07:30 hours—Get Zora up for school and make her breakfast.

08:30 hours—Drive Zora to school. A car accident on I-5 caused major delays, which resulted in us being twenty-five minutes late for Zora’s first class. I promise her a milkshake if she “forgets” to tell that piece of information to her mother.

09:45 hours—Return to the workshop, where I spend the next several hours going over my notes from the previous day. I admit that this is a little strange to watch. The “notes” I’m going over are the notes that I’m writing right now. I’m watching myself go over the same notes in the future, even as I move my hand to write them. Extraordinary.

14:23 hours—Break for lunch. Natasha has informed me that there’s leftover roast chicken in the fridge, but I leave the workshop to get a burrito from the taco truck down the street instead. Shh.

. . . And that brings us to where we are now. I have to admit, it’s excruciatingly boring to watch myself live an entire day. It’s occurring to me that I’m not a very interesting person.

In any case, I have enough data now to continue with my experiment, and so it’s time to go home.

Or, rather, to my past home. Present home? It’s impossible to keep all of this straight.

UPDATE—

JUNE 21, 2074

15:06 HOURS

Okay! I’ve returned to the present timeline with my notes, and I’m ready to proceed with the current experiment. My mission was to change one small part of the day that I just witnessed my future self living.

I’ve seen that I chose to eat a burrito for lunch. Tomorrow, though, I’m going to change my mind and have pizza instead. Will I be successful? Only time will tell.

UPDATE—

JUNE 22, 2074

14:51 HOURS

Here we go! I’m back in the future, trying to live my life as though I don’t know that my past self is hiding outside of the window directly behind my head, watching my every move and recording it in the very notebook I’m currently writing in. My plan was to choose something different for lunch: pizza instead of a burrito.

I imagine that whoever is reading this is at the edge of their seat with anticipation, so I won’t make you wait much longer. I successfully ate a slice of pizza.

I referred to the journal as soon as I ate the slice of pizza, half expecting to see that the entry had changed. But there, in black in white, in my own damn handwriting, was the word burrito.

Cassandra 1 was a success. Humans have free will. We are indeed capable of changing the future.

17

Dorothy

NOVEMBER 7, 2077, NEW SEATTLE

Dorothy was not prepared for the crowd that awaited them on the docks the next morning. She saw them from the air as she and Roman flew toward the anil, and they had a magnetic hold on her gaze. Hundreds of people, standing shoulder to shoulder, cheering and holding signs, faces upturned to watch the time machine fly overhead.