Tomorrow

Tomorrow

Like most things do, it started innocently enough. Early on a Friday afternoon, Pete Smith had just sent his final report of the week to his manager. As a data analyst, he could work from home whenever he pleased, but since his wife’s recent passing, he preferred going to the office most of the time.

“Just to be out and around people,” He would say.

But with several errands to run over the next few days, today he decided to work from a spare bedroom office to get a head start on the weekend.

The first thing on his list was dropping off his dog at the veterinarian’s clinic. Blue, the dog’s name, would undergo a minor operation requiring an overnight stay.

Not long after he returned home from the vet’s, an email arrived from his daughter saying how happy she was that Blue’s procedure had gone well. He hadn’t told her about the dog’s problems and intended to update her once he knew the animal was okay. Yet here was a message from her saying she understood everything worked out.

Pete scratched his head, wondering if he had inadvertently mentioned something to her and if she had checked with his veterinarian before contacting him. It seemed odd, but he assumed there must be a rational explanation.

Pete shrugged this off and forgot about it until the following day. On Saturday evening, he emailed an old friend he hadn’t seen in years. It contained nothing special, only your typical, how are you doing, correspondence between two buddies.

To Pete’s surprise, he got an immediate reply. Not only did an answer come right away, but the timestamp on his friend’s email showed he had replied to it fifteen minutes before Pete had sent the original. Pete’s initial message went out at eight PM, yet the response appeared to have been transmitted at seven forty-five PM.

Now, something like this might occur for many reasons. If the two men lived in different time zones, this could happen, but they don’t. It’s also possible that the settings on one of their computers were incorrect. Then again, it may be the much overused “glitch” in the system excuse.

Whatever caused it, Pete was glad his old pal was doing okay, so he left it at that.

Three days later, a coworker emailed Pete, grumbling about some corporation that screwed up and contaminated an entire town. After reading this, Pete checked his hometown newspaper’s website but found nothing about the calamity. When he flipped on his favorite TV news channel, no one mentioned a single word about the tragedy. If this were such a big story, why couldn’t he find anything about it?

The next day, the reports regarding the disaster proved difficult to miss since it had become a global headline. Everywhere he looked, he saw information about the toxic cloud that sickened a small city’s entire population.

Pete shook his head. Could it be possible he’s a complete day behind the rest of the world? No, there had to be a logical reason.

Curious, he went back and examined the first two unusual emails. The one from his friend, that he thought was only fifteen minutes premature, turned out to have been sent a full day ahead of its arrival. His daughter’s email had been created on the nineteenth of the month, yet he received it on the eighteenth. Then there was the disaster notice from a colleague that was delivered twenty-four hours before it actually happened.

His first thought was that his computer must have been hacked. To correct this, Pete fired up his best antivirus program and ran it. Then he broke down and bought the most advanced malware software he could find on the internet. After running all those cleanup applications overnight, he felt confident the computer was scrubbed and ready to function without errors.

Thursday morning, as he sipped a mug of coffee, he accessed the website of his hometown’s newspaper. The top story was about a local man who had been run over by a truck in the parking lot of the nearby mall. The unfortunate fellow was identified as Peter W. Smith.

Pete froze. As chills ran down his spine, he began to shake, making reading any further difficult. This was because Pete’s full name happened to be Peter W. Smith. Even when he reached out, thinking he should reboot the offending computer, his trembling hands made it impossible. As he gazed at the screen, his thoughts turned to how he planned to go shopping at that very location this afternoon.

It took him a minute to push back his chair, and looked around the room, trying to decide what to do. The moment he stood up, he glanced down at the computer’s monitor. The date on the news feed was tomorrows. In a panic, he bolted for his basement steps.

Over the following twenty-four hours, he hunkered down on a musty, worn-out chair in the corner of his cellar. He felt sure a dump truck would come crashing through this front door any minute.

By the time he gathered up enough courage to take a few tentative steps upstairs, he approached his computer with caution. When he touched the power-on switch, he jumped back, as if the device might reach out and bite him.

Once his monitor flickered to life, he selected the icon for his newspaper’s website. The headline was now about a school board election. For over an hour he searched through yesterday’s headlines, but was unable to find anything about anyone being hit by a truck. Anywhere.

Pete would never know if he had been dreaming, or had dodged a bullet. But since his inbox still contained the original odd emails, he figured either way it didn’t matter.

After unplugging and dismantling his old computer, he discarded its major components at three separate electronics recycling facilities. Then, he bought a new laptop.

Of course, one question remained. What would you have done?

End