Page 76 of Ideal Life

She did it a total of seven times. By the last undo, she was nauseous and her head felt like it was cracking open, and then she fell asleep before the level 6 live stream even started.

When she woke up, level 6—version eight—had ended, and Sam had lost identically.

“Seat open at table twenty-three.”

Talia staggered into her bed, so ill that it felt as if every single cell in her body was throbbing, threatening to burst and spill out their insides. Her skull was all migraine and no brain; she’d had to shut down Ideal Life Queen Elizabeth after the second rewind because the royal bee was whirling herself into a tizzy with concern.

Short of rewinding and calling Sam during his earlier break to tell him Louise’s future cards, it seemed nothing would change.

Sam would never cheat, of course. She had only hoped that by turning back time, it would have given him an opportunity to make a different decision.

But he hadn’t. Why not? Talia tried her best to think through her pounding headache, and all she could conclude from the evidence of all these “microexperiments” was that things didn’t change when she rewound, unless she was there to effect the change.

Talia buried her face in a pillow.

Sam needed the winnings to keep Lighthouse Books afloat. He was such an earnest person, doing the work of running a bookstore to encourage a love of reading in a world where shallower, more passive entertainment was easier to achieve. People who swam upstream to try to do good ought to be rewarded. It wasn’t fair that life was harder for them.

But was this really about Sam? Or was it subconsciously about herself?

Because it wasn’t only about wishing that Sam could have made a different decision in the tournament, was it? It was also about wishing that she could have made a different choice about signing the acquisition agreement with Omni. But now Talia and Ideal Life were trapped on a path they couldn’t veer from, like being locked in on a roller coaster. You couldn’t get out once the car left the station. Not unless she magically had a million dollars with which to pay the termination fee to stop the ride and get out of the deal.

Talia bolted upright in her bed, even though a flash of pain shot through her head.

The prize at the poker tournament was a million dollars. And it was only half an hour away in San Jose. It was also an open competition that anyone could enter. Registration had closed only last night, and her recent stock market investments meant she had enough money for the $5,000 buy-in fee.

Sam couldn’t win the Summer Million. But maybe Talia could.

Talia

Talia had played poker in college, but it had been years, and she’d never played in a professional tournament. Still, she turned the watch dial back to yesterday, just before midnight when registration closed.

Here she was again, before she went for a run, before Erin hit her with her car.

How many actual hours had it been since the first time Talia was here?

But her brain was so scrambled from going back and forth she couldn’t get a grasp on the answer. With all the redos for Sam, she felt lost in time, although ironically, she hadn’t made any forward progress.

Talia looked at the clock: 11:50 p.m.

A fog of pain closed in on her mind.

Wait—why was she here? Talia looked around her apartment, her thoughts muddled in the murkiness of her brain.

She blinked. She’d rewound because…

Oh, right. She’d come back to sign up for the poker tournament.

And yet, with that clarified, Talia still hesitated. On the morality spectrum, where did this fall between buying BiomeLabs stock before a market surge and sneaking winning lotto tickets into the past? One had seemed acceptable to her (maybe not virtuous, but acceptable), while the other had felt obviously unethical, even though she couldn’t put a finger on exactly why they were different.

Talia’s breathing sped up.

Had her moral compass broken and been replaced by the watch?

Ideal Life Queen Elizabeth: It appears that you’re experiencing stress. Would you like suggestions to calm your mind? How about exercise?

“What? How did you get turned back on?” Oh, wait—Talia had rewound again past the moment she’d shut her Ideal Life app off. She dismissed it again now, and Queen Elizabeth flew away.

Before Talia could change her mind, she created an account on the Summer Million website and registered.