Page 39 of Ideal Life

Talia frowned as she flopped onto the purple couch in her office. “I’m not hurting anyone. Think of it this way—what if yesterday I had just happened to buy BiomeLabs stock without knowing anything. It would’ve just been a normal stock market transaction.”

Sam sighed. She could hear the sound of books being stacked on top of one another, the quiet thump of hardcover on hardcover.

“You could buy some stock, too?” Talia said. “I could go back and tell you to invest your recent poker winnings.”

“No, thanks.”

“Why not? Six thousand dollars—minus the few bucks you spent at Taco Bell—would turn into thirty grand today. You could relax a little about the bookstore’s bills.”

“I don’t know…”

“How about this? I’ll rewind and talk to Past Sam about it. And if Past You is also unsure, then I’ll leave you out of it.”

He laughed at that. “Why do you think that the me from twenty-four hours ago is going to think any differently? Besides, aren’t you supposed to be on Omni’s campus yesterday?”

Crap. Talia had forgotten about that. As much fun as she’d had on the Segway and with impressing the Omni execs, she didn’t really feel like redoing that all again, just so she could put in a stock trade in the middle of it.

She couldn’t just rewind to yesterday afternoon when the meeting was over, either, because the stock market would already be closed.

Was having to go through the long Omni meeting worth it?

Talia thought of her student loans. College hadn’t been cheap, and she’d scraped her way through grad school on teaching assistant stipends.

So yes, it was worth it.

“Happy book-release day, Sam. I’ll talk to you yesterday.”

She called Sam from the Segway, on the way to the Omni meeting.

But Future Him had been right; Past Sam was still wary of buying BiomeLabs stock. He couldn’t put his finger on why he didn’t want to do it, but it just didn’t sit right with him.

Talia had come this far, though, so she wasn’t going to miss the opportunity.

She hung up with him, then invested all $5,000 in her savings account in BiomeLabs.

Maybe she could have fast-forwarded through the Omni meeting and it would have stayed the same. But she was nervous about it—this wasn’t just fast-tracking check-in at the reception desk—and she decided not to risk it.

So Talia went to the meeting and nailed it again. In fact, this time she was even wittier, and their CEO, Jack Zimmer, and the rest of their executive team liked her even more than the previous yesterday. “I’m very impressed with your business acumen,” Jack had said. “It’s uncanny—some of the ideas you suggested matched mine before I could even voice them!”

The rest of yesterday had been inconsequential enough that Talia felt it was okay to forward through it. It took a while, since she had learned not to turn the watch crown too fast.

But that also meant that Talia felt like she had spent a lot of time patiently rewinding twenty-four hours to buy BiomeLabs stock, then getting herself back where she belonged twenty-four hours later.

What a disconcerting sensation, to be exhausted by time passing personally for you, while no time at all had passed for anyone else.

This seemed like a physics problem for Sam: How do you keep track of the time you spend moving through time?

If time is known as the fourth dimension, would the time inside of time be a fifth dimension? Or something else even more inexplicable?

Regardless, here Talia was again, back on the purple couch in her office, worn out before her new day began.

She stumbled over to her computer; she was dizzy, an aftereffect of going backward and forward in such a short span, even though she’d done it slowly.

Talia logged into her investment account, and there it was—BiomeLabs stock, worth five times as much as she’d bought it for yesterday.

$25,000.

Her smile was so bright satellites probably picked up on it from outer space.