"Deep breath," John instructed as he held my hand. He noticed my fidgeting hands and bouncing knee. "You don't have to do this."
I tilted my head toward him looking annoyed. "Ok, ok," he replied, "I know how much you want to do this, but what I'm saying is we don't have to do this now. I want you to feel ready."
I wrapped my canvas jacket tightly around me like a security blanket and looked around the brightly lit waiting room. It was overly embellished with baby blue carpet, soft paisley-patterned chairs, gold plated side tables, and tasseled lamp shades. Clashing with my sneakers and worn jeans the room seemed to snobbily remark, "You don't belong here." Across the room a woman in her mid 60's with puffy red eyes and silver strands peppered through her hair stared off in thought as she clutched a small framed portrait of an older man. On the other side of the room a man in his late 20's with sandy brown hair, deeply set eyes, and an obvious probation ankle monitor hidden under his right pant leg leaned forward in his chair with his arms resting on his knees looking down at the ground. Then sitting a few chairs down from John a young, blonde woman adjusted her long skirt to briefly reveal a metal prosthetic lower leg.
I did as John instructed and took a deep breath and closed my eyes, "I'm ready."
"John and Alyse," a young women's voice called from across the room holding open the mirror-like metal door leading into the clinic.
John and I stood up and held hands as we walked toward the woman and through the door into a bright white hallway. "My name is Shay," the woman smiled as we approached, "And I'll be your guide today." She had dark brown hair that hung down past her hips, a pretty face, and wore a white, casual dress.
"I'm showing you've already taken care of payment," she commented. I nodded as my stomach tightened with guilt remembering the surgery. The clinic provided alternative payment to those who were unable to pay the six-figure price tag for the experience: One healthy embryo signed over for stem cell harvesting. John grasped my hand and squeezed it knowing what I was thinking about.
"And we did your preliminary data pull last week, so you two are here only for the results, right?" We both nodded and smiled knowing we were done with blood draws, brain scans, and MRI's. "Okay, great. Step into my office and we'll go through a few things and then we'll head into the theater."
My heart leaped with excitement knowing what I was about to see it a few minutes. We walked into a white office with a large window covering the entire far wall which revealed Seattle's skyline against the backdrop of grey clouds and a steady drizzle. Shay sat down behind a plain metal desk and picked up white tablet while motioning us to sit down on the grey couch across from her.
Flipping through information shown on her tablet Shay read aloud, "John and Alyse Packer for a 5-minute window. And Alyse, it's showing here you ordered a 5-minute window from MightHaveBeen a few years ago."
"Yes," I said smiled hesitantly. "It was the clinic in Dallas. My parents died when I was younger, and I wanted to see them."
Shay's face lit up with moderate interest and a smile, "Oh that's great. Did it end up being a good experience for you?"
"Definitely," I carefully remarked with a fake smile not wanting to relive or talk about the initial viewing. "In fact, I have the sphere window in my bag. I carry it everywhere."
I pulled out small leather pouch from my purse, reached inside and pulled out a glass ball about the size of baseball. The glass was dark and cloudy until it entered into the light and suddenly images started playing inside the sphere. It showed a man and woman in their 50s laughing amongst a group of friends and family. There was no sound and although the images were visible and three-dimensional, they looked more like shadows than an actual images.
I looked into the sphere as I had done hundreds of times before recognized the familiar motion the woman made as she smiled widely and then suddenly threw her head back in vivacious laughter while placing her hand on her chest as if to keep her heart from escaping. Even though she was clearly older, sported an unfamiliar blonde, pixie haircut, and wore clothes that I had never seen before, she was obviously my mother. The man sitting next to her was giggling uncontrollably with one arm folded around his body and the other hand pressed against his face in an unsuccessful attempt to control his laughter. And even with his unfamiliar wrinkles, added weight, and grey speckled hair, the man was clearly my father.
Those damn ParaScouts at MightHaveBeen were experts at scanning through billions of parallel moments to capture the happiest and most emotional scenes available. They were highly compensated to produce images that were so perfect and so sweet the images would have bordered on the brink of tawdry and cheap had they not been depicting real bits of time.
I also saw myself amongst the crowd, a little skinnier and almost hollow, different haircut, blue tank top holding hands with a man I didn't recognized and clearly a mother to three children I had never seen before. The sphere gave a short glimpse of my sister in the background among other unfamiliar children. It was an eerie experience to witness myself and my loved-ones living a completely unfamiliar life. It was my life, but not my life. Not this life. It was good to see my parents, but it felt uncomfortable and impertinent to be peeking into such an intimate moment where I clearly did not belong. For this reason and moral distain for the company, my siblings refused to order their own time sphere. Although, Caleb did ask to see mine since he couldn't pass up an opportunity to see images of the parents of which he held no personal memory. He was too young to remember them.
Realizing I had been staring into the sphere longer than I planned, I dropped the glass ball back into the leather pouch and stuffed it into my purse. "Sorry," I murmured upon realizing John and Shay had been shifting uncomfortably in their chairs waiting for me snap back to the present moment.
"That's perfectly fine," Shay responded, relieved to be taking control of the conversation again. "I'm glad it was a happy experience for you and I'm confident today's viewing will be just as moving."
Shay propped up the tablet and turned it toward us preparing to show us a video we had viewed previously. "This will obviously be a review for you since this is your second order, but we always like to review this video with our clients before every viewing to help give context to the images we're about to view."
The video started with the gold MightHaveBeen logo against a white screen with promotional music in the background. Then the logo cross dissolved into an image of a glass sphere building. A young woman's voice began narrating the video, "Paraview laboratories in New York City is the central headquarters for MightHaveBeen, Inc - the para-scanning capital of the world.
An image of a man with dark hair and charismatic smile flashed onto the screen. "Para-scanning, or the process of viewing images across layers of time-space reality was first discovered by Dr. Edward Hall. Using the particle oscillator at the University of Maryland he discovered how to jump across quantum particle's probability loops in order to produce energy stamps and eventually full images from parallel dimensions."
The screen showed an unnamed scientist sitting inside a large glass sphere known as a particle oscillator. Inside the sphere the scientist could see the laboratory surrounding her. As she manipulating switches and dials inside the sphere the scenes of her current laboratory melted away to reveal the same laboratory, but with a completely different scene. People were standing in different places and furniture was arranged differently. The scientist began slowly turning a dial inside the glass sphere and the scene around her began to change at the same rate of speed she turned the dial. Suddenly she was no longer surrounded by a laboratory, but instead her sphere was sitting in a large park surrounded by buildings. As she turned the dial the buildings around her changed places, shapes, and designs. Suddenly she was sitting in a forest of trees and the forest changed and altered around her revealing lakes and then mountains. She continued turning the dial and the changed from forests to deserts to small towns to neighborhoods.
"Researchers and engineers soon learned how to control image scans across parallel dimensions in order to pinpoint certain scenes of reality by measuring out the distance from our present reality."
The screen showed a widow crying near a grave and then cut to her looking into a small glass time sphere showing images of her and her former spouse dancing closely in another parallel time.
The narrator continued, "After years of testing the scientists at MightHaveBeen have developed a process allowing you a chance to peer into the parallel time of your own life to witness glimpses what might have been."
"Using quantum maps gleaned from the info contained in your DNA, brain scans, and body scans, our expert ParaScouts created a starting place for your reality and then branched out to scan for images that will reveal your life under different circumstances.
The narrator is then revealed on screen as a blonde woman in her mid-forties wearing a white lab coat and blue fitted dress, "I'm Dr. Sara Bell and I invite you to come take a look at your life as it might have been." She reached out her hand and then she faded away into a white screen.
"Okay!" Shay flipped off the tablet and set it face down on the table. "Are you ready?"
John looked at me and I nodded nervously.
"So, I want to make sure we have the right images because we've mixed them up before which always makes for an interesting viewing," Shay smirked. "I understand you had a miscarriage last year?"
My eyes welled up with tears hearing the words and I looked down in confirmation. "And it says it was late miscarriage. 13 weeks? Oh, I'm so sorry." Shay reached across the room and touched my hand which I then pulled away. "But it looks like you two are expecting again. Congratulations," She said as she pointed to my 8-month pregnant belly.
I said nothing, but put my hands against belly and felt a familiar kick from inside.
"Well, we were able to get some very nice images of your lost baby girl who would be about 5 months old now."
Girl? They knew it was a girl. Suddenly the moment became real. I realized what I was about see. I was walking into the reality of what my life would have been had the miscarriage not happened, and then I felt another kick from my unborn baby boy.
Shay stood up and motioned John and I to exit the office into the white hallway. We walked out and started walking down the long corridor leading to the theater where I would first view the images. Afterwards the attendants would provide me with another time sphere like the one of my parents and I could take it home and keep it forever.
As I walked down the hallway I kept feeling my baby kick and I wondered what I was doing. Was I still devastated about the miscarriage? Yes. The pain was thicker at the beginning but it would still come and go and doubted it would ever completely recede. My new baby was due close to the year mark of when I lost the other baby and my emotions were tangled into big mess. Happiness and excitement for the new baby, sorrow and pain at the anniversary of my lost baby. I blamed myself completely for what had happened. The complications that were revealed months afterwards confirmed in my mind that had I been more diligent I could have prevented everything. Had I been paying better attention the baby wouldn't have died.
But then I looked over at John and thought about the unfamiliar man I was holding hands with in the images of my other glass sphere. If my parents hadn't died, I wouldn't be with John. My life would be something different. And although I miss my parents more than I can bare at times, I can't imagine a life without John. It's a complicated and confusing reality I'll never understand: how such a horrible and horrific experience can lead to something so wonderful and beautiful.
I suddenly felt another kick from my baby and I realized this was the same phenomenon. Something beautiful and wonderful was coming after such a terrible tragedy. Even if I could have prevented it, I didn't. That's not what happened. I could choose to let guilt consume me and live in a fantasy of what could have been or I could let go and live out the beauty of my present life.
As we approached the door to the theater I stopped. "I'm not going to do this," I announced. Shay turned to me and looked at John. John looked down at me and touched my arm, "Okay."
We turned around, walked down the hallway hand in hand, through the waiting room, and out the front doors of MightHaveBeen.
And as we walked over a bridge leading to the lot where we parked I pulled out my glass time sphere from my purse. I looked at the images of my mom and dad showing again what they would have looked like today. I smiled and then tossed the glass ball into the river below.
