I shook away the voice with another pull of my margarita. There was a question trying to bubble out of me while I watched them. I leaned back and loaded it up.

“Just how does the machine work?”

Silence settled over our table. Yusuf looked to Kaori and I got the sense that I’d stepped in it. In the restaurant around us, the other Compound staffers were gathering their shopping bags and closing checks. We’d be heading back to real life, soon enough.

“It shouldn’t,” Yusuf mumbled. “The Envisioner should not work.”

Kaori leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms as I listened to Yusuf. The universe is made up of a bunch of particles that interact in predictable ways, he said. From the faraway look in his eyes, I knew to settle in for a long tutoring session. The only way you could theoretically predict the future is if you knew—with infinite accuracy—the positions and velocities of every one of these particles. Never mind that you can’t know both the position and velocity of a particle at the same time. Never mind that no computer can calculate anything with infinite precision. Never mind the randomness that seems hard-wired in a universe barreling towards disorder. The never minds kept building up and I understood maybe half of what he was saying by the time he got to the Second Law of Thermodynamics. He still wasn’t convinced that this wasn’t some big hoax. Sure, have a blast getting theoretical about alternate universes, but it’s not like you can jump into one and prove it’s even there.

I waggled my eyebrow at Kaori. “Thoughts from the director?”

“I’ve been trying to get Yusuf to relax a bit. Breathe and be more present.”

“Yeah, but what do you think about the machine?”

“Everything he says is right,” she said, shrugging. “But at the same time, here we are.”

That was her catch-all answer to anyone who complained about the mind-fuck impossibility of what they were doing.

“Uncharacteristically imprecise,” Yusuf said.

“Oh, come on,” Kaori chirped. “Have a little faith.”

Yusuf clammed up after that. I think if I was a scientist being told that by another scientist I’d probably flip a table. Kaori paid for us and the rest of the Compound’s stragglers in the restaurant before slipping her beige sun visor back over her brow.