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.