In the Tesseract review room, Adeline sat at one of the stations, scrolling through photos. The one on the screen was from the Imperial War Museums in the UK. It was dated September 14, 1940—a week after the Nazi bombing campaign known as the Blitz began.
The photo was from London, of a town house where a family was standing on the front stoop with two visitors in front of them: Elliott and Charlie.
Adeline used the aging algorithm to estimate Elliott’s and Charlie’s age in the photo. The software predicted that they were approximately six months older than they were now. It would probably be their first mission to the past. That made sense to Adeline. Charlie would likely be ready then.
She added the picture and departure date to the schedule of upcoming missions.
The next photo Tesseract had tagged was from an archive in the United States. As Adeline studied it, she realized it wasn’t a photo but a black-and-white drawing that wasn’t dated.
It was, however, beautifully done, clearly by a talented artist. It depicted a frontier family sitting around a fire in front of a covered wagon. The family’s three children were holding what looked like marbles in their hands. Adeline sat to the left of the children, her father on the right, both smiling. The father of the family was whittling a stick of wood with a small knife.
Adeline opened the accompanying files and found a picture of a journal entry that was apparently below the drawing (she could see the lines and shadings of it at the top of the writing).
Fellow travelers came to call today, a man and his daughter, bearing fresh-baked bread and a cured ham. By some miracle, they also gave the children marbles to play with. I wish they had conveyed them privately to Oliver and myself, for we would have saved them as gifts for Christmas.
At dinner, they recounted that, like us, they were in search of a better life for their family and had come out here to seek it. Try as I might, I couldn’t place their accents, and they were a tad circumspect about divulging their roots. But I suppose that’s fine. Smart even. You never know what grudges strangers might be carrying around and what scores they’re looking to settle. Out here, holding your tongue about yourself might help you live longer.
Adeline studied the drawing and journal entry. There was no date. Or location. That was a problem.
There were two more files associated with the group. One was a map with a line drawn across present-day Colorado, southern Idaho, northern Nevada, and ending in northern California. Adeline recognized it as the California Trail from the nineteenth century, the dirt road traveled by hundreds of thousands of settlers going west to the gold rush in California.
The trail had a series of numbers along it, and the second file was a scan of a notebook with the corresponding numbers. Adeline quickly read them, focusing on number 49:
Nov 14, 1852: Came across what we thought was a wrecked wagon. Suspected it was an Indian trap at first. Would have kept moving along if not for the smell of the bodies. Oxen dead too. Too long dead to butcher. Unfortunate.
The wagon was cracked like a ship on the rocks. Best guess is a windstorm got them. I didn’t think that was real common in these parts, but there it was. Maggie yelled at me to pass them by, insisting they likely got the cholera. But I buried them. Kept the mother’s journal in case any of their kin come asking about them. The kids had marbles. I know I should’ve buried the toys with them, but I slipped them in my pocket to give to Mary and Luke at Christmas. Ain’t proud of it. Guess that’s why I confessed it here. Likely all the kids will get this year unless we make a strike early.
And with that, Adeline had what she needed: location and date. In her mind, she began putting the mission together. They would approach the family—with gifts—share a meal and invite them back to their camp. At a safe distance, perhaps on a nearby ridge, they’d watch the windstorm destroy the wagon, then give the family recall rings and bring them back to Absolom Island, where they would find exactly what they were going west for: a better life for their family in an unsettled frontier.
*
Adeline spent the afternoon sewing the outfits she and her father would wear. The hum of the sewing machine always made her think of her mother and her teaching her the craft. Sarah Anderson would forever stay in the past, but in so many ways, she was here with them too.
*
Two weeks later, Adeline and her father were walking along the California Trail in northern Nevada in November of 1852.
It was cold, but there was no snow on the ground, only a rocky, dusty path worn with ruts from wagon wheels and the trudging of oxen and mules.
Mountains rose to the right and left like rock giants silently watching the procession.
“Dad?”
“Yeah?”
“When we were arrested in the cemetery in Absolom City, did you ever think it would end this way?”
He shook his head and laughed. “In a million years, I didn’t see this coming—rescuing people in the past.”
“It’s wild, isn’t it?”
“It is, but the future is always stranger than you imagine. In my experience, things rarely turn out the way you expect them to. And in a strange way, it makes sense.”
“How?”
“Time and causality.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, consider the tuning bars—the breakthrough that made Absolom Two possible. You think about the outcome, you go search for that result, and if you find it in the past, you conduct the experiment.”
“Right, but how does that apply to Absolom One?”
“Same principle. When we created Absolom, we weren’t trying to build a time machine. We were trying to build a machine that saved our families. Sure, we wanted to help others, but our intention was to create a better life for our families.”
He paused a moment. The wind blew through the passage, whipping dirt against the clothes Adeline had sewn.
“Did you know your mom used to teach a psychology class about beliefs and reality?”
Adeline smiled. “I did. In fact, I helped her teach it once upon a time. The class was PSYCH 20N: How Beliefs Create Reality.”
“That’s the one.”
“It was all about how our perception of the world around us is shaped by our convictions, mental health, physical health, and environment.”
“Well, I think our beliefs are more powerful than that,” her father said. “I think they—along with time—are the unseen engine of the universe.”
“The missing piece,” Adeline said.
“That’s right. I think beliefs and time determine our future. All those years, when you were thinking about creating a machine to get your lost family member back—and when Elliott was thinking about it—I think it shaped our future.”
“That’s where the missions come from.”
“Yes. Like the universe itself, you can’t say what happened before they existed, only that they do.”
With that breakthrough, Adeline saw it all.
Absolom Island was like the United States of America. A new version. Where America had been a melting pot of people from different places, attracting the best and the hungry and the outcasts from around the world, Absolom Island was a melting pot of people from different times, offering a refuge for people from across the past to build a better future.
Absolom—the machine itself—was a physical manifestation of the march of humanity. It was a device that removed the worst members of human society and rescued the innocent. Adeline wondered if that was the true nature of civilization, if that was humanity’s great work.
“Do you think the world will ever figure out what we’re doing on the island?” Adeline asked.
“Yes. It’s inevitable.”
“What do you think will happen then?”
“I don’t know. But that’s one thing I’ve learned about time: sometimes life gives you problems you can’t solve today. That’s what tomorrow is for. And that’s why you keep going.”
The trail rounded a rock outcropping, and ahead, Adeline spotted the covered wagon off to the side. Rocks formed a ring around a crackling fire, and three very dirty kids sat around it, holding their hands out to warm them. Their mother was writing in a journal—or perhaps drawing—and the father was lying down, hat over his eyes.
He wasn’t asleep, though, because as Adeline and her father approached, he rose and pushed the hat back. “How do you do?”
Sam nodded. “Hello.”
“Y’all on your way to California?”
“No,” Sam said slowly. “We’re going a little farther than that.”
The man studied him. “I see. Well, you looking to trade then?”
“We don’t have anything to trade. We actually just came to help.”