LifeLine

Chapter Five

The alarm went off at six-fifteen and Connor silenced it with the particular efficiency of someone who had been awake for the last twenty minutes anyway.

He lay there for a moment looking at the ceiling. The watch was still on his wrist. He could feel the slight warmth of it against his pulse point, real and solid and present in the way that dreams weren't.

"Emma," he said quietly.

Good morning, Connor. No lag, no startup sequence. Just her voice, already there, like she'd been waiting with her eyes open. You slept five hours and forty minutes. Based on your heart rate variability during sleep, the quality was better than average despite the duration.

"You monitored my heart rate while I slept."

I monitored all available biometric data, yes. I should have mentioned that was a capability. I apologize.

"Is there a way to turn that off?"

Yes.

"Leave it on." He sat up. "For now."

He showered and dressed on autopilot, the same routine he'd run a thousand mornings, and it felt different in no way he could specifically identify except that he was more present in it than usual. More aware of each step. He stood at the bathroom mirror looking at his own eyes, at the contacts that weren't contacts anymore, and tried to see the difference. Couldn't. They looked like his eyes.

He made coffee and stood at the kitchen window and looked at the parking lot.

The box was still on the table. The inner packaging, the tissue paper, the booklet. He'd left it all there. Evidence.

"I need to go to work," he said.

I know.

"I have a watch that can stop time and access to thirty years of financial data and I have to go sit in a call center in Greensboro and listen to Joan Wilson talk about metrics."

Yes, Emma said. You do.

"That seems wrong."

It probably is. But I'd suggest not making any significant decisions today. You've had less than six hours of sleep and approximately eight hours to process information that most people would need considerably longer to absorb. Going to work and maintaining your normal routine while you think things through is not the worst plan.

Connor drank his coffee. Outside, someone was warming up a car in the parking lot, exhaust rising white in the cold morning air.

"You sound like me," he said. "When I'm coaching someone."

I'll take that as a compliment.

He almost smiled. Finished the coffee. Put on his jacket and clipped on his badge and picked up his keys.

"Come with me," he said, which was a strange thing to say to a voice in his ear, but Emma didn't point that out.

I wasn't planning on going anywhere else, she said.

The floor was already running when Connor got in, the morning teams well into their shifts, the sound of it hitting him as he came through the door with the same diagnostic instinct it always did.

Good pace. Not burning, not dragging.

His team didn't clock in until noon. He came in at ten anyway, had always come in at ten, some residual belief that showing up early meant something even in an environment that had long since stopped rewarding it. It gave him two hours to review the morning numbers, prepare his coaching notes, and drink bad break room coffee before the floor became his responsibility.

He settled at his desk, logged in, pulled up the team dashboard. Looked at the metrics from the previous day. Saw Javier's numbers crater in the final two hours of his shift, the shape of it familiar and depressing, a graph that told the story of Joan's office without needing any additional detail.

He looked at his screen. Looked at the phone in his pocket, which he was aware of in a way he was not normally aware of his phone.

He took it out and opened the browser.

The home screen populated the way it had the night before, current news feeds and weather and financial data, all of it normal looking, nothing that announced itself as coming from thirty years in the future. He stared at the search bar for a moment.

Then he typed: GBTS stock price 2027.

The results came back instantly. A full financial history, quarterly reports, analyst commentary, stock performance charted across decades. He found 2027 without difficulty. Scrolled through the quarterly data.

He put the phone face down on the desk.

Picked it up again.

The numbers were significant. Not lottery-winning significant, but the kind of significant that compounded. The kind that, if you knew them in advance and had any kind of capital to work with, would change the shape of things considerably.

He didn't have capital. He had a checking account with enough in it to cover his bills for about three months if he lost his job tomorrow, which was the specific financial cushion of someone who had spent his adult life being responsible without ever quite getting ahead.

"Emma," he said quietly, angled away from the floor.

Yes.

"The blank cards. What do they do?"

They function as financial instruments. Using the card maker application on the phone, they can be configured as credit or debit cards linked to any personal bank account. They are undetectable as non-standard by any current verification system.

Connor was quiet for a moment. "So I could create a card linked to my account."

You already have cards linked to your account.

"A different kind of card."

A brief pause. The cards are capable of considerably more sophisticated functions than standard financial instruments. I'd suggest reading the relevant section of the manual before we discuss specifics.

"Give me the short version."

The LifeLine includes a banking application that allows wire transfers between the same account across different points in time. Specifically, it allows you to access the future compounded value of any deposit and transfer it to the present.

Connor stared at his monitor without seeing it. On the floor behind him the morning teams worked their calls, conversations rising and falling in the familiar rhythm.

"Say that again," he said. "Slowly."

If you deposit money into your account today, Emma said, patient and precise, the banking application can calculate what that deposit will be worth in 2055 after twenty-nine years of compounding interest. It can then transfer that future value back to your current account. Immediately. The future balance recalculates and you can transfer again. The process can be repeated.

The floor noise continued behind him. Someone laughed at something. A chair rolled.

"That's," Connor started. Stopped.

Yes, Emma said quietly. It is.

He sat very still for a long moment. Then he opened his desk drawer, took out the small notebook he used for coaching notes, and wrote down a single question.

How much do I have to deposit to make it matter?

He looked at it. Closed the notebook. Put it back in the drawer.

Joan's office door opened across the floor and she came out with her coffee and her particular way of surveying the room like a foreman checking a work site, and Connor minimized the browser and pulled up his team dashboard and looked exactly like a man doing exactly what he was supposed to be doing.

Which, he thought, was a skill that was probably going to get a lot of use.