Flux by Orson Scott Card

dream.”
    â€œWhat dream?”
    â€œI destroyed her.”
    â€œNo, you didn’t.”
    â€œIt was a goddamned selfish thing to do.”
    â€œYou’d do it again. But it didn’t hurt her.”
    â€œShe was only fourteen.”
    â€œNo, she wasn’t.”
    â€œI’m tired. I was asleep. Leave me alone.”
    â€œCharlie, remorse isn’t your style.”
    Charlie pulled the blanket over his head, feeling petulant and wondering whether this childish act was another proof that he was retreating into senility after all.
    â€œCharlie, let me tell you a bedtime story.”
    â€œI’ll erase you.”
    â€œOnce upon a time, ten years ago, an old woman named Rachel Carpenter petitioned for a day in her past. And it was a day with someone, and it was a day with you . So the routine circuits called me, as they always do when your name comes up, and I found her a day. She only wanted to visit, you see, only wanted to relive a good day. I was surprised, Charlie. I didn’t know you ever had good days.”
    This program had been with Jock too long. It knew too well how to get under his skin.
    â€œAnd in fact there were no days as good as she thought,” Jock continued. “Only anticipation and disappointment. That’s all you ever gave anybody, Charlie. Anticipation and disappointment.”
    â€œI can count on you.”
    â€œThis woman was in a home for the mentally incapable. And so I gave her a day. Only instead of a day of disappointment, or promises she knew would never be fulfilled, I gave her a day of answers. I gave her a night of answers, Charlie.”
    â€œYou couldn’t know that I’d have you do this. You couldn’t have known it ten years ago.”
    â€œThat’s all right, Charlie. Play along with me. You’re dreaming anyway, aren’t you?”
    â€œAnd don’t wake me up.”
    â€œSo an old woman went back into a young girl’s body on twenty-eight October 1973, and the young girl never knew what had happened; so it didn’t change her life, don’t you see?”
    â€œIt’s a lie.”
    â€œNo, it isn’t. I can’t lie, Charlie. You programmed me not to lie. Do you think I would have let you go back and harm her?”
    â€œShe was the same. She was as I remembered her.”
    â€œHer body was.”
    â€œShe hadn’t changed. She wasn’t an old woman, Jock. She was a girl. She was a girl, Jock.”
    And Charlie thought of an old woman dying in an institution, surrounded by yellow walls and pale gray sheets and curtains. He imagined young Rachel inside that withered form, imprisoned in a body that would not move, trapped in a mind that could never again take her along her bright, mysterious trails.
    â€œI flashed her picture on the television,” Jock said.
    And yet , Charlie thought, how is it less bearable than that beautiful boy who wanted so badly to do the right thing that he did it all wrong, lost his chance, and now is caught in the sum of all his wrong turns? I got on the road they all wanted to take, and I reached the top, but it wasn’t where I should have gone. I’m still that boy. I did not have to lie when I went home to her .
    â€œI know you pretty well, Charlie,” Jock said. “I knew that you’d be enough of a bastard to go back. And enough of a human being to do it right when you got there. She came back happy, Charlie. She came back satisfied.”
    His night with a beloved child was a lie then; it wasn’t young Rachel any more than it was young Charlie. He looked for anger inside himself but couldn’t find it. For a dead woman had given him a gift, and taken the one he offered, and it still tasted sweet.
    â€œTime for sleep, Charlie. Go to sleep again. I just wanted you to know that there’s no reason to feel any remorse for it. No reason to feel anything bad at all.”
    Charlie pulled the covers tight around