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After the engagement party, I got a video call from a future point in time.
"Don't buy that luxury flat. It belongs to your fiancée's male best friend's family, and it's priced at double the market rate. Buying it means paying off his loan-shark debt for him."
"Go out to the suburbs and buy the run-down old unit at 28 Franklin Street. In half a month it'll get a demolition buyout worth thirty times as much."
"Cough, cough... the triplets in Chloe Lambert's belly aren't yours. They're her male best friend's."
"For the next three or four decades, you'll pour everything into this family, and Chloe will keep sneaking off to meet her male best friend."
"The day you collapse from illness, Chloe divorces you and marries him!"
"And the three kids you raised with everything you had all turn out to be ingrates. They throw you out of the house, and you end up begging on the street, cough, cough..."
In the video, he was destitute, clutching a fertilizer sack stuffed with scrap, coughing up blood now and then, but his face was startlingly like mine.
"You, who are you?"
"I'm you, decades from now. I've got no one left, and my life is almost over."
He rambled on for a while, then slumped down beside a trash bin.
...
"No, no!"
My mind raced. "Tell me the lottery numbers, or the score of any game in the future, quick!"
"Those, I don't remember."
Curled up like a dog in the frozen snow, he closed his eyes for the last time, full of scorn and bitterness for this era.
The call ended.
My mind went blank.
That old man dragging a huge sack of scrap, was he really me, years from now?
Was someone messing with me using AI?
I sat in the room a long time, until my fiancée Chloe walked in and shyly threw herself into my arms.
"Baby, I'll give you a little treat tonight."
The softness of her body made me start to doubt whether that video had been fake.
"Oh, and about that luxury flat I mentioned. Let's head over early tomorrow and buy it."
Suddenly this gentle with me, all so I'd buy the flat?
My guard went up.
"That flat isn't cheap. Eight million. I'm not sure we can afford it."
"Your parents have savings! And we can take out a loan! The place isn't downtown, but it's still a busy, upscale area."
"Plus it's on the thirtieth floor. At night you can look out over the whole city."
The thirtieth floor?
Living high up in a tower was a hassle, and hard to resell too.
"How about this. Let me ask a friend first."
I'd trusted her a lot before, so when she said she wanted to buy the luxury flat, I'd agreed without much thought.
"Ugh..."
Chloe started to say something, then a wave of morning sickness hit her, and she bent over the trash bin, throwing up.
I stepped over, patting her back, and handed her some tissues.
After a moment she settled down, wrapped her arms around my neck, and said excitedly, "Baby, I've got good news for you. I'm carrying triplets."
I froze where I stood.
Chloe hadn't gotten her period in over two months, and I'd been urging her to get a prenatal checkup. She only went to the hospital after the engagement party, and it turned out to be triplets, exactly like the old man in the video said. That nailed it: she'd been cheating on me with her male best friend.
