Future Perfect Tense

Something just wasn’t right. It was lodged in my head like a particularly thorny equation, my subconscious doing everything it could to turn it over and over in my mind. I was missing some key piece of information. Something didn’t add up.

I had convinced myself that all of this was on me. That the complete collapse of my relationship with my best friend was due to me suddenly coming onto him, and him not knowing how to deal with that. I wouldn’t have blamed him - there were any number of valid reasons he had to turn me down, not least of which being that I had previously told him just how much of a lesbian I was. But aside from that, I knew I had plenty of flaws. I had always believed that the two of us worked together because we balanced each other out, with him keeping me grounded and me showing him how it felt to fly. But I understood why he wouldn’t want to sign up for a romantic relationship where he was stuck having to take care of my numerous shortcomings like always: my indecisiveness and fickle nature, my preternatural ability to find trouble, the times when my huge ego came suddenly crashing down to earth and I was trapped in a pit of self-loathing.

So, yeah, there were plenty of reasons he’d reject me, albeit politely, and it also made sense that he’d start to distance himself once he saw how difficult it was for me to totally let go of how I felt about him. I mean, I really tried! But it was so hard to untangle my loving him as a best friend from my loving him as… as someone I wanted more from.

But his reaction to the answers he got today were bothering me. The first one was… Well, I couldn’t read too much into him and Samantha breaking up, right? Relationships were hard, and it felt like a minor miracle for two people to actually work together. Maybe he and Sam wanted different things in life and that was fine.

But the second? Ellie? On paper she should be everything he wanted - and I should know, because I thought for the longest time that she was everything that I wanted. And even after the vision, he said he loved her, and that he loved his kids. Plus, the more I thought about it the more I was certain those kids had to be criminally adorable. But he still didn’t sound happy about it. He sounded hollowed out, empty. I didn’t understand - what did he want, if it wasn’t that? Who did he want to be?

It was a conundrum. And I was a person who couldn’t let a tricky problem just be. I had to solve it.

I went back over to the Decision Vision, popping open a panel in the lower section of the console. One of the things that Nicky had convinced me of - and one of the things I had been slacking off on lately - was that documentation and logging of my projects was vital for proper debugging. And so the Decision Vision maintained a complete record of its usage. I thought I knew what I had just typed, but I had to check everything, just in case. What if I had messed up? What if that mistake had somehow altered the vision?

I stuck my head into the space under the machine and located the dusty set of buttons. Flicking on a few switches brought the secondary digital readout in the backup compartment back to life. It worked fine:

RUN #18 - #PRIMARYUSER dates Eleanor Perez

I clicked again, going back further.

RUN #17 - #PRIMARYUSER dates Samantha Nichols

No, both of them looked correct. I sighed. But I suppose it was worth the try. Nicky always said that I had to be thorough, that skipping steps only got me into more problems. The more that I missed him and what our relationship used to be, the more that even his light scolding seemed charming and just a sign that he cared.

Still vaguely thinking about Nicky and what our relationship used to be, my finger brushed the button to scroll back.

RUN #16 - #PRIMARYUSER was born a girl

…What?

I read the text again. We never asked the machine this. I would have remembered it! I fumbled over the controls as I tried to figure out how I’d set up access to the time log. But then that came up, and… it revealed that run #16 happened over four months ago.

This had to be the last thing that had run, right before Nicky started growing distant. Before I freaked out by him pulling away and confessed to him. Before he disappeared from my life.

And I didn’t remember it at all. Had he used the Decision Vision on his own? Without me? For this?

…What had he seen?

“Izzie?”

I jolted upright, banging my head on the inside of the machine.

“Ow…” I said, rubbing my head as I extracted myself.

“Are you okay?” he hovered, looking vaguely worried. Whatever disassociation or discomfort he had been feeling before, it was either overwhelmed by concern for me or else locked back under the self-image he was trying to project.

“Y-yeah.”

“What were you doing?” He glanced down towards the open panel and I immediately stepped in front of it to block any further view.

“Just making sure everything worked right,” I lied. Wait, why was I lying? Suddenly it felt like I had too much information and didn’t know how to fit it all together.

“Right. Well, I just forgot my phone. So…”

I sucked in a breath. “Wait.”

He froze. “Yes?”

“I need you to use the Decision Vision one more time.”

“Why?”

Thoughts raced through my head. “I think something is wrong with it. I just need one more test.”

He looked uncertain. I knew what he had to be thinking: what was the point? If the machine worked only for him, and he had no desire to use it ever again, especially now…

“Please,” I said. “For me?”

He looked up at me, and gave me that shy, fond smile, the one that always melted my heart. “Okay.”

As he walked back to the machine, and started putting the headgear back on, my mind spun in circles. What did it mean? What did it all mean? Why would he ask the machine what life would be like as a girl? Is that… is that what he wanted? 

What did he feel like when he experienced that vision? There was no way of knowing. Other than the fact that shortly afterwards he started pulling away. Had some alternate version of me treated him badly? So badly that he couldn’t stand to be around me anymore? 

This is why we had originally agreed to always both be there together when we used the machine. Because I could hardly bear the thought of him experiencing some great realization without me there to cheer him on, just as much as I would have hated for him to suffer a dark vision without me there to comfort him.

I had to know what was going on. I had to see his reaction.

But why had he phrased it that way? Normally in our testing, we had focused on decisions under our control. Even in the silly stuff - what if we went to get pancakes vs what if we went to get burgers. It was important, particularly when we were testing out the power to make alternate decisions. Whether or not Nicky had been born a girl wasn’t Nicky’s decision, per se. Right?

And so, when I typed something in, it was ever so slightly different.

As I looked up at Nicky, he finished securing the metal crown and gave me a smile and a thumbs up.

I took a deep breath.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered. He must have heard me. His eyebrows drew together in confusion, but then I pulled the lever.

The machine whirred and hummed, and the crown glowed for a long time this time. 

One minute passed, then two.

And just as I was considering cutting the power, worried that something had gone wrong and he’d never return, the brightness faded away.

“Nicky? Are you…?”

He burst into tears.

I banged my shin against some corner of the machine as I stumbled past the console, sputtering and cursing at myself. I reached Nicky, and wrapped him in a huge hug.

“Are you okay?” I said.

He sobbed into my shoulder, and I squeezed him tightly.

“I’m so sorry.” Tears sprung to my eyes too. I had made a mistake, again. I had fucked up.

“Why would you do this to me?” he said shakily, but I was asking myself the same question.

“I just— I— I just want you to be happy!”

“But Izzie—” His words were cut off by another sob, and he slumped even further. I tried to hold him upright. “I can’t… Not with you. You know that. I told you that. I’m… I’m not…” 

“What?” I froze.

I gently pulled apart from him, holding onto his shoulders and getting him to face me.

“Nicky, what did you see? What did I do to you? Did I hurt you? Oh, god, is this why you hate me?”

“No! I couldn’t ever hate you, Izzie.” Nicky stared down at the floor. “I— We were dating. I was…” His voice dropped away to nothing.

I wasn’t sure if the fluttering in my stomach was joy or sheer panic or what.

My mouth was suddenly very dry. “Were you… were you happy?” I croaked out.

He looked up at me, his mouth twisting in wry despair. “Yes. So unbelievably happy.”

“Then why are you crying?”

His eyes slid shut. “Because it’s impossible. Because I’ve seen this before.”

“What?”

“Or close enough to this.” He took a deep, shuddering breath. “I asked the machine what my life would be like if I was a girl. And what it showed me was us, together. And so happy. I knew then that that’s what I really wanted. To be with you… and to be a girl. But I knew at the same time that it was impossible. Because… because I’m just not, no matter what I might want. I can’t be that person for you. And it’s not fair for me to hang around in your life and get in the way of you being happy with a girl you can fully love.”

I was crying too, and now as I pulled Nicky back into a hug, I was getting the front of his shirt wet. “You idiot,” I sobbed, pounding lightly at his chest. “Idiot, idiot, idiot.”

“And so when you asked it this time what my life would be like if I dated you… It must have basically reverted back to the previous question. Because that’s the timeline in which I dated you. It’s just not one I can ever reach. I know that.”

“You idiot,” I repeated. “That’s not what I put in.”

He went silent for a moment. “What?”

“Was this time really the same as before? Exactly the same?”

Nicky shook his head. “No, but close. We were together, and happy. We were lying on the couch, watching a movie, and then you pushed me down, and…” His face grew red. “Then you, um.” He hesitated, eyebrows creasing. “But I still…” Now he was staring off into space.

I reached up, my vision still blurry as I pulled off the headgear, resting my hand against his cheek for a moment that went only slightly too long. Then I pulled him gently by his hand, back around to where the control panel was. Where the last statement I typed in still showed up.

Statement: #PRIMARYUSER chooses to transition and live as a woman

He looked down at it, blinking a few times. “What?”

“Nicky, what you put in four months ago wasn’t a decision you could make. This one is. That future is possible, if you want it to be.”

He stared at it. Then he stared at me. Then he stared at a point five feet to the left. “But I can’t—”

“No,” I said firmly. “You can. You saw that you can. It’s just a matter of what you want. And you… you need to make that decision for you, not for me, okay? I’m… I’m going to be fine either way. All I want is you to be happy as yourself.”

I reached up to cup his face in my hands, tilting it down to make him look at me.

“Do you want that future, Nicky?”

My heart was beating a million miles an hour as I watched the expressions dance across his face. Anguish, hope, fear - an ocean of turmoil under the surface, and all I could do was be there for Nicky, in whatever way I could.

But then the conflict stopped, revealing a radiant smile, more beautiful than any I had ever seen before.

“I do want that,” Nicky said. “More than anything.”

And look. I’m not perfect. I’d never claimed to be.

So I decided to be selfish, one more time.

I pulled her face down to mine and kissed her, until I ran out of breath and she was giggling too deliriously to continue. And then she kissed me back, even harder. And—

Well, the rest is just between me and Nicky.

But suffice it to say...

It turns out we didn’t need a machine to see our future together anymore.