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I grabbed a spiral notebook from the backpack at my feet and wrote both scores down. My head was beginning to hurt, and I could feel my eyes growing heavy. I had to be up at six and in my first class by seven. I’d spent most of the night with Kassi, and though I had achieved a total of zero homework for the night, I’d achieved getting her to forgive me. I’d also achieved what sounded like a steady commitment to be exclusive with each other. I patted my strange little computer before telling it to hibernate. I drifted off to sleep wondering what it would be like to grow old with Kass.

CHAPTER 6 - Truth & Liars

December 3, 2014

I had a hard time concentrating in any class. All my brain could think about was that the Predators had won 2-1 the night before, and the Spurs had won 98-93. I’d barely gotten any sleep once I looked at ESPN.com’s scoreboard. All day long, even while I was with Kass, my brain kept revolving around the fact that the
future
BBC site had predicted the scores. She knew something was up with me, and every time she’d ask me if everything was okay, I’d nod and berate myself for doing the exact opposite of what I wanted to do, which was to give her my undivided attention. By the time I arrived home for dinner, I felt like I was going insane.

I tried to convince myself that it was just a lucky guess. I told myself that I was having either a very vivid dream, or a serious hallucination. Maybe I really was in a padded room in some loony bin. My parents didn’t seem to notice, or maybe they just thought I was daydreaming about Kassandra. I tried to answer in more than single syllable words, the same as I tried to do more than push food around on my plate. Once dinner was over, I went straight to my room and sat down at the desk.

“Computer. Wake up.”

I didn’t think I’d ever stop feeling foolish about addressing the computer. The monitor projected its image within seconds, and two seconds later, I had the screen extended and the virtual keyboard ready to type something. The problem was, I couldn’t think of what to type. I didn’t know where to begin. I opened the
normal
browser to Google, and the
future
browser to Qwerry. Then I sat and stared at the screen for about five minutes.

Finally, I sighed and extended the screen left and right. I dragged the normal browser to the right screen so I could keep the browsers side-by-side. I typed “Kennedy assassination” in both browsers, and while the ranking of the search results were slightly different between browsers, there was nothing out of the ordinary that came up in Qwerry’s search.
So far so good
, I thought. Then I searched the election results from back on November 4th by looking at web pages from November 7th.

Harold Lincoln won a seat in Missouri’s 6th District, according to both browsers. Someone named Darren Gregory won the special election held in South Carolina for the Senate seat up for grabs. Both browsers proclaimed Stephen Trent Buckner the projected winner of the Texas governor’s race in one of the closest elections in American history, but at the time of the news stories I was reading, the recount was still going on. I jumped ahead to the 20th and looked it up, and again both browsers had the same results. Buckner had won the election by thirty-six votes, out of just over six million votes cast.

I spent the next hour checking results in all sorts of subjects. Sports scores, weather, world history, and I even thought about searching for myself. On my laptop, and my old desktop, the results would show that I was a blogger, and a bunch of other Tyler Gallaghers were criminals, baseball players, lawyers, doctors. I had a moment of cold fear pass through me when I thought about searching for myself with the Qwerry search engine, until my brain asked me what I would do if I found my own obituary. That thought led into other insane thoughts, like looking up when my mother and father would pass on, or any engagement notices or wedding announcements for me.

I was afraid of the engagements and weddings, as I didn’t want to find out that Kassandra might not be the girl I ended up with. What if she wasn’t, and I ended up with someone named Jane Smith? What if I didn’t even know Jane Smith, and then the day I finally met her, I tried to convince her that we were meant to be together? Or would I be creepy and use the quantum computer to find out everything I could about her and then
woo
her, as if it was a real-life version of the movie “Groundhog Day”? What if I met her and somehow screwed it all up, and we didn’t end up together? Worse, what if I intentionally tried to screw it up so I didn’t have to marry her, but the future was already set, unchangeable?

I closed both browsers in frustration. I was starting to freak myself out again. The urge to open the Qwerry page back up and search for my own date of death was almost overpowering, and that freaked me out more than anything else. I wasn’t normally morbid like that. I spent a few minutes calming down as best I could, then decided to do a much more in-depth experiment to see if I was crazy, or if the strange computer really could see into the future. My logical brain practically screamed at me that it was impossible, and I was the stupidest human ever born to even entertain the idea, but an underlying, barely conscious part of my mind shivered in fear because it knew the truth.

I pulled out my spiral notebook and opened the Qwerry browser. I started at its version of ESPN’s site, going through the football scores. I began writing down not just scores, but details of the game. The Friday night NCAA feature game had Virginia Tech playing Florida State for the ACC Championship. According to the box score, the Seminoles’ DeShon Franklin would go 23/32 for 306 yards and three touchdown passes, and he’d also have 6 rushes for 82 yards and a touchdown, with Florida State winning the game 56-14.

I moved on to the NBA and noted that tonight, Lebron James would score 30 points, snatch 11 rebounds, get 10 assists, to go along with his 7 steals, almost completing a rare quadruple-double. I could have chosen any of the NBA games, but a player almost achieving a Q-D was something that would stand out. In the NHL, Stamkos would have a hat trick and two assists as Tampa blew out Florida 6-1, but not before taking a slash on the hand and leaving the game, the later x-ray showing a broken thumb.

As I was filling out half of a page with notes, stats, and scores, I happened to think of another way to test my theory. It was probably statistically impossible for all of the sports numbers I wrote down to happen in a sheer coincidence. However, the one thing I was sure of was that unless the computer could see into the future, there was no way it could simply
guess
what the Powerball and MegaMillions lottery numbers would be.

Which of course made me pause and wonder if I shouldn’t check the numbers then run out and buy a ticket for Saturday night’s drawing. The temptation to do that was even stronger than looking up my own death. Being rich was nice, so I’d heard and had always believed, but I wanted to do it more for my parents. They’d worked their whole lives at jobs they liked, in my mom’s case truly loved, but neither made very much money, one of the pitfalls of being a public servant. I stared at the projection screen that displayed the winning numbers of both lottery jackpots for at least ten minutes while I fought within my own head about what to do.

I definitely wasn’t the most moral person on the planet, but I felt like I was a pretty good kid. Man. I was twenty-one now, had lived a good life, had great parents, hadn’t done a lot of mean or harmful things to others (again, I was no angel either), and was confident that I had enough compassion to do things like care for sick and injured animals and help starving or homeless humans.

I began to scheme about winning the lottery multiple times, or winning the big national lotteries then hitting all of the individual states that also had them. I could take all that money and do the world a ton of good. I could start foundations, corporations, hell, religions if I wanted to. Would it be a good thing to “cheat” and win maybe more than a billion dollars and put it all back into humanity?

After my little euphoric mental wet dream came back to reality, I realized it was a stupid idea. Not because the money or help wouldn’t be appreciated, but because it was pretty goddamn suspicious that one person would be able to win fifteen, maybe twenty lotteries in the span of a month. Hell, a year, or even over five years. Eventually, and sooner rather than later, there’d be some federal agents knocking on my door, wanting to know just how it was that I’d
guessed
with such accuracy.

I frowned, but then smiled again. The stock market. I could win one lottery, no one would ever be suspicious of that, and then start playing the stock market. If the quantum computer really was able to do some kind of digital or informational time travel… where would the limit be on how much money I could make? The warning center in my brain remembered an old fable about being granted three wishes, and one of the wishes was for more wishes, which turned into a never-ending cycle. Would I be satisfied making a billion dollars trading stocks and bonds? Ten billion? A hundred billion?

With that much money, I’d have almost unlimited power. I could practically buy governments, whether outright or in secret. Would such ultimate power ultimately corrupt me? I thought I’d be pretty benevolent, but I’d never had access to maybe a trillion dollars in liquid assets. What if someone really pissed me off? I could pay a hitman ten million dollars to snuff that person out. Hell, I could probably order up a drone strike or a special-ops team to take care of it. I’d have Senators and Prime Ministers and Police Chiefs in my pocket.

My head swam from the swirling thoughts. I stood up and left my room, going out the back sliding glass door to the patio to get some fresh, cold air. The urge to run back in the house and start becoming the richest, most powerful man on Earth was so great that I thought I might have to cut off my hands and feet just to keep myself from walking to the computer and typing anything in.
I could still touch the search box with a stump and use voice commands
, I thought.

I’ll cut your fucking tongue right out of your stupid head
, was the warning I gave my brain in reply. I knew I was going insane. No one stands in the freezing cold arguing with himself, threatening self-inflicted bodily harm, unless they were crazy. I wondered if this is what it was like to be schizophrenic or have some other mental illness. I stood on the patio for almost ten minutes until I was shivering so much that I bit a small chunk of skin off my tongue with my chattering teeth.

I walked back to my bedroom and sat down. It took another ten minutes to warm back up completely, but by the time I’d stopped shivering, I’d made up my mind as to what to do. I wasn’t going to win any lotteries. I wasn’t going to play the stock market. I wasn’t going to bet on sports, become a psychic, or anything else. Not yet. First I had to make sure that my strange little quantum computer really could see into the future.

I touched the search box and typed in “August 1, 2100.” Qwerry instantly alerted me to the fact that there were no web pages available for this date. I grunted, and typed in “NASA 2050” and tried that. No results. I wasn’t sure if I was doing something wrong, or if the computer couldn’t see that far into the future. I tried a few more searches, hoping beyond hope that mankind had figured out how to travel the stars, or maybe aliens had landed and said Nanoo-Nanoo or whatever it was that they might say, should they have mouths. Nothing. Every search came back with zero results.

I sighed and gave up. I had an entire page full of results in my notebook to check as the weekend approached. I wasn’t sure how I’d react if every single detail came to pass. My mind began to creep into the schemes of becoming filthy rich. My daydreaming was interrupted by the ding from my phone.

I miss you ;) <3

Kassandra. I hadn’t even thought of her in my crazy quantum fantasies. Which brought me to a new problem. A few actually, but the first one was whether or not I should tell her about the computer. I decided that was a bad idea, and put it out of my head. My problem solving drifted into daydreaming as I went from trying to explain to her how I was suddenly rich, to buying her anything and everything she could ever want. We were coming up on two months of dating, and only about a week of exclusive commitment, which made my brain turn another corner and begin wondering if I would be satisfied with her if I was as wealthy and powerful as I couldn’t stop fantasizing about being.

“Stop it,” I growled to myself. It was too cold to go back outside for another ten or fifteen minutes to get my head under control. I began to wish I had a little weed to smoke to smooth me out, but even that was filled with worry. What if I got too stoned and did some crazy stuff?

“Computer. Hibernate.”

I needed a break. I needed to get away from it. The scenarios were coming into my head too fast to focus on any one of them. I waited for the blue light to fade out, then left my room and went downstairs. Mom and Dad were sitting on the couch, arms around each other, watching a television show about restaurants.

“What’s up?” my father asked as I sat down in the recliner next to them.

“Nothing much,” I said, hoping my voice didn’t sound as shaky as it did to my own ears.

“Tyler?” Mom asked. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

“Yeah, Mom. I’m fine.”

“You’ve been acting funny ever since your girlfriend—”

“—Kassandra,” my father added.