In the months that followed, Adeline spent several evenings a week at her childhood home, sewing and talking and enjoying those fleeting moments with her mother. She was doing what she wished she had done as a child. Back then, Adeline had always assumed her mother would get better. That it would all pass. Losing her had been unimaginable. That’s part of why it had hit her so hard.
The pieces of fabric weren’t the only things she was assembling.
In the Nevada desert, she was buying large tracts of land. The previous year, she had acquired a solar company, and they were already getting permits for the expansive solar field that would become known as the sea of glass.
The plans she filed with the state and federal regulatory agencies called for a massive power plant that could bring cheaper energy to the region. But she knew the power wouldn’t be sold. It would be used to send people to the past. Including her father someday.
In the Absolom Sciences lab in Palo Alto, the machine was close to completion—or failure, depending on one’s perspective.
Thousands of miles away, in the middle of the Pacific, Absolom Island was progressing nicely. The port was operational, and construction was well underway on the housing village, offices, and recreational facilities. She had told the construction companies that she was building a resort. Her checks had cleared, so they hadn’t asked any other questions.
*
One Thursday morning, Elliott gathered everyone in the lab. He held up a small silver bar with an Absolom Sciences serial number.
“Ladies and gentlemen, behold one of the biggest, and possibly most expensive, scientific blunders in human history. And unfortunately, our blunder.”
He placed the tuning bar in a small Absolom prototype, closed the door, and nodded to Sam, who typed on a keyboard.
A second later, the lights dimmed, and through the glass window on the door, the box flashed, and the bar was gone.
At the computer, Sam said, “Quantum entanglement tracking confirms that the bar should be three hundred miles away, in Death Valley.”
He clicked the mouse and a live video stream appeared. Sam switched to the recorded footage, showing that there was nothing there.
“Elliott and I have repeated this exercise…” His head tilted back, gaze fixed on the ceiling. “Four million, two hundred and eighteen thousand times. Same thing every time. Entanglement tracking confirms the payload was delivered, yet it’s not there.”
Hiro spoke then. “Maybe the transmission process destroys the payload—or breaks it down. Maybe the atoms are shattered into subatomic particles and scattered at the delivery site—i.e. it’s there, but it’s in trillions of tiny pieces.”
“Our tracking says the entangled particles are still intact.”
“What this means,” Nora said, “is that the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is true. Absolom works. It just doesn’t work the way we expected.”
“There’s another problem,” Hiro said. “I haven’t been able to solve the energy requirements. Frankly, even if these payloads were arriving in our universe, the power required to transport any meaningful amount of mass would be cost-prohibitive. Even if we solve the technical aspects, financially, based on the cost of energy, it will never be practical to ship things this way.”
Adeline sensed that her moment had arrived. “This isn’t a failure. It’s what Bob Ross called a happy accident.”
Elliott grimaced. “Bob Ross? The guy at University of Detroit Mercy?”
“Not that Bob Ross,” Adeline said. “The landscape painter.”
Sam held his hands out beside his head. “The guy with the big hair.”
“That’s the one,” Adeline said. “What we have here is a Bob Ross-style happy accident. He said we never make mistakes on the canvas. Only happy accidents. And we need to figure out how to use this accident. We’re certainly not the first in history to find ourselves in this position. Alexander Fleming found penicillin completely by accident. He went on vacation for two weeks and returned to find mold growing over his petri dishes, mold that prevented the growth of staphylococci. Even the discovery of plastic was an accident. So was the microwave. And gunpowder.”
Adeline glanced around the room at the five scientists. “We’ve discovered something here. We just need to figure out why the world needs it.”
Adeline knew the answer. But she wanted to give it some time—time was, after all, what it was all about.
*
Two seminal events in her past were drawing closer, and Adeline dreaded each one.
Absolom Sciences had moved into a larger building in Palo Alto, but the individual offices of the Absolom Six were still close enough for her to hear signs of stress outside of work.
Increasingly, Elliott was growing desperate and frustrated with Charlie. The whispered calls had become shouting matches. In the mornings, he drank more coffee, and his eyes were more bloodshot—either from crying the previous night or drinking alcohol or both.
On her calendar, Adeline had circled the date that Charlie’s suffering would come to an end. She dreaded that night. And she knew she had to be there.
The past couldn’t be changed.
She would walk down that street and look at the convenience store’s security camera and go into that apartment. She knew what she would find there.
Another date loomed large in her mind: her mother’s death.
She had contemplated trying to stop it a million times. But that would break causality and the universe. And besides, there was no cure for her at this time. Maybe there never would be. Maybe time couldn’t cure everything, despite what her father had said.
She visited her mother more frequently then. Adeline knew she was trying to hang on to something that she couldn’t stop, as though time itself was sand slipping through her fingers.
At the door one evening, Adeline came face-to-face with her younger counterpart. The girl was twelve and cocked her head impatiently and yelled, “Mom! Your sewing buddy is here!”
She stormed out without another word, off into the evening, likely to a friend’s house nearby to homework-gossip or indulge in social media feeds.
As an adult now, it was hard to even remember herself being that moody and self-absorbed as a teen. Yet there it was.
Adeline’s mother appeared in the small foyer, a kind smile on her face. “You’re more than a sewing buddy to me.”
Adeline laughed. “Likewise.”
The quilt they worked on that night was one they had been laboring on for weeks. It was a photomosaic made from hundreds of family photos of Adeline’s youth—of her, her mother, her father, and Ryan. The individual photos combined to represent a picture of the whole family at home in front of the Christmas tree.
A stab had gone through Adeline’s heart when her mother had shown her the pattern she’d created with a website called Mosaic Quilt—because she knew it was the last thing she had sewn. All this time, Adeline had wondered if her mother knew how it would end, if she had selected the mosaic quilt as a sort of swan song for her hobby and her life. If so, it was fitting. The tiles and pictures were little slivers of a shared existence together, hundreds of moments that, when knit together, formed the tapestry of a life. A family’s journey together, one that would soon have no more pictures with the four of them.
Her mother was laying out the quilt’s batting when she said, “I was just going to make one for the living room. But now I think I’ll make three.” She set out another layer. “So they’ll all have one.”
A part of Adeline wanted to ask, Why not four—so you’ll all have one? But she didn’t need to. She knew then that her mother knew, somehow.
Instead, she steadied her voice and said, “I think it’s a great idea.”
*
As she was walking home that night, under the maple trees and the streetlights, Adeline thought about that quilt, about the pictures that formed a larger image. There was a truth there somewhere, just out of her mind’s reach.
For some reason, she thought about Constance’s room with the photos of the people from her past. And Elliott’s room with the photos from the night Charlie died.
Once again, in her mind’s eye, she saw herself on that street in Menlo Park, looking at the camera.
That was it. The world as a quilt of photos. All of history was a sort of photomosaic, waiting to be seen. And so was her life. More than ever, Adeline was sure there was a larger montage here. And she felt that there was a missing piece—a missing scene—that would join all the strips of film together, creating a loop with a beginning, middle, and end that all made sense once you had seen it all and zoomed out.
That’s what she had been missing. That seminal scene. That piece of cloth that tied the others together.
She was going to find it.
*
The next day, Adeline was sitting in the office of another company in Palo Alto, one named after the seeing stones in The Lord of the Rings.
The man across the table was one she had known for years from her time as a venture capitalist in the Bay Area.
“What can we do for you, Adeline?”
“I need a piece of software, one I believe you specialize in.”
“What kind is that?”
“One that can take a photo as input and find it in a supplied data source of images and videos.”
He smiled. “Sure. We can do that. Most of our clients sign an annual operating contract. We can notify you in real time when we identify matches. Until you’ve found the person.”
“That’s not what I’m looking for. I’d like you to create the software, and I want to be able to operate it. I supply a photo, and it searches the data sources for matches. And speaking of sources, I want to license any that you’re able to supply. I’d also like intros to government agencies and any other organizations you think might be willing to sell data.”
*
That evening, Adeline was thinking about all the pieces in her life, of the past, the present, and the future, and the piece that was missing, the one that might tie it all together, when the doorbell rang.
She rose and opened the door, and on her stoop, under the glow of the porchlight, was Nora, standing in a three-quarter length black trench coat, a floral dress on underneath, smiling at her.
“Hi.”
“Hi,” Adeline said. “I wasn’t expecting you.”
An awkward pause passed as Nora stared at her, and Adeline finally swung the door open. “But come on in—of course. Good to see you.”
She wondered if the tension was obvious to Nora.
As the door closed, Nora shrugged. “I figured it was time we talked.”
Adeline swallowed. “About?”
“I thought we could start with all the things we haven’t talked about.”