Page 23 of What If It's You?

“That’s true.” A tiny flare of anxiety shot up from the pit of my stomach,There are so many traps to potentially fall into.But the gentle comfort of Drew’s touch, the caring, credulous look in his eyes—deeply familiar, even if we’d never been this to each other in my other life—quickly snuffed it. I didn’t have to go into details to get this right, he wasn’t planning a fact check. I knew Drew, and different trappings in my life didn’t mean I was an entirely different person here. Well…except possiblyliterally;it wasn’t really clear to me whether I’d taken over some other-world-Laurel’s body or just entered averydeveloped simulation of that. “I guess it’s been long enough that I don’t feel as awkward about it anymore. Hell, Mark didn’t even recognize me until I dropped your name.”

“Seriously?” He scrunched his entire face in disbelief.

“I guess I’m just not that memorable,” I quipped, wishing I didn’t want so badly for him to contradict me.

“I seriously doubt that,” Drew said, smiling slyly. His eyelids lowered. “Either way, it’s good to see you. Now that we’re on track to present AltR to the entire board, the team is…”

“Freaking out?”

“Constantly.Like, they all know what they’re supposed to be working on, they’re all good at their jobs, why do they suddenly need me to sign off on every single line of code, you know?”

“Awww, you’re their fearless leader,” I singsonged. Drew rolled his eyes. “No, seriously, they look up to you!”

“Well, I’d be a lot more impressed if they looked down at their keyboards instead.” He widened his eyes comically, leaning back to let the server drop our sushi platter, squeezing my hand once morebefore he released it to start applying a precise rice-grain-sized smear of wasabi on every single roll and glistening slab of fish with the tip of a chopstick. It was so emphatically him that I had to smile. Had I ever noticed the habit before? There were probably hundreds of little quirks of Drew’s that I’d been privy to as his friend but hadn’t really internalized.

“Are you feeling more like yourself?”

“Mostly,” I said. It wasn’t entirely untrue, even if I still wasn’t sure exactly who this self was. “It was probably just a bad night’s sleep. Maybe something I ate.”

“As long as you’re sure you’re okay. You know I don’t like when you push yourself too hard.”

“I’m not, I promise. Anyway, I’ve gotta push myself alittleif I’m gonna prove this whole ‘writer’ thing was a good idea.”

“How’s all that going?” he said, eyes still on his sushi.

“It’s…good. Or, you know, as good as can be expected.” He nodded noncommittally. “Honestly, I’d rather talk about what you’re working on. I want to know everything about this AltR stuff. I feel like we barely scratched the surface last night.” Hopefully that was true? Asking him for a granular breakdown of every aspect of the program might raise his suspicions, but Ihadto find out more about whatever it was that had happened to me, and Drew was not just my best chance for that, he was possibly the best person to go to, full stop. “Besides, the stuff youdidtell me is like…so far above my pay grade I don’t even think I fully grasp it, you know? Like…tell me everything again, but slower this time.” Was that too obvious? After the way I’d been acting, any more lapses in memory would have to set off alarm bells.

But Drew just smiled, flushing slightly, clearly enjoying the praise.

“It is a little tough to wrap your mind around—it’s not like anyone else is doing anything evencloseto this level of complexity yet. I just wish we could get the program to run longer than a few minutes at a time.”

“So right now you can see…what? Just a single choice?”

“It’s not a choice, exactly, more like an inflection point. A moment where things can split betweenif thisversusif that. But to answer your question…yeah, more or less. One inflection point and a few minutes before and after it. But we’re gonna be able to go longer soon, every time we input new data, the AI gets smarter, which cuts down the computational time it takes to run all the—” He glanced up and smirked at the expression on my face. “Sorry, I know how much you hate it when I get in the weeds. Suffice it to say it’s getting better really fast.”

Hated it? Drew’s nerdy enthusiasm for his passions was one of my favorite things about him. Or at least…it was as his friend. I tucked the tidbit away and forged ahead.

“And what if the program were to…I don’t know, keep running somehow?”

“I mean…it can’t.” Drew shook his head once, sharply.

“I know, but if itcould.”

He rolled his eyes, exhaling a small laugh.

“Laurel, itphysically can’t. Do you know anything about quantum computers? Other than the fact that they exist, which honestly…even knowing that puts you ahead of maybe ninety-five percent of the population.” He sniffed out another laugh. I tried to ignore the flare of annoyance in my chest.I may not be a literal genius, but I’m not a simpleton.

“They run computations faster than regular computers, right?”

“Right. Because they can exist in two states at once. Superposition, it’s a principle of quantum physics. Each bit isn’t simply a zero or one in a quantum computer, it’sbothzero and one until the moment we observe it.”

Déjà vu washed over me, but not from our unknowable life together. It was of much more recent origin, a weird echobetweenmy two lives.

“Like Schrödinger’s cat.”

“Exactly!” Drew’s eyebrows shot up in pleased surprise. Clearly he’d assumed the concept was beyond me. Which, honestly, it stillwas, but that same annoyance lit again. Had he always thought I was dim and I just hadn’t realized it? And was it just proximity, or was this world’s Drew a little…different? I couldn’t pinpoint how, precisely, but I was sure I was right. But why would that be the case? I pushed the thought away as he finished chewing and continued. “A large enough quantum computer could run more computations per second than there are—”

“—atoms in the entire universe, I know.” Drew’s head jerked back and I bit my lip. Clearly in this life we’d never had this conversation. “What? I try to keep on top of the latest tech developments.”

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