For reasons Adeline couldn’t quite identify, she was nervous about the meeting with the scientists who would found Absolom Sciences.
Maybe it was because she hadn’t seen her father in ten years. In his mind, in the case of Daniele Danneros, they were meeting for the first time. Would it be awkward? Would she be able to hide the emotions she knew would come during the meeting?
If living in the past had taught her anything, it was how to be a good liar. But even this would be a challenge.
She decided to have her associate partner sit in on the meeting and ask questions. His name was Greg, and he was a recent Stanford MBA. He was a ninja with a spreadsheet, golfed constantly, and loved grilling start-up founders. It was almost like a sport for him, as if he thought a certain amount of verbal pain had to be endured before an early-stage investment was allowable. Adeline told him to go easy on this group—they were scientists, not steel cage fighters.
A few months before the meeting, she had purchased a historic home on Cowper Street in Palo Alto. It was a Queen Anne-style house that had been used by a law firm, which had outgrown it. She had it furnished, but the seven-thousand square feet home wasn’t staffed. She could have had some of her staff come up from Santa Barbara, but she didn’t much see the point. Adeline and Greg would do the meeting alone.
They waited in the foyer for the scientists to arrive. Every few minutes, she wiped her hands on her dress and tried to focus on her breathing.
Why was she so nervous?
The door opened, and Elliott strode in. Dark bags hung under his eyes. He looked haggard, as if the weight of the world was crushing him.
He introduced Constance, who looked sick even then. To Adeline, she looked as fragile as the woman she had known in Absolom City.
Nora had the same haunted countenance as Elliott—and so did Adeline’s father. She knew why. He had recently gotten bad news about his wife’s cancer. Even at age ten, Adeline had seen how hard it had hit him.
Hiro was last through the door and the most aloof. He was one of the greatest minds of the group but easily the least social.
In the conference room, Elliott said, “Did you rent this place for the meeting?”
“No, in fact I recently purchased it, with the intent of making it an incubator for start-ups.”
“It’s a good location,” Sam said. “It’s actually a few blocks from our homes.”
Adeline smiled. “Perhaps it’s a sign.”
The meeting lasted an hour, and at the end, Adeline asked the partner in her firm to leave. When he was gone, she addressed the scientists.
“There’s one last item, I’d like to discuss.”
Elliott leaned back in the room chair. “And what’s that?”
“My role,” Adeline said. “I want to be more than the person who funds this venture.”
“What do you mean?”
“I want to be part of it.”
“How?” Elliott asked. He seemed more nervous now. Perhaps he sensed that something was amiss, that she knew that they had been faking their enthusiasm, that she was testing them.
Adeline pressed on before he could say any more. “What we’re talking about here—Absolom—is monumental. It’s a foundational technology, like few before it. Consider its predecessors. The printing press. Thanks to Gutenberg’s machine, for the first time, information could be carried across long distances—granted at the speed of a horse or a ship. The telegram enabled text messages to be sent instantly. The telephone transported a voice, instantly, across vast distances. The web gave us instant access to pictures and text and video, from anywhere in the world. And now Absolom. Soon, matter itself will be able to travel anywhere, in the blink of an eye, just like text, and voice, and video.”
Adeline paused, watching the group. They were nervous. Her enthusiasm was a sharp contrast to their own doubts, which they were hiding. But she needed to continue the ruse. Both sides did, if the future was to occur as it had. She pressed on.
“Imagine how Absolom will change the world. I want to be part of that. For the sake of history. You might think I’m not qualified. You’re wrong. I don’t have a college degree—in physics or anything else. In finance, I had a mentor, but everything else I’ve learned, I’ve taught myself, alone. And in my work, for the most part, I’ve been alone. I’m ready for that to change. I want to be part of a team. As I said, I don’t have a formal education in this field, but I am a scientist in the strictest definition of the term: I’m an expert in the underlying science; I’ve studied it; and I’ve done my own research. That research has led me to Absolom, and I know I can contribute to the work that still needs to be done.”
As the group was leaving, Adeline’s father lingered in the doorway of the conference room. “I wanted to say that while this…”—he motioned to the projector mounted on the ceiling—“idea is promising, it’s still risky.”
Adeline thought, if he only knew.
*
What Adeline didn’t realize was how seeing her father would change her.
She had always heard that you didn’t appreciate something until you lost it. Well, she had lost her father once. She couldn’t do it again.
She knew she would have to. In nine years, she would have to stand in that box in Absolom City and watch him travel to the past. The question was what she could do about it.
Her plan, all this time, had been to discover who truly killed Nora, prove her father’s innocence after he left via Absolom, and bring him home.
But what if that wasn’t possible? What would she do then?
She could hardly bear to think about it.
To Adeline, there seemed to be only one solution. If she couldn’t prove her father’s innocence—if she couldn’t clear his name—she would still bring him home, and they would live in exile.
That night, a plan began to form in her mind.
A plan to build a place where she and her father and brother could go and no one would find them. They could build a new life and live in peace, without wondering if the authorities would find her father.
That place was an island in the Pacific. In the future, Elliott had told Adeline that Daniele had bought an island and was developing it, but until that moment, she had never understood what Daniele’s plan had been. She saw it now. The island was a refuge of last resort if she couldn’t clear her father’s name.
The island became her secret project. She began researching seasteading to expand it and hired contractors to draw up plans to create the ultimate self-sustaining escape. Off the grid. Off the map. A place to disappear to.
*
When the legal documents for Absolom Sciences were ready to be signed, Hiro requested a meeting with Adeline.
They met at the office on Cowper Street one morning, both sipping coffee in the conference room.
“I don’t want to own my shares,” Hiro said.
“Why?”
“Risk.”
Adeline shook her head. “You’ll be paid in addition to the equity—”
“Not that risk. The risk is… that I’ll sell the shares and spend the money. I want you to control a trust that owns my shares and only allow me to sell a small percentage each year. The rest should go to these charities when I’m gone.”
Hiro slid a page across the table.
“Why?”
“I have a sickness.”
Adeline studied him. She knew what his sickness was. And she knew he would feel better once he told her. She waited as he spoke slowly, staring at the floor.
“It’s the same reason I don’t have a wife or a family.” He looked up quickly. “It’s not that kind of sickness. It’s a compulsion I’ve never been able to control. I gamble.”
*
The confession from Hiro wasn’t the only one Adeline received that week. She woke the next morning to an email from Constance, requesting a meeting at her home.
Adeline arrived that afternoon, and she was reminded of that day she had visited her in Absolom City, of how terrified she had been back then, of what she had seen.
This meeting started in the same way, with the two of them sipping tea in the living room, the doors to the backyard open.
“If we’re going to be partners, I think it’s only fair that I tell you something you should know about me. About my health.” Constance set the mug down on the glass table with a clink. “I’m sick. I have been for a few years. And I’m getting worse.” She opened her mouth to continue but seemed to reconsider. “Actually, I think I should show you.”
She rose and made her way upstairs, to a room on the front of the home.
The hairs on Adeline’s arms stood on end. It was as if she was reliving the scene from her past—and Constance’s future.
The woman reached out a skinny hand and turned the handle to a bedroom with no bed, only pictures on the wall and notes. Adeline had seen these very pictures and notes before, in the bedroom in Absolom City. Only here, there were fewer pictures, as if Constance was only now beginning to build the tableau.
She walked close to the wall and studied a photo of a young man in his twenties, holding a large glass full of beer in a pub.
“After college, I took a year off before going to grad school. I was restless and wild back then. My father had just died. I was mad at the world. I had enough money saved up to travel, to not work, and simply indulge. And I did. I spent a hedonistic summer in Europe. A downright shameful fall in Hong Kong. A winter full of debauchery in Australia. I arrived home in California that spring out of money and ready to live a normal life again.”
Constance turned and clasped her hands together. “But time and money aren’t all that reckless interlude cost me. I didn’t know it until years later, but somewhere along the way, I contracted HIV. And I very surely passed it along to others during my romp around the world.”
Constance inhaled. “I thought you should know. That’s my interest in Absolom. The treatments for the disease have come a long way, and I want to get the best care possible—but it’s more than that. I want to use the money to find whoever I might have infected. To notify them and offer to get them care as well.”
Adeline stepped deeper into the room, scanning the pictures. It all made sense now.
“I hope that doesn’t change anything,” Constance said.
“It doesn’t,” Adeline whispered. “The past is the past.”
But she wondered if it did, if Constance’s secret was the piece she was looking for—if it somehow connected to Nora’s murder in a way she didn’t yet understand.