Page 34 of What If It's You?

“Got it.”

After a few false starts, I was sure I’d found the right inflection point for the program: the late summer day just before senior year when I’d dropped out of concert band, unwilling to stomach another season of ill-fitting marching band uniforms that always stank of old sweat. I visualized my old band director, Bill Wharton, bumblingly pleasant, with wire-rimmed glasses that always slipped down his nose, the baffled look on his face as I politely informed him that I was planning to drop band that fall,But you just made second chair, why drop out now?

Unable to process additional requests at this time.

The calm feminine voice sounded in my head.

“Laurel, can you try something else? We’re still working out a lot of kinks, sometimes the program has a problem with the input we’re trying to feed it for reasons we don’t really understand yet.”

“Sure. Just give me a second…”

I flung around for something else, something anodyne—maybe some specific night out with friends? Or something even smaller: What if I’d ignored Drew and just gone for the saag today?

Unable to process additional requests at this time.

“One sec. A couple other profiles are running in the background right now, if I just force-close them…”

Hello, Laurel. Would you like to further refine your AltR profile?

“Dammit, sorry, Laurel. I think we overloaded the processing power.”

I blinked against the sudden fluorescent light as Drew carefully removed the headset from my head.

“Did I do it wrong?” I asked once Drew stopped rapid-fire typing, frowning at each new return from the program.

“No, this thing just isn’t as powerful as we wish it were.” He exhaled heavily and turned to me, slapping his thighs. “In a perfect world, we’d be able to run multiple data streams simultaneously, and they could go on indefinitely. Or at least longer than they do now. As it is, we’re pretty limited.”

“Because of the number of qubits you’ve linked?” I said automatically, running a hand through my hair—the right length and color again, thank god—to hopefully shake off the swim-cap crush.

“Uh…yeah, actually. How’d you know that?” Drew was staring at me with a mix of admiration and confusion, like I was a dog who’d just asked for an evening paper.

“I…read up a little on quantum computing yesterday. If this is going to be as big a deal as I think it is, I’m gonna need to start wrapping my head around the layperson version, right?”

“Oh.” Drew smiled ruefully. “Looks like you’ll have plenty of time for that. If we don’t even have enough working memory to load new users, AltR isn’t gonna be making headlines anytime soon.”

“Lucky for me. If you reallyarea layperson, even the dumbed-down version gets ridiculously confusing, fast.” I ruffled my hair one more time then stood. “You’re sure me trying to run the calibration on my own didn’t screw things up somehow?”

“How would it have done that?” Drew leaned back in his chair, head tilted to one side with genial interest.

“I don’t know. What if the program is…still trying to process my first request?”

“I thought you said you didn’t actually manage to load a specific inflection point.”

“I didn’t. But maybe the computer got…stuck in a loop or something?” I held my breath, half fearing and half hoping that was the case. Surely there had to besomeexplanation for what had happened to me.

“I’d have seen that the second I logged in. I only noticed your profile at all because I was going through Luke’s latest scripts this morning. Users are alphabetized by first name.”

“Oh. Right.” I blinked rapidly, willing my disappointment off my face. “Well…as long as I didn’t screw anything up for you.”

“Nope! You’re in the clear.” Drew smiled. “But I’ll let you get back to it. Thanks for trying. Hopefully I’ll have this figured out soon and you can see what this bad boy can really do.”

“Can’t wait!” I said, voice unnaturally high, then headed out, leaving Drew huddled over his keyboard again.

The program wasn’t the problem. And I was back in my real life, my memories once again matching up with the world around me. In this world, I’d only failed to log a single day, and according to Drew I hadn’t even managed togetto the point of playing out an alternate version of some past event. So…had my time in World D just been a long dream? Or maybe I’d taken a personal day to get really, really high? Off some drug that had not only managed to hijack my brain for upwards of twenty-four hours, but had retroactively overwritten the moments when I decided, and proceeded, totakeit?

They were the only explanations I could come up with that made sense. But that didn’t mean I believed them.

The rest of the day was unremarkable, even Drew’s and my chat messages run-of-the-mill. I’d sent him an article about the possibility that Paul Rudd was a time traveler, positing that maybe he was just one of the earliest AltR adopters—I loved throwing Drew a semi-sciencey conspiracy theory, knowing he’d dissect it with the same attention he applied to everything from his actual sci-fi-adjacent job to breaking down the plots of complex movies. A few hours later, he sent me an article about Lou Diamond Phillips driving a group of stranded motorists to the airport when their Uber broke down on the side of the freeway in L.A.; my outsized love for LDP was one of the things he seemed to find most amusing about me.

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