“Yeah, but I don’t think this is the one.”
“If it’s going to happen anyway, why shouldn’t I be the one to do it?”
“You kill me, you’re the one that goes to jail. And like I said, you don’t want that.”
Oehlsen stared at him for a minute. Then he lowered the pistol, picked up his phone, and walked out of the store.
Nat and Morrow both let out enormous sighs of relief. “Jesus Christ, Morrow,” said Nat. “What the fuck were you thinking?”
Morrow smiled weakly. “I knew he didn’t have it in him.”
“When a guy is holding a gun on you, you do what he says.” Nat realized her heart was racing; she tried some deep breathing to slow it down. Her shirt was soaked with sweat. “I better check on the customers—” Oehlsen was standing in the doorway again.
“Fuck it,” he said, “what difference does it make?” He raised the pistol, shot Morrow in the face, and walked away.
The police picked Glenn Oehlsen up a few miles away. Officers questioned Nat, the customers who were in the store, and an executive who came from SelfTalk’s main office. Nat told the officers she had no idea what Morrow had been up to, and they seemed to believe her. She admitted to the executive that she knew Morrow had been taking a prism out of the store and visiting Jessica Oehlsen at the nursing home, and was reprimanded for failing to report a violation of company policy. The next day a temporary store manager arrived; he ordered an inventory of all the prisms in the store and established new procedures for checking them in and out of the storeroom, but Nat had already taken home the prism that Morrow had bought from Lyle.
At the next scheduled meeting with parallel Morrow, Nat got on the keyboard:
Hey bro.
This isn’t Morrow. This is Nat.
Hey Nat. Why are you on the prism?
We’ve had problems here. Morrow’s dead.
What? Are you serious?
He ran a scam on a woman named Jessica Oehlsen. Her son Glenn came in here and shot him. I don’t know if you’re running a scam on her in your branch, but if you are, back off. Her son’s unstable.
Shit. That’s fucked up.
You’re telling me. So what do you want to do now?
There was a long pause. Eventually a reply appeared on the screen.
We can still go ahead with the deal. You’ll have to take care of things on your end by yourself. Think you can handle that?
Nat thought about it. Selling the prism to Scott Otsuka would mean going to Los Angeles, a bus ride of several hours each way. There would probably have to be a preliminary meeting before the actual sale could take place, which would mean at least two trips.
I can handle it.
For the first time, Nat wasn’t acting as the buyer; she was the seller. She would have to provide evidence of what made her prism valuable. Nat and parallel Morrow exchanged photos of their respective printed newspapers; these were harder to forge than screenshots of the newspaper websites.
Now she had to contact someone who worked for Scott Otsuka, explain what she was offering, and send the photo as proof.
Ornella had worked as Scott’s personal assistant for ten years, well before he met and married Roderick. Roderick’s assistant had moved to France a couple years ago, and while he got someone to accompany him when he was filming on location or doing a publicity tour, when Roderick was at home Ornella worked as assistant for both of them. Until six months ago, when a drunk driver had changed everything. Now she worked just for Scott again.
Before the car crash, Ornella had never paid much attention to prisms. She knew that Scott’s fans circulated pirated copies of other versions of his songs, but he had never listened to any of them, so she hadn’t, either; the same was true of Roderick and his films. But ever since the car crash, it seemed like she was barraged by advertisements from prism data brokers: “Subscribe now and be the first to see the movies Roderick Ferris would have made if he had lived.”
And then there were the offers from fans who owned prisms and wanted to give them to Scott. They knew from interviews that Scott and Roderick hadn’t owned a prism, and while it would have been easy for Scott to buy one from a data broker, a lot of his fans wanted to connect with him, to be the one who eased his pain. Ornella knew Scott had thought about finding a prism; he would have given anything to see Roderick alive again. But the problem was obvious: in every one of those branches where the car crash hadn’t happened and his husband was still alive, his paraself was there, too. Scott would be a grieving widower intruding upon a happily married couple, a reminder that disaster could strike out of nowhere, a specter at the feast. That wasn’t what he wanted. If Scott were going to see a parallel Roderick, it couldn’t be as an object of pity or dread.
This newest offer was different: a prism connecting to a branch where there was no parallel Scott, only a grieving Roderick. This was something Scott might be interested in. She wasn’t going to mention it to him without making sure it was a legitimate offer first, though.
Ornella had asked an expert to examine the image she’d received, of course. He’d told her it wasn’t an obvious forgery, but he could easily create one just as good, so by itself the image wasn’t proof of anything. She told the seller that she wanted to talk to the Ornella in the other branch first, so they arranged a time when that could happen.
She was a little surprised when the seller arrived. She had assumed “Nat” was a man, but it was a woman who showed up at the front gate carrying a prism. Nat was thin and could have been pretty if she tried, but she had a certain sadness about her. Ornella’s years of working for Scott had given her a lot of experience identifying opportunists, but she didn’t get that sense from Nat, at least not right off the bat.
“I want to be clear,” Ornella told her when she came in. “You’re not going to see Scott today. He’s not even in the house. If I’m satisfied by what I see, then we’ll schedule another appointment.”
“Of course, that’s what I figured,” said Nat. She seemed almost apologetic about what she was doing.
Ornella had her set up the prism on a coffee table. At first Nat had a text conversation with the person on the other side, and then she switched to video and slid the prism over to Ornella. A face appeared on the screen, but it wasn’t a parallel version of Nat, it was a man, lean and lanky. An opportunist. “Who are you?” she asked.
“Name’s Morrow.” He stepped away and then the screen was filled by another version of herself. Ornella could see that the room in the background was the same one she was in now, and she recognized the outfit her parallel self was wearing, too.
“Is this for real?” she asked, tentatively. “Roderick is alive in your branch?”
Her parallel self looked like she could hardly believe it, either. “He is. And Scott’s alive in yours?”
“Yes.”
“I have a few questions.”
“The same ones I have, probably.” The two Ornellas exchanged information about the car crash. It had happened the same way in both branches: same movie premiere, same drunk driver. Just a different survivor.
They agreed that Ornella would talk to Scott, and her parallel self would talk to Roderick. Assuming both of them were open to the possibility, the Ornellas scheduled a date next week for them to try the prisms and decide if they wanted to buy them.
“Now let’s talk about the price,” said Ornella.
“We’re not talking price now,” Morrow said firmly, from the other side. “After your bosses have tried the product, I’ll name a price. Either you pay it, or we walk.”