that money to good use.”

“So you’re going to be Bill Gates? Philanthropist extraordinaire?” Her tone suggested it didn’t matter what I answered with.

“Something like that,” I said.

“Okay, Mr. Save The World. Where is your ‘ten year plan’ for that?”

“It isn’t set,” I admitted.

“Uh huh,” she muttered.

“Seriously. There’s not a set plan. That’s part of the plan. I thought about using the computer to look eleven to twenty years into the future, to see what the worst of the world’s problems are, and maybe tackle as many as I could. But at some point, and this is written down in one of these notebooks somewhere, I didn’t think it was a good idea to waste every waking moment studying an entire future decade to try and decide what the worst problems were. I decided by the time this first decade ends and it’s time to spend that money wisely, I’d have had ten years of reading the news, watching the news, hearing the NPR people drone on about world events. I’d be a much better judge of what I thought the worst problems were.”

Kassandra looked at me for a while, judging me. She finally decided that I was being genuine, and came to me. I pushed my chair away from the table and pulled her into my lap, and held her for a long time.

“This isn’t happening,” she said into my neck.

“It is. I’ve already set events in motion. I could stop, but I’ve yet to see anything terrible or even odd happen. Haven’t you noticed that the computer hasn’t been on my desk in months?”

“I guess I never thought about it until just now.”

“That’s how much it scares me. Not only could I ruin entire economies, probably the entire world’s economy, but I could spend the rest of my life looking up every single daily detail of the future. In some ways I guess it can be useful, like if we decided to take a trip to Hawaii, I could look up the dates and make sure our plane didn’t crash, didn’t get hijacked, a volcano didn’t erupt and kill us, things like that.

“But then there’s other stuff. What fun is watching sports if you know every single score, how each season will end, who will win championships? What if I can’t wait to see the next episode of a favorite show? What if I want to play the latest video game that isn’t even out yet, and when it finally is released, I’m already bored of it? Not to mention, video games are utterly boring already with the computer. I can’t seem to lose in any game now.”