Jim Baen's Universe

Introducing: Stories by new authors

Russian Roulette

Written by Simon Horvat

Illustrated by Dan Skinner

 The gun lay on the table. It already had three bullets in it; at the start I'd only loaded it with one. Every three spins I'd put another bullet in. I'd only ever gotten to four bullets before blowing my brains out. Not a game to play when you're loaded, not a game to play when you're not.

It's no real risk for a precog. And if my powers fail me, well I don't think I could go on without my second sight. It freaked out my parents when they caught me at it, though Mum knew what I was going through.

You might think that one day I'm going to pull the trigger when I shouldn't, but that happens in so few timelines that I know it's not bloody likely. Most of my visions show me around for decades before they fade into the distant future.

A lonely, distant future. We'd tried changing that. Kat and I built a home together with the average two point three wonderful children, and then, one day, she'd die. And die . . . and die.

We tried everything to change that. Shuffled the timelines as much as possible—different doctors, different medicines, different exercises. There's not much you can do with a fatal genetic disorder, though we managed to stave it off for decades before . . . well, before she'd die.

It's funny. We'd start to make love, see the baby