Page 27 of Ideal Life

Next, Jody and Jonathan popped into Talia’s office.

“Hey, Talia,” Jody said, “movie night is tonight. Think you might come by?”

Jonathan was already shaking his head. “The day Talia Morgan isn’t chained to her computer and has time to come to movie night is the day that I swear I will never add another musical to the film poll again.”

But Jody snickered. “We have an opportunity here, Talia. You could single-handedly put a stop to our misery.”

Talia smiled. This is what she loved about working at Ideal Life. Even though they had grown over the years to 150 employees, there was still a definite personality to the team. They were big enough to be noticed by the Omnis of the world, yet still small enough to know each other on a personal level.

Maybe this was an opportunity to do something social for herself. She understood that she and her employees couldn’t be true friends, because there would always be some aura of “boss” around her, but still… That sadness she’d felt earlier when Erin asked about Sam—when Talia had realized she had no one in her life other than him, her parents, Libby, and endless work—made her think twice about skipping movie night yet again.

“Actually,” Talia said, “my brain is fried, and I was just about to shut down my laptop. So, yeah, I will come to movie night.”

Jonathan let out an involuntary gasp.

“Don’t worry—you can still put musicals on the polls. In fact, I insist.”

Jody sighed loudly, as if terribly disappointed.

But Jonathan stuck his tongue out at his sister, then winked at Talia. “Well, in honor of you attending movie night, I think we should scuttle the poll and have you choose what we watch.”

“Oh, no, I couldn’t—”

“Yes!” Jody said, practically vibrating. “I love that!”

She flew out of Talia’s office, hopped onto a chair, and shouted to the whole floor, “Poll’s over, suckers! Talia is coming tonight, and she gets to pick what we watch!”

There was a collective, amused shrug, and then everyone went back to work. They might have had strong opinions during polling, but once it was over, they didn’t really care. As long as there was good pizza.

Conference room A was the biggest of their meeting spaces, but the turnout for movie night was twice what was expected. Luckily, Ideal Life’s modular floor plan extended to the conference rooms, too, and Talia, Jody, and Jonathan just had to unsnap a couple of tabs on the moving wall between conference rooms A and B to slide the divider away, and voila! It was now room A/B.

Talia had chosen La La Land with the reasoning that a little bit of nontech might be a nice change of pace—not to mention balance—for her team. Despite some groans at the announcement, the forty-five or so employees who stayed for the whole film found themselves tapping their feet to the music and shimmying a little in their plastic seats during the choreographed scenes. Jonathan added to the atmosphere by jumping up to the front of the room whenever a dance number was about to begin, and he performed as decent a version of each dance as one might expect from a software engineer. He bowed each time to enthusiastic whistling and applause, Jody and Talia loudest of all.

When La La Land was over and all the pizza had been demolished, everyone seemed to want to linger, to hold on to the shared moment a little longer. Talia couldn’t remember the last time she’d skipped out on working in the evening to simply have fun—the Omni dinner the other night didn’t count, since that had definitely been work, what with the press interviews and the schmoozing with Omni execs and venture capital investors, not to mention having to do the whole day over again.

Oh! Talia thought. Tonight didn’t have to end just because La La Land was over. She glanced at her watch.

She frowned at it for a second, though. She still didn’t understand how it worked, and Talia briefly considered telling Jody and Jonathan about it to see if their brilliant engineering minds could figure it out. They wouldn’t remember anyway, after Talia rewound.

But Jody and Jonathan would want to take the watch apart to examine its gears and guts. Engineers liked to physically tinker—even software engineers who usually worked with code—and what if they dissected the watch and it didn’t work anymore when they put it back together?

Forget it, Talia thought. Besides, she didn’t want to stop the momentum of fun she was having. It was so rare to get to relax with everyone here in a casual context rather than the usual work, work, work.

Still, Talia illogically felt like she shouldn’t make them watch the same movie again, even though they wouldn’t remember.

What about butterfly effects? She’d brushed them off before when she wanted more breakfast, but now she thought of it again. Like, by picking a different film, would that somehow change something and lead to unforeseen consequences?

How can you answer a question like that definitively, though?

Time travel hypotheses were the province of theoretical physicists and science fiction writers, and neither group had figured out the answer. It was all just conjecture. Even Talia—a researcher who had actually experienced short-term time travel—couldn’t draw decisive conclusions.

But what she could do was examine each as a mini experiment of sorts, even though they were more anecdotal evidence than scientific.

1) She’d gone back to the past to change the Tinder murder. This was certainly an alteration of the past that had measurable downstream effects—a life had been saved, and the Ideal Life AI had been improved so nothing like that would happen again. The result had seemed like a net positive. And the world had continued to function normally, even after Talia made that “edit” to the past.

2) Breakfast with her parents—Talia had rewound so she could choose different dishes, for a total of four times. Each of those times, the only thing altered was what she ate. The conversation with her parents and the behavior of the waiter had remained the same. So that experience seemed like the opposite result of the first one—no obvious butterfly effects.

There was a flaw in her tentative logic, though. Talia was assuming that the watch behaved rationally. She was treating it like a device like her phone or Omni 3Ds. But she had no idea how this watch worked. It hadn’t exactly come with a user’s manual when it randomly appeared on her wrist.