Kaley and the Portal

Here’s another response to a writing prompt found online. I hope you like it.

They say the camera never lies, but it does. You can’t trust pictures. People edit, enhance, crop, and otherwise manipulate photography all the time, so the camera can lie all it wants with complete impunity. Portals? Portals are a different thing altogether. Portals can’t be forced into falsehoods, at least not yet. Someday, someone somewhere, some kind of hacker no doubt, will find a way to corrupt the blockchains portals rely on and kludge them all up, but not today. Today, the portal is truth. Truth that cannot be denied. And the truth was Kaley was going to make it, at least in this timeline. She was risking arrest and a potential death sentence for using a portal to view her own future, but she had to know. She didn’t need to know details, but she had to know if she was going to survive. That much, the portal made clear. She saw herself looking straight into her own eyes from decades in the future. She looked different, of course, but the recognition was unmistakable. She looked tired, but she was very much alive, gazing back across the years.

But then came the second-guessing. Was she seeing a future ordained by her resolve to expose corruption at the highest levels of government, or was she seeing a future granted to her by her last-minute decision not to go through with it? The past is simple. It’s done. The future is different. It relies on countless decisions that lead to its eventual outcome. Is everything deterministic? Will free will even matter? What is free will? Is it real or is it an illusion? Could Kaley change the image in the portal by consciously changing her intentions while looking into the revealing pane? And if she did, would she, in fact, already be destined to have that change of heart, resulting in no change to the portal’s premonition at all?

“This is why peering into your own future is illegal,” she muttered to herself. “It’s madness. It’s madness to do it and madness is its reward.”

Crumbling under the weight of countless swirling thoughts of decisions, outcomes, lives impacted, and everything else that composed the unfathomable combination of variables that would lead to the image before her, Kaley began to feel faint. Her fall backward onto the hard tile floor of the lab at the Temporal Security Agency was broken only by the firm grasp of two timeline enforcement agents, each grabbing an upper arm.