“We require from our clients a leap of faith.”

Sam Kersey stood on the far side of the oval cherry wood conference table. He offered a wry smile to the older man sitting opposite him, a smile of menacing tenacity masquerading as cordial. His pale grey suit did far more than necessary to emphasize broad shoulders and a slender waist. His silk tie, a pure field of Oxford Blue, was tied neatly in a Windsor Knot around the defined starch collar of a shirt that was just enough off-white to be deliberate. 

“So, er, how exactly does this work?” said the old man with nerves of rubber. “The woman up front didn’t tell me anything other than what the brochure said.”

The old man looked up at Sam. He wore a grey sweater with a fresh ketchup stain on the chest and two not as fresh and less identifiable stains on the stomach. He wore grey sweatpants that had seen enough trips through the laundry to earn frequent flier rewards. His eyes had lost all traces of life. He was a weary man.

Sam’s smile warmed.

“Let’s start with why you’re here,” Sam said.

“I’m not sure,” the old man said, but Sam cut him off by raising two fingers less than half a foot.

“Allow me,” said Sam. “Your name is Felix Greene. You were a commercial real estate lawyer in solo practice over in Arlington. Four months ago your largest client, Cobalt Retail LLP, sought new representation after its managing partner stepped aside as a result of an embezzling scandal in which you played no part. Your monthly billable slipped from fifty-two thousand down to thirteen thousand, or slightly less than four-fifths of your overhead expenses.”

Felix opened his mouth but no words found their way out from his chest.

“Three months ago,” Sam continued, “your wife of twenty-three years, Meredith Winslow Greene, left you for a twenty-two year old clerk at Stop and Shop named Trevor Haskell. Since that time you have placed sixty-seven orders from Feng Wah Chinese Take Out and forty one from Dominos Pizza of Arlington. Two and a half months ago the USPS stopped delivering mail to your postbox because you failed to collect it. You have not paid a bill in over two months. Six days ago you were personally served with notice that Nstar would cut off your electricity five days from today.”

“In the past three months, the only social contact of any kind you have had have been through an online fantasy game called Myrmilian’s Castle. In that game you have presented yourself as a twenty-three year old lesbian graduate student from Suffolk University, using pictures of your niece Claire to back up your claim. You spent most of your time engaging in erotic roleplay with a character ‘Fionella’, who you believed to be a nineteen year old girl in her second year at the University of California at Bakersfield. Yesterday, however, the person controlling the character Fionella told you that she never wanted to speak to you again. Would you care to tell me why, Mr. Greene?”

“I’d rather not,” Felix said after a long pause.

“I understand,” said Sam. “But I know the answer. After what I presume was a fair bit of anxiety, you decided to tell Fionella who you really are, hoping that the bond your characters created would overcome the deception and lead to at least a friendship that would provide you with some much needed sympathy for your circumstance. Alas, you were wrong, and what was your last real social connection with the world was severed.”

“I can explain why,” said Felix, the first words he spoke with any sort of urgency. Sam humored Felix with silence for five seconds before continuing himself.

“You don’t need to explain anything to me,” said Sam. “We all have our foibles and fetishes and faults and goodness knows, I’m in no position to judge anyone. The things I do here would land me in one of the deepest circles of hell, if you believe in such a thing.”

“Do you?” asked Felix.

“I do not,” Sam said with an assured smile.

Felix paused but had nothing more to say at the moment.

“For the record, I suppose I should clear up a few lingering questions in your mind. Meredith broke up with Trevor two months ago and, as far as we can tell, left the state headed west in the company of a trucker working for the Mayflower Moving Company. Your online confidant Fionella was being played by a thirty-seven year old man from Boise, Idaho, named Jim McDermott. He very likely was unsympathetic with you for the very same reason that you had convinced yourself he was a nineteen year old girl. He couldn’t handle the idea that he had been erotically involved with another man.”

Felix looked at Sam. He nodded his head forward in resignation.

“This has brought us to where you are today,” said Sam. “Your life has crumbled in the past four months. You have no source of income and no social contacts. You are terminally depressed. Likely the only thing that has stopped you from killing yourself is the lack of motivation. We both are fortunate that our brochure made its way into your house and into your imagination before you were able to consummate your suicidal ideation.”

“Why?” asked Felix.

“Because we can help you,” said Sam. “We can make your life better. You were once a successful lawyer with a happy marriage. We can bring that back."

"How?" asked Felix.

"That's a rather intelligent question, Mr. Greene," Sam said, "and to answer that requires an explanation of the inner workings of the human brain. Tell me, do you like baseball?"

"Sure," said Felix.

"Do you root for the Red Sox?" asked Sam.

"Yeah," said Felix.

"Do you know who Jackie Bradley Junior is?" asked Sam.

Felix nodded. "Center fielder."

Sam motioned to a hidden cabinet on one end of the room. He opened a pair of doors to reveal a wide flat screen monitor. With the touch of a remote in Sam's left hand, a still image of a baseball game appeared on the screen.

"This is from a game between the Red Sox and Yankees last year," Sam said. "Rick Porcello is pitching to Chase Headley in the bottom of the sixth inning. The score is seven to four. Headley is going to hit a fly ball to the corner in left field. Watch this carefully."

Felix nodded. On the screen the play proceeded as Sam had said. (Note: the video clip is available at <https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YaotkmUh8Ok>.) The ball flew to the corner, a hard fly ball that would normally be a double to the far left field corner of Yankee Stadium. At the last second, the left fielder, in a full sprint, reached out to catch the fly ball. Another click of the remote paused the action on the field.

"Quite the catch," said Sam. "Wouldn't you agree?"

"It was a very good catch," said Felix.

Sam shook his head. "It was not merely good. It was extraordinary. Let me show you why. Last year, in order to feed baseball fans with solid information about the extraordinary skills of the athletes who play the game, Major League Baseball started a program named Stat Cast, which would display relevant statistics for the more extraordinary events on a baseball diamond. Here's what they found about this particular catch."

The video advanced a few seconds with a replay of the catch. A moment later, the image paused as words appeared on the screen. The words showed the following statistics:

First step: -0.26 seconds

Max Speed: 19.5 miles per hour

Distance Covered: 100.1 feet

Route Efficiency: 97%

Sam paused to allow Felix to consider the statistics on the screen.

"It was a great catch," Felix said.

"Is there anything in particular that seems a little odd about those statistics?" Sam said.

"He got a great jump," Felix said. "A quarter of a second is a very quick reaction time."

Sam nodded. "Indeed, you are right. A quarter of a second is just about the peak of human efficiency when it comes to reactions. It's a hard wired restriction based on the amount of time it takes for chemicals to transmit signals from the brain to our muscles. The time it takes from the excitement of a nerve in the eye to travel to the brain and a corresponding reaction to travel to the legs is about a quarter of a second at an absolute minimum. Those constraints are physiological, a matter of chemistry and physics, and are true for everyone in the world."

Felix nodded.

"There's something you missed, however," Sam said with a smile. "The time it took Jackie Bradley to take his first step was not a quarter of a second. It was negative twenty-six hundredths of a second."

Felix tilted his head to the side.

"He took his first step before the ball hit the bat," Sam said. "Porcello's pitch was about ninety miles per hour. At that speed it would take approximately half a second to travel from his hand to the plate. Bradley took his first step when the ball was halfway to the plate, and based on what we just went through about reaction time, he decided to take his first step about a dozen milliseconds before the ball even left Porcello's hand."

"That's impossible," Felix said.

"It's not impossible," Sam said. "He did it."

"How?"

"You tell me," Sam said. "How do you think he did it?"

"He must have been very good at anticipating things. He guessed that the ball would go that way."

Sam shook his head. "He would have looked awfully silly if Headley had hit the ball directly at him, or to his left. How often do you see a major league outfielder sprint at top speed the wrong way?”

Felix shook his head and shrugged.

“There’s another thing that I’d like you to consider,” Sam said. “His top speed is roughly thirty-two feet per second. If he left exactly when the ball was hit—still a seemingly impossible feat—he would have been eight feet away from the ball and unable to catch it. If he left exactly when the ball was hit and improved his route efficiency to perfect, he still would have been about five feet away. He simply could not have caught the ball unless he took that first step before the ball was hit.”

“So?” said Felix.

“So how did he catch the ball?” said Sam.

Felix shrugged. “I don’t know what you’re getting at. He obviously anticipated where the ball was going before it was hit.”

“You’re a lawyer,” said Sam, “so you know that you need to be very precise with your language. The word ‘anticipated’ suggests uncertainty. A guess. There was nothing uncertain in that catch—he couldn’t afford to be uncertain.”

“Are you suggesting he knew where the ball was going before the ball was hit?” asked Felix.

“I am,” said Sam.

“How?” asked Felix.

“You tell me,” said Sam.

“Stop this,” said Felix with exasperation. “You want me to say something, so just go ahead and say it.”

Sam grinned. “Tell me, Mr. Greene, have you ever had a premonition that something was about to happen, and then it happened?”

Felix nodded. “Doesn’t everyone?”

“Indeed,” Sam said, “everyone does. But not everyone has learned to trust the accuracy of such things. For those that do, like our wonderful outfielder, the results can be extraordinary.”

“So he anticipated where the ball would go,” said Felix, “because he had a premonition as to where it would go.”

“Language again, Mr. Greene,” Sam said. “Anticipation suggests a guess. Premonition suggests knowledge. He knew where the ball was going.”

“How?” said Felix.

“This is the first leap of faith I will ask you to make, Mr. Greene,” said Sam. “We have been trained since birth by school and logic and elementary physics that the thing I am about to tell you is impossible. But for one with an open mind, it is the only logical way to explain the premonition Bradley had. Are you ready?”

Felix sighed. He nodded, as if he had no other choice.

“A premonition is a message from the future,” Sam said. “Bradley received a message from the future, a message from his own brain, telling him where the ball would be hit and that he needed to move when the ball was pitched to get there in time.”

“That’s absurd,” said Felix.

“What other explanation is there?” said Sam.

Felix shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“So will you take that leap of faith with me, Mr. Greene?” Sam asked. “Will you accept that it is not only possible for people to send messages to themselves back in time, but that it happens and I’ve given you video proof?”

“I suppose,” said Felix with the exhaustion of someone having been beaten down with an impeccable sales pitch.

“Would you like to know how it works?” asked Sam.

Felix nodded.

Sam clicked on the remote and two images appeared on the screen. They were images of human brains, one viewed from the front and one viewed from the side. Near the middle of the brain, slightly to one side and down toward where the nose would be there was a part of the brain marked in a light red. The red marking was small, perhaps the size of a flattened pea at the appropriate scale. The section was labeled “Temporal Cortex”.

“About ten years ago,” Sam continued, “a medical student at Harvard discovered that these cells, which she labeled the Temporal Cortex, had an unusual property to them. Unlike practically every other thing we encounter, these cells travel backwards in time. The woman who made this discovery is named Holly Desmarais, and I have the honor of working for her.”

Felix stared at the images of the brain and said nothing.

“As far as we know,” Sam said, “only humans have these cells, and most people do not know how to consciously use them. But most people are familiar with the phenomenon that happens when these cells are at work. You said you had premonitions before. The Temporal Cortex is what is responsible for those premonitions.”

Felix nodded, quite taken in by the demonstration.

“Premonitions are the Temporal Cortex sending messages from the future, sometimes warning of a catastrophic event, sometimes just a mundane thing like where a ball is going to be hit. It’s a particularly useful evolutionary trait, wouldn’t you agree?”

Felix continued to nod.

“Most people haven't learned to trust that part of their brain,” Sam said. “They can only hear the most powerful of premonitions, and haven’t learned to trust them. But for those who have trained themselves to listen, the message can be quite compelling. It makes Bradley the world-class outfielder that he is.”

“So where do I come in?” asked Felix.

Sam pointed to Felix’s head. “You have those cells in your head, Mr. Greene. I’m going to use them to send a message to your past self. Something to undo a decision that you regret. Your one regret.”

“How?” asked Felix.

“Our knowledge of language has exploded in the last few decades,” Sam said. “In this case, we’ve learned how to imprint a message on those cells to activate a short phrase, no more than sixty phonemes, at the appropriate time. It’s actually not that difficult if you have the cells and a laser, but it wasn’t until the discovery of the Temporal Cortex that we had a practical application for doing so.”

“How are you going to get access to the cells?” Felix said.

“Surgery,” said Sam. “I’m going to cut your skull open and extract the cells from your brain.”

Felix recoiled. “Wouldn’t that turn me into a vegetable?”

“Well no,” said Sam. “It would kill you. But follow with me the chain of causality for a moment, independent of the time constraints we normally place on causality.”

“All right,” Felix said nervously.

“You’re going to tell me a message,” Sam said, “one that reverses a decision you made in the past. I’m going to imprint that message on the cells. That message will travel backwards in time and be delivered as an imperative, a premonition that is impossible to ignore. That message will change your decision and alter your future. Your life will unfold in a different and hopefully better way, one that in any case will not bring you here to our clinic. You won’t take our preparatory pill, I won’t slice your brain open, and everything that we did here would suddenly cease to be. It simply would not happen.”

Felix looked at Sam skeptically.

“It’s actually quite disconcerting for me,” Sam said. “At one moment, I’m performing brain surgery, and the next moment, I don’t remember a thing. All I have is a set of cells in our imprinting machine. I have no idea who they came from.”

Felix shook his head. “That’s very confusing.”

“That’s the leap of faith I’m asking you to take, Mr. Greene,” Sam said.

“How much do you charge for this?” said Felix.

“Nothing,” said Sam.

“Nothing?”

“It’s not that we don’t want to,” said Sam. “We’d love to ask for a million dollars, but as you might guess, our clients aren’t the sort who could pay such a thing, and even if they could, no payment could survive the procedure. Once I imprint the message and the past is changed, the client no longer comes to our clinic and would no longer pay anything. It’s impossible to collect a fee that survives the procedure.”

“So what do you get out of it?” asked Felix.

“The cells,” said Sam. “Because their causality is reversed, they are the only part of a client that survives the procedure. We take those cells and use them in research—some exciting research into horrible brain diseases.”

“How much are they worth?” asked Felix.

“It’s best that you don’t know the answer to that question,” said Sam. “I don’t know exactly myself. That’s Ms. Desmarais’s job.”

“Let me get this straight,” said Felix. “You cut open my brain, take these cells and print a message on them. That message goes back in time to me, telling me to do something or not do something, and then my life changes, hopefully for the better?”

“That’s correct,” said Sam.

“What if I don’t follow the message?” asked Felix.

“The message is intense and hard to ignore,” said Sam. “It feels like a directive from your own brain, as if you had just made a decision about something about which you were trying to make a decision. I will say that it’s never happened, not as far as I know.”

“How do you know that?” asked Felix.

“If it didn’t change a person’s life,” Sam said, “he or she would follow the same path and I’d not only remember who he or she was, but the body would remain in the operating room, with the head cut open. That’s never happened. The only record we have that we’ve ever done this are the cells themselves.”

“It all sounds crazy,” said Felix. “Do you really expect me to believe that you can do this?”

“Not yet,” said Sam with a smile. “But I have another thing to show you. Do you remember that Amtrak derailment near Sharon seven months ago?”

“Of course,” said Felix. “It was in the news for days. One hundred forty-six people dead. Horrible tragedy.”

“It used to be one hundred fifty-two,” said Sam.

“Oh come on,” said Felix. “Do you really expect me to believe that?”

Sam opened a drawer hidden under the table and pulled out a laminated newspaper clipping. “Take a look at this,” he said. “It’s an article from the Concord Local, about a woman named Stephanie Williams. She had a ticket for that train, but she didn’t board it.”

Felix looked at the clipping. The edges of the paper had yellowed slightly within the laminate, but it was otherwise a pristine copy of the paper.

“She had a feeling,” Felix said, reading off the paper, “that she shouldn’t get on the train. She said that she’s normally very skeptical, but this dire premonition was too powerful to ignore. ‘Don’t get on the train,’ is what she thought. So she didn’t.”

Sam had reached into the drawer for another piece of paper. “This is a passenger list for that train. The last names, addresses and telephone numbers are blacked out, but I assure you that we have a copy that’s not blacked out.”

“How did you get this?” asked Felix.

“We have a very talented assistant, Ms. Sinkovic,” said Sam. “I don’t know how she got it, but she’s very good at procuring such things.”

Felix nodded slowly.

“Next to every name on that list is a status listing,” said Sam. “Most are dead or injured. Next to that is a column showing the results of contacting the families. Attached to the list is an instruction sheet, which is a basic summary of what we did when we came into contact with the family. The first step is to contact the family and ask for permission to use the body for the purposes of scientific research. You’ll note that most of the listings indicate that permission was refused.”

Felix nodded as he looked through the chart.

“If we did get permission,” Sam said, “we followed the procedure that I suggested earlier and that’s listed on the next sheet. We retrieved the corpse, cut open the brain, retrieved the Temporal Cortex and imprinted the message ‘Do not get on the train’ on the cells, with a delivery time fifteen minutes before the train was scheduled to leave South Station.”

Felix paused for a moment to consider this. He looked at the sheet behind the listings and read it. He nodded slowly.

“There are eight listings for people who did not get on the train,” said Sam. “We happen to know that two of them we had nothing to do with, because we only retrieved six cells from our  operations. We don’t know which two, although we’re pretty sure that Stephanie Williams is one of the people on whom we operated.”

“How?” said Felix.

“Once our operation was complete,” said Sam, “the corpse disappeared and their status on the listing would change from ‘Dead’ to ‘Did not board train’. Of course, we had no memory of who exactly we talked to, but we could guess from the list. And we had the cells.”

“That sounds impossible,” said Felix.

“I know it does,” said Sam. “Let me show you one last video.”

Sam pressed the button on the remote, and the images of the brains on the screen disappeared, revealing a woman sitting at a nondescript table in an unremarkable room, poorly lit and framed, as one would expect an amateur video to be. She was a smartly dressed woman, with dirty blonde hair pulled up into a bun. She looked to be about forty years old. A voice from off camera spoke, recognizably Sam’s. The two had a conversation establishing background information, such as her job, her name, and that she had a ticket on the doomed 11:15 train to Philadelphia from South Station.

“Why were you taking the train that day, Ms. Williams?” Sam said on the video.

“I was traveling to Philadelphia on business,” said the woman. “I take that train once a month or so, and I usually take the 11:15 because it gets me into Philly with enough time to check into the office there before the workday ended.”

“Why didn’t you take the 11:15 that day?” Sam asked.

“I was set to,” said the woman. “I was sitting in the station drinking coffee. At about eleven, I had a powerful thought, ‘Don’t get on the train.’ I almost spilled my coffee.”

“Are you a superstitious person?” Sam asked.

“I wasn’t,” the woman said, “not then. But the thought was so strong that I couldn’t ignore it. I checked at the counter if there was room on the next train. There was, so I just switched my ticket. It wouldn’t get into Philly before the office there closed, but that was never a large concern.”

“What happened next?” asked Sam.

“The 12:15 never left,” said the woman. “We didn’t know why at first. The station manager said he didn’t know, but I think it was that they didn’t want to tell us of the derailment. I learned of it early that afternoon. Thank God I didn’t get on that train.”

“Why do you think you didn’t get on the train?” Sam asked.

“It was the thought,” said the woman. “I think it was a message from God. I wasn’t a religious person back then, but that made me get to church more regularly. He saved my life.”

“What was the message again?” asked Sam.

“It was ‘Do not get on the train’,” said the woman.

“Exactly that?” asked Sam.

“Exactly that,” said the woman. “I’ll remember that thought for the rest of my life.”

Sam clicked a button on the remote and turned back to Felix.

“The nature of our operation prevents us from getting customer testimonials,” said Sam. “The people we’ve operated on have no idea that they were here, in a different course of history, before I changed their destiny. Ms. Williams there is the closest to a customer testimonial that we can get.”

“You saved her life?” said Felix.

Sam nodded. “You’ll note that the thought she recalled, the premonition, the message from God, and the one our procedures indicated we sent back was…” He paused, looking at Felix expectantly.

“Do not get on the train,” Felix said, reading from the sheet of instructions in his hand.

“Mr. Greene,” said Sam, “it’s at this point that I’m going to ask you to take your leap of faith. This is the best proof I can offer that what we do works. We can change your life. It’s not easy to believe, and the nature of the thing prevents us from having the sort of positive proof that we’d like to have when making life and death decisions.”

“What do you want me to do?” asked Felix.

“Think of a message,” said Sam. “Think of a short message and a specific time to which you can send that message. The one decision you most regret.”

Felix rubbed his chin pensively. Two minutes later he spoke.

“I think it was a mistake for me to go into solo practice,” he said. “I had a good job in a law firm. I left it five years ago this April. I was always uncertain of the decision when it was made, and I now see that it removed financial stability from my life. If I hadn’t left the firm, I wouldn’t have been decimated by the loss of my largest client. I think that’s what started the ball rolling downhill.”

“So,” said Sam, “a message such as ‘Do not quit the firm’?”

Felix nodded. “Five years ago, sometime in March. I remember thinking about it for several months but I didn’t make my decision until early April.”

“If I sent the message back to March 14, 2011, a Monday, would that work?”

Felix nodded.

“Do you remember what time you ate lunch usually?” Sam asked. “Do you remember what that day was like?”

“I don’t,” Felix said. “We usually took lunch from twelve to one, but that was five years ago. I have no idea what I was specifically doing.”

“Do you remember anything important?” Sam asked. “Some sort of trial, deposition, hearing or other thing you wouldn’t want interrupted?”

“I’m a real estate attorney,” said Felix. “We don’t do any of those things. In fact, though, I think I was pretty bored at the time. It was why I was thinking of leaving in the first place.”

“Do you think 12:15 on March 14, 2011 would work?” Sam asked.

Felix nodded.

“‘Do not quit the firm’?”

“That sounds about right,” said Felix.

“All right,” Sam said. “Come with me.”

Sam stood up and walked to the back of the room. He opened a hidden door and beckoned Felix forward. A short hallway led to a bright room. Along one wall of the room was an impressive array of computer screens, a microscope, and a gleaming white machine with an impressively scary sign on its upper right reading “Warning: Laser”. Another wall held a water cooler and a large freezer. In the middle of the room sat a padded blue chair with arm rests. Over the chair a light fixture attached to a swinging arm dropped from the ceiling. Next to the chair was a metal tray lined with surgical equipment.

Sam pointed to the gleaming white machine. “That’s the machine I’m going to use to imprint the message on your cells. Let me go enter the message now.”

Sam walked over to the machine and tapped some keys on a keyboard. Felix looked at the keyboard briefly but his attention was soon drawn to one of the computer screens. As Sam typed, the message ‘Do not quit the firm’  appeared on the screen, followed quickly by a phonetic representation of the words. The date March 14, 2011 then appeared on the screen, and shortly afterward the time 12:15 EDT. 

Sam directed Felix over to the machine. He pointed to a green button on the side of the machine. 

“That button will confirm and lock in the message,” said Sam. “This is your last chance to reconsider the message. Once you press that button, I can’t change the message. That’s for your own safety.”

Felix nodded. He paused for six seconds before reaching out and pushing the button.

“Good,” said Sam. He motioned to the seat. “Have a seat.”

Felix walked over toward the seat and sat down. His body slumped, as if a weight had been removed from his shoulders. He looked around the room and twitched.

“Now, Mr. Greene,” Sam said. “I’m going to ask you take a leap of faith. I’m asking you to put your faith in me and that machine that we will make your life better. I told you earlier that parts of my job would land me deep in hell, and this is one of them. You are a terminally depressed man, Mr. Greene. You’re a few days away from being committed by the state and sent to one of several mental hospitals, where you would undoubtedly be placed on suicide watch. There, they would confine you to your room and shoot you up with medicine. That plus some therapy would, if things went well, convince you that your life was still worth living. If all went well, you would return to your situation with your wife having abandoned you, your reputation in tatters. You would have no family, no job, no money and no prospects as a fifty-six year old man. And that is the best case scenario.”

Felix nodded in understanding. He looked down at his feet. He had nothing to say.

Sam walked over to the water cooler and poured a water into a small paper cup. He next walked to the wall with the computer screens and opened a drawer. He pulled out a blister package. He popped a large red pill from the package and walked back over to Felix. He held up the pill and showed it to Felix.

“And now,” said Sam, “this is what will surely land me in hell. This pill contains Cantarella Dexacyanide. It is a poison that works as a remarkably good anesthetic for four hours, after which you will die. It has no known antidote. The anesthetic is enough time for me to perform the procedure to remove your Temporal Cortex. At that point, your life will change, you and I will never have met, and nothing that we said here will ever have happened. But if that doesn’t work for some reason, you will die.”

“You are asking me to kill myself,” said Felix.

“Yes,” said Sam. “I’m asking a terminally depressed person to commit suicide. It’s the sort of thing most religions disfavor. But I am asking you to take this pill because you have faith that the new life I can offer you will be better than the commitment, confinement, and potential for recovery to an empty life with no family, no money, and no professional opportunity. This choice is yours. I can’t make that choice for you.”

Felix held his hand out for the pill. Sam dropped the pill into his palm. Felix looked at the pill for thirty-seven seconds. Then, with a swift motion, he slapped his hand to his mouth, popping the pill deep into his mouth. Sam offered him the cup of water. Felix took the water and drank, swallowing the pill.

“How long will it take?” asked Felix.

“The poison should begin to take hold in a couple of minutes,” said Sam.

“Will it hurt?” asked Felix.

“No,” said Sam. “You will just fall asleep.”

“Can I call my wife to tell her goodbye?” Felix asked. His head nodded forward slightly.

“Would there be any point?” asked Sam.

“No,” said Felix, “I suppose not. I’m feeling sleepy.”

“That’s how it works,” said Sam. “Just relax.”

“Should I try to stay awake?” asked Felix. His voice was beginning to slur.

“Why?” asked Sam.

“Should I try to stay awake?” were the last words Felix Greene ever said. His eyes closed and his collapsed to the side. His muscles lost all tension and he rested in the chair, by all appearances dead.

Sam strapped Felix’s arms to the chair and his head to the headrest. He placed a metal cap atop Felix’s head and tightened a set of thumb screws to hold it in place. He walked over to a small door on the blank wall and pulled out a small power saw. Two minutes later, he was sawing through Felix Greene’s skull.

—

Sam was sitting at his desk in his relatively spartan office. Papers were strewn across his desk, describing the life and circumstances of a man named Edward Stanton. He read them carefully, believing him to be his first patient.

A soft bell sounded. A red light affixed to the wall began to blink. Sam looked up and smiled. Stanton was not to be his first patient. He was going to be the second. Sam stood up and walked out of his office, down a set of stairs and a short hallway to the operating room.

Sam turned on the lights for the operating room. The room was pristine, as if it had never been used. Along the far wall a light atop the gleaming white machine blinked a warm orange. Sam went over to the machine and pressed a button. A tray pushed out from the machine, revealing an unlabeled petri dish. In the petri dish was a gray lump of brain matter, about the size of a nickel. Sam knew it was someone’s Temporal Cortex. Beyond that he had no idea from where it came.

Sam took the petri dish and walked over to the freezer. He opened the freezer and took out a styrofoam box, about the size of a large brick. It was cooled to hold the petri dish on its subsequent journey to a group of researchers. He placed the dish in the block. He sealed the block and walked back up to his office. He picked up his phone and made a call.

“We have our first live sample,” said Sam.

“Excellent,” said the voice on the other end of the line. “Who was it from?”

“I don’t remember,” said Sam.

“Exactly as we suspected,” said the voice. It was a woman’s voice, a low alto, commanding and alluring. “Bring the package here. The representatives from Biosyn will be here in a half an hour to pick it up. They’ll take it from there.”

“I’ll be there in a minute, Holly,” Sam said.

“Excellent work,” said Holly. “I’ll see you then.”

—

Holly Desmarais’s office was much warmer than Sam’s was. Dark wood paneling and warm sconces covered the interior walls, while the outer walls were covered with shaded windows. The office overlooked a busy roadway—it could have been any of the hundred or so office parks in the Boston metropolitan area.

Holly herself sat in a comfortable leather high back chair behind a large cherry pedestal desk. She was a woman of average height dressed smartly in a grey suit. She had dark hair with a slight curl that almost fell to her shoulders. Her eyes were a deep and intense blue, partially hidden by rectangular frame glasses. She leaned back in her chair and crossed her legs.

Sam sat on the other side of the desk from her, in a similarly comfortable chair. He held in his hand a pair of standard six-sided dice. Atop the desk was the styrofoam block that Sam had retrieved less than two minutes ago.  Sam rolled the dice away from the block, along the top of the otherwise bare desk.

“Eight,” said Holly.

The dice skidded to a halt atop the desk. The top of one die had three pips on it, and the other had five.

“I wish I could do that,” said Sam.

“It’s good practice,” said Holly, “and we may as well do something while waiting for Biosyn to get here.”

“Planning on taking on the craps circuit?” Sam said with a smirk.

“Roll the dice and we’ll see.”

Sam rolled the dice again.

“Eleven,” said Holly as the dice tumbled to the far side of the desk. The dice came to rest, one showing six pips and the other five.

“I don’t see why you wouldn’t,” said Sam with a grin.

“Well, let me show you something,” said Holly. “Roll the dice again.”

Sam picked up the dice and began to roll them. This time, Holly spoke before the dice left Sam’s hand.

“Seven,” she said.

The dice tumbled along the desk and stopped. One showed two pips, the other three.

“Five,” said Sam. “First one you’ve gotten wrong.”

“That’s because I guessed before the dice left your hand,” said Holly. “You heard my guess and subconsciously either tried to roll a seven, if you wanted me to succeed, or not roll a seven, if you wanted me to fail.”

“I always want you to succeed,” Sam said with a warm smile.

“Aw, that’s sweet of you,” Holly said. “But you failed.”

Sam shrugged and looked at the dice.

“In this case my guess,” Holly said, “because you heard it before you let go of the dice, could and did affect how you rolled the dice. The future remained uncertain. The loop didn’t resolve.”

Sam nodded. “I still have trouble wrapping my mind around it.”

Holly smiled. “You’ll get it. This will help.”

Holly pulled out a scrap of paper. She wrote something on it and folded it up. She held it in her hand.

“Roll the dice,” she commanded.

Sam picked up and rolled the dice again. They skidded along the desk and came to rest with one die having one pip up, the other two.

Holly grinned and opened her paper. On it was written the number three.

“That’s incredible,” said Sam.

“I wrote the number down before you rolled,” said Holly, “but because you couldn’t see it, it didn’t affect how you rolled the dice. The loop resolved.”

Sam nodded. “That makes sense.”

“So, all we have to do to get rich,” Holly said with a grin, “is to find a shooter who doesn’t care what I bet.”

“Or,” said Sam, “we could just sell this sample to Biosyn.”

“Or that,” Holly said with a laugh.

A knock came on the door to Holly’s office.

“Come in,” said Holly.

The door opened and in stepped a tall woman. She was dressed simply, in a cropped t-shirt revealing a bare midriff. She wore a jean skirt, sheer leggings and a pair of flat sneakers. She had long hair, some of it blonde, some of it brown, some of it blue and some of it red. It was held up in a loose bun with several strands falling free and reaching down to her bare midriff.

“Tiana,” Holly said with a smile.

“More research on Stanton,” Tiana said. She handed a set of papers to Sam.

“Thanks,” said Sam. “Have a seat,” he said, offering a chair next to him.

“He’s probably coming in tomorrow at ten,” said Tiana. “Hard to say for certain with people as far gone as him—tragic what happened to his wife and kids—but I think he’ll be here.”

Holly nodded. “Good work,” she said.

“Our first patient,” said Tiana. “I’m excited.”

“Actually…” said Sam. Holly cut him off.

“He’ll be our second,” Holly said. She poked the styrofoam block on the desk.

“Oh!” said Tiana. “Where’d we get those?”

“No idea,” said Sam with a grin.

“Our business model comes with it an inherent sense of confusion,” said Holly.

“I get it,” said Tiana with a delightful laugh. “His past changed and we have no idea how.”

“Never met the guy,” said Sam with a grin.

“Well,” said Tiana, “let’s go out tonight and raise a glass to him, our anonymous benefactor.”

“After the deliveryman from Biosyn gets here,” said Holly. “After that, I’m buying. This is worth celebrating. We’re going to make a lot of money.”

Thirty minutes later, the three left the nondescript office to head to the local watering hole. Felix Greene’s living Temporal Cortex was on its way to an advanced secret research facility of the research conglomerate Biosyne. Holly, Sam. and Tiana were about to take their first drinks as millionaires.