Adeline stared at her father for a long moment, then opened her mouth to speak, closed it again, and finally spoke slowly, carefully.
“You’re telling me that Absolom—”
“Was an accident. One we never imagined. In fact, the entire experiment, from the very beginning, is something we never thought would work in the first place. Never in a million years did we dream Absolom would work. The truth is, we’re double frauds.”
Adeline held her hands up. “If you didn’t think it would work, why even create it?”
“Money.”
“Money?”
“We needed money.”
“Who?”
“All of us. Everyone in the original group: me, Elliott, Constance, Nora, and Hiro. For different reasons.”
“What exactly are you telling me?”
“I’m telling you that the most celebrated scientists in the world began as nothing more than a group of desperate people who were basically trying to scam a venture capital fund.”
“Back up, Dad. To the beginning.”
Sam exhaled. “Did you know Elliott and I have been friends since college? We were roommates our second year and after.”
“No. I thought you were friends because they lived next to us in Palo Alto.”
“Just the opposite. Elliott was one of the reasons we bought the house next door—it was in pre-foreclosure, and he found out about it before it hit the market. Elliott and Claire had their first child the year after we graduated college, so you probably thought they were older since Charlie was about eight years older than you.” Sam took a breath. “Anyway, the point is, we’ve been close for a long time. Back before Absolom, Elliott was doing research on quantum entanglement. His work was really amazing. He was studying how the Higgs interacted with gravitational waves and dilated time—”
“Dad. English, please.”
“Right. Suffice it to say, Elliott was doing groundbreaking research. With a lot of potential. But he had problems at home.”
“Charlie.”
“That’s right. I don’t know how much you remember about those years, but Charlie was in and out of substance abuse programs and rehab facilities. Elliott and Claire had spent virtually every last dollar they had, and Charlie was still in terrible shape. Elliott was desperate.”
Adeline nodded. “And so were you back then.”
“I was.”
“Because of Mom.”
“That’s right. Every day, I watched her get sicker. She put a brave face on, but we were facing some tough decisions too. The only treatment options left for her were complete long shots. Nothing that was covered by insurance. Nothing we could afford on my university salary.”
“And the others? Hiro, Constance, and Nora?”
“We were at a conference in London, the five of us, at dinner, just commiserating about our various money problems. Just colleagues complaining about their lot in life to others going through the same thing.”
Sam interlaced his fingers. “Nora’s parents were aging and in poor health. Their financial advisor had swindled them. Took every last dollar they had saved their entire lives. Nora wanted to keep them in an assisted living facility, but she couldn’t afford it. She had already drained her savings. They were going to be evicted, and she had no idea what she was going to do.”
“And Hiro?” Adeline asked.
“He was deep in debt and at risk of losing his house. But Connie had it worst. She was sick.”
“Even back then?”
“She’s been sick a long time. She needed money for a new therapy.”
“What’s her diagnosis?”
“I can’t say.”
“You don’t know?”
“I know. I just won’t betray her confidence. That secret is hers alone to tell.”
“Is that why she never married and never had kids?”
“Yes,” Sam said. “It is.”
“What about Daniele?”
“She wasn’t at the dinner where we hatched our plan. At that point, none of us had ever met her in person.”
“She wasn’t one of the original group?”
“No.”
“So she wasn’t in financial trouble?”
“No. Just the opposite, actually. She was what got us out of financial trouble.”
“She’s not a fraud, then?”
Sam laughed. “As it turns out, she is a fraud—or became one—but not for the same reason the rest of us are.”
“What do you mean?”
“In a way, Dani started it all. She had contacted Elliott a few months before the conference.”
“About what?”
“His research. Back then, Dani was a partner at a venture capital firm—San Andreas Capital. She still has the fund, but I don’t think she invests much anymore since Absolom took off. The point is, at the time, she was looking for a big opportunity to invest in, a technology that could revolutionize an entire industry—or ideally, multiple industries. Her words to Elliott were: ‘I think you’ve stumbled upon something bigger than the internet.’”
“Pretty grandiose.”
“Very grandiose. And for good reason: billions of dollars in capital require big ideas to realize decent returns. Dani thought she had found one. She had read some of Elliott’s published research and wanted to know if it could be applied to a new technology that San Andreas was interested in.”
“Which was?”
“The other secret the six—now five—of us have kept from the world all this time.” Sam took a deep breath. “As I said before, Absolom’s original intention had nothing to do with time travel. Or prisons. Or reducing crime.”
“What was it?”
“Shipping.”
Adeline squinted at him. “Shipping?”
“Parcel shipping. Think about it—shipping is at the heart of the entire global economy. E-commerce. Healthcare. Construction. You name it. At its core, the internet changed one thing: the speed at which information could easily and instantly be transmitted anywhere. Look how profound the effect has been. With Absolom, Dani wanted to do for physical matter what the internet had done for data. She wanted to invent a machine that would take any item and instantly transport it anywhere in the world.”
Adeline sat back in her chair. “Wow. That’s incredible.”
“It was. Truly incredible. And something none of us—the original five scientists at dinner that night—thought was possible. In fact, it’s still not. But the original business plan, which cited research by Elliott, Constance, Nora, Hiro, and myself, made it seem inevitable. That original business plan for Absolom Sciences—which has since been deleted, purged, and shredded—was to revolutionize shipping. And to make an unimaginable fortune for San Andreas Capital.”
“So what happened?”
“Elliott set up a meeting with Dani. I admit, I felt guilty about it, but he did most of the talking. He told her we were somewhat skeptical that Absolom transportation could become a reality, but the five of us were willing to work on it full-time—assuming we were paid well. We insisted that since we were giving up cushy salaried jobs—and for some of us, tenured teaching positions—we needed massive signing bonuses, generous pay packages, and stock. Some of the stock would vest at signing and some over time. Dani also agreed to let the science founders sell stock at every funding round—and with board permission, in between rounds, assuming the shares had vested.”
“I’m assuming that solved your money problems.”
“It did. For all of us.”
“And then what happened?”
“And then,” Sam said slowly, “the strangest thing in the world happened. We all went to work at the newly formed Absolom Sciences, we built the machine that none of us thought would work, we hired some of the brightest minds, and we sort of assumed the ruse would soon run its course. The crazy part is that along the way, we made breakthroughs we never imagined. Bringing that many geniuses together has a way of making the impossible a reality.”
Sam stared at his daughter. “I’ll tell you, some days back then, it was like magic—we’d be at lunch talking about big ideas in physics and how they might impact our work and a week later, we were putting them into practice in the lab. And one day, we made a discovery that changed everything. It was a discovery about time.”
Sam held his hands out. “Time and gravity are linked. For example, if the gravity pulling against my right hand was twice as strong as the gravity acting upon my left, do you know what would happen?”
“Your right hand would be pulled to the ground.”
“That’s technically true, but assume I can exert a counterforce sufficient to keep my hand where it is. Think about it in the context of time.”
Adeline shrugged.
“Strong gravity slows time,” Sam explained. “In fact, for my right hand, time would pass at half the rate of my left. If you had a time-lapse camera and watched these hands for years, you would see my left begin to wrinkle and discolor while my right barely aged. That is gravity’s effect on time. But our breakthrough was about the third piece of the puzzle: energy.”
Sam let his hands drop. “Did you know that according to general relativity, any form of energy is a source of gravity?”
“Of course I didn’t know that, Dad.”
Sam laughed. “Relativity proved that gravity and energy are essentially manifestations of the same thing. In particular, both distort the curvature of space-time. Our breakthrough is that we could use increasingly large amounts of energy to modify gravity and distort space-time, essentially causing a specific object to be displaced in space and time.”
“You’re losing me, Dad.”
“The point is that we, much to our surprise, were indeed able to create a machine that could transport items from one location to another, just as Dani had theorized.”
“So Absolom did work?”
“Yes and no.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that the payloads Absolom transported did arrive at their destination—we used quantum entanglement as a form of tracking. The problem was that the packages weren’t actually there, despite the quantum tracking confirmation.”
“They were in the past,” Adeline said.
“That’s right—that was our second discovery about time. If we used energy and gravity to displace an object in space, it was also displaced in time. It was sent into the past. But the worst part was the final realization: that the act of transporting something with Absolom essentially branched our universe—it created an alternate timeline where the payload was deposited. This is consistent with the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, which is the idea that we are constantly creating copies of our universe, even as we speak.”
Sam laughed. “Frankly, I thought we were finished. We’d spent billions to build a machine that was no use for anything I could imagine—I mean, what good is sending items to the past in an alternate universe?”
Sam paused. “But Dani saw what none of the rest of us could: she saw the potential to use Absolom for prisons, to exile the worst of humanity and make the world a better place. That day, she destroyed the original business plan, and all documents related to shipping. Everyone at the company was under an NDA, and it was a very secretive place to work. Actually, very few even knew what we were working on in the first place—at least, what it was supposed to be used for. I think half the staff probably thought it was a new form of energy generation, a replacement to nuclear power. Some thought it was a new weapon.”
“So Dani sold it to the world?”
“She did. It all happened so fast. Absolom Sciences transformed from a secretive start-up to this purpose-built city in the desert that changed the world.”
Sam stared at his hands. “And along the way, we lost your mother anyway. In a strange twist of fate, we had accomplished the very thing none of us believed in—using Absolom to better the world and make a fortune—and all of us from the original five had lost the reason we were doing it. For me, your mother. For Elliott, his son. For Constance, her health. For Nora, her parents—they never really recovered from their financial advisor and friend’s betrayal. Nora moved them to the nicest facility in the area, but their health declined. She thought it was maybe them feeling like they had lost the last bit of control and independence they had in the world. Losing your life savings has a way of doing that to you.”
“And Hiro?”
“He’s still fighting his demon. And he’s always in financial trouble.”
“One thing I don’t get, Dad. How is all that related to Nora’s death?”
“Because I think it’s all happening again.”
“What’s happening again?”
“The night Nora was killed, Elliott gathered us in the lab and showed us a new prototype he’d been working on, Absolom Two. He’d made another breakthrough.”
“What kind of breakthrough?”
“I can’t tell you.”
Adeline squinted at her father. “Why?”
“You’re smart enough to know why.”
“Because you think if I knew, I’d be in danger.”
“Exactly.”
“You think that’s why someone killed Nora.”
“I think that’s half the reason she was killed. That night in the lab, after Elliott showed us his experiment, Nora insisted he destroy the machine. She felt it was too big of a risk.”
“What did everyone else say?” Adeline asked.
“I agreed with Nora. Hiro had been working with Elliott on the Absolom Two. He was for it. Constance agreed with Nora and me. She was against it.”
“And Daniele?”
“Dani was as insistent as Nora. Except she wanted the opposite. She wanted to continue Elliott’s work, and to finish it, regardless of the risks.”