Departure(55)

“That’s right. We’d have to get more trial subjects somehow.”

“Interesting.”

“The question became, if the worst happened, how could we get human test subjects who hadn’t been exposed to the Titan Virus? As I said, Sabrina survived the Titan War, and so did Yul. Their two minds were the keys to our plan, in our time and yours. Yul devised a solution that we all thought was crazy. To us the exercise was academic, an effort to show the colonists we’d exhausted all alternatives, rational and irrational.”

“Q-net.”

“He told you?”

“Only that he had received messages claiming to be from the future.”

“It took our Yul three years to create a modified version of the Q-net that could communicate with the past. When it worked, we were all shocked. The first moment he could possibly contact was 2014, just before your flight, when the first Q-net prototype became operational. In the course of our Yul’s research, he had determined that altering the quantum states of the particles in the past would actually create a copy of our universe. He theorized that after the moment of contact, there would be two timelines: yours, in which the future after 2014 is uncertain, and ours, where everything’s already happened up to 2147, where we are right now. That created a moral dilemma for us, which I’ll get to in a minute. The next part of Yul’s plan was a quantum experiment on a much larger scale. Yul thought that with enough power, he could dilate the existing link between our universes, making it big enough for something to pass through.”

“Big enough for say, a 777.”

“Exactly that size. In fact, that was about all we could manage with the electricity generated from the Gibraltar Dam. But it’s all we needed. Yul believed he could build the endpoints for this quantum bridge within a few years, but it proved to be far more complicated than the Q-net alterations. It took him sixty-seven years. When we were ready, Yul sent the schematic for the device back to himself in 2014. He also sent directions for your Yul to pass to Sabrina.”

I see it now, the last piece, the answer to why some of the passengers died of old age, and others didn’t. “The vaccine.”

“Correct. We knew who would be on Flight 305, and we told the Sabrina in 2014 that she needed to carry out a series of experiments outside the lab, making sure that the vaccine reached the passengers well before they boarded the flight. We assured her it was related to her progeria research, and it probably looked that way to her. There were two groups: control and experimental.”

This seems like as good a time as any to ask whether I’m doomed to die of a plague in which I age rapidly and perish in days. “Am I . . . which group—”

“Relax. You were in the experimental group. You received the vaccine before takeoff,” my clone says casually, as if I’m worrying about a nagging cold.

“How exactly—”

“Did we administer it? You really want to know?”

“Actually, no.” That would probably just freak me out.

“After the experimental group was vaccinated, the last piece was for Yul and Sabrina to board the plane with Yul’s device. That brings you up to the point right before things went very wrong during the flight.”

“Very wrong, as in a plane crash.”

“That was unintended, and very unfortunate. As I mentioned, we had a moral dilemma. In creating your separate timeline, we had created a world destined to repeat our mistake, in which every person on Earth, save for our thirty-eight, would perish.

“Oliver and I still felt responsible for the fall of our world, and we couldn’t bear to see your world suffer the consequences of another of our well-intentioned experiments. We arrived at a very simple solution. Your plane would land at Heathrow, where we’d evaluate the passengers. If the vaccine worked, roughly half, a hundred and twenty or so in the experimental group, would live. That would tell us if we had a viable vaccine. We confirmed that our vaccine works from survivor autopsies yesterday. For Oliver and me, the next step was clear: do nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“Our plan was simple: let your plane and the survivors remain here in 2147. In your world, in 2014, Flight 305 would simply vanish over the Atlantic, never to be found. And that disappearance would save the lives of over nine billion people roughly fifty-seven years later.”

It never occurred to me. “Because of who was on the plane. Sabrina, Yul, and me.”

“And Grayson. We had an incredible opportunity: a flight where the key people involved in the Titan Foundation and in our great mistake could be taken out of your timeline, ensuring the catastrophe never happened. To us, the loss of two hundred and thirty-four lives from your world for the safety of billions was a simple choice. There was only one problem: Yul and Sabrina.”

“I don’t follow.”

“They wouldn’t hear of allowing the passengers of Flight 305 to stay. They argued that removing those two hundred and thirty-four passengers from your timeline could have unintended consequences, create a far worse catastrophe that might strike the next year, or in ten years. Philosophically, they believe that changing another universe is a dangerous game. If the quantum bridge between our worlds remained open, someone from your universe might eventually find it and make their way here when they needed something from us, which could be perilous. They advocated noninterference, reasoning that if interfering with another universe was a viable survival tactic, we would have already been visited many, many times.”