“Remember, you can still influence your future timeline, but not the past.”
This was usually when they signed. Alex sat forward and finished her tea. It was cold. Christ, she’d been reeling this guy in for the best part of two hours.
“We like to think it’s a small price to pay for the ultimate peace of mind.” she added, cringing to herself. She never liked that line.
“I can’t break any NDAs, but almost all of our clients are ultra high net worth individuals. The government and military offer something similar too, but through their own schemes for obvious reasons.”
“And it’s just life assurance?” the man reiterated, bringing his hands together and sinking into his designer executive chair as if he’d heard thousands of pitches like this, when actually he was way too young. “Yes, that’s our only product now. We used to do other stuff, but – “
“Injury, litigation. Group cover. The last time we tried that it ended in disaster.” Alex shuddered at the memory. Sending information back in time was simple compared with getting four billionaires to agree on a joint policy. The technology had changed things, but human nature wasn’t one of them. Besides, the authority ruled that anything but single death cover was either too complex or insignificant to add to the timeline.
“Sorry, but could you take me through it one more time?” the man asked, unapologetically. He retrieved a small metal case from his desk drawer, opened it and offered the contents to Alex. “Don’t worry, they’re psygars. Perfectly healthy.” She shook her head politely, gave a brief thought to the upcoming annual review (her mantra you will make partner was nearing three years old) and returned to the section of the augmented reality presentation on skewed timelines. The man seemed to relax slightly as his brain simulated the effect of nicotine.
“46 years ago the world’s only telephotonic communication device came online,” Alex recited. She could never remember song lyrics, but had pitched the product so any times she could almost see the words in front of her; the AR presentation had an option to literally do that, but a practiced, nuanced delivery was always far more effective. And Alex actually liked exercising her brain.
“The telephotone, if you will, enables us to send one-way packets of information back to any time during its existence. A year after launch it was the deciding factor that won us the third cold war. Shortly after that, the government made a small amount of bandwidth commercially available, enabling a select few businesses to operate chronoilogically under close scrutiny from the Temporal Conduct Authority.”
The authority required all services to lay this blurb on prospective customers, but the key point was this: if you were healthy, and wealthy, enough to afford the service, the policy would guarantee an email notification in the present-day in the future event of your premature or untimely death, thus enabling you to re-evaluate your goals, change your lifestyle, whatever - knowledge was power.
There were rules; healthy meant no pre-existing, life-limiting conditions (gene-editing prior to 2035 also made you ineligible). Sending back specific details about the future, including an exact date and cause of death, was strictly prohibited, while ‘premature death’ was defined as anything unexpected that might kill clients before - or within ten years of - the average retirement age, which currently stood at 74. Common claims included undiagnosed illness, accidents, acts of god and acts of war. The policy covered them all.
“Remember, you’ll only experience the effects of any cover in our remaining timeline,” Alex explained, as the presentation illustrated multiple brightly-coloured timeline ribbons skewing in various directions. “Timelines are infinite and parallel, so if you are going to require the policy, then it’s actually already happened.”
She liked to simplify this concept with a simple example; “if you take out a policy this afternoon, you could conceivably receive an email from yourself sometime in the next few days, weeks or years. That’s our recommendation, but you can choose when to break the news to yourself.”
“And if I want instead to notify myself aged 18?”
“Technically, you can. But as you haven’t received that email, should one ever be sent through the TAT a new timeline will skew from your teenage years - one that we won’t experience. The precise reason we target young clients is because you have more to gain from the policy.”
That seemed to do the trick. The man took a deep breath, then sighed.
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