Read Online Search Terms: Alpha by Travis Hill - Free Book Online Page B

the night before, and the Spurs had won 98-93. I’d barely gotten any sleep once I looked at ESPN.com’s scoreboard. All day long, even while I was with Kass, my brain kept revolving around the fact that the future BBC site had predicted the scores. She knew something was up with me, and every time she’d ask me if everything was okay, I’d nod and berate myself for doing the exact opposite of what I wanted to do, which was to give her my undivided attention. By the time I arrived home for dinner, I felt like I was going insane.
    I tried to convince myself that it was just a lucky guess. I told myself that I was having either a very vivid dream, or a serious hallucination. Maybe I really was in a padded room in some loony bin. My parents didn’t seem to notice, or maybe they just thought I was daydreaming about Kassandra. I tried to answer in more than single syllable words, the same as I tried to do more than push food around on my plate. Once dinner was over, I went straight to my room and sat down at the desk.
    “Computer. Wake up.”
    I didn’t think I’d ever stop feeling foolish about addressing the computer. The monitor projected its image within seconds, and two seconds later, I had the screen extended and the virtual keyboard ready to type something. The problem was, I couldn’t think of what to type. I didn’t know where to begin. I opened the normal browser to Google, and the future browser to Qwerry. Then I sat and stared at the screen for about five minutes.
    Finally, I sighed and extended the screen left and right. I dragged the normal browser to the right screen so I could keep the browsers side-by-side. I typed “Kennedy assassination” in both browsers, and while the ranking of the search results were slightly different between browsers, there was nothing out of the ordinary that came up in Qwerry’s search. So far so good , I thought. Then I searched the election results from back on November 4th by looking at web pages from November 7th.
    Harold Lincoln won a seat in Missouri’s 6th District, according to both browsers. Someone named Darren Gregory won the special election held in South Carolina for the Senate seat up for grabs. Both browsers proclaimed Stephen Trent Buckner the projected winner of the Texas governor’s race in one of the closest elections in American history, but at the time of the news stories I was reading, the recount was still going on. I jumped ahead to the 20th and looked it up, and again both browsers had the same results. Buckner had won the election by thirty-six votes, out of just over six million votes cast.
    I spent the next hour checking results in all sorts of subjects. Sports scores, weather, world history, and I even thought about searching for myself. On my laptop, and my old desktop, the results would show that I was a blogger, and a bunch of other Tyler Gallaghers were criminals, baseball players, lawyers, doctors. I had a moment of cold fear pass through me when I thought about searching for myself with the Qwerry search engine, until my brain asked me what I would do if I found my own obituary. That thought led into other insane thoughts, like looking up when my mother and father would pass on, or any engagement notices or wedding announcements for me.
    I was afraid of the engagements and weddings, as I didn’t want to find out that Kassandra might not be the girl I ended up with. What if she wasn’t, and I ended up with someone named Jane Smith? What if I didn’t even know Jane Smith, and then the day I finally met her, I tried to convince her that we were meant to be together? Or would I be creepy and use the quantum computer to find out everything I could about her and then woo her, as if it was a real-life version of the movie “Groundhog Day”? What if I met her and somehow screwed it all up, and we didn’t end up together? Worse, what if I intentionally tried to screw it up so I didn’t have to marry her, but the future was already set,