Lloyd Simcoe, a 45-year-old Canadian particle physicist, oversees a run of the Large Hadron Collider. He works with his fiancée Michiko Kamura, who has a daughter, Tamiko. The experiment unexpectedly brings about a vision of a plausible future in which the characters are twenty years older. The consequences include the death of Tamiko as an out-of-control vehicle plows into her school. No recording devices in the world function in the present during the event. Citing the absence of any human awareness during that time, this is interpreted as evidence of the observer effect in quantum theory.