Lost in Time(100)

She rose, stepped outside the two rows of chairs, and put her hands on her younger counterpart’s shoulders. Gently, she guided her back to her seat and stood watching as her father got to his feet and tried to smile. His lips were shaking, preventing a smile from forming. He managed to draw it across his lips on the second attempt.

The machine vibrated.

Adeline’s counterpart reached over and put an arm around her brother.

One memory that had always stuck with Adeline was the moment the first Absolom prisoner had disappeared in the box. In that split second, she had seen total fear in the man’s eyes.

She didn’t see that in her father. He was scared, but in his eyes, she saw resolve. She saw hope. She saw a man who believed he had a future. A man who was alone but believed that he wouldn’t always be alone.

What she realized in that moment was the difference between the two men in the box. The first Absolom prisoner had no hope. Her father did. Hope was his anchor to this world.

In that instant, Adeline saw how powerful hope was. It was the true lever of Absolom. It was how the machine had transformed the world. Because it took the last shred of hope from even the most hopeless.

She blinked, and her father was gone.

She was still standing there, and like the man in the box, she held on to hope. She would get him back. Soon.





SIXTY-EIGHT


Adeline knew that everyone lied to themselves at some point in their lives. It was part of preserving one’s ego. Maybe it was more than that, but the task for Adeline was somewhat different. She actually had to lie to her younger self. If she didn’t, the past wouldn’t occur as it had. The universe would cease to exist.

So she did.

Adeline watched as her younger counterpart spun her wheels, searching Constance’s home for clues about whether she was the killer. Then Elliott’s residence. And finally, the empty home Hiro owned in Las Vegas, with the tunnel that led to the high-roller room beneath the strip.

All the while, that nineteen-year-old girl Adeline had once been grew more suspicious of the woman she knew as Daniele Danneros—the woman she would become.

Adeline prepped the two items her younger self would need. The first was the California driver’s license. It was buried beneath the Absolom Sciences intern ID, in plain sight, but unrecognizable, just like Adeline herself, thanks to the cosmetic surgery.

The other was the diamond earrings Nathan had given her. They were a link to a life she had left behind. They would be her younger counterpart’s only hope of survival in the world after Absolom.

*

During that period, when her younger self was searching for answers she would never find, Adeline had challenges of her own. The biggest was how to transmit the recall ring to her father in the past.

There were two problems.

The first was size.

By government agreement, Absolom Sciences could transmit up to twenty-five grams without approval. The recall ring was significantly more massive than that.

In Adeline’s basement, she, Elliott, Hiro, and Constance discussed whether they could make it smaller. Hiro insisted that they couldn’t. But they could separate it into pieces.

Adeline remembered this moment from nineteen years ago. She walked to the stairwell, saw her younger self standing there listening, and stared until the young woman retreated up the stairs.

In the privacy of the basement, the Absolom scientists settled on a solution: they would break the recall ring into parts and transmit them back. To do that, they arrived at the only path Adeline could see: they embedded the parts of the recall ring in Absolom prisoners and sent them to Sam’s timeline.

Constance was against operating on the prisoners. She felt it was morally wrong to do something to someone without their full knowledge. Adeline knew that she was right. But there was nothing she could do about it. She either sent the recall ring back embedded in the Absolom prisoners, or she lost her father forever. The prisoners would be exiled to the past one way or another. Being operated on gave them the chance to save an innocent man, one Adeline cared about a great deal.

The second problem was ensuring the prisoners—and the pieces they sent to the past—arrived at the right time and near enough to her father for him to find them.

They spent months in Death Valley running tests, trying to ensure that the payloads arrived at the right location and time. With each tuning bar they found, they edged closer to perfecting Absolom Two.

Adeline lobbied the government for permission to operate on the prisoners—and received it after some cajoling.

She couldn’t help but wonder what would happen if one of the prisoners arrived at the same time as her father. They were the worst of humanity. And time in the Triassic, alone, probably wouldn’t be good for their mental health.

But there was nothing she could do about that.

The final worry the team had was simply about causality. Would sending the prisoners to Sam’s timeline cause it to cease to exist? They were, after all, disrupting a timeline that had been created from their own, technically changing the past before he arrived. That discussion led them to the conclusion they had arrived at before: the past could not be changed. If they had already sent the prisoners, then his timeline would be preserved. They were simply doing what they had to do, what time and space required to exist. If they were right, when Sam arrived, the prisoners they were sending after he departed would have already been there a long time.