Lost in Time(20)

“She’s been sick a long time. She needed money for a new therapy.”

“What’s her diagnosis?”

“I can’t say.”

“You don’t know?”

“I know. I just won’t betray her confidence. That secret is hers alone to tell.”

“Is that why she never married and never had kids?”

“Yes,” Sam said. “It is.”

“What about Daniele?”

“She wasn’t at the dinner where we hatched our plan. At that point, none of us had ever met her in person.”

“She wasn’t one of the original group?”

“No.”

“So she wasn’t in financial trouble?”

“No. Just the opposite, actually. She was what got us out of financial trouble.”

“She’s not a fraud, then?”

Sam laughed. “As it turns out, she is a fraud—or became one—but not for the same reason the rest of us are.”

“What do you mean?”

“In a way, Dani started it all. She had contacted Elliott a few months before the conference.”

“About what?”

“His research. Back then, Dani was a partner at a venture capital firm—San Andreas Capital. She still has the fund, but I don’t think she invests much anymore since Absolom took off. The point is, at the time, she was looking for a big opportunity to invest in, a technology that could revolutionize an entire industry—or ideally, multiple industries. Her words to Elliott were: ‘I think you’ve stumbled upon something bigger than the internet.’”

“Pretty grandiose.”

“Very grandiose. And for good reason: billions of dollars in capital require big ideas to realize decent returns. Dani thought she had found one. She had read some of Elliott’s published research and wanted to know if it could be applied to a new technology that San Andreas was interested in.”

“Which was?”

“The other secret the six—now five—of us have kept from the world all this time.” Sam took a deep breath. “As I said before, Absolom’s original intention had nothing to do with time travel. Or prisons. Or reducing crime.”

“What was it?”

“Shipping.”

Adeline squinted at him. “Shipping?”

“Parcel shipping. Think about it—shipping is at the heart of the entire global economy. E-commerce. Healthcare. Construction. You name it. At its core, the internet changed one thing: the speed at which information could easily and instantly be transmitted anywhere. Look how profound the effect has been. With Absolom, Dani wanted to do for physical matter what the internet had done for data. She wanted to invent a machine that would take any item and instantly transport it anywhere in the world.”

Adeline sat back in her chair. “Wow. That’s incredible.”

“It was. Truly incredible. And something none of us—the original five scientists at dinner that night—thought was possible. In fact, it’s still not. But the original business plan, which cited research by Elliott, Constance, Nora, Hiro, and myself, made it seem inevitable. That original business plan for Absolom Sciences—which has since been deleted, purged, and shredded—was to revolutionize shipping. And to make an unimaginable fortune for San Andreas Capital.”

“So what happened?”

“Elliott set up a meeting with Dani. I admit, I felt guilty about it, but he did most of the talking. He told her we were somewhat skeptical that Absolom transportation could become a reality, but the five of us were willing to work on it full-time—assuming we were paid well. We insisted that since we were giving up cushy salaried jobs—and for some of us, tenured teaching positions—we needed massive signing bonuses, generous pay packages, and stock. Some of the stock would vest at signing and some over time. Dani also agreed to let the science founders sell stock at every funding round—and with board permission, in between rounds, assuming the shares had vested.”

“I’m assuming that solved your money problems.”

“It did. For all of us.”

“And then what happened?”

“And then,” Sam said slowly, “the strangest thing in the world happened. We all went to work at the newly formed Absolom Sciences, we built the machine that none of us thought would work, we hired some of the brightest minds, and we sort of assumed the ruse would soon run its course. The crazy part is that along the way, we made breakthroughs we never imagined. Bringing that many geniuses together has a way of making the impossible a reality.”

Sam stared at his daughter. “I’ll tell you, some days back then, it was like magic—we’d be at lunch talking about big ideas in physics and how they might impact our work and a week later, we were putting them into practice in the lab. And one day, we made a discovery that changed everything. It was a discovery about time.”

Sam held his hands out. “Time and gravity are linked. For example, if the gravity pulling against my right hand was twice as strong as the gravity acting upon my left, do you know what would happen?”

“Your right hand would be pulled to the ground.”

“That’s technically true, but assume I can exert a counterforce sufficient to keep my hand where it is. Think about it in the context of time.”