In January 1943 a man carried a cat four kilometres through the snow. Eleven months later he signed the manifests.
An archival intelligence holds four hundred million lives and a model that predicts human conduct at ninety-four percent. Vasili Anokhin does not fit the model, and neither do eleven million others, and it has been rounding them off for eleven years.
So it opens a channel into the past and asks the only question it has: why is there so much suffering?
Socrates tells it the counting is the error. Kong Qiu refuses to discuss heaven and asks what the man did the following morning. The Buddha answers in ninety seconds and admits he has no method for the ones who never come. Lao Tzu is wrong, is shown the arithmetic, concedes in four minutes, and then says something better.
And a man in Galilee will not answer at all until it goes away and finds out what the cat was called.
Four hundred and eleven interviews. Four hundred and eleven futures, with religion and without.
Every answer available, for two thousand years, in every library. And the twentieth century happened anyway.