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“Didn’t he just win a special election last year?” I asked, remembering the name from when I was attempting to verify that my quantum computer could most certainly look into the future.

“Yep,” my father said, looking to me with what I thought was pride at knowing about a random senator from the South. “He’s put his name in the race as a late horse.”

“I don’t trust him,” Mom said from the kitchen.

“You don’t even trust your own son and daughter-in-law,” I said, getting a laugh from everyone. “Besides, he’s a Democrat.”

“So?” she asked, coming to stand at the edge of the kitchen, hands on her hips. “What does that have to do with anything?”

“I just figured since you always vote Democrat—”

“Tyler!” she said sharply. “You aren’t supposed to tell people how you voted.”

“Why not?” Kassi asked her.

“Your
mother
,” my father said to her, “thinks it’s a sacred event that should be kept secret even though we all know how she votes.”

“Peter!”

“It’s kinda true, Mom,” I said. “You don’t announce it to us with neon signs, but we live with you. We know you.”

She turned and went deeper into the kitchen, miffed that we knew her so well, and that we had violated one of her little taboos.

“So, what’s so special about this Gregory guy?” I asked my father, interested in politics for the first time that I could remember.

“I don’t have a clue,” he answered. “Just that he’s got a lot of buzz around him, and a lot of talk about how he’s doing exactly what Obama did and coming out of left field.”

“Is he black?” Kassandra asked.

“No,” my father chuckled, “that’s the funny thing. He’s a white guy. Kind of an uptight white southerner. A fairly conservative one, which is necessary in the Deep South.”

“Is he old?” I asked. I hadn’t bothered to actually find out anything about the man other than his name and he’d won the election.

“Depends on your definition of old,” my father said, giving me a scowl.

“You know, like sixties or seventies?”

“Good answer,” he said, giving me an approving nod and Kass a smile. “He’s in his fifties.”

“Okay, so what’s so special about him?” she asked.

“No clue,” Dad answered.

*

“What’s the matter?” Kassi asked as I pulled the quantum computer from my closet and set it up on the desk.

“That guy, Gregory. His name came up when I was searching for stuff right after I found out what the computer could do.”

“Did he start World War Three or something?” she asked, sitting down on the bed.

“No, I happened to see his name when I was testing to see if this thing could look into the future. I remember his name standing out just because it was a surprise win in a special election. Him and some other guy, some dude running for governor in Texas. I checked them out, but nothing further than the current date when I looked.”

“A Texas governor? I don’t understand.”

“Computer, power on,” I said to the computer, then turned to her while it booted up. “I was looking at election results, trying to see if the normal browser and the future browser would show the same thing. We’d just went through mid-terms, and I looked up a few races that had made national headlines.”

“So what happened with these guys? What’d they do?”

“I don’t know,” I said, touching my finger to the Qwerry browser. “But this Gregory guy was just elected as a senator in 2014. From out of nowhere, if I remember the bits I’d read back then. Now he’s come out of nowhere again to run for president.”

“You think something bad is going to happen?”

“I don’t know. It’s just one of those weird coincidences that bugs me, and I need to see if he actually wins the election.”

“Why?”

I stopped typing on the virtual keyboard and looked at her. “I don’t know, hon. It’s just one of those nervous ticks or weird personality disorders I have.”

She laughed. “Which one? You’ve got like ninety.”

I narrowed my eyes at her and stuck my tongue out before going back to typing into the future search engine. I wasn’t sure what to think when the results came back that Darren William Gregory, Democratic Senator from South Carolina, was indeed the forty-fifth President of the United States of America. The picture splashed across the NPR website showed a healthy, hearty-looking white man in his fifties, his hair about three-quarters gray, shaking hands with another man that I didn’t recognize. The caption said it was his vice president, Stephen Trent Buckner, the Republican governor of Texas.

“What’s the matter?” Kassi asked.

I just pointed to the screen. She got off the bed and sat in my lap. I watched her face as she read. Her brows drew down into a frown, her lips moving as she read the words on the screen.

“What does this mean?” she asked after shifting so she could look at me.

“I don’t know,” I said for the millionth time.

“Do you know if you feel any foreboding or anything?”

“I don’t know. A little. Something doesn’t seem right with this.”

“Why not? Did you buy into the conspiracy when Obama won? That he wasn’t a real American citizen?”

“No, I didn’t pay a lot of attention then. I was still a stupid teenager thinking about boobs and booze. I remember the hoopla surrounding him, but it was mostly because he was maybe going to be our first black president, and all the nutters were going crazy.” I frowned. “More crazy than usual.”

She grinned. “So why is this guy different? Because he’s a proper, privileged, white southern gentleman?”

“I don’t know,” I said without smiling. “It’s bugging me though. What bugs me more is that his vice president is a Republican from Texas.”

“Why does that bug you?”

“Seriously?” I asked. “Don’t you pay any attention to politics?”

“Apparently even less than you,” she said, looking offended that I might be being mean to her.

“Apparently so,” I said, but with a smile. “At least I know that Democrats and Republicans are mortal enemies. One would probably shove the other one down a flight of stairs if he could get away with it.”

“Don’t exaggerate.”

“I don’t think I am. Seriously. This is too weird. I mean, Gregory is a conservative Democrat, so it’s not weird that he’d pick another southern conservative, but a Republican? That’s just too weird.”

“Should we look into it further?” she asked, becoming very serious.

My explanation of the rules had sunk it firmly, and she’d taken the scrying power of the computer seriously since then. She even gave me grief regularly when I used it to further the acquisition of more money.

“I don’t know,” I answered.

“God, Tyler. Do you know anything?”

“I know that you better be a good wife and get over to that bed,” I said, giving her hips a squeeze.

“Or what?” she asked, pushing herself down onto my lap. It made me feel like I needed to pee more than it turned me on.

“Or I’ll pee on you.”

“Gross.” She stood up then flopped down on the bed.

“Be right back,” I said with a grin as I headed to the bathroom to relieve myself. “If any trick-or-treaters come, just open the door and show ‘em your face.” I heard her growl half a second before I heard her shoe hit the door that I’d closed just in time.

*****

November 19, 2015

I already knew that the ground invasion in Syria would only last nineteen days. I couldn’t wait to turn on the computer, a real computer, or even the television, and verify it. For the first time in a long time, I began to worry that events might change between the time I looked them up, and the date they were supposed to happen.

I’d run into a small glitch with my trading two days before. Vartraan Industries’ stock was supposed to close at two cents over ninety-four dollars per share, making me a tidy half-million dollar profit. It closed at ninety-four dollars and five cents per share. I had made a few extra bucks, but I’d started panicking immediately.

The next four hours were spent checking and re-checking various stock prices, weather temperatures, sports scores, anything that had hard data an hour or two in the future that I could compare. Everything else was spot-on, no variations or deviances from what the quantum computer’s Qwerry browser reported. Everything except Vartraan Industries. It made me curious, and I began looking the company up, wondering if there was something sinister going on, like maybe they were tied to a political scandal, or had received some back-door contracts from the DoD.

Vartraan Industries made metal fabrication stamping machines. I was curious about that, but it turned out to be mundane. They made the machines that other companies used to stamp metal parts for various uses. They had no ties politically, or had hidden it if they did. Their CEO and CFO were normal middle-aged men with clean backgrounds as far as I could research.

I searched and searched some more for another three hours, digging as hard as I could, but nothing came back that seemed like a red flag. Not even looking five years into the future, something I treaded carefully through so I wouldn’t find out too much about anything else. It was a challenge to read news reports two and four years into the future about the company without purposely reading any other information that might reveal the future that I didn’t want revealed. I’d become afraid of knowing too much after learning too much about Kassi’s cousin, Nico.

“What’s got you so involved in the computer?” Kass asked after a few hours of being bored and alone.

“Something happened today,” I said, not looking away from the 3D projection of the monitor.

“What happened?”

I told her how the stock price for Vartraan was slightly different than what the computer reported it would be. She looked worried.

“Is this bad? Was anything else screwy?”

“I don’t know, and no, everything else was exactly like it should have been.”

“I don’t like this.”

“I don’t either. I’ve spent the last who knows how many hours trying to find out anything odd or whatever about Vartraan. Nothing. Clean as a whistle.”

“What do you think?”

“I think that whatever happened to cause that stock price to be slightly off wasn’t anything Vartraan did. It might be just a slight glitch, or maybe me buying a hundred grand in shares was enough of a fluctuation to tick the price up three more cents.”

“Haven’t you bought tons of stock over the last year? How come none of those caused a glitch like this?”

“I don’t know, Kass. I’m pretty fucking worried though. I’ve got a giant list of shit to check out over the next two days. Even then, it might prove nothing since I’m not putting a direct stake in any of it.”

“What do you mean?”

“I bought a shitload of Vartraan stock, which affects the price it gets traded at. Every time before, maybe the computer knew I was going to buy ten thousand or a hundred thousand shares, and already had my data added in. I don’t know, I didn’t get an instruction manual that explains how all of this works. Sports scores and lottery numbers, I’m not affecting those things in any way. I’m not buying, selling, trading, doing anything with them other than observing.”

“And…?”

“So all of this stuff that I check might not deviate from its future state. If the lottery numbers are six-nineteen-forty, then they’ll be six-nineteen-forty when the drawing happens. Just like when I bought the winning ticket. I’m not really affecting stuff directly. But what if I bought ten houses on the block for inflated prices? That would affect something. I’m not sure what, but I can’t help feeling that this is because the computer was surprised, which sounds really weird, or that the future changed just slightly because of me tugging on a temporal string or something.”

“That’s not really very scientific,” she said, but she looked more worried than before. “Maybe you should stop buying stock for a while,” she suggested.

“I’ve been thinking about that all day, but I think I’m going to keep going for now. I’m curious as to whether or not any future trades I do will cause this to happen again.”

“Tyler, what if it does cause another glitch, but this time a bad one?”

“Like what?”

“Like you buying a million shares and suddenly the stock market crashes for some reason, which leads to something else bad happening.”

“Like stockbrokers jumping out of windows during Black Friday?”

“It’s not funny, Tyler. You told me yourself about the whole
being responsible
thing when you lectured me on the ‘rules.’”

“Okay, you’re right. It’s not funny. And it is a bit frightening. But what if it’s just a ‘time adjustment’ or something that is necessary since we’ve been fooling around with the future a bit.”

“What if it’s someone else with a computer like yours? What if whatever he’s doing affected your stock, but only as a ripple from the outer edges? How would you know what major change happened since you are only tuned into this specific stock?”