The stone emitted a strange buzzing sound and went silent. Nothing seemed to have happened. "I wish that whenever a wish fails Karyn and I would know why, including this last wish," Jon intoned quietly.
"No..." Karyn gasped. "This morning other Jon made his own wish. He wished he could live in a world with no looming robot war. I don't think there's any way to bring him back. Coward."
"I'm sorry--" Jon started.
Karyn cut Jon off. "It's not your fault! You wished something interesting would happen. Anything could have happened. You just happened to make sure that it was you who balanced out the other side of the equation from the other Jon's wish. He would have been gone from this reality in any case."
"Okay, you're right. What do we do now?" asked Jon.
"If you really wished for something interesting to happen, I can promise you the next several years are going to be very interesting. Are you willing to stay?" said Karyn, almost pleading. "Maybe you can be the man the other Jon should have been."
Jon stared into Karyn's beautiful green eyes deeply enough to read the Made in Germany label in tiny faint letters on the lower edge of her irises. After a long pause, Jon's expression tightened. "Okay. I'll stay. I'll be extra careful not to make any major reality-warping wishes again."
"Thanks. I was wondering, you knew me back in your world, didn't you?" Karyn asked. "I would have been your age there. Do you mind me asking how close you were to-- that other me?"
"We grew up together. We were best friends," replied Jon. "Hold on, are you saying that you're thirty-eight years old?"
Karyn acted as though she was checking the room for witnesses. "Yes," she whispered. "I understand if you think that's kind of weird, us hanging out like this. I can explain."
"Please," urged Jon.
"It's a long story, but I'll try to give you the not-too-long version," began Karyn. "I've only been a full metahuman for the past eight months. I was a cyborg for almost six years before that, ever since I got into a bad car accident. The circumstances of that accident left me in a real mess-- mentally. My psychiatrist eventually decided that the best way to work my way out of this was to start a new life. Even six years ago it was starting to be pretty obvious that the technology for personality offloading was going to be ready soon, so it wasn't as though my brain was going to keep getting older for much longer. I could really start it all over again, so I did. He pulled some strings and got me enrolled in high school three years ago. I've known you since then."
"Okay. That is kind of weird," Jon admitted. " If you think about it, I sort of am your age since this version of me remembers all the great television of the '90s. So I think I might be able to get over it. So how am I going to move to Texas?"
