Page 9 of Ideal Life

Could she go forward again? Could she return to where she’d started?

Shh, don’t panic, she thought. If she couldn’t, it wasn’t a big deal to redo a single day.

Still, her heart beat a little faster.

But the most important thing right now was that Talia was being given a chance to stop the murder of an innocent person. She shouldn’t waste the opportunity with worrying about whether she could fast-forward, or how this was possible at all. You didn’t look a wish horse in the mouth. (Yes, she knew that wasn’t the actual saying, but close enough.)

First things first. She turned on the light, then crossed the room to get her laptop. Talia lived in a studio apartment—the bedroom, living room, and kitchen were all a single space—because she spent most of her waking hours in the Ideal Life offices anyway. It didn’t make sense to pay astronomical Bay Area rent on a bigger apartment she was never in.

She also lived frugally because she took only a modest salary from Ideal Life; Talia wanted her startup to be able to use its resources for getting better, rather than paying her. And the Omni money wouldn’t come through until the deal closed. So Talia didn’t have much by way of furniture, either. There was a small Ikea dining table and chairs, a single bookshelf, and her bed. The only decoration in the apartment was a waist-high robot sculpture made of old computer parts that Sam had found at a flea market; it stood by the door holding a tray for keys and other miscellany.

Talia opened up her laptop and logged into Ideal Life. As CEO, she had access to everything on her dashboard. There were real-time performance metrics, including currently active users, server response times, and a panel on system health indicators like error rates and API status. Under the more technical section of the dashboard, she could see bug reports, cybersecurity alerts, and details about things like resource utilization. And of course, there were all the customer profiles.

Ideal Life’s chief privacy officer, Sara Trankjaer, would be upset over what Talia was about to do. But what Sara didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her, and if Talia didn’t do this, then someone would die.

She found Rebecca Lawrence’s profile and double-clicked. A new window popped up, populated with the personal history Rebecca had provided to Ideal Life, as well as her brain-activity logs for the three months she’d been using Ideal Life’s app. That invention—wireless brain monitors in the form of small circular stickers—had been Talia’s innovation during her PhD.

But she wasn’t interested in Rebecca’s brain-activity log right now. What Talia wanted was the right side bar of Rebecca’s profile, where a drop-down menu gave the following actions:

Export Data

Issue Warning

Suspend Temporarily

And finally, a red button that read Freeze Account.

“Gotcha,” she said.

But Talia’s cursor hovered over the red button without clicking.

Just a touch of her fingertip, and she would literally erase the past.

If it worked.

Her heart was trying to throttle itself out of her chest. Was this really happening? Could it really happen?

Her Ideal Life Friend, the cartoon bumblebee wearing a crown, appeared as an augmented reality image, overlaid onto what Talia was seeing through her Omni 3D glasses. The posh British voice came through tiny speakers in the Omni 3Ds.

Ideal Life Queen Elizabeth: Are you feeling all right? I am detecting some hyperactivity in your left amygdala, which may indicate heightened emotions.

“Dismiss!” Talia said. “And ignore my brain-activity indicators for the rest of the day.” She couldn’t have Queen Elizabeth piping up every two seconds when Talia was trying to do something that was obviously going to be stressful.

Obediently, the bee flew off the Omni 3Ds’ display.

“Okay, focus,” Talia said, eyes back on her computer. “I can do this. I should.”

But what were the downstream effects of changing the past?

It’ll be worth it, she told herself.

Talia clicked on the red button and entered her employee passkey to confirm the action.

ACCOUNT FROZEN.

“Holy shit. It worked.” She let out a long breath. Thank god.

Rebecca Lawrence was now locked out of the Ideal Life app, which meant she would never see the suggestion later today that she should “eliminate” Gabe Marques.