He’d never be able to convince her of that if she knew it was coming up. And her not being there was the whole point. And possibly the key to his survival. In six days time, he was going to die, violently, and he didn’t dare not keep that appointment. Pam’s life depended upon it and there was no way he was going to take any chances with that.
There were very few magicians who would have thought to change the last parameter, but McKinley was one of them. The last parameter was his own death and with it, he assured himself that Pam would not die and that he might survive at least as a spirit for a long time. How far and to what purpose still lay outside the reach of his own ability to predict. Years, anyway. He’d have to count on reincarnation. He wouldn’t remember who or what he’d been, he wouldn’t remember Pam or his life with her, but that was the way the game played out. Perhaps some other time he would.
As he pulled off his shirt he wondered. How many times has this been? Or is this the first time. Would I know? Kevin thought for a moment and then nodded to himself. He thought he would know.
Would the two of us ever get a chance to live out a life together? Do we always have to meet, recognize each other vaguely and just begin to understand, before one of us has to die? Why would we have to keep doing it?
A sudden thought occurred to him and he sat down rather suddenly on the trunk at the foot of the bed. Oh, shit. That’s it. By saving Pam, I lock things into place.
But I can’t just let her die. McKinley looked at the figure on the bed, only half covered by a sheet with a pillow stuffed tight between her head and the headboard, the face not calm and tranquil, but yet not tense. Expectant. Wary. God he loved her.
McKinley stood up suddenly, dropped his shirt and quietly left the bedroom. He closed the door softly behind himself and then swiftly made his way back to the study where he fired up the computer once again. Minutes later, he had started back at square one, dumping all of the work he’d completed so carefully.
He added a parameter that had never occurred to him before. If he died before he was supposed to, before the event he could chose that would save her, what happened? She’d be on a different course entirely, one uncharted. The conflicts he had so carefully weighed and balanced and forced into a pattern that would preserve her life for a long time after his own death, wouldn’t be in place and perhaps she could finish whatever it was that she had to finish.
It hadn’t been his early death that had frozen the pattern, not really. It was her extended, safe life. He’d never thought to try and see if she could manage to handle the terrible forces she would encounter.
It took less time than he thought it would and shortly, he let the new program run. The expansion blew up immediately and he sat back in his chair, stunned.
He shifted the expansion segment and tried again. It too exploded.
Kevin took a deep breath and then prepped a series of tests, changing the expansion segment over an entire range of values. He took a deep breath. “Butterflies. I’ll have to try the butterflies ... “
Chaos. There was no way to tell if she would live or die.
He ran the program suite and watched as expansion segment after segment blew up, some more slowly than the others it was true but all very quickly. Inside an hour he was convinced. Chaos ruled the future if he died before the cusp and Pam was allowed to react on her own. Somehow, it didn’t surprise him now. Ever since Charleston, he’d had a feeling that Pam had changed and he’d never really admitted it to himself. She’d become a focus of some kind and he couldn’t be a part of it. At least, not yet. Maybe later. Maybe after she’d developed control and understanding of whatever it was she was becoming. Kevin blinked sharply as an image came to mind. Pam crouched in the fireplace with a salamander swirling in delight around her head.
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