Adeline studied Nora’s face. Slowly, terror was growing inside of her. Did Nora know her secret?
Had she finally figured it all out?
Nora must have seen the fear in Adeline’s eyes. She held up her hands. “I just meant that it feels like maybe you and I got off on the wrong foot or something. All these years, the group has become so close, but it’s just—it just feels to me like there’s a gulf between us.” Nora smiled, eyebrows rising. “Am I imagining that?”
“You’re not imagining it,” Adeline said quietly. She knew she was on precarious ground here. Where it led, she wasn’t sure she wanted to go.
“Can we sit?” Nora asked.
In the living room, Adeline took Nora’s coat, and they sat by the fire.
“Do you ever get this sense that everything around us is a slow-motion catastrophe?”
Adeline didn’t trust her voice to speak. She nodded, still wondering if Nora knew more than she was admitting.
“It’s not just this crazy pandemic. It’s closer to home. For Sam and Elliott, the things they love are slipping away. Hiro and Connie are fighting their demons—different demons but both soul-consuming.” Nora took a deep breath. “And then there’s you and me. Two islands in the middle of the storm. Both single women. Career-oriented. It seems like we have a lot in common, but I don’t really know much about you, Dani. And I was sitting at home thinking, why is that? And why don’t I do something about that?”
Adeline swallowed. This was dangerous. The more she revealed about herself, the more likely it was that Nora would figure out her secret. If she did, she might alter the past.
But that was only half the issue. Adeline knew that in seven years, Nora was going to die—possibly at Adeline’s hands. Getting close might make the things she had to do harder. Adeline knew what it was like to lose someone close to her. Instinctively, she knew she was scared of getting close again.
Nora smiled. “Anyway, I was drinking wine—from a box—and I just thought, ‘why don’t I go over and take a chance?’ With the lockdown, I know she’s at home. Everyone’s at home. We can’t exactly go anywhere, but I thought maybe we could talk. Or binge-watch TV. Or just read in the same room. Or play a board game.”
Nora’s gaze shifted to the window. “I probably shouldn’t say this, but I feel like Absolom is coming to an end. Frankly, I can’t see what use our machine that beams matter to nowhere could be to anyone. I know you’ve invested a lot money—and your time—and I want you to get it all back. I really do. Maybe we can license it for research to universities or government labs, but it feels like that will end our involvement in it. And tonight, I thought, maybe this is our last chance to get to know each other. And I was a little sad about that, frankly. Like I had missed an opportunity to get to know someone great—wait, that sounds super weird. I think I mentioned the wine earlier. There was wine involved. If you kick me out, let’s blame the wine tomorrow. Deal?”
Adeline laughed. “I’m not kicking you out.”
“Good. That would be so awkward.”
“We don’t do awkward here.”
Nora laughed, a heartfelt, belly laugh that she physically shook off, her head tossing from side to side. Adeline thought the woman indeed seemed a little drunk.
When the laugh subsided, Nora’s tone was more reflective. “I’ve always been an introvert. But this lockdown has been too much solitude even for me.”
“Same.”
“It works on you,” Nora said. “Being alone. Like every day is a replay of the one before. The isolation has also made me realize some things. It’s like the music stopped on human civilization, and we were all marching around, going through life, mostly unaware of what we didn’t have, and now that I have to sit at home and just think, I’ve finally recognized that I’m truly and utterly alone. But it’s not just being alone. I feel like there’s no one in my life who really understands me.”
Nora swallowed and closed her eyes. “Anddddd… I think my wine-induced soul outpouring just violated the we-don’t-do-awkward policy.”
Adeline laughed. “Updated policy: we do awkward for the sake of soul outpouring.”
Nora held a finger up theatrically. “Wine-induced soul outpouring. I’m blaming wine.”
“Actually, I think wine-induced soul outpouring is exactly what this world needs right now. Even if it gets awkward. It’s totally worth it.”
“In that case, it feels like we’re missing something.”
Adeline smiled and rose and retreated to the butler’s pantry and returned with an uncorked bottle of Chardonnay. “It’s not from a box.”
“I’ll let it slide—this time.”
Adeline poured two glasses nearly to the rim and both women took a long sip.
“What now?” Nora asked. “Do we drink wine and keep complaining and blaming said wine?”
Adeline let her head fall to the side. “Doesn’t quite seem like our style.”
“No. It doesn’t.”
“What does?”
“Board games,” Nora said.
“Yes,” Adeline agreed. “Board games—until we’re too brain-dead to play.”
“Or drunk,” Nora added. “Not saying that will happen.”
“That would never happen to us. We don’t get drunk. We just get tired.”
“Exactly. And when we get too tired to play board games, we—”
“Binge-watch TV,” Adeline said, completing the sentence.
Nora took a long sip of wine. “I like this plan.”
“There’s just one problem.”
Nora raised her eyebrows.
“The potential for a bad binge.”
“A bad binge?”
Adeline nodded with mock seriousness. “It’s a situation that arises when two or more people are binge-watching TV together, and one or more people aren’t into the show—but they’re too afraid to say anything because they perceive that other members of the party are into it. They endure hours of the show, suffering from extreme boredom under the watchful eye of an unknowing loved one, unable to call out for help. It’s what’s formally known as a bad binge.”
Nora paused. “Wait. Is that…”
“A real thing? No. I just made it up.”
Nora threw her head back and laughed. “But it is real—it happens.”
“It totally happens. And needs to be planned for.”
Nora held her wine glass up, saluting Adeline. “That’s why you get paid the big bucks. You think of everything. Always imagining what could go wrong.”
You have no idea, Adeline thought.
“So how do we avoid a bad binge?” Nora asked.
“Mandatory check-ins. At the fifteen-minute mark in episode one, we hold our fists out and do a thumbs-up or thumb-down. Same at the end of episode one and two. We need two thumbs up to continue.”
“It’s a little dorky, but it could work.”
“It will work. And yes, it’s extremely dorky.”
Adeline refilled their wine glasses, and they started the board games phase of the evening, sitting at the table in the dining room, playing Scrabble, music on in the background.
Thirty minutes later, Adeline was laying down the tiles for the word relativity.
*
The next morning, in the lab, most of the Absolom Six were sitting around a raised metal table, looking haggard and tired.
Hiro had recently returned from a trip to Vegas. Adeline had last talked to him at 3 a.m. the previous night and knew he was returning a hundred thousand dollars poorer. She had cut him off, which was perhaps the only reason he was back at all.
Constance had been up late doing a video conference with someone from her past who lived in Australia. Adeline could tell from her countenance that the person had been sick, and that the experience was weighing on her.
Adeline looked up to find Nora staring at her across the metal table, a cup of coffee in her hand, a subtle grin on her lips. Adeline had to admit, last night had been the most fun she had had in a long, long time.
They weren’t the only two who were slightly hungover. Elliott was guzzling coffee as if the dark liquid could vanquish the fatigue and stress that grew every day.
“Sam’s late,” he said.
Adeline rose. “I’ll get him.”
She once again found the door to his office cracked, but he wasn’t sitting in the chair this time. He was standing at the window, staring out, in a daze, with no idea Adeline was there. In the reflection, she could see the tears creeping down his face.
“Sam.”
He jumped at the word as if a needle had pricked him.
He ran his forearm across his face, the sweater soaking up the tears.
“Has it started? I lost track of time.”
“You should go home.”
“No. We need to figure this out. If we don’t, we’ll lose everything we’ve worked for. All the money you put in.”
“Forget the work. And the money. Go home, Sam.”
He inhaled and shook his head. “I’m not leaving you all to figure this out alone—”
“I lied before, Sam.”
He squinted at her.
“I told you we were partners. We’re not. I’m still the majority owner of this company. I control it. At the end of the day, I call the shots here, and I’m telling you to go home.”
His chest heaved, but he didn’t move.
“Besides,” Adeline said, stepping out of the office, “I already figured out what we’re going to do with Absolom. We don’t need you right now. But somebody does.”
He barreled past her then, his eyes full of emotion, hurt from what she had said or because of what was waiting for him at home—of what was happening in slow motion, the knowledge that these moments would be his last with the love of his life.
At the stairwell, he looked back, and Adeline thought he understood because his eyes said thanks, but his mouth didn’t move.
When he was gone, she returned to the lab and the four waiting scientists, who sat silently at the table, all seeming to contemplate the things hanging heavy in their lives.
“Sam can’t make it.”
No one said a word. They knew why he couldn’t make it. Like any real friends, they felt some part of his grief.
“I have an idea,” Elliott said. “I’ve given it a lot of thought.”
All eyes turned to him.
“Nuclear fuel rods.”
No one said anything to his pronouncement.
“It’s quite simple,” Elliott said. “We offer a waste disposal service. Spent nuclear fuel rods are radioactively dangerous for about ten thousand years. We put the rods in Absolom, transport them to an alternate universe, and the world is rid of them.”
“Yes, but not the world they arrive in,” Constance said. “We can’t just dump our poison on another world because it helps us.”
“Of course we can,” Elliott said. “The world is full of people dumping their poison on others for profit.”
It didn’t take a leap of imagination for Adeline to see where Elliott was coming from. The poison he was talking about wasn’t nuclear. It was what Charlie was putting in his arm, the poison that had torn Elliott’s family apart.
She also knew what Constance was really thinking. The root of her aversion was in her own past. She had spent half her life cleaning up the wreckage of one reckless year abroad.
“Technically speaking,” Nora said, “we would be shipping them to a copy of our world—a world where humans are destined to evolve. That means, if the rods don’t go back far enough in time, the radiation could alter the biology of species pre-dating humanity, which could impact the advent of the human race. We could be causing an extinction event in a universe we created at the moment we used Absolom to send the rods back.”
Elliott shrugged. “Who cares? We created the split universe. It’s ours to destroy.”
“I don’t see it that way,” Constance said. “We should be mindful of our consequences. Even if it feels right now, we could regret it.”
“There’s another solution,” Adeline said. “Prisoners.” Adeline took a page from her pocket. “The latest stats I could find were from 2019, but that year, there were over two million Americans in either prison or jail. Including 2,570 people on death row. That’s down from a peak of 3,601 in 2000.”
Constance held a hand up. “Wait a second. What exactly are you proposing?”
Elliott set his coffee mug down. “She’s saying we do the same thing I was proposing with nuclear fuel rods on murderers and terrorists.”
Adeline held out her hands. “I’m simply saying that we license Absolom to justice departments to use as they see fit.”
Constance closed her eyes. “We’ve created a death machine.”
“On the contrary,” Elliott said. “Today, killers are put to death. With Absolom, they will be given life—under the sun, in the past, where they can live out their lives in the only peace this universe has to offer them.”
“We should get the licensing fee up front,” Hiro said. “The Supreme Court will surely rule it cruel and unusual. I favor a no-return policy.”
Constance still had her eyes closed. She was wavering on the stool. Adeline thought she was going to pass out. Instead, she pitched forward, opened her mouth, and emptied the contents of her stomach on the metal table.