Hugh Howey - Molly Fyde and the Blood of Billions

“Sure.” The Seer turned, her gaze following and approximating Cole’s location. “Just dump it in the sink if you don’t mind.”

Cole pulled the pot out and sloshed it carefully into the small sink. Ahead of him, the wall of tin rattled with the sound of a billion drops of water thundering to their doom. Other than the direction from which the storm came, the entire scene reminded Cole of home. His original home, not the orphanage or the Academy, just that little shanty crowded by thousands of others in one of the poorest barrios of Portugal.

Standing in front of the sink with the empty pot in his hand, he sank into that recollection. There was nothing he had ever wanted more than to get out of that place. To see the world. To see the galaxy and all its finer things.

And now he had. He’d been to places few ever would. Seen things most people could only dream of. And somehow, standing in a shack that reminded him of his childhood, he felt more at ease, more comfortable, more himself than he had in years. The suddenness of the sensation hit him hard, making him gasp with awareness. No sooner had he felt that sense of peace, some bastard portion of his brain stabbed him with a reminder of where he was, how very far from home, how far from the one he cared so deeply for, and how impossible it may be to ever return.

He put the pot away, hanging it between a skillet and a wide pan. The three jangled together softly, almost as if greeting their returned friend.

“I guess that’s that,” Cole said, trying to force the shakiness out of his voice.

“Thank you,” the Seer said. She folded her thin legs beneath herself and gestured to the edge of the bed once more. Cole checked his hands, wiped a small bit of caulk on the front of his pants, then looked around at the rattling cabin.

“There anything else I can do for you?”

The Seer smiled. “Could I ask you a question?”

“Sure.”

Cole took the few steps required to cross the room and plopped back onto the bed.

“Could you have not fixed the leak?” the Seer asked.

Cole glanced over his shoulder, back at the closed cabinet door. “Uh, I guess, but it didn’t seem to be leaking. Should I put the pot back, just in case?”

The Seer smiled and shook her head. “No, what I mean is: do you think you could have refused to fix it? Could you have declined?”

“I—” Cole looked at his fingernails. He scratched at a fine line of dark caulk running along the edge of one. “Could I have refused,” he said to himself.

The Seer sat quietly while he thought about it.

“I think so,” Cole finally said. “If you had asked differently, or if I didn’t feel so at home here, or maybe if I was in a bad mood—”

The Seer waved him off. “Forget what wasn’t. I’m asking you, in the state you were in at that very moment, could you have said ‘No?’ Could you have refused?”

Something about the question irked Cole. It made him want to lie, to be argumentative. He wanted to say: “Yes, I could’ve chosen not to,” but he couldn’t. He couldn’t because he knew, given a billion chances, if every event leading up to that choice was the same, he would’ve always done the favor for the old lady with the familiar eyes. And something about that knowledge made him bristle with anger. It put him in a state in which he probably would refuse if asked again.

“Can you not say?” the Seer asked.

He wondered which way she meant the question. Did she mean that he couldn’t say because he didn’t know? Or that he couldn’t say because he chose not to? It irked him further. And he realized why: this was the same conversation he’d had with Molly a long time ago, back in the cockpit of their simulator. Only then, he had been the provocateur and she the annoyed. But now that Cole knew what the Seer was really talking about, the foam of anger fizzled away to be replaced with curiosity.

“You’re asking about my free will, aren’t you?”

The Seer smiled, but only a little. It was a smile filled with sadness, if such a thing could be. “I’m talking about our free will,” she said. “Everyone’s.”

“Yes, I believe in free will.”

As soon as Cole said it, the smile melted away, the wrinkles returning as the skin over her cheeks sagged back down, exposing that sadness beneath.

“You don’t?” Cole asked.

“I’m not sure,” the Seer said. “Or maybe I am, but I refuse to admit it. Maybe I can’t admit it.” The smile returned, wry and slanted. “I think about it a lot. More than anything else, probably. I see all these things that end up happening, as if they couldn’t have gone otherwise. Some of them—a lot of them are bad things. And I wonder if they might not have happened, somehow.”

“You have visions of the future? Is that why they call you the Seer?” Cole felt idiotic for asking, the answer so obvious, but he had a hard time buying the mystical aspects, even having recently seen so many strange things.

The Seer laughed. “See- er ,” she said. “The Bern see- er . I don’t foretell the future, I just watch it.” She waved one hand in a tiny circle. “But people hear it the way they want to, and that’s how legends grow.”

“You see the future? How is that possible?”

The woman shrugged. “Light and water do funny things in this place. Maybe I’m just seeing the reflections of things. Maybe the photons know what they’ll bounce off of before they get there. I have a hundred theories and they all make me sound crazy. Some of them make me feel crazy. I know only enough about quantum mechanics to make it all seem like magic to me. Maybe I only see the things I want to see, or fear I’ll see. Maybe seeing them makes it real.” The Seer turned to the side, her jaw clenching and unclenching. “Maybe it is my fault.”

She shook her head, her eyes remaining unfocused as she turned to the other side. Cole wondered if the looking about was habit, or if she was just diverting her ears from the echo of her admissions.

“I don’t think you can blame yourself for stuff that hasn’t happened yet,” he told her.

“But I’ve said things,” the Seer whispered. “Maybe that was enough. And to be honest, I’ve said things I knew were going to alter events. I’ve wrestled with that, but I don’t see a different outcome. I don’t see anything I could’ve chosen otherwise.”

“Is that why you don’t believe in free will? To protect yourself?”

“No.” The Seer shook her head. “Nothing feels safe about a lack of free will, about being out of control. The reason I don’t believe in free will is because of—because of so many things.” The Seer rubbed the back of her hand, the agitation apparent in the rise of her tone. “Why are people unhappy much of the time? Why would they choose to be miserable if they are truly free? Why do we repeat the same mistakes over and over and wallow in our regret? Why does it feel like my every action is really a reaction, and that I only afterwards rationalize my behavior as having been a conscious decision?”

Cole leaned back, away from the words. They seemed sharp and dangerous, laced with barbs that could wiggle in and never come back out. Not without pain, anyway.

“If there’s no free will,” he said, “then what are we? Automatons? Organisms just responding to environmental cues?” He shook his head. “No thanks. If we aren’t free to choose our paths, we should at the very least pretend.”

The Seer frowned. “We should lie to ourselves. Is that what you’re saying?”

Cole nodded, forgetting for a moment that the woman was blind. “I think that’s what I do. I think I know what you know, but I avoid it.” Cole glanced over his shoulder. “I don’t think I could’ve chosen to not fix that leak. I’m sure of it, actually. The state I was in, what was going on around me, I had already agreed to fix it before you asked. If you could see those things, see inside me, I think you’d know the future.”