I already knew that the machine told the future. Well—a future, Yusuf corrected me. The most likely one, and sometimes they could get it to cough up hints about the present. Kaori had told him that the machine could also model past events but outright banned everyone from going down that rabbit hole. The past is masturbatory, she’d said, because all you find out is that everyone lied or otherwise tried to kill each other, and that only victors get to tell their stories, which was nothing new. They were there to shape the future and with all the Theater’s cameras and shift logs, anyone sleuthing about the past would be canned. Already, Kaori had thrown out one of the researchers who’d been caught trying to ask the Envisioner what had happened during the month that the machine had been on the International Space Station for preliminary study before heading to Earth.

To commune with the machine, you had to hold two dials on one of the panels and speak into a small microphone. The answer popped up on the screens or you could print it out. The answers were often evasive, incomplete, or half in whatever language Figueiredo and his team spoke. Kaori and her researchers were still calibrating the Envisioner to work in English. Here, Yusuf lost me with talk about dice-roll sessions and ambient language and I pictured Kaori reading kids’ books to the machine and tucking it in at night.

Annoying, though, was that the machine seemed to have—and here Yusuf looked a little embarrassed—a temperament. The answers got wonky depending on how you asked and maybe who was asking. For starters, Kaori couldn’t get the machine to give her a straight answer about how I was involved, because it seemed to be confusing me with Figueiredo. And he’d probably restricted the machine from answering questions about himself to keep anyone from snooping. Sometimes—like when you asked about events too far in the future—the screens spat out lines and lines of equations the researchers couldn’t make sense of. Or the answer was a bunch of electron shell diagrams, or star charts of constellations either too distant to see or viewed from some other planet.

The sun and all of Yusuf’s words fried my brain. The gross cafeteria dinner churned around on spin-cycle in my stomach. I was trying not to puke as we were jogging, with each sentence that mentioned something about “this universe” or “the other you” just making me more nauseous.