"Good morning!  Welcome to PreVision Reproduction.  Do you have an appointment with us this morning?"

Anne glanced at her husband cautiously, unsure that they were doing the right thing.  He held on to her firmly, and said tentatively, "No, uhhh... do we need to have an appointment?"

The receptionist's hands moved in a familiar way in the air before her, interacting with an interface only she could see, and she seemed to be gathering information as if by magic.  "You're in luck, we've got an opening in one of our PreVision Oracles' busy schedules which hasn't yet been filled."  Anne and Harold were familiar with technologies such as the in-lens displays which projected an augmented version of reality directly into the wearer's eye and the wide variety of gesture and body-tracking systems that allowed people to interact digitally without the need for actual physical interfaces.  "If you don't mind taking a seat over there and registering yourselves on our network, someone will be with you in just a few moments."  Technologies like this were not unusual or even expensive anymore; the contact lens displays had been available as over the counter disposables for years, and a full-haptic proprioception interface could be installed or upgraded by taking a simple nanomachine-filled gelcap.  

Anne and Harold had simply never taken to the use of such advanced technologies.

"We..." Harold swallowed loudly.  "We don't use nano."

"No problem, sir.  We're a biotech company; our network is fully compatible with the latest in biodigital netware."  The receptionist didn't even make eye contact, and her tone rightfully implied that full bio-nano cross-comaptibility was to be assumed from any business worth its salt.

"No, I mean, we..."  No matter how many times he said it, no matter how often he had to interact with the Internext Generation, Harold always feared being labeled a Luddite or a radical and being mistreated when he explained "we aren't connected.  We don't use bio, we don't use nano, we aren't enhanced."

"You aren't enhanced."  Now, the young woman looked up again from her virtual display to look at the couple standing before her.  "Not at all?"

She didn't sound like some of the bigots they had met more than their share of over the years, the ones who treated them as subhuman for going on as "only" human, but rather came across as though she hadn't known it were even possible to survive without basic net awareness and medical upgrades.

"Is that going to be a problem?"

"Hold on."  The young woman's hands flashed out a memorized path in the space before her, then one hand was touched briefly to her ear, and she spoke again, to someone at the end of a virtual audio connection.  "Sal? ... I've got a couple out here, they don't have an appointment ... I know, I was going to put them in with Bunnyfluff, but Sal, they're... ..." her voice lowered, as though sharing a closely held secret, "they're unenhanced, Sal.  What do I do?"  There followed a long enough pause that Anne and Harold weren't sure whether the young woman was listening to a long answer or had simply chosen to ignore them, but before they could question her strange behaviour, an opening formed in the wall to their left, and a tall, well dressed man strode confidently through it into the lobby.

"My name is Sal Borman.  I run this branch of PreVision Reproduction."  He reached his hand out toward Harold as he approached, and they exchanged a firm handshake.  "Sorry about the trouble with Miss Kittentits, she's new to our office."  Sal took Anne's hand in both of his and shook it warmly.  "Here, come inside, let's see what we can do for you today, and into the future."

Sal led them through the opening in the wall, and almost as soon as they'd crossed the threshold into the hallway it began to contract behind them to form what appeared to be a solid, unbroken wall. Anne and Harold's home still only had traditional doors, the kind that hung on hinges and had to be opened by hand.  Sal proceeded with haste down the long hallway, past the name plates and LiquidPotential office doors of at least a dozen other Oracles, to the big, real, wooden door at the end of the hall.  The big name plate on his door, which read "SAL BORMAN" in big block letters and "licensed Oracle & manager"  in a more reserved typeface below that, appeared to be made out of gold - except something like GlowGold or Fire AU, which seemed to emit light rather than merely to reflect it.  Neither Anne nor Harold knew enough about either brand to know which one they were looking at, though their awareness of the advertising for each brand indicated to them that they ought not only to know, but to have a preference.

Sal grasped the door handle in one of his big hands, turned, and pulled the door open into the hallway, gesturing them in ahead of him.  The room was decorated in a way that set them immediately more at ease than even the sight of a real door had done.  "Have a seat," Sal said, indicating the two big, apparently-real-leather chairs opposite his huge, wooden desk.  "I hope you don't mind, almost everything in here is pre-singularity.  If you'd rather do this in a more modern environment, I can see if Bunnyfluff is still free."

"This will be perfect."  It was the first time Anne had spoken a word since they'd arrived.

"I thought it might.  Now, if you'll give me a moment to warm up the display..." Sal bent down as he spoke, reaching under his desk and switching on the only thing in the entire building which could be considered a personal computer.  As the PC hummed to life below the desk, a holographic display also flickered into view above it.  A volume of air nearly the dimensions of the desk itself was filled just above its surface with the glowing, three-dimensional interface of Mac OS X 10.8.  "Alright, here we are."  Sal reached into the display and activated the netware bridge.  Within seconds, the PreVision network took control and replaced the interface with the smooth, branded, corporate-approved appearance that most customers saw automatically in their in-lens displays.  Sal suddenly spoke quickly what must have been an oft-rehearsed speech. "And now we're officially recording.  Per UNSRS Title 14 Chapter 158 Section A sub-paragraph 7, all Oracular meetings are recorded and filed with Internext AI.  PreVision Reproduction uses an automatic anonymizing encryption, so your identities will only be revealed in the event of a court order, but general information about revealed futures is always public domain pursuant to UNSRS Title 14 Chapter 156 and Chapter 157, known publicly as the Freedom of Future Information Act.  My name is Sal Borman, and I am a licensed Oracle in all four hundred and thirty eight nation states of the republic, including via telepresence with any authorized Internext portal.  My license number is 48, and I am fully bonded and insured by Sphinx."  Sal took a deep breath, and continued in his former, more convivial tone.  "Normally all that stuff just flows by as text in people's in-lens display and meets the legal guideline.  When the courts decided that foreground in-lens text with user defined scroll speed can legally be considered to have been read, everything switched to text.  Contracts, license agreements, all the fine print...  Believe me:  You're glad you don't have a constant stream of legal jargon flowing across the periphery of your vision every waking hour of the day."

Anne and Harold nodded in silent agreement.

Sal continued.  "Now, before we continue, I'm going to need some basic information.  First, I know Kittentits said you two were unenhanced, is that correct?"

Another nod.

"Alright, are you totally off-network,  or are you citizens?"

"We're both born citizens, grandfathered in when the UNS was formed."

"May we scan your passports?"  Harold began reaching into his pocket and Anne into her purse, but Sal interrupted them.  "You don't need to get them out, if they're current.  We just need your consent before we read them."

"Oh, yes, sure," said Harold.

"That's fine," said Anne, passport already in hand.

Immediately, their faces appeared in the display before them, along with all the other information contained in and linked to from their passports.  Sal's in-lens display was showing him the rest of their information, culled instantly from the Internext and their equiXperian dataset, along with status information on their now-threading PreVision.

"Excellent.  It appears you're both in good health, medically and financially, although your son..." Sal cut himself off, changing direction mid-sentence.  "It looks as though you've come to us at just the right time, considering your unenhanced status; natural breeding is typically limited to the first couple of decades after puberty, after which chances of conception drop precipitously.  At your age, without enhancement, our service is the only safe way to have children who share your genetics 100%.  How much do you know about our service already?"

"We read that your service didn't rule out a natural pregnancy and childbirth."  Harold squeezed Anne's hand in his.  "That after the initial procedure..."  His voice trailed off.

"Quite right, Harold.  The most technologically advanced part of our service is in your PreVision Consultation."  Sal's right hand moved smoothly down and opened a drawer beside him.  "Once outcomes have been filtered and a target sequence identified, we can simply generate the first cell of your new son or daughter and you could have it inserted with something roughly as advanced as a..." Sal's hand reappeared from his desk drawer holding up an example, "...a turkey baster."  He smiled jokingly, and the smile they returned was neither clearly genuine or forced, "although I'm sure you wouldn't mind having a doctor use something a little more accurate.  From the moment the blastocyst implants, either in your uterine wall or in one of our partner's incubators, your child's life is out of our hands, and under your control.  You can use the latest and greatest in bio or nano embryology and artificial gestation duration cessation, or you can go completely natural.

"I had an unenhanced, neuOrganic vegan client use our service last year, and she didn't see a doctor once after she left our office.  Carried to full term, gave birth at home, in the tub, with only a midwife to assist!"  A photo stream began to flow across the virtual display, showing a couple dozen tasteful images of some attractive young woman increasingly pregnant, then sitting in a bathtub, then holding a newborn and smiling.  Anne and Harold took the story at face value, and Sal just continued with his spiel as the computer-generated images floated by.  "No complications, no doctors, a complete PreVision Reproduction success story.  Her PreVision specifications included selecting for the exact birth she'd dreamed of, and we delivered."  Sal chuckled, "well, she delivered, but you get the picture."  Just as he finished his sentence, the last image was disappearing out of the display.  A couple more savvy than Harold and Anne might have noticed how perfectly sound and image, lighting and tone, even subtle scents piped into the room were working in concert and been skeptical.  Anne's doubts had been washed away like so much grey goo, and Harold hadn't needed half as much show to be reassured.

"That sounds lovely.  She looked so happy."

"You'll be just as happy this time next year, when you're holding your new boy or girl."  The display subtly changed until it was polarized, its volumetric glow became tinted pastel green on the left to indicate a boy and lavender on the right to indicate a girl, as Sal asked them, "Which gender were you thinking of for your next bundle of joy?"  Sal's keenly trained eye noticed a few of small bubbles of color hovering towards the bottom center of the display, but waited to see his clients' reaction before he said anything; a definitive response would remove the more-complicated possibilities automatically.

"I think we want to keep all our options open for now."  As non-definitive a response as Sal could have received this early in the interview.  Anne had been looking back and forth between the pale green and the lavender sides of the display, and then her eyes seemed to catch on the blue-green, pink, yellow, and deep purple blobs of light that seemed to be clinging to the top of the desk in between them.

"I see you've noticed your rares."  Sal reached out and scooped up the light-blobs in both hands, and pulled them up and spread them out.  The pastel green and lavender colors, which had dominated the display before, now receded to become small bubbles of color at opposite edges of Sal's desk.  The other four colors expanded to fill the entire display as Sal explained them.  "At PreVision Reproduction, we don't rule out any possibilities for you.  In this case, what you're seeing is that our software has determined that four gender variants are possible within the constraints of your natural reproductive process.  These two variants," he indicated the blue-green, and yellow bubbles, "represent the small possibility present of hermaphrodite outcomes.  Two of the six natural variants are represented, which is fairly normal for people with no history of genemod.  I've filtered out a few other mutant variations that, while possible from your combined genetics, would never happen through natural means."  Sal paused, looking from one to the other and back again, as though giving them the chance to ask to see the rest of their choices.  Harold and Anne didn't make a move or a sound, they just stared at the bubbles of light, and listened on.  Sal indicated the pink and deep purple bubbles.  "These variants simply represent a mutation that, with your genes, is fairly common, an extra X chromosome.  In males, it is known as Klinefelter Syndrome, and its symptoms can include learning disabilities, problems with impulse control, lowered testosterone, and infertility.  All treatable with common bio or nano enhancements, but most clients still prefer to rule out such things."  Sal motioned as though to brush the pink bubble aside, trying to judge their reaction.  This sort of demonstration usually got the uninitiated familiar with what was to come in their Oracular reading, with the PreVision filtration process, and even the most natural-minded parents tended to rule out hermaphrodites, making it hands-on instruction.

Harold was thinking about possibilities.  Anne was thinking about their first son.  Neither of them was thinking much about learning some computer interface.  After a long moment, when it seemed Sal's hand had been held up a moment or two too long to remain comfortable, Harold spoke up.  "I think we want to keep all our options open for now."  Sal pulled the four 'rares' in and down again, allowing the two primary genders to re-fill the display.

"Perhaps I'm being presumptuous!"  Sal had no problem keeping his tone light and his demeanor disarming.  "Did you have any particular criteria in mind for us to look forward into?  Not gender, perhaps, but there must have been something on your mind to bring you in to PreVision today."

"We want the best for our child."

"Of course..."  Sal tried to convey both a sense of understanding security as well as an encouragement not to hold anything back.  He knew that given enough time and processing power, PreVision Reproduction's proprietary techniques and software could spin out a thread for every last one of their 'open options,' but Sal also appreciated that the sooner and more clearly they narrowed their scope, the less of his branch's allotted cloud computing ration would be wasted on a client who clearly was not interested in any of the bells, whistles, or extras he could normally add to the bottom line.

"Sal, we're not ready."  Sal's welcoming smile did not budge, even a fraction of an inch.  "We're just not ready for enhancement.  Not for ourselves."  Harold took a long moment to gather his words.  Sal nodded warmly, waiting to see where Harold was going.  "And with Bart, our first child..."  Harold looked down at his hands, holding Anne's tightly, then back up at Sal with a look that made Sal feel like one of the long-gone Catholic priests must have felt back when people still visited the confessional.  Sal didn't know exactly what had happened, but more than anything he wanted to forgive Harold, then and there, of everything.  "We weren't ready.  We should have...  We..."  Harold blinked, and tears escaped from each of his eyes, racing each other down his cheeks, away from his pain.  "We want the best for our child, and now that means enhancement.  Upgrades.  Bio, nano, and whatever's coming this year, next year and the year after that.  We aren't ready, ourselves, but we don't want another ..."  Harold stopped himself.  Anne's eyes closed and her face closed and her heart tried hard to stay open to the future; open to hope.  "We want the best for our child."

Sal wiped away the gender colors with a broad gesture and worked quick magic from his side of the desk to generate a custom filter for them.  He paused the automatic threading that had already been started.  "I think I understand what you're trying to look forward to, and I'm glad you came to me.  Other PreVision Oracles are trained for a lot of things, but I believe this will take a little creativity."  Sal worked furiously at the virtual console, only part of which was being shown in the desktop display, and Harold and Anne watched and waited in silence.  If you don't mind, while I get things in order here," Sal seemed to be strained, reaching in three directions at once, no longer putting his whole attention into the sales pitch, "let me run the old interactive brochure for you."  Before they could react it was running, filling the volumetric display as Sal turned away from them to face a large black panel they'd overlooked earlier, four feet square on the wall to their right.  The panel had tiny IR LEDs at its corners that his in-lens system could use for orientation - modern in-lens systems no longer required such things for normal augmented reality registration, but when available they created the most stable and exact display possible without fixing atoms in place on a substrate.

"Welcome to PreVision Reproduction," the automated introduction began, "where we look forward to looking forward for you."  This hadn't been their slogan for several campaigns, but Sal still preferred this brochure to the new one, so he retained a local copy.  The recorded voice continued, as a computer generated actress only a generation or two beyond the uncanny valley floated into frame.  "Before we get started with your reading, I'd like to explain a little about the history of reproductive filters and how PreVision Reproduction stands out from the rest, as the best."

A timeline that stretched back about seventy years in time began to flow in from the right, detailing early 'test tube' babies and then IVF and other pre-singularity reproductive technologies.  "In the beginning, after doctors had learned enough about biology to fertilize eggs outside the body, the first types of filtration were actually performed on unfertilized spermatozoa and ovum.  At this primitive level, it was all doctors could do to select for gender.  Within a few years, they were able to work with fertilized eggs, removing a cell or two from an early blastocyst for filtration - usually to create offspring which could be farmed for bone marrow or other immuno-matched organs."  The virtual woman shook her head and furrowed her brow disapprovingly.  "It wasn't until the last few years before singularity that SNP mapping had progressed far enough that parents began to be able to use these formerly-barbaric filtration techniques to select from the handful of blastocysts labs could create from the parents' own extracted gametes.  This was first generation filtration."

Sal, in the background, unnoticed now by Harold and Anne, had actually pulled out an old, hardware keyboard and was typing away furiously in between direct hand-made adjustments within the virtual display in front of him.  He was going way beyond what was expected of him to sell a bare-bones Reproduction, but he was having fun for the first time since he'd made management.  He ignored the brochure as it droned on.

"Hair color, eye color, body type," volumetric images of children stood all over the desk, with their features gradually morphing and changing as she mentioned the possibilities, "height, weight, athleticism.  Genetic diseases were easy targets, and subtle differences soon followed as parents were able to choose the healthiest, smartest, and most beautiful children from among their frozen possibilities."  The mostly tall, mostly blond-haired and blue-eyed around her now appeared literally to freeze into human icicles behind and around her.  "When the singularity hit, the old barriers were shattered as gene banks and full-sequence genemods became available."  The frozen children shattered all around her, flying into thousands of virtual pieces and disappearing.  "Children could now be engineered safely to be born with any of the features available for purchase from Virgin GeneBank, or from the open-source bank at TIGR, and new qualities could be custom tailored by Synthetic Genomics and its boutique subsidiaries.  Instead of having to choose from the limited set of blastocysts that had formed by a random sampling of their natural gametes, Parents could now filter through the billions of individual genes and complex and proprietary feature sets that began to flood the market.  They could raise lovingly crafted, tailor-made children of their own design.  Combined with genemods for post-birth fine tuning, the possibilities were endless.  This was second-generation filtration."

The miniature children that replaced the frozen, shattered, and later melted representations of so-called first-generation filtration were significantly more varied in shape, color, and configuration.  Mirroring, at a much faster speed than they had been born into the world, the actual progression of fashionable genemods, they rapidly lost resemblance to humanity.  An extra limb or a short tail at first, then the tail was long and prehensile, and the extra limb -or ten- were tentacles.  Feathers instead of hair, then inoperable wings, then angelic children actually capable of flight.  Centaurs, mermaids, all the mythical creatures that were biologically capable of survival (if not natural reproduction) had been conceived in labs and "born" to often unprepared parents with more money than sense.  These representatives of the second generation of mass-customized children slithered, swam, flew, ran and trotted around merrily as the floating, glowing, artificial bust of a woman had spoken, and simply moved beyond the edges of the display in the exact moment her speech paused.  It was a beautiful display of man-made biodiversity, if a bit over-the-top - to remind the client that they haven't come to PreVision Reproduction to order a monstrosity, but something genuinely human.

"Now, with cutting-edge technology combined with proprietary Oracular software, PreVision Reproduction is proud to offer you true third-generation filtration.  Unlike the wetware hackers and error-prone yeast-based combinators of the past," almost too small to read, a line of legal jargon floated across the lower front edge of the volumetric display; disclaimers and notices about the first-gen synthetic life creation tools which were outlawed throughout the Republic and no longer even risked by black market dealers and terror groups and which were only mentioned by every modern genetic practitioner to scare you into worrying that their competitor might be using something dangerous, "PreVision Reproduction works strictly virtually until a finished helix is ready for output as forty-six perfect chromosomes."  Another line of text floated by, indicating that their software was perfectly capable of working with more or less than forty-six chromosomes, and that for an additional fee they would be glad to output partial or final code to licensed partners for further "second-generation" processing.  "This allows for flawless access to and reproduction of every single bit of a child's genes, and for each one of the parents' genes to be available for consideration instead of relying on random chance, wetware compatibility, and other people's genes."

It was actually the cutting-edge nature of what PreVision Reproduction was doing, computationally, that led to their restricting gene selection to the two parents' own genomes.  Predicting an existing person's future based on genetics, past behaviour, family behaviour, and the nearly-entirely tracked and monitored and recorded environment that the modern world had become was only a somewhat complex task for the computing cloud to tackle.  Licensed Oracles could "tell your fortune" in a computationally accurate way, for a reasonable fee.  Looking ahead only a short way through time allowed for a significantly detailed reading.  Looking further forward in time naturally reduced the accuracy of a reading, and it was only major corporations that invested sufficient capital to look more than a few months forward with any significant detail.

"We start with a virtual reproduction of both parents' full genome, and we calculate every possible genetic outcome that can be built by combining them.  With each parents' billions of genes to choose from, the scope of potential results creates radical zillionic effects.  Throughout human history, these effects have been mediated by biological controls beyond our reach, often with results that were not obviously manifest until unwanted genes had already been passed on.  PreVision Reproduction handles the zillionic effect of potentiality for you, allowing you to take control in the ways you choose without having to worry about other details.  Oracles guide parents through the basic questions of first-generation filtration, but with total freedom across their genes and with no messy surgeries, commitments, or up-front costs.  Then we do what no one else can:  Our Oracles will guide you through your child's future."

What PreVision Reproduction was doing was only possible because continual, geometric advancement in the capabilities of gene manipulation and reproductive science had maintained a very high price point for custom work.  The cost of second-generation genetics had already had the rug pulled out from under it on the supply side, and it was only a matter of the market catching up and realizing that -like all information technologies before it- its fair market price was about to collapse to zero.  Second-generation genetics had risen to popularity before the cost of first-generation products had really been commoditized, and over the course of the products' life spans, the public had become accustomed to a relatively fixed price point for these sorts of services.  PreVision Reproduction, by combining their revolutionary software concept with the now effectively free tools that had been built by the first-generation genetic pioneers like Venter and Branson and later perfected through open source work on the Internext, were able to squeeze just enough computing power out of the cloud with what people were willing to pay in order to accomplish what they promised.

"So much more meaningful than what the fortune teller on the corner can tell you.  So much more valuable to your family than a corporate Oracle's profit-optimizations.  So much more accurate than the vague probabilities about simplistic concepts such as intelligence, personality type, and creativity that previous generations of genetics have offered.  PreVision Reproduction allows parents not only to get a glimpse into their child's future, but to actually filter for the particular future they want for their child.  Our Oracles will help you find the child who is not only one hundred percent your genetic offspring, but who is most likely to become the doctor, lawyer, politician, or interplanetary explorer you've always dreamed of raising.  A child who qualifies as fully human under every registered government and within every corporate hierarchy, and who has the benefits of a tailor-made genome.  Not just strong, tall, smart, and beautiful, your child can be in all the right places at all the right times.  You can even select for specific milestones with a high degree of accuracy:  Do you want your child to win their third-grade science fair?  Do you want your child to fall in love for the first time over summer break at the age of 14?  Do you want your child to get into a particular exclusive graduate school?  Do you want a certain number of grandchildren to call your own?"  As the virtual woman continued, these milestones were played out behind her in a much more realistic and engaging way than the previous examples had been presented.  Living dioramas played out the third-grade science fair, the summer vacation and the first kiss at the edge of the methane lake of some deep-space vacation spot, the college graduation, the older couple playing with their dozen all-apparently-humanoid grandchildren.  "With PreVision Reproduction's exclusive third-generation filtration, you could filter for any of these."

PreVision Reproduction's proprietary software predicted the future for every single possible child a couple could have, and it did so with a high level of detail for final candidates.  The real reason they limited their services to the genes of the parents was that otherwise the data set was too big, and the computational costs too high.  The total possible number of viable offspring that were considered at least capable of citizenship -if not even partially human- by registered governments with the lowest barriers to entry, even if restricted to public domain genes and techniques, went beyond the problems of zillionics into hyper-zillionics.  The scope of possible lives times the cost of computing a detailed and accurate prediction of each future life was beyond the pale.  By limiting their genes to those of the prospective parents, the scope of possible children becomes much smaller, and the computational challenge of calculating vague predictions for all of them, plus more-detailed predictions for a smaller subset creates, on average, a computational cost low enough that PreVision Reproduction is able to make a profit.  This is the real filtration taking place, selecting which potential children the parents want to examine full-detail readings for, and it is done in the background of the interview process.  Official policy is to always maintain the myth that every potential child's entire future has been predicted with a high level of detail and with the cost of computation dropping so fast, the myth would become operational reality within a year or two.  Not long after which time they planned to have their software ready to roll out the ability to filter through literally all possible life using the optimized algorhythms they'd been perfecting since day one.

"The beauty of PreVision Reproduction is that it virtually insures that your specific hopes and dreams for your children will be realized.  Don't leave anything up to chance.  Filter out disappointment, filter in accomplishment, from your own genes."  The growing crowd of virtual children being projected in the space around and behind the smiling woman's torso were now being based on Harold and Anne's actual profile information.  These were the most likely faces that could be generated naturally from their DNA, and this was the part of the virtual brochure that almost always sold PreVision's services.  There was something about one's own children that people couldn't resist having an emotional reaction to - even children they had never borne or met.  "Your child, built from your genes and from your dreams."  This technique had proved doubly effective for anyone who had tried to raise one of the so-called second-generation; children whose demeanor and behaviour were based partially or entirely on other people and on synthetic genes written by some engineer.  Whether because they were so 'other' as the first truly man-made generation, so separated from everything around and preceding them, because of biases their parents didn't discover they'd had until their inhuman children were held in their arms, or because of direct, unpredicted, emergent psychological and behavioural results of their patched-together genome - there was a lot of discord between second-generation children and their parents.  "Build your family.  Build your legacy.  Build happiness."

Sal was still working intensely at his console as the brochure faded out, and Harold and Anne waited patiently, holding hands.  They were used to silence, to the slow, calm passage of time without a constant stream on information and requests flowing across their consciousness, without even an awareness of the constant drumbeat of seconds and minutes marching forward in the corner of their vision.  In other words, they were strangers in a strange land - seemingly the only people around who still experienced time naturally and had to seek out information manually.  They didn't mind waiting, and had no way of distinguishing a passing moment from a passing hour.

Sal, on the other hand, was painfully aware of exactly how long he had kept his clients waiting.  Of how much time he was spending on a single sale, ignoring incoming messages and trying not to think about how many other -more reasonable- clients he might have been able to walk through an entire pitch before he would even get properly started with this one.  Sal worked, coded, built new filters, hooked into new data sources, flexed his branch's reputation and credit limit to create relationships with nodes of infospace that PreVision Reproduction had never bothered with before, and he watched the seconds tick by.  There was, by default -part of his own branch's efficiency system- a counter visible to him at all times, counting up the seconds, minutes, hours any rep spent from first setting eyes on a client to closing the sale; his had been blinking furious red for some time before he put the finishing touches on the structure he'd built and started it compiling.  Sal knew he had kept them waiting for longer than any connected couple would have stayed for, and was readying an apology in his mind as he neared the end of his work, getting ready to have to work twice as had to make the sale.  When he turned again to face them, though, he saw that no apology would be necessary.  Harold and Anne looked perhaps more content now than they had when they'd first arrived; waiting, rather than infuriating them, had somehow calmed them.

"Thanks for waiting," said Sal, watching for his software to finish compiling and come online.  "I've been building a custom program for you two.  Our standard filters weren't designed for traditionalists, and as you could see in the brochure, our marketing is aimed at couples on the bleeding edge of technology.  Most people who come to PreVision Reproduction do so because they accept only the latest and greatest, and everything has been built to sell to that market.  For you, something special."  The progress indicator he'd been watching in his peripheral vision reached completion and another began in its place, and Sal reached out and reactivated the interactive sales display.  Two grey bubbles filledd the volumetric display, a smaller, lighter bubble and a larger, darker one.

"Now, I know you're completely unenhanced, but I got the impression that you don't intend to restrict your child's life to the level of purity you've maintained."  Sal grabbed the lighter bubble and stretched it to show the dozens of smaller shapes bouncing around inside it.  "This represents all the possible lives of your potential children where they entirely avoid enhancement.  The other, which we will examine in a moment, is the opposite - enhanced lives."  Sal manipulated, jostled, applied color to, and dismissed the various subgroups as he went over them in detail.  "You can see that only about eight percent of them make it past age thirty, and over forty percent die in infancy from afflictions preventable with common bio or nano immunizations.  Let's just filter out all the possibilities that die in infancy, alright?"  Sal didn't force them to answer verbally, he knew from his first look at their file that they would want to avoid that fate a second time.  When he discarded the handful of shapes that represented infant deaths, the same filter was applied on the darker bubble waiting in the periphery - if anyone had been looking at it, they'd have seen a small chunk tearing off and floating away, mirroring the speed and angle of Sal's gesture in the central display.  "Is there a minimum length of life you're looking for?  Eighteen years?  Thirty-six?  More?"

Harold spoke, less uncertain than he'd been when they'd first arrived, "We want our child to have a chance to live their own life, and we'd like to remain UNS Citizens, so at least to adult-hood plus a couple years.  How about minimum ..." he looked at Anne, guessed "...twenty?"

"Twenty-five, at least."  Anne was getting used to the idea that she could have a say and still give birth to her own child.

"Twenty-five," repeated Harold, and squeezed his wife's hand, smiling.

Sal was using controls only he could see for precision delineation, but then sliced through the remaining shapes with a broad, symbolic stroke.  Another chunk of each bubble was torn away from the whole and cast aside - this one representing potential future children with very high likelihood of death on or before their 25th birthday.  "Were there any other things you had in mind?  I know you want to keep your options as open as possible, but I'm about to skip over the normal interview to your new program, so any other considerations you've thought of should be addressed now."

There was a long moment where Sal looked to Harold, then to Anne, and back again, where Harold looked to Anne, and Anne looked away from Harold and tried to bring herself to speak.  Sal could tell she was trying to speak, and he tried to patiently give her the time she needed, while counting the seconds adding up.  "Can uhh..."  She stammered briefly, "Can we filter...  uhh..  I don't know how you'd tell your computer, but..."  She stopped.

"Whatever it is, I'm sure we can find a way to specify it.  What are you thinking of?"  Sal kept up as encouraging an exterior as possible, hoping that whatever she'd been keeping silent about wasn't about to contradict the application he'd invented and had churning through data as they spoke.

"I don't want our child to give up easily.  They should ... persevere through challenges."  Anne was struggling to be able to form the words, to admit that she didn't want to leave this up to her parenting skills.  "I know...  I'm certain that a lot of that will have to come from us, as parents, but... Can you..."

"Yes.  We can filter for a persevering demeanor, certainly.  Filter out children most likely to quit in the face of adversity."  This was not an uncommon selector among their average clientele, and Sal accessed a bookmarked filter and began adjusting the settings.  "How far do you want to go?  We can push it to the extreme, look for children who never give up, no matter what, pushing forward even when there's absolutely no hope, or we can filter at both ends, and try to keep them open to seeing that there are some times where giving up and starting over is the right thing to do."  By the time Anne nodded her assent to this, Sal had already set it up.  A good Oracle knows what his client will do before the computer can predict it.  Each bubble of possibility sub-divided into two,  and as Sal brushed the born-quitters aside, there was only a very tiny proportion of the original light-colored bubble left.  "Now I'm going to combine these two, and we can move into your custom filtration."  He pressed the two bubbles together, and the few small shapes left in the lighter one tumbled and mixed in among those of the larger, darker bubble, it's color lightening somewhat as it grew to fill the space over the desk.

"As you may already be aware of, predicting market forces, specific technological advances, the course of the spread of diseases and malicious software, and of political outcomes is big business.  Each niche Oracular area presents unique challenges, and requires vast computational resources to gain any reasonable degree of accuracy.  Our area of expertise is people.  We know who people are, how they behave, and how they're likely to behave in the future.  We don't usually need to know what technology your children will be using when they go to school to tell you how they're going to interact with their schoolmates; if the singularity taught us anything, it was that even as technology changes everything, technology changes nothing.  People are the same as they've been for thousands of years:  What they want, how they relate to one another, how they react to environmental influences, it's predictable.  And for most of our clients, with a little guidance by PreVision Reproduction Oracles, they are satisfied to select a child based on these human factors.  They want first-generation choices like gender, hair color, body type, and intelligence, and they want a child who will choose a best friend well, who will rise to the top of their class or be popular, who will love and honor their parents."

Harold and Anne nodded, listened patiently, waited for the other shoe to drop.

"What you want, I think, is a child best-suited for the world of today, and for the world that they are in as the world changes around them.  You aren't just interested in how your child will relate to yourselves, or to other people, but to the increasingly rapidly changing world around them.  You don't want your children to end up like you have, trapped in a past that has passed, unsure or unable to keep up with a shifting baseline.  Is that right?"

"That's ... close enough," Harold said, "we aren't ashamed of ourselves or our lives, but we can see that it would be much more difficult for a child coming into the world today."

"Right, good," Sal breathed a sigh of relief.  "So the program I've built for you starts with the world today, the current standards for child-rearing, immunizations, learning tools and implants, and looks forward.  I've leveraged my relationships with Oracles across the spectrum of predictions to build an accurate model of the future world, though due to trade secrets, non-disclosure agreements, and UNS security reasons, I will be unable to show that future to you.  If you want to be able to see your child's future, or to see what exact choices are being made, we can do a standard filtration, but if you want the best for your child in the ways I believe you do, you'll have to trust what I've built for you."

They nodded again, watching his face intently through the glowing, jostling shapes in front of them.

"Okay, so there's some of this I can show you, so you can have a better idea of what I can't show you.  For example, there's a small percentage of people whose bodies are allergic to Matsushita nanomachines.  Most of them just choose to go strictly bio for enhancement, but for the best possible outcome, you'll want a child who has the most possible options, right?"  Sal triggered the first animation of his software, and a couple of black tentacles oozed in from the edges of the display, sought out and broke off sections of a few of the floating shapes, and dragged them off screen.  "So, there goes all the children who would have had Matsushita allergies.  I can even show you how this extends into the future, if you'll verbally consent to a simple 3-month NDA for a particular product release?"

They nodded, Sal pulled up the NDA on the display, and they verbally agreed -on recording, of course- to comply.

"Great, so, this won't be announced publicly for about 10 weeks, but one of our partner companies is rolling out a new line of dual-redundant bio+nano network-aware brand-insensitive immuno-boosting comm-enabling enhancements for newborns.  With a natural gestation period, our prediction shows there will be three knock-off competitors on the market, and this will be the new standard when you give birth.  Our partner's product is pretty robust, and works with three nines of the UNS citizenable strands--"

Harold interrupted briefly, "...three nines of... what?"

"Three nines, it's short for ninety-nine point nine nine nine percent, or another way of saying that only one in one hundred thousand people whose DNA qualifies them to be UNS citizens has an adverse reaction to the new product.  By the time you give birth, two of the other brands will only be one nine safe, and the third will be five nines safe, but for your purposes, we'll go with what's normal at the time, and rule out children who have a negative reaction to what will then be the industry standard."  As he said this, a dozen or so black tentacles reached into the display and broke off several small pieces from the floating, bumping shapes that represented the remaining breakdown of children they were now filtering from, carrying them away.  "Before we move on, I'm going to apply filters based on positive reactions to all standard tech and enhancements in use near the middle of the bell curve for infants born in about 40 weeks, alright?"

The tentacles were oozing onscreen and taking away chunks of potentiality before Harold and Anne had even had a chance to nod, but they nodded anyway.  Sal didn't wait for them to finish before he continued, knowing that this visual display was significantly behind the program's actual progress.

"And when that finishes, let me see... Yes, now, the IP owner won't let me tell you what it is, but there's a new teaching technique that's going to be very popular around the time your child will be entering primary school.  Based on some very detailed predictions, for the children who can handle it, it is roughly 300% more effective than the next-best methods.  For about 15% of children, it will be about ten times worse; they just don't think that way, and have trouble learning in that environment.  There will be actual segregation, and only niche schools will keep to old methods.  Well, to current methods, that is.  Your child will have a competitive advantage by being in the 85% who are well-suited to this new technique."  Another 15% of the remaining shapes were ripped away and carried off by tentacles.  "And so on.  With the information I have access to, the partners I have, the favours I've called in, I've generated a very accurate picture of the world that will be, and if you think this is a good idea, I can execute it and have the system automatically narrow down from your remaining possible children to the ones who will seemingly serendipitously be well suited to all predictable future cultural and technological paradigm shifts, as they occur."  He didn't mention that according to the gauge in his peripheral vision, the computations were nearly complete, and tried not to think about how much this could cost him if they didn't agree, or worse - if they turned out to be spies for a competitor.

Luckily for Sal, they both nodded again.  "That sounds just about exactly right," answered Harold.  Anne smiled again, squeezing her husband's hand in anticipation, getting her hopes up.  "Gender, hair color, body type, intelligence and the rest don't matter if you can't cope with day to day life or if you can't communicate with people in a way they're comfortable with and used to.  If you dream of visiting other nation-states or going off world, but can't get a travel visa because you can't or won't get modern immunizations, your dreams can never be fulfilled.  We don't want to dictate our child's dreams, we just want them to be able to achieve them."

"Perfect," replied Sal, triggering the animation to run at high speed, showing the filtration process he'd had the cloud churning for twenty minutes, so it would catch up just in time for the calculations to finish.  The tentacles of black were less creepy -more comical- in fast-forward.  "This program basically maximizes your child's ability to make their own choices, by filtering out the children whose options are limited in the face of changing times."  As they worked, the multitudes of rushing black arms became like sculptors, chipping away at the original abstract and geometric shapes that had represented broad categories within possibility to give form to the optimal possibilities that lay within them.  When a particular sub-group's possibilities had been narrowed enough that all the potential children it represented were similar enough, it began to take on the form of what they had in common.  So over a few minutes, Harold and Anne were able to literally watch their child be sculpted before their eyes by the program Sal had designed for them, to go from a formless mess to a few humanoid shapes, to a couple of well-defined figures, and finally to the single most optimized -and highly detailed in the display- potential child that PreVision Reproduction could see in their future.

"He's beautiful," remarked Anne, as the animation completed and her child's happy face floated before her.  She leaned in, reached out towards it, and its eyes lit up, its hands mirrored the gesture, reaching out as though for a hug.  All part of the sales routine, of course - activating mirror neurons in the parent, stimulating the urge to be able to hold and hug their child - something that could only be done if they decided to buy.

Sal smiled.  Perfect children practically sold themselves, even if the perfection stopped at the edge of the volumetric display.  "There he is," male, of course, because men still had unfair advantage over women in a few ways -despite cheap, functionally complete gender change being broadly available- and the program was looking for maximal options.  "He's composed entirely of your DNA, and we've saved you the ninety-quadrillion to one gamble of hoping to produce the child you want the old-fashioned way.  We can have his strand transfered to one of our partners immediately, and you could have him growing inside you before lunch.  Do you have a preferred clinic, or would you like me to see who we have available that works with the unenhanced?"

"Our family practitioner is the one who recommended you... Can you see if she's ... Can you send the strand to her?"

Sal had already sent preliminaries to their doctor's office, and had made sure they could get an immediate appointment before he'd even suggested same-day service.  "Absolutely.  If that's what you want to do, we can pull up the contract right here," the floating, smiling representation of their future child shifted to the right of the display to make room for the huge scrolls of text that were the standard contract, "get everything signed, sealed, and paid for, and it looks like we can get you into Dr. Chandra's office in half an hour.  Would you like me to send him over to your doctor so they can get started building your son?"

"Yes," Harold replied.

"Thank you," said Anne.

Sal started the transfer and went over the contract and payment processing with them by rote.  His mind was elsewhere, considering how he could leverage his new optimization scaffold to first increase profits for his branch and then -after he'd polished the system somewhat- to give him a quick boost up the corporate hierarchy.  Sal wasn't even going to charge the couple extra for the extra work and time and processing power he'd put into selecting their child for them, though he had tacked a few extra NDA clauses onto their contract to keep them silent about the whole thing - he knew he could turn their unusual request into future earnings without letting them know they'd given him the idea and getting it into their heads they were due residuals, somehow.  Before he knew it, Sal was showing them out of his office, "and remember, if you decide to have another child at a later date, don't hesitate to come back to PreVision Reproduction.  Even if what you're looking for doesn't change between now and then, the very act of adding your new son to your family will change another child's possible futures, so there's no worry about ending up with identical twins born years apart.  At PreVision Reproduction, every child is unique, and uniquely yours."

"Thank you, Sal."  Harold shook Sal's hand vigorously.  "I knew you would be able to help us out."

"It's no problem, Harold, I'm just glad I could give you what you were looking for."  Sal led them through his wooden door, down the hall, and out through the LiquidPotential door that led to the lobby.  It occurred to him that since they weren't enhanced at all, they hadn't asked about the email he'd sent them because they simply hadn't seen it yet.  "Oh, and one more thing.  I emailed you a list of names.  You're welcome to give your son any name you like, but the optimizer gave me a list of names least likely to contribute to limiting his potential, so you'll probably want to make your selection from the list."

"We just want the best for our son," answered Harold, "we'll look over the list when we get home."

"I gave it a quick look, and you'll be glad to know I didn't see many NuTrends names like kittentits or shockshank on the list.  It was mostly traditional."

"We'll look it over," said Anne as Harold led her out of the office, "thank you, Mr. Borman."

"You're welcome."  Sal turned around as soon as they were out of sight, to return to his office and shut down his PC before it overheated and burned the office down.

"You don't like my name," asked kittentits accusingly, "or you just like making fun of me in front of clients?"

Sal shook his head, rolled his eyes, walked through the wall and back to his office without another word.

“Six weeks in one room is too long,” Brent thought to himself as the doctor continued on about risk factors and bodily fluids, “especially a hospital. Especially when there’s nothing wrong with you.”

Brent was right that the doctors, the specialists, the scientists and every other stranger that had poked, prodded, taken samples from, and otherwise examined him in the month and a half since the incident occurred had been unable to find anything going wrong with him, even down to a micro-cellular level.  The small tears in his skin where his piercings had been ripped out by the electromagnets had long since healed, and the damage to the supercollider by their supersonic impacts in its housing had likewise been repaired.  The police hadn’t been involved since Brent had signed a mutual release of liability; the research facility wouldn’t charge Brent with trespass or any other such crimes, and he wouldn’t ever bring suit with them for future medical problems.  As long as they were paying for the last six weeks of tests, not to mention not ending up in jail, Brent figured he’d come out ahead without having to lift more than the pen to sign away his right to litigation.  Soon he would be back on the road.

“Do you understand what I’m saying, Mr. Horschadt?”  The doctor, whose name Brent had managed not to learn on any of the last hundred times they’d interacted, seemed as disinterested as always.

“Sure, sure.  Don’t donate blood, don’t share needles, don’t get another MRI, and notify you if I notice anything out of the ordinary...  We’ve been over this.  And over this.  And over this.”  Brent was exasperated.  “When can I put some pants on?”

“Your new clothes are in the cupboard.  It looks like all your paperwork is in order.”  The doctor made a show of flipping through the stack of pages on the clipboard he held, but Brent knew the important papers, the legal forms and non-disclosure agreements he’d signed, had never crossed under this man’s nose.  “You’re free to leave at any time.”

Brent literally leapt out of the hospital bed, the open flaps of his hospital gown blowing open behind him as he hurried to the cupboard.  Having been so naked before so many strangers for so long had made getting himself covered more important than the cultural standard instilled in him to dress in privacy, and Brent pulled on the clean, new underpants and pants before the doctor could turn away.  “Is there anything else, or can I just go?”  Brent tore off the paper-like hospital gown and discarded it to the floor with all the disdain he could muster, then continued dressing.

“You’re supposed to be escorted out, but I don’t see any reason...”

Brent didn’t wait for him to finish.  He pulled his shoes on as he hopped to the window, jacket under his arm and wallet in his teeth, and made a half-dismissive wave and a wink to the doctor as he climbed out.  If he never returned to a hospital bed, it would be too soon for Brent.  He crossed the back lot of the hospital and had donned his jacket and pocketed his wallet before he climbed over the wall at its perimeter and disappeared.  The doctor hadn’t moved so much as to close his mouth as he watched his patient beat this hasty and unorthodox retreat.

Brent had used his time in isolation to plan his next move, but without any new information coming in, and while under such constant observation, he couldn’t be sure things would work out the way he hoped they would.  He hoped Charlie would let him crash after everything that had happened; he didn’t want to have to try this out in the open.  The trek across town took the better part of the day, and as Charlie’s place finally came into view Brent knew his new shoes had given him some new blisters along the way.  The sun was kissing the horizon as Brent stepped up to the door and didn’t knock.

He turned away.  “This was a bad idea,” he muttered under his breath.  He turned back to the door, then around again, taking half a step away.  Brent was cursing himself for coming to Charlie, and he stared into the fat brilliance of orange light that was descending behind silhouettes of suburbia with his fists thrust hard into jacket pockets, his head shaking slowly left to right and back again.  The purple light of twilight cast everything into cool hues, and a hand landed firmly on Brent’s shoulder from behind, taking him unawares.

“I wasn’t sure I’d be seeing you again after what you said at mom’s funeral.”  Brent turned around to face his brother, and they hugged.  “We all thought you really meant it this time.  No one could find you, none of your friends knew where you were.”

“I’m sorry,” was all Brent could muster as he collapsed into Charlie’s warm embrace, “I’m sorry...”

“It’s okay, you’re here now.  Are you alright?”  Charlie pushed Brent back to hold him at arm’s length and take a good look at him, “you look thin, have you been eating enough?  Come inside!”  Charlie didn’t release contact with his younger brother, pulling him through the door and into the warm interior of the house by the hand.  “You’re just in time for dinner,” and Brent wasn’t worried any more.  He was home.

Charlie lived alone, since the divorce.  It had been years, but missing pieces of furniture still hadn’t been replaced, bare nails stood out from the wall where pictures had been taken down in haste, and other tiny visual reminders of the life he had once had were hiding around every corner.  Like a submarine pinging out the contours of an underwater landscape, each thing left behind or thing taken and not replaced echoed out against the hollow, heart-shaped cavity in Charlie’s chest.  Brent knew not to mention a thing.

When dinner turned out to be of the frozen variety, Brent was just happy to see something fried in front of him, half a step better than anything at the hospital if only for the MSG and salt so generously flavoring the microwaved processed foods.  Both brothers tore into their meals without a word until the plastic trays were discarded and they went to the living room to collapse into overstuffed furniture.

“Where have you been?”

“Some private hospital on the other side of town.”

“What happened?”

“I took a wrong turn or two and got in the way of someone’s research project.  Everyone kept expecting me to get sick and die, but it never happened.”

“Are you okay?”

“The doctors couldn’t find anything wrong with me.”

“But are you really okay?”

“As okay as I was the last time you saw me, I guess.”

“So...”

“Nevermind that, Charlie.  There’s one other little thing, but I didn’t want to let the doctors know.  Can I trust you not to freak out?”

“I’m your brother, Brent.  You know me better than anyone but Angela...” Charlie’s voice and face dropped a bit as he mentioned her, remembered her face.  “What do you think?”

“I think you’re going to freak out, but I don’t know who else to go to.”

“What is it?”

“Watch.”

And then a strange thing happened.  Brent closed his eyes to concentrate - he had only done it a couple of times by accident before, and wasn’t sure he could do it on cue - and when he opened them he was sitting beside himself on the couch.

He tried turning to look at himself, or at his brother, and became immediately disoriented, closing his eyes as the world turned the wrong way all around him.  “Relax, you can do this,” he thought to himself, and he turned his head away from his double and opened his eyes just in time to see his own eyes open and hear himself suck in the odd sound of “.hctaW”

The fact that he seemed to be seeing a mirror image out the back of his head began to approach normalcy, and the strange glow and contradictory dimness of everything began to fascinate him in between bouts of dizziness every time he turned his head.

“?ti si tahW”  The sound preceded the movement of Charlie’s lips by the slightest fraction of a second, but it was enough that the backwards-speech took on the feeling of a badly-dubbed kung fu flick.

“.ot og ot esle ohw wonk t’nod I tub ,tuo kaerf ot gniog er’uoy kniht I”  His double seemed to be in full-on gibberish mode, speaking fast enough that Brent couldn’t even remember what he’d been saying anymore.  It didn’t really matter, though, because he wanted to do more than just sit there and watch himself utter nonsense.  Brent stood up, keeping his eyes open despite the intense disorientation; he needed to get used to seeing out the back of his head.

“?kniht uoy od tahW”

Brent turned his body around and walked backwards across the room.  This was less awkward than standing up, since he was seeing in the direction he was headed by facing away from it, but the muscles of his legs and the sensations generated by his inner ear were not designed to do it.  Halfway across the room,  Brent reached into his pocket and threw his wallet back to his double, still sitting on the couch.

Charlie’s voice still expressed his sadness as it continued, “...alegnA tub enoyna naht retteb em wonk uoY  .tnerB ,rehtorb rouy m’I”  The wallet landed in Brent’s lap, unnoticed.  Brent continued walking backwards out of the room and down the hall as his double spoke.

“?tuo kaerf ot ton uoy tsurt I naC  .wonk srotcod eht tel ot tnaw t’ndid I tub ,gniht elttil rehto eno s’erehT  .eilrahC ,taht dnimreveN”

Charlie tried to concentrate on the shift with his eyes open this time, but in the instant it happened everything went momentarily black.  “So...” came from the next room and he was standing by a very odd-looking version of himself.  He didn’t have time to marvel at his appearance again, but it was like looking at a shadowed version of himself, like the light wasn’t quite hitting him right.

“Nevermind that, Charlie.”  Brent walked ahead of himself back to the living room, and noticed the seated version of himself make eye contact, but continue speaking.  “There’s one other little thing, but I didn’t want to let the doctors know.”  The wallet was sitting in Brent’s lap, and he knew what was coming, so didn’t touch it.  “Can I trust you not to freak out?”  Brent continued into the room, ahead of himself, made sure he had Charlie’s attention, then turned back to the seated Brent so he wouldn’t miss his cue.

Suddenly, the wallet flew out of Brent’s lap towards the dim version of Brent walking awkwardly forward into the room.  The normal-looking Brent caught it in mid-air, and strangely-shadowed Brent seemed to un-throw it, and place it in his pocket.  Charlie sat silently staring, and the seated Brent did not speak the words he had said the first time.  As the dim Brent took wary steps toward the couch, his slightly-glowing eyes moving unnaturally, the other standing Brent reached into his pocket and pulled out the wallet that had just been placed there.  The dark-shrouded Brent turned and sat with an uncanny slowness, looked around as though confused, closed his eyes, and then the two copies of Brent sitting on the couch disappeared entirely.  The remaining Brent sat down where the first one had been, reached out, and handed the two wallets to Charlie.

“Look at those.”

Charlie didn’t move, didn’t look away from his brother.  “What just happened?”

“What did you see?”

“You, uhhh... You were sitting right there.”  Charlie looked back, over to the hallway the two additional copies of his brother had emerged from, back to Brent, then back and forth again.  “You were sitting there, and then two more of you came out of the hallway, except something was wrong with one of you.”

“Wrong how?  How would you describe it?”

“I don’t know, Brent!  Like something out of a horror movie!  The light didn’t hit you right somehow, like you were in the dark, and you moved ... Ugh,” a look of disgust came over Charlie’s face, as though thinking about what he had seen literally left a bad taste in his mouth, “You moved wrong, okay?  The darker one moved unnaturally, like... I don’t know what it was like.  Maybe like the ghosts in a Japanese horror movie.  It was sick.”

“And then?”

“And then your wallet,” Charlie suddenly realised he had the wallets in his hands, and looked down at them with that look of disgust on his face.  He looked like he wanted to drop them, but wasn’t sure what would happen if he did.  “Your wallet leapt out of the lap of the one of you that was sitting there, and then both of the standing copies of you caught it, somehow.  The ghost one catching it was weird, though, like it didn’t see that you’d already caught it, and... I know it sounds weird, but it was like watching a video in reverse somehow.  The physics were all wrong.  But he caught it somehow, and put it in his pocket, and then you took it out of his pocket without him noticing it.

“And then the weird one sat down like his joints were all on backwards, looked around like he was going crazy, and the two copies of you that were sitting on the couch disappeared.”  Charlie looked back up at Brent, a pleading look on his face.  “I thought that if I answered you...  I thought that if I said it out loud, it would make sense somehow, or you’d tell me it hadn’t happened.”  Charlie looked deep into his little brother’s eyes, “but it did happen, didn’t it?”

“Look at those.  Open them up.”

Charlie opened one of the wallets and looked through it.  Everything in it looked weird.  Dark.  Like the unsettling copy of Brent that had disappeared.  Like somehow it wasn’t catching the light correctly.  He took out a twenty dollar bill and turned it over and over in his hands.  The colors were right, just a shade darker than normal.  He held the bill up to the light, and Charlie saw something even stranger.  When he held it up to the light, instead of light passing through it like a normal bill so he could see the watermark and the security strip, it suddenly looked normal.  Like somehow the light from the other side of the bill was hitting it from the side he was looking at.

“Weird, isn’t it?”

Charlie didn’t know what to say.  He put the bill back in the wallet.

“Look at the other one.”

Charlie picked up the other wallet, and it was the same.  Not only same in the way it looked, which was like nothing Charlie had ever seen before that day, but also identical to the other wallet.  The driver’s license, the money inside, the photos, everything was identical between the two wallets.  Charlie looked to his brother for an explanation, “They’re the same?”

“They’re actually the same wallet, yes.”  Brent took the two wallets from his brother, closing them as he spoke.  “But you couldn’t let someone else see them like this.  You couldn’t spend the money.  They don’t look right.  But give me a minute...”

To Charlie’s perception, suddenly two versions of Brent - one normal and one dim - appeared, standing beside the coffee table, and two normal-looking copies of the wallet appeared resting on the table.  The normal-looking standing Brent was holding two more copies of the wallet, which appeared normal, and the dim-looking standing Brent was holding yet another two copies of the wallet that appeared to be dim.  The normal-looking standing Brent quickly handed his wallets to Charlie and took the two normal wallets from the table.  Then the dim Brent leaned over and handed the two copies of the wallet he held to the seated Brent who had already been holding them.  Then the dim Brent reached down to where the wallets had just been on the table and picked up the normal-looking wallets that weren’t there.  He did that strange, horror-movie-esque walk to the couch with the two normal-looking wallets in his hands, sat down disturbingly, and the two seated copies of Brent again disappeared.  The standing Brent sat down and opened the two wallets he now had, and Charlie opened his.

They were all identical, but now everything in them looked normal, including the money.  “When I started out, I had twenty-eight dollars.  A twenty, a five, and three ones.  If we put together all the money from the four wallets, it would be one hundred and twelve dollars.”

“A hundred and twelve.  From twenty-eight.  That can’t be possible.  Where did the other eighty-four dollars come from?”  Charlie asked this as he proceeded to pull the fifty-six dollars out of the two wallets in his possession and lay it out on the table.

“I don’t have a good explanation for that, except that it seems like the universe thinks it’s easier to duplicate things than to deal with what would happen if effects happened without causes.  But it doesn’t really matter what forces created the money as much as it matters how we handle it.  There’s a problem with the extra money.”

“What?  Does it disappear or something?”

“No, nothing like that.”  Brent paused, “at least, I haven’t noticed anything disappearing yet...”  Brent had only had a couple of opportunities to test his newfound abilities out at the hospital, and they had been in the bathroom in the middle of the night.  He wasn’t really sure what the long-term effects of duplication might be, but he hadn’t had any problems so far.  “But let’s cross that bridge when we come to it.  For now, ignoring possible weird side effects like disappearance, there’s a big problem with this money.”

“You can’t explain it on your taxes?”

“Look closer.”  He handed Charlie the four twenties.  “All four bills have the same serial number, and the same corner torn off.”  Brent reached into his pocket as his brother verified what he was saying, then held up a small piece of torn paper.  “I tore it off on the walk here, and left it in my pocket so it wouldn’t be copied.”  He handed the corner of the twenty to Charlie, who matched it to all four bills.  “It fits all four, because they’re copies of the original, and that’s the original corner.”

“Which one is the original bill?”

“I don’t know.  As far as I can tell, they’re all the same bill, all identical.  Which means that you can’t spend them all in the same place, or take them all together to the same bank.  Someone might notice they were identical.”

“So you have money from nowhere, but you can’t spend it?”

“Well, we can spend it, we just have to be careful.  We also have to be careful what we do with the rest.  We can’t leave four copies of my driver’s license just sitting around, and we can’t just throw them away.  Too many people go through the trash these days to be so careless.”

“So what can we do with them?”

“I can handle that, I think, we just have to be aware that it’s a problem.”

“Handle it how?”

“Watch.”  Brent made sure all the money from the wallets was out on the table, and held three of the wallets out in front of himself, his hands cupped a little too widely.  He waited a moment, then concentrated on that twisting feeling of shifting.  Blackness, then he was sitting next to himself again, holding three dark copies of the wallet.  He didn’t hesitate, quickly turning his head away and awkwardly placing the three wallets he held into the outstretched, cupped hands of the other copy of himself, on top of the three already there.  Only being able to see what was behind him made things a little more difficult, but Brent was beginning to get the hang of it.  He set back in his seat, and before the other version of him could say “.hctaW” he shifted again.

And it was suddenly very crowded on the couch for a moment, as he was suddenly squeezed between two other copies of himself.  He leaned back to stay out of his own way as the dim version of himself reached across to take three of six wallets from the normal-looking version of himself’s cupped, outstretched hands.  Then, with each of the two duplicates holding three copies of the wallet, both disappeared at once.  One copy of the wallet remained, on the table, and one copy of Brent, on the couch, and all $112 was laid out before them.

“Where did they go?”

“HeckifIknow.”  Brent just smiled, not worried about how this was all working, just glad that it did.  Most of what he was showing his brother had been things he’d thought of but been unable to attempt in the hospital.  Long hours, day after day without a television or a book to distract him had given Brent ample time to consider the basic problems of his new ability.  His brother seemed to be taking it in stride, somehow, and Brent asked him about it, “How are you okay with this?”

“What else am I supposed to be doing?  Calling the police to report a counterfeiting operation? I’m sure you wouldn’t demonstrate ... whatever it is you’re doing, so the only evidence is the $112 in front of me.  Maybe try to weasel out of you what hospital you came from so I can call them up to turn you over to the nice young men in the clean white coats?”  Charlie looked his brother hard in the eye, “I trust you, Brent, and I don’t want to lose you again.  This - whatever this is - is more reason to go on living than anything else in my life has been since ...” Charlie’s gaze didn’t falter, but his eyes changed, went wide and sad, “... well, you know.”

“I know, Charlie.  And I’m glad you’re taking it so well.  There’s just one more thing I want to try.  Are you sure you trust me?”

“Of course, Brent.  What is it?”

“Stand up.”  Charlie didn’t hesitate, and Brent stood up and they both walked to the open part of the room.  When Brent reached out to embrace his brother in a deep bear hug, Charlie reciprocated with all the heartfelt compassion he felt for his little brother, returned as from the dead.  Charlie thought Brent had just wanted a hug, and so didn’t expect what happened next.  Suddenly everything went black.

And then Charlie was seeing the world in a whole new way.  At first he felt like the ghost his brother had appeared to be, because while Charlie still felt like himself, he could see himself hugging Brent a few feet away.  This was no out of body experience, though.  Charlie could still feel his brother in his arms, his clothes on his back, the air on his skin.  But everything looked strange.  Like the entire world had taken on the dim quality his duplicated brother and the multiplied wallets had displayed, but also a sort of blooming inner light.  A glow.  Like everything he was seeing was on overexposed film, pushed a step too far into darkness to compensate.  Which wasn’t quite right, either.

Especially after Brent let him go, and he moved, and was overwhelmed with disorientation.  Instead of seeing what was in front of him, Charlie was seeing what was behind him, and that as though in a fun-house mirror; his eyes were having trouble focusing on anything, on communicating depth, and every time his head moved he lost his bearings again.

“.pu dnatS”  Charlie tried to turn in the direction of his brother’s strange utterance, but ended up looking away from where the duplicate he knew must be the original version of Brent was sitting, and almost fell down before the other Brent reached an increasingly accustomed arm backwards to steady him.  “Whoa, whoa, are you okay Charlie?”

“?ti si tahW  .tnerB ,esruoc fO”  Charlie’s former self continued as though not seeing what was going on.  The standing, nearly nauseous Charlie leaned against his brother and his wall and tried to get his bearings.  “I’ll be okay.”

“?em tsurt uoy erus uoy erA”  Brent spoke over himself, “It takes a little getting used to...” “...tsuj s’erehT  .llew os ti gnikat er’uoy dalg...” “...going backwards in time, I mean.”

“.wonk uoy ,llew ...”  “We’re going backwards in time?”

“What did you think?  Here, before we go back too far and it gets too crowded,” and Brent tried shifting both of them with the mere contact of his steadying hand on his brother’s arm.  “,dedworc oot steg ti dna raf oot kcab og ew erofeb ,ereH  ?kniht uoy did tahW” 

“...what’s going on now?”  The seated Charlie never finished his sentence, reacting to the appearance of four more people in his living room, two of them himself.  “It’s okay,” the standing, normal-looking Charlie answered himself as the other version of himself asked “?emit ni sdrawkcab gniog er’eW”  “...or is it?”  Charlie turned to the standing, normal-looking copy of Brent and ignored the dim-looking Brent’s backwards, stilted explanation, “what if those two of us don’t get up and reverse time, now that we’ve interrupted them?”

“Then there’ll be two of each of us, just like the wallets and the money when their course was interrupted.”

“.yako eb ll’I”  “Is it even possible for them to reverse time at the right instant now that they’ve seen us?  What if they try, but hit the wrong instant?”

“We’re just going to have to try,” said the seated Brent just before the dim, backwards Brent asked his dim, backwards brother, “?eilrahC yako uoy era ,aohw ,aohW”  “But there seems to be a sort of ...pull on things.  I can feel myself working against it every time I take something out of its normal course,” said the standing, normal-looking Brent.  “I’m willing to bet that the other me will instinctively be able to shift the two of us at the right time.  Watch.”

And the seated Charlie just went along as his seated brother drew him up to stand next to the dim-and-disoriented pair of them, and into a hug.  And at what appeared to be the same instant, the four hugging brothers disappeared. 

“See?  No problem.”

“That was really weird.  I sorta remember it both ways.”

“And do you remember how you felt while you sat there, watching yourself question what would happen?”

“I felt...” Charlie’s eyes glazed over a little as he thought back, “I felt like the other me was making a big deal out of nothing.  I knew somehow that I was going to stand up and hug you and that everything would be okay.  But I definitely didn’t remember what had happened on the first pass at the time.  Not consciously.”

“And now you remember both, right?”

“I guess so, but...”

“But it’s not quite right, is it?”

“No.  When I think about one of the two versions of events - and there isn’t much there, it was only an moment or two - the other one seems like a dream, like something I imagined.  And then when I think about the other one and it seems real, and the first memory seems like it was the dream.”

Brent just nodded in response as he crossed the room to his original position on the couch.  Charlie followed his lead, returning to his own seat.

“So what now?”

“You mean, what do I do, now that I can travel backwards and forwards in time and perfectly duplicate physical items simply by plucking them from the past?  That what now?”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“Well, I suppose that depends on what we decide about the ethics of the situation.”

“The ethics?”

“Well, for starters, what about this money?  Assuming one is not foolish enough as to get caught spending multiple bills with the same serial number in the same place, is it ethical to spend the same money twice?  Or four times?”

“Well, it’s not really stealing, is it?”

“If you can tell me what’s being stolen, and from whom... but no, I don’t think it’s stealing.”

“Doesn’t it contribute to inflation?  We’d be adding money to the economy without adding value.”

“Is it unethical to contribute to inflation, to deflate the value of your own currency?  If it is, what about purchasing things that are not at the lowest price available?  What if you know you can get a lower price for the same product at Wal*Mart, but you buy it at a higher priced store?  Doesn’t that reduce the buying power of your dollar?”

“Literally.  But is it the same thing, ethically, to shop with money that hasn’t been earned as it is to shop without concern for value?”

“What about people who shop with money they get from social security, from welfare or other government programs that give money to people that they haven’t directly or personally earned?  Is that ethical?

“Some would say it was unethical for the government to give the money to them in the first place.”

“But that isn’t the question.  The question is about whether it is ethical for the recipients of social welfare programs to spend money they haven’t earned.  Because the real question is whether it’s ethical for the two of us to spend this money that we haven’t earned in any normal way.”

“I’m not sure breaking the laws of physics counts as work.”

“I’m not sure I’m breaking the laws of physics.  On the contrary, I’m pretty sure the scientists don’t have a good grasp on the real laws of physics.  They certainly couldn’t tell I’d been altered in any way.”

“What happened?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“You’re going to have to tell me at some point, you know.”

“No.”  Brent was very serious for a moment.  “I don’t.”

“All right, all right.”

“Okay?  Now,” and Brent was suddenly light and jovial again, like nothing had happened, “the ethics question.”

“What about the other one?”

“Which other one?”

“Is it ethical to disappear something, like you did with what looked to me like six copies of your wallet at once?  To remove something from existence like that?  And what if it was money, and what if it was real, earned money?  And what if it was a person?”

“A person presents a significantly different ethical proposition than an inanimate object or a piece of paper that merely represents potential exchange value for goods and services.  But it’s another good question.”  Brent paused a long moment in thought, and Charlie didn’t seem to have an answer either.  “I don’t know, really.”

“Of course, none of these questions is as cut and dry as we’re making them sound.  What about the people who shop at places other than Wal*Mart in the hope that the extra money they’re spending on the equivalent product is going to pay for better working conditions?  Isn’t there a bigger picture than their individual purchase, where they’re assigning part of the value of each dollar to something beyond the capitol and labor that went into producing whatever it is they’re consuming?”

“If it does, the same thing goes for people who spend more money trying to protect the environment.  Better working conditions for employees is one thing, but an investment in renewing and recycling the resources used to create consumer products is a much larger one, financially, at every step of the market.”  Brent liked being able to talk to his brother like this, but didn’t want to start getting off track.  He tried to steer the conversation a little, “but is the transaction of the dollar spent at the lowest-cost for greatest tangible value ethically superior or inferior to a transaction of lower cost to value ratio, on the basis of its contribution to inflation as a whole?  Because what we really want to know is whether we can go spend the $112 on the table, right?”

“Does it really matter to you whether it’s ethical?  Knowing that unlimited resources are available to you, could you resist taking advantage of them just because you believed it was unethical?”

“Maybe.  I’ve always gotten by before.  I could find work again.”

“Okay, so let’s say that shopping at Wal*Mart isn’t morally superior; most people do.  And let’s say that people on welfare aren’t immoral by spending what has been given to them.  And let’s say that day traders on the commodities market aren’t unethical when they buy their groceries and their sports cars.”

“I’m not about to agree that day traders on the commodities market earn their living ethically.”

“That isn’t the question.  Not how they got their money, but whether spending it is ethical, remember?  We don’t think taking from the past without diminishing the present is unethical, do we?”

“I guess not.”

“We were just wondering whether adding cash to the market without adding value is ethical, right?”

“Right.”

“Then the answer is that it’s fine.  Or at least indistinguishably close to ethically neutral.”

“Fine.  So.  What now?”

“Now I suppose we have to figure out how to launder money.”

“Can I sleep on it?”

“Sure.  I always keep a room ready for you.”

“Thank you.”

“It’s nothing.  I’m glad to have you home again.”

“I’m glad to be home.”

Brent slept better that night than he’d slept in months.  He slept, and he rested.  Rest like he hadn’t been able to find in the sterile environment of the hospital, rest like he hadn’t been able to find on public benches or under bridges or even underground where he had usually gone undisturbed for days at a time.  He dreamt, and his dreams weren’t interesting or troubling enough to stick with him, dispersing from his mind like a whiff of perfume into the crisp dawn air before he even began to rouse from sleep.

When he stumbled out of the guest bedroom in the morning, Brent saw that his wallet and the $112 were undisturbed on the coffee table.  He also saw a note left next to them from Charlie:  “Went to work.  Eat whatever.  I’ll see you tonight.  -Charlie”

The day buzzed by as Brent allowed processed foods and daytime television to permeate his being after so long in isolation.  The programming was inane and almost incomprehensibly bad, but it was like a light rain on desert sands and Brent was too thirsty for input to look away.  Eventually he found one of the twenty-four-hour news networks and got sucked into the propaganda machine’s grinding wheels until the sound of Charlie’s key turning in the lock on the front door jarred his mind back to life.  He switched the TV off before his brother surprised him with unexpected pro-activity.

“I had an idea, and I brought you something.”  Charlie handed over a small, deceptively heavy package, and Brent looked inside.  “It’s gold bullion.  Unmarked.  Unregistered.  I could only afford one ounce of it, because of the daily cash limit on my debit card.  But it’s a start.”

“Do you have a plan for selling it without raising suspicion?  You can’t exactly take it back to where you bought it, identical copies in hand.”

“There are plenty of places to take it.  There are two major exchangers in town, not to mention banks, jewelers, pawn shops...  We don’t have to hold out for fair market prices to come out ahead every time.”

“Gold.”

“It’s better than cash.  Not even the alchemists figured out how to counterfeit gold.  No matter how much we come up with, it will always be real gold, right?  And no tricky serial numbers to work around.”

“Why not platinum then, or saffron?”

“Why not?”

“Well, it’s a little harder to move saffron, I suppose.”

“Right, and platinum wasn’t in my budget today.  But maybe next week we can move up to something pricier.”

“Sure, and next month we can start selling weapons-grade uranium or plutonium.  I’m sure it’s worth a thousand times more than platinum on the black market.”

“A little harder to handle, a little more dangerous clientele, a little stickier ethical question, but certainly something to discuss.”

“So while I relaxed today, you ... what, you went nuts?”

“If I went nuts, it was well before you came home, Brent.  You just woke me up.  For the first time in a long time, I didn’t feel like a puppet or a zombie.  I had something to think about, something to look forward to.  A dream.”

“And how far did you take your dream?”

“Not as far as selling nukes to terrorists, Brent.  Not as far as imagining myself driving a Hummer or covering myself in useless jewelry.”  Charlie’s voice was raised, not quite angry, but definitely eruptive.  “But how about getting out of this goddamned house?  How about getting out of a job where I have to see people glaring at me every day because they took Angela’s side in the divorce?  How about getting out of a city where every street, every restaurant, every fun thing to do just reminds me I wasn’t good enough for her?”  Brent could see tears streaming from his brother’s eyes, and Charlie’s voice trembled as he spoke now, “I’ve been trapped here, Brent, and I know it’s my own fault.  I know I could have walked away at any time, but it was like I was frozen in a time long gone, stuck to keep re-living this loss again and again.  I don’t know if I could ever have escaped if you hadn’t come along and literally un-stuck me in time, Brent.”  Charlie paused, his voice barely above a whisper, sniffling despite himself.  “I don’t know if I can go back to that life again.  I don’t think I could survive it, Brent.”

Brent didn’t know what to say, but without thinking about it he took Charlie finally into the genuine embrace of brotherly love he had only pantomimed the previous night.  Charlie shuddered and sniffled and hugged right back.  He hadn’t had anyone to turn to, anyone to talk to in so long.  It had seemed as though the entire world had turned on him at Angela’s decision to leave.  She had cheated.  He had forgiven her.  She refused counseling, refused to accept his forgiveness, refused to admit she had ever loved him.  Somehow he ended up the bad guy in people’s minds, perhaps for wanting to try to reconcile, for wanting to try to work things out.  He had been alone in his empty shell of a home, empty shell of a life, ever since.  He had been waiting for his dried-out husk to crumble to dust and blow away on a passing wind until Brent had shown up with a way to break free.  Charlie fed all this, everything that had been building up, everything that had been wearing him down, into this moment, these tears, this embrace, trying to let go of this burden so he could move forward.  Brent just knew he needed to hold on, give in, until his brother let go, gave up.

They stood there for as long as it took for Charlie’s breathing to begin to even out, his nose to stop sniffling, his entire body to stop quaking, and the tension and pain to melt away from all the muscles in his body.  Brent, who had been avoiding having to develop relationships with people largely because most of them seemed almost never to be able to share moments of such openness and honesty with each other, felt more at home in Charlie’s arms than he had felt in a very long time.

Finally, after an incalculable period of emotional down-winding, they separated.  “Let’s go to my room and get started.”  Brent led Charlie to the bedroom, and closed the door behind them.  “Take out the gold and hold it in your open hand.”  Charlie did as he was asked.  “Now, that’s one Troy Ounce, right?”  Charlie nodded.  “So it’s light.  Do you think you could toss it straight up in the air and catch it a hundred and fifty times in a row?”

“Sure,” and Charlie began tossing the small piece of unmarked gold up into the air and catching it back into the same hand.

“A little higher?”  Brent stayed on the opposite side of the bed from his brother and watched, counting in his head at first, then aloud.  “...seven, eight, nine, ten...” and on and on and on.  In a period of time that seemed shorter than he’d thought a hundred and fifty tosses would take, they reached the end, “...one forty-three, one forty-four, one forty-five, one forty-six, one forty-seven, one forty-eight, that’s fine Charlie.”  Charlie tossed it the last couple of times, and then just let it set there in his hand.

“Now what?”

“Now you wait,” and Brent closed his eyes and shifted, reversing his direction of travel through time.  He hurried over across the room to stand next to Charlie before the piece of gold began leaping out of his hand into the air.  Brent watched the timing on the first few tosses, practicing swinging his arm behind him, finding that he couldn’t reach high quite enough, then twisting his head one way so he could reach beside him in the other, and as his voice came out from across the room, “...thgie-ytrof eno ,neves-ytrof eno ,xis-ytrof eno...” Brent began knocking the gold bar out of the air and onto the bed.

Swipe, swipe, swipe, he knocked the gold out of the air, and just as with the wallet before, it didn’t prevent it from also falling back down into Charlie’s hand.  Clink, clink, clink, the gold was beginning to pile up on the bed.  “...eerht-ytxis ,owt-ytxis ,eno-ytxis...”  Up, down, up, down, the gold kept leaping out of Charlie’s hand, into the air where Brent knocked it aside, then down again until Charlie’s hand strangely grasped up into the air and pulled it down into his open hand.  “...net ,enin ,thgie ,neves...” and a few more, and then Charlie simply held the gold piece out, still.

Brent walked over, opened the door, and went out to the kitchen.  He found an empty plastic garbage bag and took it with him back to the room, closing the door behind him.  Charlie still held his hand out, staring at the gold.  Brent gathered the other pieces of gold from the bed into the garbage bag as quickly as he could, and the other version of him asked in reverse-sounding speech if Charlie thought he could toss it up and catch it over and over again.  Once Brent had all the gold in the bag, he faced away from the bed, holding the bag at arm’s length.

Brent had grasped the bag near the bulge of weight that was gathered at the bottom, with most of the length of the tall kitchen bag blooming out above his hand like a limp, monochrome flower.  It weighed about twelve pounds, and the gold strained and stretched the plastic.  As he held it there, Brent very slightly relaxed his grip on the bag, allowing it to oh-so-slowly slip down and down towards the floor.  Charlie and the other Brent walked backwards towards the door, opening it and walking through.  “This is taking too long,” Brent said quietly to himself, but he just kept letting the bag slowly slip, slip, slip.  And then it slipped a little too far and fell to the floor with a loud, hard thud.  Brent stood still, waiting, trying to get the timing right so he wouldn’t get in his own way, and when he felt enough time had passed, shifted again in time.  Brent walked out through the door and over to where he and his brother were hugging.  “It’s time, come quickly.”  He went back into the room, and the two others followed.

“What’s going on?”

“Gather around me here,” and the three of them did, as Brent explained, “I had an idea.  That bag is about to leap up off the floor into my hand.  Once it does, the three of us need to start pulling it out of my hands as fast as we can and tossing the copies aside.  I’m not going to be holding it very tightly, so a sharp tug should be sufficient to pull it away, and if it works the same as everything else, it should also still be in my hand.”  The dark colored copy of Brent lifted his arm up, as though to catch the bag.  Brent continued quickly, “Just toss the bags anywhere, we want to get as many as possible, okay?”

The bag rustled and with an unusual “duht” sound, leapt up into the dark-looking Brent’s hand.  The other Brent leapt into action, yanking down hard on the bag and in a quick flowing motion swinging it hard backward.  It hit the floor hard and slid and rolled away, but the first Brent, who had no real idea of what was going on but trusted himself, was already pulling another copy of the bag out of his own hand.  Charlie hesitated a moment, and the Brent who had brought him into the room reached in, “just go for it, as fast as you can,” throwing another bag behind him.

Then hands were in and out quickly, and caught a rhythm of pulling down and swinging back and away with bag after bag of gold.  Brent, then Charlie, then the other Brent, then Brent again and around and around.  At one point, the only one of them that was standing still muttered too softly to be heard over the noise of the others’ motion, “,gnol oot gnikat si sihT”  The bag in the time-reversed-Brent’s hands was slipping slowly up and up, rising against gravity, the unfilled top of the bag flowing slowly out to re-take on the appearance of a strange, wilted dark/white flower.  The bags on the floor were piling up, smacking and ringing and clinking and clanging against each other, and thudding and rolling when they missed each other.

Just as suddenly as it had started, it stopped.  Brent was stuck, pulling against his own strength.  As soon as he realized he was stopped, he let go and turned around.  “Okay, now we need to get these bags out of the way so no one trips on them.”  Brent was already tossing bags into the open closet, and was far enough ahead of the others that he had the gold from his side of the room out of the way in time to form a sort of bag brigade, feeding bags from the other two into the closet.  The weight of each bag wasn’t a lot, but it was enough that each bag’s progress across the room required a twist of the entire body.  The three of them worked to clear the floor while the dim, reversed Brent was bent over, feeding the gold out of the bag and onto the bed.  They just managed to toss the final bag across the room before the one that couldn’t see them walked to the door and out to put the empty garbage bag away.

“Now just stay out of the way, I guess.  Brent, in a few minutes you’ll need to come over to this side of the bed and shift backwards.”

“I can already feel it, yeah.”

Then they all just watched in silence as the pieces of gold flew up off the bed, intersected with the horror-movie-like motion of Brent’s arm, and disappeared at the moment it hit the back of his hand, over and over.  The way Brent was holding his body, his head twisted away from the action, his arm swinging away from each piece of gold as it flew up, only to be struck over and over in the back of the hand, was unnerving.  Each of them wanted to look away from that monstrous spectacle of that dimly-lit horror, but found their eyes drawn to the flash of light as each ounce of gold unsettled and lifted itself from the soft surface of the blanket and glided as if under its own power, gently through the air until it vanished.

The gold on the bed diminished, dwindled, and the last few glimmers of it disappeared into an alternate past before the creepy Brent began moving even more disgustingly - the reversed versions of his first attempts at hitting the gold.  Then both copies of Brent on that side of the bed walked around it together, turned, stopped, and disappeared.  It was just one copy of Brent and a Charlie who only remembered the stranger, abbreviated and altered version of events.  Brent grabbed a sack from the overflowing mass leaking out of the closet and brought it over to the bed, where he dumped it out.

“It’s all ... dark.”  Charlie sounded more interested than worried, still experiencing a semi-euphoric state in the aftermath of his earlier emotional release.

“Yeah, but I think if we get it all together in a neat pile on the floor, I might be able to reverse it all at once.”  Brent was already putting the gold back in the bag as he spoke, “You remember I had you toss it in the air a hundred and fifty times?”

“No...”

“Oh, right.  You didn’t go back with me, so you don’t remember it.  Well, you remember the gold on the bed that flew up and disappeared against my hand?”

“Yeah...”

“There were about a hundred and fifty of them,” Brent tried to explain what had happened and not happened and Charlie tried to follow.  “So, twelve Troy ounces in a pound, about twelve pounds of gold per bag, and how many bags?”

“Maybe ... a hundred?”

“We’ll count it later, but I was trying to give us enough time to pull a gross of bags.”

“A gross... oh!”  Charlie figured out each bag held about a gross of gold pieces and smiled, “so if you’re right that’s ... that’s over twenty thousand ounces... that’s...”  Charlie tried to work out the value of the gold from what he’d paid for one ounce that afternoon, but Brent beat him to it.

“Over thirteen million dollars at full market value right now.”

“That’s ... wow.”  Charlie was flabbergasted, and Brent just kept loading gold back into the bag in silence, appreciating the clinking of the wealth tumbling through his fingers.  “Won’t that be a lot, though?  Thirteen million dollars inflation...”

“Twenty thousand ounces of gold is less than a third of a percent of the total market, if I read the ticker information running along the bottom of the news correctly today.”  Brent had all the gold together from the first sack, and carried it out to the living room.  He set the bag down and moved to one end of the coffee table, indicating to Charlie to grab the other end, and they moved the table out of the way as he spoke.  “Assuming we can find a way to sell all the gold at once, and pretending that there were a predictable linear relationship between the value of gold and the amount actually available, our haul here would shift the market less than it’s moved almost any day in the last few years.”

They began filing back and forth from the bedroom closet to the living room with a bag in each hand on each trip out, trying to get the heavy plastic bags to pile up instead of spilling or spreading out all over the room.  “This is a lot of gold.  Twelve pounds times a hundred and fifty bags is about ... eighteen hundred pounds.  How are we going to transport almost a ton of loose gold?”

“It’s probably closer to fifteen hundred pounds, as far as figuring out how to move it goes.  Gold is weighed in Troy Ounces, right?”

The pile of bags was becoming increasingly difficult to handle, the plastic bags slipping and sliding around against each other.  “Right, yeah, they said that little piece we started with was one Troy Ounce.  Is that different from a regular ounce?”

“Definitely.  There are only twelve ounces of gold to a pound, and there are sixteen ounces in a regular pound.”

“So they’re bigger?”

“Only about 10% bigger, so the pounds are lighter overall.  About... 17% smaller, I’d guess, by actual weight.”

“I thought we were talking about actual weight.”

“Well, sort of, but because there’s two kinds of ounces and two kinds of pounds, going to something like grams and kilograms makes more sense and causes less confusion.”

“Alright, alright, the point is that it’s heavy, right?”

“Obviously.”

“So how do we move it?  Physically?”

“Depends on a few things, I suppose.”

“This is the last one,” Charlie handed Brent the final bag, and he added it to the unstable mound.

“Alright, let’s see if this works.”  Brent stood back for a moment, waiting silently, counting out the seconds in his mind, then shifted.

Standing again beside himself, Brent stepped towards the mound of gold and climbed upon it.  As though trying to mount it or hug it, Brent spread himself out over the pile, stretching his arms and his legs out and down around as much of the gold as he could wrap himself around.  He shifted again, and immediately realized his mistake as the second pile underneath him, overlapping the first in places and not quite as huge, spilled all over the floor.

Brent was barely able to extract himself from the mess before the time-reversed version of himself stood with apparent ease and weightlessness, moved across the room to stand beside the third Brent, and disappeared.  “Okay, that didn’t work out so well.”

“I think you ... maybe, should you have been holding the gold when you reversed the first time, and then switched?”  Charlie didn’t really know, and still wasn’t one hundred percent clear what the logic of the dark and light items was.

“I suppose we’re going to have to do this the hard way.”

“What’s the hard way?”

“One or two at a time.”  Brent rubbed his hands hard against his temples, squinting as though with a headache from hard thought.  “Alright, well, uhhh...  Let’s get these separated first, and I’ll figure something out while we move.  We’ll put the ones that are normal in the bedroom, and the ones that need to be shifted ...”

“The dining room is out of the way.”

“Fine.  We’ll put the ones that need to be shifted in the dining room.”

The two of them set to work.  They tried not to spill any more gold than had already been spilled.  They tried to keep the loose pieces that appeared normal from getting mixed up with pieces that needed to be made normal again.  They carried a ton and a half of precious metals from room to room, a dozen or two dozen pounds at a time, light, shiny gold to the bedroom and dark, weird and waxy-looking gold to the dining room.  Together it took them about half an hour, and neither of them made more than a few grunts and groans of noise the entire time.  Finally, with the last of the gold cleaned up and sorted out, they collapsed into chairs at Charlie’s dining room table, out of breath.

“So.”

“So.”

“Any ideas?”

“I think so.  Something we can try, anyway.  How much energy do you have left?”

“We’re going to have to stop for dinner, take a break.  I figured out I’ve probably lifted well over a ton of gold tonight already.  I have a desk job, you know?  No heavy lifting or sustained exertion.”  Charlie was still gasping a bit between sentences.  “The heaviest thing I carry is the six copies of my TPS report every week, one per boss.”

“You still have six bosses?”

“It was down to four until the re-org last month.  Now I spend more time in meetings about my work than I actually spend doing my work.  One of them got assigned to a department that was never funded, and now his entire job is to manage me.”  Charlie was exasperated in a different sort of way now, thinking about the insanity thriving in his workplace, “Yet he has no real authority, so he spends half his time meeting with my other superiors to get permission to give me instructions that make it harder to get anything done.”

“Which is why you’ll never see me working in a cube farm, like you.”

“You’d better believe I’m out of there after all this,” and Charlie didn’t even move to indicate the twenty-five million dollars’ worth of precious metals they’d just exhausted themselves moving around the house, they both knew their lives were never going to be the same.

“Alright, so.  Dinner sounds good.  Wanna go out, or...”

“If we eat here we can get this over with quicker.”

“If we go out, we can take a longer break before I make you lift another three thousand pounds.”

“All of it?  By myself?”

“Well, this half,” and this time Brent did nod his head toward the heap of apparently-shadowed bags huddled like an elephant in the corner.  “but twice per bag.  And I’ll be lifting each bag once, plus reversing direction in time a couple thousand times.”

“Does it hurt to do that?”

“No, but it takes a certain amount of effort.  And I’m just guessing that my plan will work - if I can’t aim my reversed self as well as I hope, it’s going to take a lot longer to get this done.  And if it gets to be too much for me, we may have to quit before we get through all the gold.”

“Quit for good?”

“We’ll have to wait and see.  But even if we have to settle for the millions in gold in the bedroom, I have a feeling we’ll find a way to get by.”

“You don’t really think...”  Charlie didn’t want to say what he was thinking.

“That our first experiment with this new ability could use it up?  Not really.  If anything, the more I use it, the easier it seems to get.  But I thought I’d warn you that it does take some effort, and I may want to stop before we’re through.”

“Understood.”

“So do you want to go get something to eat, or do you want to get back to lifting before your body notices you’ve stopped?”

“May as well try to keep up our momentum, I suppose.  Unless you have some objection?”

“Not really.  I figure I’ll have plenty of time to be picky about what I eat once we’re both obscenely rich.  Frozen dinners again?”

“Sure thing,” and Charlie grabbed a couple more blue boxes from his freezer and in minutes had two plastic-wrapped servings of too-hot-to-eat, too-processed-to-call-food dinner on the table in front of them.  In the midst of the hunger from the previous hours’ exertions, neither brother seemed to care about nutrition facts or gourmet flavorings that may or may not have survived being processed, frozen, shipped, almost inevitably thawed and re-frozen, bought, set in Charlie’s freezer for an indeterminate span, and then blasted with a thousand watts of microwave energy with little regard to suggested heating directions.  It was hot, it filled them, and that was enough.

Cleanup was nearly instantaneous, no dishes to wash, plastic forks thrown away with the packaging that served as plates and they were ready to begin again.  “Okay, what I’m going to try is to control where I physically shift to when I change direction in time.  If I can do that, this should go pretty quickly.”  Brent grabbed a couple of the odd-looking bags from the corner and set them in front of an empty seat at the dining room table, and pulled the chair out far enough to sit in it.  “Help me pull all the chairs out like this.”  There were six chairs around the round table; the top could be pulled off to reveal a hexagonal poker table that Charlie hadn’t used in a long time, and the two of them quickly had the chairs spaced out from the table instead of tucked in under it.  “Good, now I’m going to set this up so there’s three sets of bags on the table,” Brent spaced the bags out evenly around the table, in front of every other chair.  “And I need you to stand here,” Brent indicated for Charlie to stand between two chairs, “and be ready to pick up two bags of corrected gold from the table in front of that seat,” and Brent indicated a chair without anything on the table in front of it, “which you’ll put on the other side of the room.”

“Starting a new pile?”

“Right, starting a new pile.”  Brent set down one seat clockwise from the chair he’d indicated he’d be in.  “And then you’ll do the same thing again, but I’ll be there,” and Brent indicated the seat two seats clockwise from where he was currently seated, and Charlie nodded as though he knew what was going on.  “But then you need to get two new bags from the old pile and stand right here,” Brent was very clear to indicate the space directly beside him, between the chair he was seated in and the vacant chair to his right, “because you’ll have to set the bags on the table where these are now, and then turn and take two corrected bags from the table where I’m sitting now.  Got it?”

“I ... I think so.”  Charlie felt sure he would understand once things were moving along.

“And once you set the two new corrected bags in the new pile, you’ll come back to where you are now with two bags that need to be fixed and repeat that motion, setting them down to your right before taking new bags from me at your left.”

“And you will be ...”

“Getting dizzy, probably.  Assuming this will work at all.  So I’ll keep popping around and around to my right, correcting bags, and you’ll keep placing them on the table and taking the fixed ones.”

“I’m going to be running back and forth a lot, aren’t I?”

“I’m going to be doing this two to three times longer than you are, so no complaining.  If it takes you half an hour to carry bags back and forth around the table, it means I’ll be bouncing back and forth in time and around and around the table for at least an hour, maybe an hour and a half.”

“Because you’ll be going forward and backward and forward and backward and...”

“...and so on, yes.  Are you ready?”

“Are you?”

Brent picked up the bags in front of him and started counting quietly, “One, two, three, four, five,” then shifted his direction in time, concentrating on the chair to his right.  Happily, he found himself seated exactly where he had hoped to be, with two normal bags of gold in his hands, and a copy of him at his left saying “,evif ,ruof” and Brent quickly set the bags down in front of him and concentrated on the chair to his right and shifted in time again before he heard himself say “,enO”.  “Quick, take those,” and Brent indicated to his now-close-at-hand brother the visually un-disturbing bags on the table to his left and began counting again at one just as the other version of himself got to five and the two others disappeared.  “One, two, three, four, five,” and with two new bags in his hands, he was gone again to his right.

Brent set the corrected bags in front of him, and before two more copies of himself could appear across the table from him, he concentrated on the seat to his right and shifted again.  He looked over to Charlie and saw that he had only just turned away with the first two bags.  Brent waited for his brother to set down the bags and return, which took just a little longer than it took the other copies of him to do their thing and disappear again.  Then it all started over, and before long they settled into a rhythm.  It was a lot harder work than the initial duplication had been, and by the end of it both Brent and Charlie were exhausted and sore and wanted nothing else than to collapse into their beds for a long night’s sleep.

When they woke in the morning, the tens - maybe hundreds - of millions of dollars’ worth of gold in heaps all around the house were given nary a second look by either of them.  It was a combination of resentment for their continued soreness and of apathy because it had all somehow become so normal to them in so short a time to have it around.  They ate breakfast in silence for a while, then Charlie spoke the first complete sentences either of them had uttered since before the bizarre round-and-round of the former evening.

“So now we’re rich beyond our dreams.  What do we do with your power next?”

“What’s the cliché?  Lots of money, a fast car, a big house, and beautiful women?”

“I think we can get those things with the money.  What else?”

“Well, I probably can’t cure cancer by going back and forth in time.”

“We could keep making money and donate it to cancer research.”

“But that’s not really any more to do with my ability  than the last couple of days have been.  Be creative.”

“Well, if you really want to get directly involved in saving people, you could...”  Charlie paused, trying to think of a way to put his suggestion that wouldn’t sound totally crazy, or dangerous.  “Well, you could listen to a police scanner, go to crime scenes, watch what happened while going backwards through time, and if possible prevent the crime from occurring or anyone from getting hurt.  Or if that was too much, you could just call in an anonymous tip to the police before anything happened, and let them take care of it for you.”

“Sure, or buy up a stack of newspapers and read them as I went back in time to the previous day to warn people of catastrophes, like that guy on that show.”

“Early Edition, right.  You could do that.”

“I don’t exactly want to live out a TV drama.”

“Sure, fine, you suggest something.”

“Well, the news of the future isn’t such a bad idea, but not for every day.  But once we figure out how to turn all this metal into money and get it invested, it wouldn’t hurt to keep an eye out for stocks and futures with big growth periods to invest in.  If you know exactly when to get out of an investment, it takes a lot of the risk out.”

“That’s still just money.  We need to think bigger.  What are we going to do with the money?  What good can we do with this power besides just manipulating the economy for our own benefit?”

“I don’t know.  We can try that police scanner thing, but I don’t exactly want to get shot at.  What if I die going backwards in time?  The effects would be ... totally unpredictable.”

“So think bigger.  Maybe we could ... I don’t know, maybe we could stop the outbreak of some disease in a third world country.  Find out where a population has recently been devastated, go back in time to before the trouble started, and use our monetary resources to get the population vaccinated or the water supply cleaned or whatever.  Save hundreds or thousands of lives at a time by giving up a few months watching time tick backward.”

“That sounds dreadfully boring, being unable to interact with anyone for months and months.”

“But wouldn’t the people’s lives saved be worth it?  And we could catch up on our reading.  maybe learn something useful on the way, like the local language.”

“Sure, and become experts on everything that happened in the world in the period we were traveling through.  Learn months’ worth of financial data, wo